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Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (, ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.

He is the 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. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.

Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.

Early life
Žižek was born in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, into a middle-class family. His father Jože Žižek was an economist and civil servant from the region of Prekmurje in eastern Slovenia. His mother Vesna, a native of the Gorizia Hills in the Slovenian Littoral, was an accountant in a state enterprise. His parents were atheists. He spent most of his childhood in the coastal town of Portorož, where he was exposed to Western film, theory and popular culture. When Žižek was a teenager his family moved back to Ljubljana where he attended Bežigrad High School. Originally wanting to become a filmmaker himself, he abandoned these ambitions and chose to pursue philosophy instead.

Education
In 1967, during an era of liberalization in Titoist Yugoslavia, Žižek enrolled at the University of Ljubljana and studied philosophy and sociology.

Žižek had already begun reading French structuralists prior to entering university, and in 1967 he published the first translation of a text by Jacques Derrida into Slovenian. Žižek frequented the circles of dissident intellectuals, including the Heideggerian philosophers Tine Hribar and Ivo Urbančič, and published articles in alternative magazines, such as Praxis, Tribuna and Problemi, which he also edited. In 1971 he accepted a job as an assistant researcher with the promise of tenure, but was dismissed after his Master's thesis was denounced by the authorities as being "non-Marxist". He graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1981 with a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy for his dissertation entitled The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of French Structuralism. He spent the next few years in what was described as "professional wilderness", also fulfilling his legal duty of undertaking a year-long national service in the Yugoslav People's Army in Karlovac.

Academic career
During the 1980s, Žižek edited and translated Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and Louis Althusser. He used Lacan's work to interpret Hegelian and Marxist philosophy.

In 1986, Žižek completed a second doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy in psychoanalysis) at the University of Paris VIII under Jacques-Alain Miller, entitled "La philosophie entre le symptôme et le fantasme".

Žižek wrote the introduction to Slovene translations of G. K. Chesterton's and John Le Carré's detective novels. In 1988, he published his first book dedicated entirely to film theory, Pogled s strani. The following year, he achieved international recognition as a social theorist with the 1989 publication of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Žižek has been publishing in journals such as Lacanian Ink and In These Times in the United States, the New Left Review and The London Review of Books in the United Kingdom, and with the Slovenian left-liberal magazine Mladina and newspapers Dnevnik and Delo. He also cooperates with the Polish leftist magazine Krytyka Polityczna, regional southeast European left-wing journal Novi Plamen, and serves on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical journal Problemi. Žižek is a series editor of the Northwestern University Press series Diaeresis that publishes works that "deal not only with philosophy, but also will intervene at the levels of ideology critique, politics, and art theory".

In 2012, Foreign Policy listed Žižek on its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, calling him "a celebrity philosopher", while elsewhere he has been dubbed the "Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". Žižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of Lacanian theory". A journal, the International Journal of Žižek Studies, was founded by professors David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor to engage with his work.

Political career
In the late 1980s, Žižek came to public attention as a columnist for the alternative youth magazine Mladina, which was critical of Tito's policies, Yugoslav politics, especially the militarization of society. He was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until October 1988, when he quit in protest against the JBTZ trial together with 32 other Slovenian intellectuals. Between 1988 and 1990, he was actively involved in several political and civil society movements which fought for the democratization of Slovenia, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. In the first free elections in 1990, he ran as the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate for the former four-person collective presidency of Slovenia.

Žižek is a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) founded in 2016.

Public life

In 2003, Žižek wrote text to accompany Bruce Weber's photographs in a catalog for Abercrombie & Fitch. Questioned as to the seemliness of a major intellectual writing ad copy, Žižek told The Boston Globe, "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing ass to get a tenured post, I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!"

Žižek and his thought have been the subject of several documentaries. The 1996 Liebe Dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! is a German documentary on him. In the 2004 The Reality of the Virtual, Žižek gave an hour-long lecture on his interpretation of Lacan's tripartite thesis of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Zizek! is a 2005 documentary by Astra Taylor on his philosophy. The 2006 The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and 2012 The Pervert's Guide to Ideology also portray Žižek's ideas and cultural criticism. Examined Life (2008) features Žižek speaking about his conception of ecology at a garbage dump. He was also featured in the 2011 Marx Reloaded, directed by Jason Barker.

Foreign Policy named Žižek one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for giving voice to an era of absurdity".

In 2019, Žižek began hosting a mini-series called How to Watch the News with Slavoj Žižek on the RT network. In April, Žižek debated psychology professor Jordan Peterson at the Sony Centre in Toronto, Canada over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.

Personal life
Žižek has been married four times and has two adult sons, Tim and Kostja. His second wife was Slovene philosopher and socio-legal theorist Renata Salecl, fellow member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. His third wife was Argentinian model and Lacanian scholar Analia Hounie, whom he married in 2005. Currently, he is married to Slovene journalist, author and philosopher, Jela Krečič.

In early 2018, Žižek experienced Bell's palsy on the right side of his face. He went on to give several lectures and interviews with this condition; on March 9 of that year, during a lecture on political revolutions in London, he commented on the treatment he had been receiving, and used his paralysis as a metaphor for political idleness.

Aside from his native Slovene, Žižek is a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croatian, French, German and English.

Taste
In the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Žižek listed his 10 favourite films: 3:10 to Yuma, Dune, The Fountainhead, Hero, Hitman, Nightmare Alley, On Dangerous Ground, Opfergang, The Sound of Music, and We the Living. On this list, he clarified: "I opted for pure madness: the list contains only 'guilty pleasures'". In his tour of The Criterion Collection closet, he chose Trouble in Paradise, Sweet Smell of Success, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Murmur of the Heart, The Joke, The Ice Storm, Great Expectations, Roberto Rossellini's History Films, City Lights, a box set of Carl Theodor Dreyer's films, Y tu mamá también and Antichrist.

In an article called "My Favourite Classics", Žižek states that Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder is the piece of music he would take to a desert island. He goes on to list other favourites, including Beethoven's Fidelio, Schubert's Winterreise, Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. He expresses a particular love for Wagner, particularly Das Rheingold and Parsifal. He ranks Schoenberg over Stravinsky, and insists on Eisler's importance among Schoenberg's followers.

Žižek often lists Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Andrei Platonov as his "three absolute masters of 20th-century literature". He ranks/prefers Varlam Shalamov over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam over Anna Akhmatova, Daphne du Maurier over Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett over James Joyce.

Thought and positions
Žižek and his thought have been described by many commentators as "Hegelo-Lacanian". In his early career, Žižek claimed "a theoretical space moulded by three centres of gravity: Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary criticism of ideology", designating "the theory of Jacques Lacan" as the fundamental element. In 2010, Žižek instead claimed that for him Hegel is more fundamental than Lacan—"Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel." —while in 2019, he claimed that "For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in [the] fifty years" between Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1831). Alongside his academic, theoretical works, Žižek is a prolific commentator on current affairs and contemporary political debates.

Subjectivity
For Žižek, although a subject may take on a symbolic (social) position, it can never be reduced to this attempted symbolisation, since the very "taking on" of this position implies a separate 'I', beyond the symbolic, that does the taking on. Yet, under scrutiny, nothing positive can be said about this subject, this 'I', that eludes symbolisation; it cannot be discerned as anything but "that which cannot be symbolised". Thus, without the initial, attempted, failed symbolisation, subjectivity cannot present itself. As Žižek writes in his first book in English: "the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately."

