Slavoj Žižek's Definition of Critical Reading
24 May 2025A critical reading, Žižek suggests, works like a short circuit—by connecting unlikely texts or ideas, especially pairing major works with marginal or disavowed ones, it shocks us into seeing what the original text disavows or cannot articulate. This method doesn’t reduce meaning but reveals its hidden assumptions and ideological blind spots.
In the foreword to A Voice and Nothing More by Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek writes:
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network— faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (shortcircuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy).What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decenter ing of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences.