The Rise of the Rockstar Intellectual: A Review of Bar-El, E. How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Slavoj iek is one of the most famous public intellectuals.At the time of writing, iek's citations number in the 58,000 range (Research.comn.d.), 1 putting him in the territory of notable intellectuals such as Edward Said and Charles Taylor.iek's influence and power are not just tied to his publications and influence in the academy, however, as he has become a cult figure in the mediasomething that contemporary intellectuals are not typically known for.As Bar-El points out, iek is perhaps the only political theorist to have both a nightclub and a fashion collection named after him (p.1).As well as this, iek's celebrity status has catapulted him into a regular feature on mainstream news, a favourite of popular online podcasts, and most impressively, a movie star.His debate with self-help guru and psychologist Jordan Peterson sold out more quickly than the local hockey playoffs.In an era which is skeptical or simply uninterested in intellectuals, especially those associated with Marxism and French Theory, it is equally perplexing and impressive to see a philosopher on the red carpet.Eliran Bar-El's How Slavoj Became iek 2 seeks to explain this curious phenomenon.Using a 'sociohistorical narrative' and databases such as Google Scholar and NGRAM to look at citation trends, as well as drawing from the author's interviews and observations, Bar-El plots the 'wider scale of the iek effect as part of broader intellectual fashions' (p.23).Bar-El's book begins with a useful engagement with the history and sociology of public intellectuals.Then, each chapter (covering about a decade) charts iek's life and work, starting out with his early academic career, where he began identifying with a complex mix of post-structuralism and Marxism before finding his own Hegelacanesea term Bar-El uses throughout the text to describe iek's idiosyncratic mix of G.W.F.Hegel and Jacques Lacan.Then, the book moves from philosophy to iek's entry into popular culture in the 2000s, which saw him publishing in mainstream venues such as The Guardian and writing adverts for Abercrombie & Fitch.The book then closes discussing iek's increasingly polarised reception and decreasing citation trends after some controversies in the mid to late 2010s, before concluding with a psychoanalytic meditation on iek as an 'internet philosopher' (Burnham 2014, 201 cited in 189).