Slavoj Zizek, a world-renowned philosopher and cultural critic, will teach students and conduct research activities at Seoul’s Kyung Hee University, school officials said Monday.

The philosopher from Slovenia will become a professor for the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee’s College of Foreign Language and Literature on July 1, according to the school’s personnel committee.

Zizek will sign a one-year contract under the school’s Eminent Scholar program where the university invites outstanding researchers to support their research activities while staying abroad, it added. 

Visiting South Korea in July, he will meet students through special lectures during the school’s international summer school.

He then plans to conduct a joint research with Kyung Hee’s English literature professor Lee Taek-kwang, according to the school.

In September, the social theorist will also meet with the public here via an open lecture about capitalism and ideology, while planning to hold an annual symposium on the communist ideology in South Korea.

“We expect his diverse activities engaging in not only our students and faculty members, but the general public. After all, he is well known not only for his academic achievements but also for his active communication with the people,” said a school official.

“We are actively reviewing an option to renew his contract.”

Zizek, influenced by Jacques Lacan, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx in terms of his critical-intellectual perspective, earned global recognition after his first book in English titled “The Sublime Object of Ideology” published in 1989.

As one of the world’s most confrontational intellectuals of the time, he now serves as a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.

He visited South Korea last June to give a lecture to students, traveled to the demilitarized zone and Imjingak pavilion near the border with North Korea, and met with members of the labor union at the country’s smallest carmaker Ssangyong Motor Co. while they were on strike. (Yonhap News)