Žižek contends throughout his work that subjects are always divided between what they consciously know and can say about political things, and a set of more or less unconscious beliefs they hold concerning individuals in authority, and the regime in which they live (see 3a).

Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master's degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism.

Marxism, was a debate between the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (a critic of Marxism) and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (a Marxist theorist and Hegelian) on the relationship between Marxism, capitalism, and happiness.