Žižek attributes this position on the subject to Hegel, particularly his description of man as "the night of the world", and to Lacan, with his description of the barred, split subject, who he sees as developing the Cartesian notion of the cogito. According to Žižek, these thinkers, in insisting on the role of the subject, run counter to "culturalist" or "historicist" positions held by thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, which posit that "subjects" are bound by and reducible to their historical/cultural(/symbolic) context.

Ideology
Žižek's Lacanian-informed theory of ideology is one of his major contributions to political theory; his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, in which he stars, are among the well-known places in which it is discussed. Žižek believes that ideology has been frequently misinterpreted as dualistic and, according to him, this misinterpreted dualism posits that there is a real world of material relations and objects outside of oneself, which is accessible to reason.

For Žižek, as for Marx, ideology is made up of fictions that structure political life; in Lacan's terms, ideology belongs to the symbolic order. Žižek argues that these fictions are primarily maintained at an unconscious level, rather than a conscious one. Since, according to psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious can determine one's actions directly, bypassing one's conscious awareness (as in parapraxes), ideology can be expressed in one's behaviour, regardless of one's conscious beliefs. Hence, Žižek breaks with orthodox Marxist accounts that view ideology purely as a system of mistaken beliefs (see False consciousness). Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, Žižek argues that adopting a cynical perspective is not enough to escape ideology, since, according to Žižek, even though postmodern subjects are consciously cynical about the political situation, they continue to reinforce it through their behaviour.

Freedom
Žižek claims that (a sense of) political freedom is sustained by a deeper unfreedom, at least under liberal capitalism. In a 2002 article, Žižek endorses Lenin's distinction between formal and actual freedom, claiming that liberal society only contains formal freedom, "freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations", while prohibiting actual freedom, "the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates." In an oft-quoted passage from a book published in the same year, he writes that, in these conditions of liberal censorship, "we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom". In a 2019 article, he writes that Marx "made a valuable point with his claim that the market economy combines in a unique way political and personal freedom with social unfreedom: personal freedom (freely selling myself on the market) is the very form of my unfreedom." However, in 2014, he rejects the "pseudo-Marxist" total derision of 'formal freedom', claiming that it is necessary for critique: "When we are formally free, only then we become aware how limited this freedom actually is."

Žižek co-signed a petition condemning the "use of disproportionate force and retaliatory brutality by the Hong Kong Police against students in university campuses in Hong Kong" during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. The petition concludes with the statement: "We believe the defence of academic freedom, the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and association, and the responsibility to protect the safety of our students are universal causes common to all."

Theology
Žižek has asserted that "Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for" in The New York Times. However, he nonetheless finds extensive conceptual value in Christianity, particularly Protestantism: the subtitle of his 2000 book The Fragile Absolute is "Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?". Hence, he labels his position 'Christian Atheism', and has written about theology at length.

In The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Žižek suggests that "the only way to be an Atheist is through Christianity", since, he claims, atheism often fails to escape the religious paradigm by remaining faithful to an external guarantor of meaning, simply switching God for natural necessity or evolution. Christianity, on the other hand, in the doctrine of the incarnation, brings God down from the 'beyond' and onto earth, into human affairs; for Žižek, this paradigm is more authentically godless, since the external guarantee is abolished.

Communism
Although sometimes adopting the title of 'radical leftist', Žižek also controversially insists on identifying as a communist, even though he rejects 20th century communism as a "total failure", and decries "the communism of the 20th century, more specifically all the network of phenomena we refer to as Stalinism as "maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity." Žižek justifies this choice by claiming that only the term 'communism' signals a genuine step outside of the existing order, in part since the term 'socialism' no longer has radical enough implications, and means nothing more than that one "care[s] for society"

In Marx Reloaded, Žižek rejects both 20th-century totalitarianism and "spontaneous local self-organisation, direct democracy, councils, and so on". There, he endorses a definition of communism as "a society where you, everyone would be allowed to dwell in his or her stupidity", an idea with which he credits Fredric Jameson as the inspiration.

Žižek has labelled himself a "communist in a qualified sense". When he spoke at a conference on The Idea of Communism, he applied (in qualified form) the 'communist' label to the Occupy Wall Street protestors: "They are not communists, if 'communism' means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that the communists who are still in power today run the most ruthless capitalism (in China). ... The only sense in which the protestors are 'communists' is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system. They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are now, with just a few cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything; they are reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself."

Žižek has described himself as a "moderately conservative Communist".

Electoral politics
In May 2013, during Subversive Festival, Žižek commented: "If they don't support SYRIZA, then, in my vision of the democratic future, all these people will get from me [is] a first-class one-way ticket to [a] gulag." In response, the center-right New Democracy party claimed Žižek's comments should be understood literally, not ironically.

Just before the 2017 French presidential election, Žižek stated that one could not choose between Macron and Le Pen, arguing that the neoliberalism of Macron just gives rise to neofascism anyway. This was in response to many on the left calling for support for Macron to prevent a Le Pen victory.

In 2022, Žižek expressed his support for the Slovenian political party Levica (The Left) at its 5th annual conference.

Support for Donald Trump's election
In a 2016 interview with Channel 4, Žižek said that were he American, he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election: "I'm horrified at him [Trump]. I'm just thinking that Hillary is the true danger. ... if Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democratics, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves, and maybe some things can happen there. That's my desperate, very desperate hope, that if Trump wins—listen, America is not a dictatorial state, he will not introduce Fascism—but it will be a kind of big awakening. New political processes will be set in motion, will be triggered. But I'm well aware that things are very dangerous here ... I'm just aware that Hillary stands for this absolute inertia, the most dangerous one. Because she is a cold warrior, and so on, connected with banks, pretending to be socially progressive."

These views were derisively characterised as accelerationist by Left Voice, and were labelled "regressive" by Noam Chomsky.

In 2019 and 2020, Žižek defended his views, saying that Trump's election "created, for the first time in I don't know how many decades, a true American left", citing the boost it gave Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

However, regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, Žižek reported himself "tempted by changing his position", saying "Trump is a little too much". In another interview, he stood by his 2016 "wager" that Trump's election would lead to a socialist reaction ("maybe I was right"), but claimed that "now with coronavirus: no, no—no Trump. ... difficult as it is for me to say this, but now I would say 'Biden better than Trump', although he is far from ideal." In his 2022 book, Heaven in Disorder, Žižek continued to express a preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, stating "Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives", while Biden lies and represents big capital more politely.

Social issues
Žižek's views on social issues such as Eurocentrism, immigration and the LGBT movement have drawn criticism and accusations of bigotry.

Europe and multiculturalism
In his 1997 article 'Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', Žižek critiqued multiculturalism for privileging a culturally 'neutral' perspective from which all cultures are disaffectedly apprehended in their particularity because this distancing reproduces the racist procedure of Othering. He further argues that a fixation on particular identities and struggles corresponds to an abandonment of the universal struggle against global capitalism.

In his 1998 article 'A Leftist Plea for "Eurocentrism"', he argued that Leftists should 'undermine the global empire of capital, not by asserting particular identities, but through the assertion of a new universality', and that in this struggle the European universalist value of egaliberte (Etienne Balibar's term) should be foregrounded, proposing 'a Leftist appropriation of the European legacy'. Elsewhere, he has also argued, defending Marx, that Europe's destruction of non-European tradition (e.g. through imperialism and slavery) has opened up the space for a 'double liberation', both from tradition and from European domination.

