Politics & Power Quote by Slavoj Zizek

Zizek’s line is a self-roast disguised as political testimony: communism didn’t just brutalize, it also manufactured a certain kind of intellectual. The joke lands because it violates the expected script. Dissidents are supposed to narrate oppression as pure loss; Zizek, perversely, credits it with rescuing him from a small-bore academic fate. The insult - “local stupid professor” - is doing double work: it needles provincial complacency and punctures the philosopher’s favorite myth, that genius naturally rises regardless of conditions.

The subtext is less “communism was good” than “history is an obscene co-author.” Zizek’s public persona thrives on that contradiction: he’s the theorist who insists that ideology operates most effectively through our little enjoyments, our fantasies of moral purity, our tidy biographies. Here he refuses the clean redemption arc. Oppression becomes a twisted career accelerator, forcing contact with censorship, surveillance, and the raw mechanics of power - the very materials his theory feeds on.

Context matters: Ljubljana is not just a city, it’s shorthand for intellectual periphery within Europe. Zizek is also side-eyeing Western academia, where radicalism can harden into professional routine. His fear isn’t only being “stupid,” it’s being safely legible: another local expert, sealed inside seminars and departmental politics. The line’s intent is to scandalize self-satisfaction on both sides - anti-communist pieties and liberal meritocratic myths - by admitting the uncomfortable truth that big, ugly systems can produce sharp minds precisely by deforming ordinary life.