Friedrich the Great defined himself (the king) as “the first servant of State”, and this is how, from the early Enlightenment onwards, a master justifies his rule: he is in reality the greatest servant, the servant of all his subjects/servants. As expected, this false humility can justify the most brutal terror – Stalin fully belongs to this space. But there are different modalities of this position of “serving the servants”, from technocracy and religious fundamentalism to obscene masterclown, or even, as Mao Ze Dong can be characterized, to a “Lord of Misrule”, a master who periodically organizes rebellions against his own rule.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department of Philosophy.

The international philosophical conference The Master/s (22–24 September 2022, Cultural and Congress Centre Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana) was organized by the International Hegelian Association Aufhebung, GoetheInstitut Ljubljana, Cultural and Congress Centre Cankarjev dom and the University of Ljubljana – Faculty of Arts.

The conference was part of the project The Theatricality of Power (J61812), which is financed by the Slovenian Research Agency.

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