In her 2010 article 'The Two Zizeks', Nivedita Menon criticised Žižek for focusing on differentiation as a colonial project, ignoring how assimilation was also such a project; she also critiqued him for privileging the European Enlightenment Christian legacy as neutral, 'free of the cultural markers that fatally afflict all other religions.' David Pavón Cuéllar, closer to Žižek, also criticised him.

In the mid-2010s, over the issue of Eurocentrism, there was a dispute between Žižek and Walter Mignolo, in which Mignolo (supporting a previous article by Hamid Dabashi, which argued against the centrality of European philosophers like Žižek, criticised by Michael Marder ) argued, against Žižek, that decolonial struggle should forget European philosophy, purportedly following Frantz Fanon; in response, Žižek pointed out Fanon's European intellectual influences, and his resistance to being confined within the black tradition, and claimed to be following Fanon on this point. In his book Can Non-Europeans Think? (foreworded by Mignolo), Dabashi also critiqued Žižek for privileging Europe; Žižek argued that Dabashi slanderously and comically misrepresents him through misattribution, a critique supported by Ilan Kapoor.

Transgender issues
In his 2016 article "The Sexual Is Political", Žižek argued that all subjects are, like transgender subjects, in discord with the sexual position assigned to them. For Žižek, any attempt to escape this antagonism is false and utopian: thus, he rejects both the reactionary attempt to violently impose sexual fixity and the "postgenderist" attempt to escape sexual fixity entirely; he aligns the latter with 'transgenderism', which he claims does not adequately describe the behaviour of actual transgender subjects, who seek a stable "place where they could recognise themselves" (e.g., a bathroom that confirms their identity). Žižek argues for a third bathroom: a "GENERAL GENDER" bathroom that would represent the fact that both sexual positions (Žižek insists on the unavoidable "twoness" of the sexual landscape) are missing something and thus fail to adequately represent the subjects that take them on.

In his 2019 article "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud", Žižek argued that there is "a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and (some kind of biological) determinism", between the idea that gender is a social construct, and the idea that gender is essential and pre-social. He concludes the essay with a "Freudian solution" to this deadlock: "...psychic sexual identity is a choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical transformation of the bearer of the choice."

Che Gossett criticized Žižek for his use of the "pathologising" term "transgenderism" throughout the 2016 article, and for writing "about trans subjectivity with such assumed authority while ignoring the voices of trans theorists (academics and activists) entirely", as well as for purportedly claiming that a "futuristic" vision underlies so-called "transgenderism", ignoring present-day oppression. Sam Warren Miell and Chris Coffman, both psychoanalytically inclined, have separately criticized Žižek for conflating transgenderism and postgenderism; Miell further criticised the 2014 article for rehearsing homophobic/transphobic clichés (including Žižek's designation of inter-species marriage as a possible "anti-discriminatory demand"), and misusing Lacanian theory; Coffman argued that Žižek should have engaged with contemporary Lacanian trans studies, which would have shown that psychoanalytic and transgender discourses were aligned, not opposed. In response to the title of the 2019 article, McKenzie Wark had t-shirts made with the transgender flag and "Incompatible with Freud" printed on them.

Žižek defended his 2016 article in two follow-up pieces. The first addresses purported misreadings of his position, while the second is a more sustained defence (against Miell) of the article's application of Lacanian theory, to which Miell responded in turn. Douglas Lain also defended Žižek, claiming that context makes it clear that Žižek is "not opposed [to] the struggle of LGBTQ people" but is instead critiquing "a phony liberal ideology that set up the terms of the LGBTQ struggle", "a certain utopian postmodern ideology that seeks to eliminate all limits, to eliminate all binaries, to go beyond norms because the imposition of a limit is patriarchal and oppressive."

In a 2023 piece for Compact Magazine, Žižek took a hard stance against access to puberty blockers for trans youth, and against trans adults being sent to prisons matching their gender, citing the case of Isla Bryson, whom he referred to as "a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women". Both of these things were attributed by Žižek to wokeness (the wider subject of the article).

Other
Žižek wrote that the convention center in which nationalist Slovene writers hold their conventions should be blown up, adding, "Since we live in the time without any sense of irony, I must add I don't mean it literally."

In 2013, Žižek corresponded with imprisoned Russian activist and Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. "All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous."

He criticized Western military interventions in developing countries and wrote that it was the 2011 military intervention in Libya "which threw the country in chaos" and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq "which created the conditions for the rise" of the Islamic State.

Žižek believes that China is the combination of capitalism and authoritarianism in their extreme forms, and the Chinese Communist Party is the best protector of the interests of capitalists. From the Cultural Revolution to Deng's reforms, "Mao himself created the ideological condition for rapid capitalist development by tearing apart the fabric of traditional society." "It is capitalism, again and again, that emerges as the only alternative, the only way to move forward and the dynamic force for change when social life gets stuck into some fixed form. Today, capitalism is much more revolutionary than the traditional Left obsessed with protecting the old achievements of the welfare state. Just consider how much capitalism has changed the entire texture of our societies in the past decades."

In an opinion article for The Guardian, Žižek argued in favour of giving full support to Ukraine after the Russian invasion and for creating a stronger NATO in response to Russian aggression, later arguing that it would also be a tragedy for Ukraine to yoke itself to western neoliberalism. He compared the struggle of Ukraine against the occupiers to the Palestinians' struggle against the Israeli occupation. In April 2024, Žižek criticized Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip.

Inconsistency and ambiguity
Žižek's philosophical and political positions have been described as ambiguous, and his work has been criticized for a failure to take a consistent stance. While he has claimed to stand by a revolutionary Marxist project, his lack of vision concerning the possible circumstances which could lead to successful revolution makes it unclear what that project consists of. According to John Gray and John Holbo, his theoretical argument often lacks grounding in historical fact, which makes him more provocative than insightful.

In a very negative review of Žižek's book Less than Nothing, the British political philosopher John Gray attacked Žižek for his celebrations of violence, his failure to ground his theories in historical facts, and his 'formless radicalism' which, according to Gray, professes to be communist yet lacks the conviction that communism could ever be successfully realized. Gray concluded that Žižek's work, though entertaining, is intellectually worthless: "Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek's work amounts in the end to less than nothing."

Žižek's refusal to present an alternative vision has led critics to accuse him of using unsustainable Marxist categories of analysis and having a 19th-century understanding of class. For example, post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau argued that "Žižek uses class as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils."

In his book Living in the End Times, Žižek suggests that the criticism of his positions is itself ambiguous and multilateral:

"... I am attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and unpatriotic traitor to my nation, for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading Bourgeois lies about Communism... so maybe, just maybe I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom.'"

Stylistic confusion
Žižek has been criticized for his chaotic and non-systematic style: Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention". O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance." Noam Chomsky deems Žižek guilty of "using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever", adding that his views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.

Conservative thinker Roger Scruton claims that: "To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox."

Careless scholarship
Žižek has been accused of approaching phenomena without rigour, reductively forcing them to support pre-given theoretical notions. For example, Tania Modleski alleges that "in trying to make Hitchcock 'fit' Lacan, he [Žižek] frequently ends up simplifying what goes on in the films". Similarly, Yannis Stavrakakis criticises Žižek's reading of Antigone, claiming it proceeds without regard for both the play itself and the interpretation, given by Lacan in his 7th Seminar, which Žižek claims to follow. According to Stavrakakis, Žižek mistakenly characterises Antigone's act (illegally burying her brother) as politically radical/revolutionary, when in reality "Her act is a one-off and she couldn't care less about what will happen in the polis after her suicide."

