About This Event

A shameless tour through the films, books and music that shaped a philosopher. Join Slavoj Žižek for a wildly original evening of film, philosophy and cultural provocation, as he takes the audience through more than twenty clips and images that together reveal his vision of reality. This is not a conventional lecture or a standard political conversation, but a specially produced 5x15 event: part cinematic journey, part philosophical performance, part cultural exorcism. In conversation with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum and acclaimed broadcaster, Žižek will move from Hollywood melodrama to political spectacle, from jokes and desire to revolution, propaganda, theology and the void at the heart of things. The evening begins with one of Jacques Lacan’s most notorious claims: “there is no sexual relationship”. What does this mean, and why does Žižek see the deadlock of human sexuality everywhere from Titanic and Casablancato The Sound of Music, The Smiling Lieutenant and Brassed Off? From there, the focus expands to politics and antagonism. With clips ranging from the October Revolution and The Little Drummer Girl to Trump, Israel, torture and Joseph Goebbels’s “Total War” speech, Žižek will explore how fantasy, violence and ideology shape the political world. Finally, the evening moves into stranger and more metaphysical territory: theology, death drive and the void constitutive of reality itself. Through images and clips including an ashtray, Rupture, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Andrew Wyeth and The Death of Marat, Žižek will ask what lies beneath our stories of love, power, faith and catastrophe. The result is Žižek in full flight: a fast-moving, outrageous and exhilarating tour through the films, images and political nightmares that illuminate his imagination. Sex, cinema, politics, ideology, theology, death drive and the end of the world: all brought together for one unrepeatable 5x15 evening with one of the most provocative thinkers of our time. Because of the extraordinary range of film and archive material being used, this event will not be livestreamed or put online. The only way to experience it is to be in the room. Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst and Communist philosopher. Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949, he earned doctorates at the University of Ljubljana and at Université Paris VIII. He is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Visiting Professor at New York University, USA. Žižek’s work is known for its distinctive reading of Hegel through Lacanian theory, its materialist interpretation of Christianity, and its Communist critique of liberal democracy. He is the author of numerous books, including The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Less Than Nothing (2012), Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (2017), The Courage of Hopelessness (2017), and Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020). The latest volume in his acclaimed essays series, Signs from the Future, will be published by Bloomsbury in October 2026. Tim Marlow is CEO and Director of the Design Museum in London. Over the past five years, he has transformed the landmark building into a hub for contemporary design with a wide-ranging programme that has received critical acclaim. Formerly Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube, Marlow has been involved with the contemporary art and design world for the past thirty years as curator, writer and broadcaster. He has written and presented over 100 arts documentaries for British television and presented radio programmes across the BBC since 1990 and lectured on art, design and culture in universities and museums in more than 40 counties. In 2020, Tim Marlow was awarded an OBE for services to arts and culture.

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