IF YOU GO: "¡Zizek! and the Public Intellectual Craze," featuring Astra Taylor, Eduardo Cadava, Anne Norton, Jean-Michel Rabate, a public conversation and film screening, will take place tonight at 6:30pm at the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St. Free. Phone: 215.222.9050.

Yes, we know you can identify T.O. and 50 Cent. You're a devoted reader. But who or what is Slavoj Zizek?

Slavoj Zizek (pronounced SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek) is:

(1) The name of Groucho Marx's character in Horse Feathers.

(2) The closest thing in Croatia to a cheesesteak.

(3) The latest strain of hip-hop in Bosnian clubs.,

(4) A world-famous Slovenian philosopher known as the "Elvis of cultural theory."

If you chose 4 immediately - well, you're probably already headed to tonight's Philadelphia premiere (see box on E4) of Astra Taylor's "¡Zizek!", the documentary, already a Manhattan hit, about the ultimate hottie in recent years on the global intellectual circuit. (It will be preceded by a panel discussion and followed by a Q&A with director Taylor.)

If not, consider this a passing attempt to explain the inexplicable: a 56-year-old bearded, hyperkinetic, self-contradictory, movie-loving, Xanax-popping, occasionally windbaggish, often depressed but never repressed philosopher (Marxist/Lacanian) - a culture critic, performance artist, and ritual teller of obscene jokes.

To English literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Zizek stands as "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe in some decades."

To Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, however, "always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake." His appeal, she wrote, is "accessible absurdity," a Seinfeldian attention to the "minutiae of popular culture."

Zizek's style is to juxtapose highly theoretical notions like Marx's surplus value or Jacques Lacan's "big Other" with the down-and-dirty "readings" of pop culture familiar from cultural studies. As critic Scott McLemee, a close Zizek observer, has noted, the famously verbose lecturer once explained "the distinctions between German philosophy, English political economy, and the French Revolution by reference to each nation's toilet design."

When people speak (and they do) of Zizek's reputation preceding him, much of that rep - or rap - comes from articles on him by three American journalists over the years: Robert Boynton's astute 1998 Lingua Franca profile, Mead's 2003 New Yorker portrait (headlined "The Marx Brother"), and the "Zizek Watch" conducted a while back by McLemee, now a columnist for Inside Higher Education.

Zizek is a thinker pursued by his profiles, and the facts revealed in them.

Born in Ljubljana (capital of the lovely country of two million sliced out of Yugoslavia without widespread killing), Zizek grew up bingeing on philosophy books and Hollywood movies. In 1971, Yugoslav professors judged his 400-page master's thesis on French structuralism insufficiently Marxist. That kept him out of a university teaching position.

Zizek scraped along for a few years by translating German philosophy. Beginning in 1977, he held his nose and took a job with the Communist Party, writing speeches (while inserting subversive bits) and otherwise working on philosophy.

Soon he joined other scholars in forming the so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, a group of scholars devoted to the work of French psychoanalyst Lacan (1901-81), himself a thinker revered by some and derided by others as an obscurantist.

In those early Lacanian years, operating through the group's journal and book series, Zizek began to display the irreverent antics that delight fans and trouble others. Under a pen name, for instance, he reviewed and savaged his own book on Lacan.

In 1979, friends secured him a position as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology. Then, in 1981, Zizek began to visit Paris regularly. He grew close to Lacan's heir, Jacques-Alain Miller, and wrote the doctoral dissertation that would become his influential early book, The Sublime Object of Ideology. By the late 1980s, though, Zizek turned his attention back home.

In the heady years that followed, Zizek, by then a well-known newspaper columnist in Slovenia, helped found the Liberal Democratic Party that came to power. In 1990, he ran for one of the four positions in the country's group presidency, coming in fifth.

Losing that post more or less launched him into feverish book production. Enjoying the government's favor, and the support of the New York publishing house Verso (which published his books as fast as he could write them), he became the country's most celebrated intellectual. Among his more than 50 titles, many fine sellers by academic standards, are Enjoy Your Symptom! and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

No one doubts Zizek's wit. Mead cited his observation that the U.S. working class still exists - it's simply in China. His effort to combine a Marxian critique of capitalism, a Lacanian insight into the psychology of everyday life, and what you might call slavish attention to pop culture excites some followers.

But the feeling that Zizek might be as much careerist operator as sincere thinker has trailed him since Boynton's much-read profile, which cited the plush visiting deals he extracts from American academe.

"When people ask me why I don't teach permanently in the United States," Zizek remarked then, "I tell them that it is because American universities have this very strange, eccentric idea that you must work for your salary. I prefer to do the opposite and not work for my salary."

Zizek went on to describe ruses he used, in America, to avoid students and grading papers. Similarly, he bragged to McLemee about his Ljubljana post: "For the last two years, I was not even once at my job. I have a secretary who writes reports for me and knows how to forge my signature." McLemee reported that Zizek "recycles whole chunks of material from one work to the next."

Genius? Rogue? Public intellectual? Publicity intellectual? Show up tonight. Decide for yourself.