Noah Horwitz alleges that Žižek (and the Ljubljana School to which Žižek belongs) mistakenly conflates the insights of Lacan and Hegel, and registers concern that such a move "risks transforming Lacanian psychoanalysis into a discourse of self-consciousness rather than a discourse on the psychoanalytic, Freudian unconscious."

Allegations of plagiarism
Žižek's tendency to recycle portions of his own texts in subsequent works resulted in the accusation of self-plagiarism by The New York Times in 2014, after Žižek published an op-ed in the magazine which contained portions of his writing from an earlier book. In response, Žižek expressed perplexity at the harsh tone of the denunciation, emphasizing that the recycled passages in question only acted as references from his theoretical books to supplement otherwise original writing.

In July 2014, Newsweek reported that online bloggers led by Steve Sailer had discovered that in an article published in 2006, Žižek plagiarized long passages from an earlier review by Stanley Hornbeck that first appeared in the journal American Renaissance, a publication condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the organ of a "white nationalist hate group". In response to the allegations, Žižek stated: "The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another's line of thought. Consequently, I did just that—and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend's resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck's review of Macdonald's book.... In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas'. I nonetheless deeply regret the incident."

title: Slavoj Žižek


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Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Edwin Thompson Jaynes (July 5, 1922 – April 30, 1998) was the Wayman Crow Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference, initiating in 1957 the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics as being a particular application of more general Bayesian/information theory techniques (although he argued this was already implicit in the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs). Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic.

In 1963, together with Fred Cummings, he modeled the evolution of a two-level atom in an electromagnetic field, in a fully quantized way. This model is known as the Jaynes–Cummings model.

A particular focus of his work was the construction of logical principles for assigning prior probability distributions; see the principle of maximum entropy, the principle of maximum caliber, the principle of transformation groups and Laplace's principle of indifference. Other contributions include the mind projection fallacy.

Jaynes' book, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003) gathers various threads of modern thinking about Bayesian probability and statistical inference, develops the notion of probability theory as extended logic, and contrasts the advantages of Bayesian techniques with the results of other approaches. This book, which he dedicated to Harold Jeffreys, was published posthumously in 2003 (from an incomplete manuscript that was edited by Larry Bretthorst).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Edwin Thompson Jaynes


text:
Agudath Israel of America

Agudath Israel of America (אגודת ישראל באמריקה) (also called the Agudah) is an American organization that represents Haredi Orthodox Jews. It is loosely affiliated with the international World Agudath Israel. Agudah seeks to meet the needs of the Haredi community, advocates for its religious and civil rights, and services its constituents through charitable, educational, and social service projects across North America.

Functions
Agudah serves as a leadership and policy umbrella organization for Haredi Jews in the United States, representing the vast majority of members of the yeshiva world, sometimes known by the old label of misnagdim, as well as a large number of Hasidic groups. However, not all Hasidic groups are affiliated with Agudath Israel. For example, the Hasidic group Satmar, which is vehemently anti-Zionist, dislikes Agudah's relatively moderate stance towards the State of Israel.

Agudah has ideological connections with both the Agudat Israel party and with Degel HaTorah (Flag of the Torah), two Israeli Haredi political parties that have representation in the Knesset (Israel's parliament). In Israel, Degel and Agudah are in a political coalition called United Torah Judaism (UTJ).

History

The original Agudath Israel movement was established in Europe in 1912 by some of the most famous Orthodox rabbis of the time, including Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagen (the Chafetz Chaim), Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna, the Radziner Rebbe, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Elazar Leiner, the Gerrer Rebbe (the Imrei Emes), and the Chortkover Rebbe. It grew during the 1920s and 1930s to be the political,  communal, and cultural voice of those Orthodox Jews who were not part of Zionism's Orthodox Jewish Mizrachi party.

Rabbi Eliezer Silver, an Eastern European-trained rabbi, established the first office of Agudath Israel in America during the 1930s, organizing its first conference in 1939. Some of the early rabbinic leaders of the organization included Rabbi Mordechai Shlomo Friedman, Rabbi Shlomo Heiman, Rabbi Leo Jung, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, Rabbi Joshua Bäumel, and Rabbi Joseph B Soloveitchik. After the Holocaust, some prominent rabbis who made their home in America established a moetzes ("supreme council") known as the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, and the movement began to grow rapidly, with the rise of the yeshiva-based and Hasidic Orthodox communities.

Mike Tress led the expansion of the movement during the early 1940s as its chief lay leader, until his death in 1967. His cousin Rabbi Moshe Sherer then took the reins as president, and the organization flourished further in size and accomplishments. After his passing in May 1998, he was succeeded by Rabbi Shmuel Bloom, as Executive Vice President. In 2008, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, having served Agudah as general counsel and director of government affairs, took over as Executive Vice-President. In 2016, his salary was $220,000.

In April 2020, Agudath Israel of America head Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, the Novominsker Rebbe, 89 years old, died after contracting COVID-19, one month after he urged American Orthodox Jews to follow social distancing and other precautionary guidelines in response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying: "We cannot behave the way we did last week or two weeks ago. We're told that the halakha (Jewish law) is that we must listen to doctors, whether it's about a sick person or Yom Kippur".

Structure
Agudah's policies and leadership are directed by its Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah (Council of Torah Sages), composed primarily of rosh yeshivas (the chief spiritual and scholarly authority in a yeshiva) and Hasidic rebbes (who head Hasidic dynasties and organizations). The Moetzes sets all major policies and guides the organization according to its precepts of Da'as torah (דעת תורה), generally translated as Torah knowledge/direction. Rabbi Yaakov Perlow (recently deceased), who was the Novominsker Rebbe and a member of the Moetzes, was appointed as the Rosh Agudat Yisrael ("Head of Agudath Israel").

The executive staff includes Rabbi Yitzchok Ehrman as COO, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel as the Executive Vice President, Rabbi Labish Becker as the Executive Director, Rabbi Naftali Miller as CDO, Rabbi Moshe Danzger as CFO, and Rabbi A.D. Motzen as the National Director for State Relations.

There are close to one hundred Agudah-affiliated synagogues across the United States and Canada.

Positions
The Agudah takes positions on many political, religious, and social issues, primarily guided by its Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. It uses these stances to advise its members, advocate for its constituency in the halls of government, and file amicus briefs on behalf of the Haredi Orthodox Jewish community in the United States.

Conservative, Reform, and Modern Orthodox Judaism
In 1956, for example, the moetzes issued a written ruling forbidding Orthodox rabbis to join with any Reform or Conservative rabbis in rabbinical communal professional organizations that then united the various branches of America's Jews, such as the Synagogue Council of America.

This position was not endorsed by the Modern Orthodox. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University had initially aligned himself with Agudah, but later established his independent views on these matters and a host of other issues, such as attitudes towards college education and attitudes towards the secular-led Israeli governments. Rabbi Soloveitchik believed it important to nurture the more modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America (RCA).

Women
In 2015 and 2017, Agudah denounced moves to ordain women. It went even further, declaring Yeshivat Maharat, Open Orthodoxy, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and other affiliated entities to be similar to other dissident movements throughout Jewish history in having rejected basic tenets of Judaism. Avi Shafran, director of public affairs, wrote: "... women ... assuming positions of public leadership is ... antithetical to the concept of tzniut (modesty)." Agudah forbade ordained Orthodox female clergy from being hired to lead congregations. Dr. Noam Stadlan, a board member of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, wrote: "On this issue, the Agudah is irrelevant to Modern Orthodoxy in the same way Satmar or Neturei Karta views are irrelevant on issues of Zionism."

