Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, In Defense of Lost Causes, and four volumes of the Essential Žižek among many others. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.