Is Žižek actually an evaluator?
The question might seem almost nonsensical. Žižek, after all, is one of the most recognizable contemporary philosophers; his work directly engages with Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Schelling, and numerous other major philosophical traditions. Yet that is precisely what makes the question interesting. What if part of what we recognize as philosophy in Žižek is better understood as something else — as a specific form of evaluative thinking? A large part of his work consists of continuous appraisal: examining what a given idea enables, what it fails to see, what it excludes, what it presupposes, and what consequences follow if we take it seriously.
This brings us very close to evaluation.
Evaluation here should not be understood in its most conventional, technocratic sense. It is not merely measuring the success of political programs, comparing results with objectives, or checking whether a policy is effective. In a broader sense, evaluation is a mode of thought that arises when we must judge among options whose value cannot be determined by a single pre-given criterion. Evaluation begins where the mere description of facts is no longer sufficient, and where knowing what is true or wise still fails to tell us how to judge among competing options. It is the kind of reasoning a physician performs when judging whether a treatment is justified under incomplete evidence, or a judge deciding whether a precedent still fits a new case. The same applies to weighing political demands for greater equality against those for individual freedom, where no single principle and no bare fact can independently determine which political option is justified.
It is here that Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of a ‘third culture’ of knowing the world — situated between science and philosophy — becomes relevant. Science seeks truth about the empirical world, while philosophy addresses questions of meaning. The third culture opens up a space for a mode of thinking that is not simply an extension of either side, but bridges facts and values, creating the possibility for a far more holistic understanding of the world.
Evaluation does not supplant science or philosophy. Science can demonstrate what happened and under what conditions. Philosophy asks: what does it mean? Evaluation, however, must answer a more vexing question: what should be done when we have multiple relevant, yet incompletely compatible reasons for understanding things differently? These are questions that science and philosophy produce, but cannot operationally resolve.
In making a judgment, the evaluator considers facts without applying a pre-determined moral principle. The evaluator must judge the relationships among options, their assumptions, consequences, limitations, and exclusions.
If we view Žižek from this perspective, his philosophical practice suddenly looks quite different.
Žižek does not accept a political or philosophical position simply based on what that position claims about itself. He is interested in what a position must exclude in order to appear consistent; what antagonism its apparent stability conceals; what an ideology cannot see about itself. He is concerned with the gap between what an institution or political project says it is doing and what it must actually presuppose to function. When addressing liberalism, conservatism, communism, nationalism, democracy, or any other political stance, he is generally not just interested in whether it is empirically correct. He is interested in its internal cost. What must it push aside? Which contradiction must it conceal? Which element of its own reality must it exclude to maintain its self-image?
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These are distinctly evaluative questions. His philosophy approaches evaluation when he realizes that a given standpoint can be judged by how it organizes that which it cannot fully incorporate into itself.
His engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis plays a key role in generating this evaluative character. His view of politics rests on a psychoanalytic understanding of the political subject as a being whose agency is perpetually intertwined with unconscious structures. Psychoanalysis does not merely seek to describe the subject; it interprets the subject’s fantasies, identifications, symptoms, and unconscious determinations, re-evaluating how the subject organizes reality through them. The critical question is thus not only: what does the subject think?, but also: what can it not see in order to think and act in this way?
In this sense, psychoanalysis is no longer an exclusively philosophical discipline, but an evaluative one as well. Clinical psychoanalysis performs its work within a specific therapeutic relationship to transform the subject’s stance toward its own determinations. Evaluation in a broader (beyond clinical) sense applies this logic to judging various ways of organizing reality and action, especially where no external normative basis exists to definitively establish what is true, right, and good. Žižek translates this psychoanalytic logic to the political level (though he still prefers to act clinically rather than evaluatively): he judges political subjects and their ideological positions based on what they exclude, and how their unconscious determinations limit their capacity for action.
Žižek can therefore be understood as a radical evaluator of ideological forms. However, an important qualification is required. His evaluative character is not merely borrowed from psychoanalysis; it is also produced by his own philosophical practice. The claim that the gap at the core of the subject and society is best understood through negativity, contradiction, loss, and rupture operates evaluatively in its own right. This becomes particularly clear when he compares different understandings of the void (the blindness of reason, the bias of the psyche), which is one of his foundational tools. In his works, Žižek often judges that a certain way of understanding the gap — namely one that achieves cancellation, one that is negative — is more adequate than another, particularly one claiming that the void points to the indeterminacy of things that are neither negative nor positive, but undefined. Not undecided, but indeterminate.
Consequently, his evaluation is often primarily negative.
And here a major problem arises regarding Žižek as evaluator. Evaluation is not identical to critique. His evaluation focuses on one type of judgment — exposing what a given position cannot achieve. But what comes next? On which of several honest, yet imperfect positions should we build when we want, for instance, to define a political strategy? His negative framework tells us significantly less about this. It is exceptionally strong at diagnosing political positions, but weaker at subsequently comparing options once the initial negative criterion has been met.
His negative evaluation is not neutral. Evaluation is not merely the discovery of problems; it must also judge among alternative options and solutions. Yet he fails to develop an equally robust apparatus for comparing different options that have passed the negative test.
His negative dialectics becomes a limitation when enshrined as the privileged way of understanding complex matters. If every positive determination is marked by its lack, every identity by its internal rupture, and every stability by its antagonism, then negativity gradually ceases to be a mere instrument of critique. It becomes a universal principle of interpretation that introduces paralysis into political life.
Here lies the essential distinction between negative critique and evaluation. Critique demonstrates why a given determination fails to hold up. Evaluation must go further: what can we judge when no determination can claim the status of an ultimate foundation? Žižek’s evaluative approach is ultimately incomplete. We can first recognize his philosophy as evaluative, but we must then constructively analyze it from an evaluative standpoint. In the end, we realize that his negativity itself must become an object of evaluation.
What useful insights does such a reflection yield? Among other things, it allows us to recognize evaluation as a distinct mode of thinking about the world, clearly demarcated from both philosophy and science. It alerts us to the fact that a significant portion of contemporary thought is actually evaluative thinking, even when it presents itself as philosophy or science. Such insight also hints that we can view philosophy and science in an evaluative way that stimulates creative thinking about the world.
AI disclosure: In writing this article, I used AI (Claude, ChatGPT) to assist with translating and narrowing down my earlier texts to the content addressed here, first by defining the thematic framework of the article. The final version was produced through my own work.