Abortion
In 2019, commenting on abortion, Agudath Israel said: "Jewish tradition teaches that a human fetus has status and dignity, and that abortion is prohibited in the vast majority of pregnancies", with certain exceptions in which it is permitted and in others where it is required. Other Orthodox New York rabbis offered opposing positions.

Vaccination
Also in 2019, Agudath lobbied against a New Jersey bill that would have ended a policy allowing New Jersey parents to not immunize their children—because of religious beliefs, but to still enroll them in school. The bill included an exemption for private schools. In the 2018-2019 school year, religious exemptions in New Jersey had grown to 2.6%. Doctors and public health experts had said the bill was urgently needed to prevent the level of measles outbreak that spread across the region in 2018 (the largest outbreak in three decades in the area emphasized that there is overwhelming scientific consensus that vaccines are safe and effective.

Zionism
While Agudath was created as a bulwark to fight against Zionism, the Rabbinic leadership of Agudath did permit "with great reluctance" participation in the government after the Israeli state was established in 1948. The reason given was that "the parliament is not an ideological organization; its purpose is to perform the mundane task of running the everyday life of the citizens of the country. It was against our will that this parliament was formed, and it has the power to interfere with inyanei hadas and to prevent the religious community from living a life of Torah. Thus, we were forced to send representatives there to fight for our survival." Agudah takes stances on issues affecting the Haredi sector in Israel; in contradistinction to the more stridently anti-Zionist Haredi communal organizations.

Political activity
Aside from its national branch in Manhattan, Agudah has active branches in the regions of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Missouri, New England, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Quebec, and Washington, D.C. The regional director of each branch lobbies the judicial and legislative branches of their state and local governments on any issue deemed morally or religiously important to their constituency (for example, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, school vouchers/school choice). Agudah's advocacy in New York state is led by Rabbi Yeruchim Silber, Director of New York Government Affairs.

Agudath Israel's federal activities are coordinated by Rabbi Abba Cohen, the Director and Counsel of the organization's Washington, D.C. office. Agudah was the first Orthodox Jewish group to open an office in Washington, in 1988, and maintains ongoing relations with the White House and executive agencies, as well as with the U.S. Congress, on various domestic and foreign issues. Agudath Israel World Organization also has a representative at the United Nations.

Agudah files amicus briefs in cases at all levels of the judiciary, often signing on as one of the organization signatories to a brief authored by Nat Lewin or the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs.

In 2023, Agudah's New Jersey state director Avi Schnall was elected as a Democrat to the New Jersey General Assembly from the otherwise solidly Republican 30th District, in what political commentators called a "massive demonstration" of the Orthodox community's political power.

Fingerprinting controversy
Official spokesman Rabbi Avi Shafran denied claims by The Jewish Week that Aguda "is opposed to both the mandated reporting and fingerprinting, and background check legislation" then under consideration, and cited a memorandum from 2 years prior expressing strong support for the legislation. The difference is Aguda's 2006 support was for legislation that passed in 2007 permitting but not mandating fingerprinting/background checking.

Youth services
Agudah maintains a network of summer youth camps (including Camp Agudah, Machane Ephraim, Camp Bnos, Camp Chayl Miriam, and Camp Bnoseinu in the Catskills in New York, as well as camps in the Midwest, California, and Toronto, Canada).

Sometimes referred to as "Pirchei / Zeirei", this was part of the work by Mike Tress.

"JEP" (Jewish Education Program) is known for its release hour work, and was identified by Harav Yaakov Perlow as "the JEP operation of Zeirei Agudath Israel" in a 1977 interview, in which he spoke about "to take off a seder from yeshiva and go out and speak at a release hour at a public school."

Social services
Agudah has a number of social service branches that cater to the elderly, poor, or disabled. It has a job training program called COPE, a job placement division, and a housing program. The Agudah is responsible for the founding of other national institutions and projects, including the Beis Yaakov girls' school system, and the national Daf Yomi Commission.

Communications
Agudah advocates its positions in several ways:
 * Publication of an e-newsletter, Weekly Window
 * Publication of a general-interest monthly magazine, The Jewish Observer, from 1963 (no longer published)
 * Maintains full-time offices in Washington, DC, and the US west coast, Midwest, and South
 * Activism by lobbying and submitting amicus briefs
 * Organizes prominent layperson missions to government agencies
 * Rabbi Avi Shafran, the official spokesman of Agudah, responds to media articles and statements which concern the Haredi Orthodox community; Shafran also organizes members to do the same
 * Conveys its positions in the Jewish media, particularly through privately owned weekly Jewish newspapers in English called "Hamodia" and "Yated Neeman" (distinct from the Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper carrying the same name), which convey news and views from the Haredi Orthodox point of view
 * Publication of articles and press releases on its website

title: Agudath Israel of America


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Incidence algebra

In order theory, a field of mathematics, an incidence algebra is an associative algebra, defined for every locally finite partially ordered set and commutative ring with unity. Subalgebras called reduced incidence algebras give a natural construction of various types of generating functions used in combinatorics and number theory.

Definition
A locally finite poset is one in which every closed interval
 * [a, b] = {x : a ≤ x ≤ b}

is finite.

The members of the incidence algebra are the functions f assigning to each nonempty interval [a, b] a scalar f(a, b), which is taken from the ring of scalars, a commutative ring with unity. On this underlying set one defines addition and scalar multiplication pointwise, and "multiplication" in the incidence algebra is a convolution defined by

 * $$(f*g)(a, b)=\sum_{a~\leq~x~\leq~b}f(a, x)g(x, b).$$

An incidence algebra is finite-dimensional if and only if the underlying poset is finite.

Related concepts
An incidence algebra is analogous to a group algebra; indeed, both the group algebra and the incidence algebra are special cases of a category algebra, defined analogously; groups and posets being special kinds of categories.

Upper-triangular matrices
Consider the case of a partial order ≤ over any $n$-element set $S$. We enumerate $S$ as $s_{1}, …, s_{n}$, and in such a way that the enumeration is compatible with the order ≤ on $S$, that is, $s_{i} ≤ s_{j}$ implies $i ≤ j$, which is always possible.

Then, functions $f$ as above, from intervals to scalars, can be thought of as matrices $A_{ij}$, where $A_{ij} = f(s_{i}, s_{j})$ whenever $i ≤ j$, and $A_{ij} = 0$ otherwise. Since we arranged $S$ in a way consistent with the usual order on the indices of the matrices, they will appear as upper-triangular matrices with a prescribed zero-pattern determined by the incomparable elements in $S$ under ≤.

The incidence algebra of ≤ is then isomorphic to the algebra of upper-triangular matrices with this prescribed zero-pattern and arbitrary (including possibly zero) scalar entries everywhere else, with the operations being ordinary matrix addition, scaling and multiplication.

Special elements
The multiplicative identity element of the incidence algebra is the delta function, defined by

 * $$\delta(a, b) = \begin{cases}

1 & \text{if } a=b, \\ 0 & \text{if } a \ne b. \end{cases}$$

The zeta function of an incidence algebra is the constant function ζ(a, b) = 1 for every nonempty interval [a, b]. Multiplying by ζ is analogous to integration.

One can show that ζ is invertible in the incidence algebra (with respect to the convolution defined above). (Generally, a member h of the incidence algebra is invertible if and only if h(x, x) is invertible for every x.) The multiplicative inverse of the zeta function is the Möbius function μ(a, b); every value of μ(a, b) is an integral multiple of 1 in the base ring.

