In the last couple of years, attacks on Slavoj Žižek multiply from different sources. Politically, he was condemned for his position on Donald Trump, for his critique of the humanitarian approach to refugees, for his more nuanced approach to LGBT+ movement, etc. In the space of psychoanalysis, Lacanians around Jacques-Alain Miller started a ferocious campaign against Žižek, denouncing him as a fraud. In the space of philosophy, new forms of realism ("object-oriented-ontology") reject Žižek's thought as still rooted in transcendental subjectivity. Attacks on Žižek are often characterized by an almost unheard-of personal brutality (Chomsky, the campaign to "erase" Žižek from public space), and they are also accompanied by Žižek's growing exclusion from public media - one can no longer read his comments and columns in LRB, Guardian, In These Times, etc.

Instead of getting caught in petty personal exchanges, the question should be raised: which are the real stakes of this ongoing conflict? What does it imply philosophically and politically? This issue of IJZS attempts to render visible some of the main antagonisms that traverse today's philosophy and Leftist thought.