Do we like them?

Do we like Slavoj Žižek?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Contested positions and a thin, partly unopened record, with nothing verified on either side to push the score far from the middle.

Žižek is the Slovenian philosopher who made Hegel, Lacan and Marx into pop-culture material, with film clips, jokes and a lot of sniffing. A 2026 Cambridge review of a book on how he became a public intellectual describes him as a regular on mainstream news, a favourite of online podcasts and even a movie star.

Provocation is the brand. The same review says that book is somewhat defensive and doesn't fully explain why he behaves so provocatively. That matters here, because a lot of what gets him in trouble is him saying something deliberately prickly and leaving the audience to sort it out.

The loudest stoush was his 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair opening speech on Israel and Gaza, which split the room and drew a fierce backlash. An Al Jazeera opinion piece argued his writing on the subject had been disappointing and sat awkwardly with his earlier work. Where you land depends on whether you read him as a thinker poking at every side or as someone who let one side off the hook.

On the harm check, honestly, the record we could verify is thin. His writing on gender and sexuality is argued over by academics and critics, and we couldn't open those pieces in full to quote him fairly, so we won't put words in his mouth. Nothing we could confirm and date shows him campaigning against LGBTQ+ people's rights, but that's a gap in our reading, not a clean bill of health.

Nothing confirmed and new turned up on him lately, so there's no fresh blow-up to report. He keeps publishing and speaking on Europe, Trump and Ukraine, but we couldn't read those pieces closely enough to judge them.

On the good-person side, we found no verified court cases, no charity work and no kind acts we could source. That's not a finding against him, just an empty drawer. What fans love him for is the ideas and the mischief, not good deeds.