The Möbius function can also be defined inductively by the following relation:
 * $$\mu(x,y) = \begin{cases}

{}\qquad 1 & \text{if } x = y\\[6pt] \displaystyle -\!\!\!\!\sum_{z\, :\, x\,\leq\, z\, <\, y} \mu(x,z) & \text{for } x<y \\ {}\qquad 0 & \text{otherwise }. \end{cases}$$

Multiplying by μ is analogous to differentiation, and is called Möbius inversion.

The square of the zeta function gives the number of elements in an interval: $$\zeta^2(x,y) = \sum_{z\in [x,y]} \zeta(x,z)\,\zeta(z,y) = \sum_{z\in [x,y]} 1  =  \#[x,y].$$

Examples

 * Positive integers ordered by divisibility
 * The convolution associated to the incidence algebra for intervals [1, n] becomes the Dirichlet convolution, hence the Möbius function is μ(a, b) = μ(b/a), where the second "μ" is the classical Möbius function introduced into number theory in the 19th century.

 * Finite subsets of some set E, ordered by inclusion
 * The Möbius function is $$\mu(S,T)=(-1)^{\left|T\smallsetminus S\right|}$$
 * whenever S and T are finite subsets of E with S ⊆ T, and Möbius inversion is called the principle of inclusion-exclusion.
 * Geometrically, this is a hypercube: $$2^E = \{0,1\}^E.$$

 * Natural numbers with their usual order
 * The Möbius function is $$\mu(x,y) = \begin{cases}

1& \text{if }y=x, \\ -1 & \text{if }y = x+1, \\ 0 & \text{if }y>x+1, \end{cases} $$ and Möbius inversion is called the (backwards) difference operator.
 * Geometrically, this corresponds to the discrete number line.
 * The convolution of functions in the incidence algebra corresponds to multiplication of formal power series: see the discussion of reduced incidence algebras below. The Möbius function corresponds to the sequence (1, −1, 0, 0, 0, ... ) of coefficients of the formal power series 1 − t, and the zeta function corresponds to the sequence of coefficients (1, 1, 1, 1, ...) of the formal power series $$(1 - t)^{-1} = 1 + t + t^2 + t^3 + \cdots$$, which is inverse. The delta function in this incidence algebra similarly corresponds to the formal power series 1.

 * Finite sub-multisets of some multiset E, ordered by inclusion
 * The above three examples can be unified and generalized by considering a multiset E, and finite sub-multisets S and T of E. The Möbius function is $$ \mu(S,T) = \begin{cases}

0 & \text{if } T \smallsetminus S \text{ is a proper multiset (has repeated elements)}\\ (-1)^{\left|T \smallsetminus S\right|} & \text{if } T\smallsetminus S \text{ is a set (has no repeated elements)}. \end{cases}$$
 * This generalizes the positive integers ordered by divisibility by a positive integer corresponding to its multiset of prime factors with multiplicity, e.g., 12 corresponds to the multiset $$\{ 2, 2, 3 \}.$$
 * This generalizes the natural numbers with their usual order by a natural number corresponding to a multiset of one underlying element and cardinality equal to that number, e.g., 3 corresponds to the multiset $$\{ 1, 1, 1 \}.$$

 * Subgroups of a finite p-group G, ordered by inclusion
 * The Möbius function is $$\mu_G(H_1,H_2) = (-1)^{k} p^{\binom{k}{2}}$$ if $$H_1$$ is a normal subgroup of $$H_2$$ and $$H_2/H_1 \cong (\Z/p\Z)^k$$ and it is 0 otherwise. This is a theorem of Weisner (1935).

 * Partitions of a set
 * Partially order the set of all partitions of a finite set by saying σ ≤ τ if σ is a finer partition than τ. In particular, let τ have t blocks which respectively split into s1, ..., st finer blocks of σ, which has a total of s = s1 + ⋅⋅⋅ + st blocks. Then the Möbius function is: $$\mu(\sigma,\tau) =

(-1)^{s-t}(s_1{-}1)! \dots (s_t{-}1)!$$

Euler characteristic
A poset is bounded if it has smallest and largest elements, which we call 0 and 1 respectively (not to be confused with the 0 and 1 of the ring of scalars). The Euler characteristic of a bounded finite poset is μ(0,1). The reason for this terminology is the following: If P has a 0 and 1, then μ(0,1) is the reduced Euler characteristic of the simplicial complex whose faces are chains in P \ {0, 1}. This can be shown using Philip Hall's theorem, relating the value of μ(0,1) to the number of chains of length i.

Reduced incidence algebras
The reduced incidence algebra consists of functions which assign the same value to any two intervals which are equivalent in an appropriate sense, usually meaning isomorphic as posets. This is a subalgebra of the incidence algebra, and it clearly contains the incidence algebra's identity element and zeta function. Any element of the reduced incidence algebra that is invertible in the larger incidence algebra has its inverse in the reduced incidence algebra. Thus the Möbius function is also in the reduced incidence algebra.

Reduced incidence algebras were introduced by Doubillet, Rota, and Stanley to give a natural construction of various rings of generating functions.

Natural numbers and ordinary generating functions
For the poset $$(\mathbb{N},\leq),$$ the reduced incidence algebra consists of functions $$f(a,b)$$ invariant under translation, $$f(a+k,b+k) = f(a,b)$$ for all $$k \ge 0,$$ so as to have the same value on isomorphic intervals [a+k, b+k] and [a, b]. Let t denote the function with t(a, a+1) = 1 and t(a, b) = 0 otherwise, a kind of invariant delta function on isomorphism classes of intervals. Its powers in the incidence algebra are the other invariant delta functions t n(a, a+n) = 1 and t n(x, y) = 0 otherwise. These form a basis for the reduced incidence algebra, and we may write any invariant function as $$\textstyle f = \sum_{n\ge 0} f(0,n)t^n$$. This notation makes clear the isomorphism between the reduced incidence algebra and the ring of formal power series $$Rt$$ over the scalars R, also known as the ring of ordinary generating functions. We may write the zeta function as $$\zeta=1+t+t^2+\cdots = \tfrac1{1-t},$$ the reciprocal of the Möbius function $$\mu=1-t.$$

Subset poset and exponential generating functions
For the Boolean poset of finite subsets $$S\subset\{1,2,3,\ldots\}$$ ordered by inclusion $$S\subset T$$, the reduced incidence algebra consists of invariant functions $$f(S,T),$$ defined to have the same value on isomorphic intervals [S,T] and [S′,T ′] with |T \ S| = |T ′ \ S′|. Again, let t denote the invariant delta function with t(S,T) = 1 for |T \ S| = 1 and t(S,T) = 0 otherwise. Its powers are: $$t^n(S,T) =\, \sum t(T_0,T_1)\,t(T_1,T_2) \dots t(T_{n-1},T_n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{cl} n! & \text{if}\,\, |T\smallsetminus S| = n\\ 0 & \text{otherwise,}\end{array}\right.$$ where the sum is over all chains $$S = T_0\subset T_1\subset\cdots\subset T_n=T,$$ and the only non-zero terms occur for saturated chains with $$|T_i\smallsetminus T_{i-1}| = 1;$$ since these correspond to permutations of n, we get the unique non-zero value n!. Thus, the invariant delta functions are the divided powers $$\tfrac{t^n}{n!},$$ and we may write any invariant function as $$\textstyle f = \sum_{n\geq0} f(\emptyset,[n])\frac{t^n}{n!},$$ where [n] = {1,. . ., n}. This gives a natural isomorphism between the reduced incidence algebra and the ring of exponential generating functions. The zeta function is $$\textstyle \zeta = \sum_{n\geq 0}\frac{t^n}{n!} = \exp(t), $$ with Möbius function: $$\mu = \frac1{\zeta} = \exp(-t) = \sum_{n\geq 0} (-1)^n \frac{t^n}{n!}.$$ Indeed, this computation with formal power series proves that $$\mu(S,T)=(-1)^{|T\smallsetminus S|}.$$ Many combinatorial counting sequences involving subsets or labeled objects can be interpreted in terms of the reduced incidence algebra, and computed using exponential generating functions.

