Biography

March 21, 1949 · Llubljana, Slovenia, Yugoslavia [now Slovenia]

Demystifying the Weltschmerz of the Zeitgeist.

Accent

Sniffing

His surname is pronounced ZHEE-zhek. The Z with caron represents a voiced palato-alveolar sound in Czech, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, and Macedonian.

He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's institute of sociology. [2008].

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Most people think I'm making jokes, exaggerating - but no, I'm not. It's not that. First I tell jokes, then I'm serious. No, the art is to bring the serious message into the forum of jokes.

I always emphasize: don't expect this from me. I don't think that the task of a guy like me is to propose complete solutions. When people ask me what to do with the economy, what the hell do I know? I think the task of people like me is not to provide answers but to ask the right questions.

I'm a pessimist in the sense that we are approaching dangerous times. But I'm an optimist for exactly the same reason. Pessimism means things are getting messy. Optimism means these are precisely the times when change is possible.

Cut all your roots, that is the solution.