Divisor poset and Dirichlet series
Consider the poset D of positive integers ordered by divisibility, denoted by $$a\,|\,b.$$ The reduced incidence algebra consists of functions $$f(a,b)$$ that are invariant under multiplication: $$f(ka,kb) = f(a,b)$$ for all $$k\ge 1.$$ (This multiplicative equivalence of intervals is a much stronger relation than poset isomorphism; e.g., for primes p, the two-element intervals [1,p] are all inequivalent.) For an invariant function, f(a,b) depends only on b/a, so a natural basis consists of invariant delta functions $$\delta_n$$ defined by $$\delta_n(a,b) = 1$$ if b/a = n and 0 otherwise; then any invariant function can be written $$\textstyle f = \sum_{n\geq 0} f(1,n)\, \delta_n.$$

The product of two invariant delta functions is:
 * $$(\delta_n \delta_m)(a,b) = \sum_{a|c|b} \delta_n(a,c)\,\delta_m(c,b) = \delta_{nm}(a,b),$$

since the only non-zero term comes from c = na and b = mc = nma. Thus, we get an isomorphism from the reduced incidence algebra to the ring of formal Dirichlet series by sending $$\delta_n$$ to $$n^{-s}\!,$$ so that f corresponds to $\sum_{n\geq 1} \frac{f(1,n)}{n^s}.$

The incidence algebra zeta function ζD(a,b) = 1 corresponds to the classical Riemann zeta function $$\zeta(s)=\textstyle \sum_{n\geq 1}\frac{1}{n^s},$$ having reciprocal $\frac{1}{\zeta(s)} = \sum_{n\geq 1}\frac{\mu(n)}{n^s},$ where $$\mu(n)=\mu_D(1,n)$$ is the classical Möbius function of number theory. Many other arithmetic functions arise naturally within the reduced incidence algebra, and equivalently in terms of Dirichlet series. For example, the divisor function $$\sigma_0(n)$$ is the square of the zeta function, $$\sigma_0(n) = \zeta^2\!(1,n),$$ a special case of the above result that $$\zeta^2\!(x,y)$$ gives the number of elements in the interval [x,y]; equivalenty, $\zeta(s)^2 = \sum_{n\geq 1} \frac{\sigma_0(n)}{n^s}.$

The product structure of the divisor poset facilitates the computation of its Möbius function. Unique factorization into primes implies D is isomorphic to an infinite Cartesian product $$\N\times\N \times \dots$$, with the order given by coordinatewise comparison: $$n = p_1^{e_1}p_2^{e_2}\dots$$, where $$p_k$$ is the kth prime,  corresponds to its sequence of exponents $$(e_1,e_2,\dots).$$ Now the Möbius function of D is the product of the Möbius functions for the factor posets, computed above, giving the classical formula:
 * $$\mu(n) = \mu_D(1,n) = \prod_{k\geq 1}\mu_{\N}(0,e_k)

\,=\,\left\{\begin{array}{cl}(-1)^d & \text{for } n \text{ squarefree with } d \text{ prime factors}\\ 0 & \text{otherwise.} \end{array}\right.$$

The product structure also explains the classical Euler product for the zeta function. The zeta function of D corresponds to a Cartesian product of zeta functions of the factors, computed above as $\frac{1}{1-t},$ so that $\zeta_D \cong \prod_{k\geq 1}\!\frac{1}{1-t},$  where the right side is a Cartesian product. Applying the isomorphism which sends t in the kth factor to $$p_k^{-s}$$, we obtain the usual Euler product.

Literature
Incidence algebras of locally finite posets were treated in a number of papers of Gian-Carlo Rota beginning in 1964, and by many later combinatorialists. Rota's 1964 paper was:

 * N. Jacobson, Basic Algebra. I, W. H. Freeman and Co., 1974. See section 8.6 for a treatment of Mobius functions on posets
 * N. Jacobson, Basic Algebra. I, W. H. Freeman and Co., 1974. See section 8.6 for a treatment of Mobius functions on posets

title: Incidence algebra


text:
Proposal for the Province of Toronto

The Province of Toronto is an urban secession proposal to split the city of Toronto and some or all of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) from the province of Ontario into a new Canadian province. Secession of Toronto, the surrounding region, or any other portion of the province from Ontario to create a new province would require an amendment to the Constitution of Canada.

The proposal for a new province of Toronto has been made by politicians and urban affairs commentators, in 2010 by MPP Bill Murdoch, and most recently by 2018 Toronto mayoral candidate and former Toronto Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat. The concept has also been supported by Jane Jacobs and others.

Variations of the proposal have appeared intermittently for decades.

Causes
Arguments posited for Toronto or GTA provincehood include those stating that the area's residents are politically and economically exploited by the rest of the province. Another argument presented is the urban issues faced by Toronto not present in other cities or rural areas of Ontario, including the delivery of public services to large numbers of immigrants and visible minorities, gun control, and differences in the delivery of education and health care to its residents. A federal political issue is the Greater Toronto Area's under-representation in the House of Commons.

Murdoch's proposal was motivated by a contrary sentiment, that the rural areas of Ontario have little clout in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario compared to Toronto. Andrew Steele, in an editorial in The Globe and Mail, stated that Murdoch was instead speaking to the rural base of voters in his constituency and calling for the separation of rural Ontario from Toronto. Another argument sometimes presented to support a split of Toronto from the province is that politicians from other cities in the province are concerned about their influence on provincial politics.

Glen Murray has stated that Canadian cities must rely on property taxes, as they have no ability to enact other taxes or collect income or consumption taxes.

History
The Province of Toronto was first proposed as the name of the province of Ontario during the debates leading to Canadian Confederation in 1867. British imperial officials considered the name after noting that Quebec City was the capital of Quebec, and hence Toronto should be the capital of a similarly named province. The idea had little traction and was dismissed in favour of using the same name for the province as the lake adjacent to its capital city, Lake Ontario.

The provincehood movement idea has been supported by the urban activist Jane Jacobs and urban planner Joe Berridge. Jacobs viewed Toronto as a region, which was split into multiple jurisdictions as an artefact of historical politics.

In the 1970s, Paul Godfrey presented to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto, as chairman of Metropolitan Toronto, arguments that the region should have the capability to set policy as does a provincial government. In 1991 academic and future member of parliament Ted McWhinney argued before a parliamentary committee that if Quebec were to separate Ontario would need to be broken up to rebalance confederation. According to McWhinney, splitting off Toronto would be the most sensible option, pointing to Germany where Hamburg and Berlin have their own states as an example.

Mel Lastman proposed Toronto provincehood in 1999 while attending the Mayors Summit of the Americas in Miami, Florida; he later retracted his comments, but by then, they had already spurred discussion of the idea in the media. Lastman was panned in an editorial by The Hamilton Spectator for not having considered all the consequences of provincehood. Debate flourished, as various proposals were presented, including one for the creation of the Province of Southern Ontario and another for the creation of a city-state status in Canada, which could also include Vancouver and Montreal. The Committee for the Province of Toronto was formed to seek a constitutional amendment enabling the formation of a new province. On 9 February 1999, councillor Michael Walker presented a notice of motion to Toronto City Council on behalf of the committee. Lastman also considered issuing a plebiscite to the residents of Toronto about Toronto provincehood.

These debates faded, but did result in negotiation between the City of Toronto government and the provincial government about greater autonomy for Toronto, which eventually resulted in new legislation "The Stronger City of Toronto for a Stronger Ontario Act", as well as the City of Toronto Act which granted the city more policy-setting powers; it has used these, for example, to define new taxes, and to ban corporate and union donations for municipal election campaigns. It also indirectly influenced federal policy, as the New Deal for Cities in 2003 was one of the platforms for Paul Martin after he succeeded Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister of Canada.

Tooker Gomberg who placed second to Lastman in the 2000 mayoral election, also favoured the idea. In November 2000, just before the election, he stated that "the province of Toronto idea, though it's a long shot and a long-term solution, is something I favour. It's a compelling idea whose time has not quite come."

At a meeting of the Bruce County Federation of Agriculture in 2010, a Member of Provincial Parliament from central Ontario, Bill Murdoch, suggested that the city of Toronto become its own province, but the other parts of the GTA (also known as the 905) would remain in Ontario, proposing its new capital to be London. David Miller, mayor of Toronto, responded by issuing a message via Twitter, stating "Province of Toronto... an idea whose time has come?", and his spokesman Stuart Green indicated that Miller would consider a public debate about the possible secession of Toronto from Ontario, and Murdoch stated that he received an email from Miller also indicating he was agreeable to a discussion about it. Murdoch had considered presenting a private member's bill to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario about this proposal. Thunder Bay mayor Lynn Peterson opposed Murdoch's proposal, stating that one of the perceived issues was inconsequential, specifically that policies defined in the Ontario legislature are not Toronto-centric. Michael Gravelle, the Minister of Northern Development and Mines, said "I look at it from the perspective of would this be good for Northern Ontario . . . and I don't think it would be".

In 2018, some activists revived the proposal again, after Ontario premier Doug Ford introduced legislation to reduce Toronto City Council from 47 to 25 seats, months after the 2018 municipal election was already underway.

Constitutional amendment
For any part of Toronto and the surrounding region to secede from Ontario to create a new province would require an amendment to the Constitution of Canada. The constitutional amendment would require resolutions from the House of Commons of Canada and the Senate of Canada, and resolutions from the legislative bodies of 7 of the provinces representing at least 50% of the population.

However, it has also been suggested that such an amendment may not be necessary if the federal and provincial government agree to split the province.

By the numbers
With 2.6 million residents as of 2016, the city of Toronto is more populous than six provinces: namely, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan. With a population of over 6 million, the Greater Toronto Area is more populous than those six, as well as Alberta and British Columbia.

The Province of Toronto would become the second smallest in Canada by area, larger only than Prince Edward Island, whose area is 5,660 km2, but would become the third most populous province in Canada only after Quebec and the resized Ontario.

If the boundaries were redefined to also include the adjacent city of Hamilton to turn the contiguous Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area into the new province of Toronto, it would supersede the resized province of Ontario as the 2nd largest province by population.

Political party
Registration for the Province of Toronto Party was accepted by Elections Ontario on 18 June 2001, and became effective on 1 July that year. One of its founding members was David Vallance. Members of the party contested for the mayorship of Toronto in the 2003 and 2006 municipal elections.

Paul Lewin's campaign in the 2003 mayoral election used the slogan "Free 416", referring to the regional use of the city's area code as a nickname, while advocating a Province of Toronto. He fared poorly in the municipal election.

David Vallance was the 2006 candidate for the mayoral election in Toronto. He has written several Letters to the Editor over the years on various matters, including the state of Toronto's provincial tax burden. He was a vocal opponent of the amalgamation of the old City of Toronto with neighbouring municipalities in 1997, and led the group Taxpayers Against Megacity. He had previously campaigned for city council in the 1997 municipal election as an extension of his anti-megacity campaign, and also advocated property tax reforms. In 2006, he argued that Torontonians should "take control of our own taxes and control our own destiny".

title: Proposal for the Province of Toronto


text:
Athenaeus

Athenaeus of Naucratis (Ἀθήναιος ὁ Nαυκρατίτης or Nαυκράτιος, Athēnaios Naukratitēs or Naukratios; Athenaeus Naucratita) was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus, who died in 192, implies that he survived that emperor. He was a contemporary of Adrantus.

Athenaeus himself states that he was the author of a treatise on the thratta, a kind of fish mentioned by Archippus and other comic poets, and of a history of the Syrian kings. Both works are lost. Of his works, only the fifteen-volume Deipnosophistae mostly survives.

The Deipnosophistae

The Deipnosophistae, which means "dinner-table philosophers", survives in fifteen books. The first two books, and parts of the third, eleventh and fifteenth, are extant only in epitome, but otherwise the work seems to be complete. It is an immense store-house of information, chiefly on matters connected with famous cooks, dining, but also containing remarks on music, songs, dances, philosophy, games, courtesans, and luxury. Nearly 800 writers and 2500 separate works are referred to by Athenaeus; one of his characters (not necessarily to be identified with the historical author himself) boasts of having read 800 plays of Athenian Middle Comedy alone. Were it not for Athenaeus, much valuable information about the ancient world would be missing, and many ancient Greek authors such as Archestratus would be almost entirely unknown. Book XIII, for example, is an important source for the study of sexuality in classical and Hellenistic Greece, and a rare fragment of Theognetus' work survives in 3.63.

The Deipnosophistae professes to be an account given by an individual named Athenaeus to his friend Timocrates of a banquet held at the house of Larensius (Λαρήνσιος; in Latin: Larensis), a wealthy book-collector and patron of the arts. It is thus a dialogue within a dialogue, after the manner of Plato, but the conversation extends to enormous length. The topics for discussion generally arise from the course of the dinner itself, but extend to literary and historical matters of every description, including abstruse points of grammar. The guests supposedly quote from memory. The actual sources of the material preserved in the Deipnosophistae remain obscure, but much of it probably comes at second hand from early scholars.

The twenty-four named guests include individuals called Galen and Ulpian, but they are all probably fictitious personages, and the majority take no part in the conversation. If the character Ulpian is identical with the famous jurist, the Deipnosophistae may have been written after his death in 223; but the jurist was murdered by the Praetorian Guard, whereas Ulpian in Athenaeus dies a natural death.

The complete version of the text, with the gaps noted above, is preserved in only one manuscript, conventionally referred to as A. The epitomized version of the text is preserved in two manuscripts, conventionally known as C and E. The standard edition of the text is Kaibel's Teubner. The standard numbering is drawn largely from Casaubon.

The encyclopaedist and author Sir Thomas Browne wrote a short essay upon Athenaeus which reflects a revived interest in the Banquet of the Learned amongst scholars during the 17th century following its publication in 1612 by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon.

title: Athenaeus


text:
Talk:May 14

Same man?
Is Karl IV of Germany really Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor? The (b. - d.) dates are close. -- Jeff

US Constitution
There is no mention of this exact date in the article US Constitution; a citation would be helpful for verification. 199.91.34.33 (talk) 15:06, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

title: Talk:May 14


text:
User talk:BrianHansen~enwiki

Welcome the the English Wikipedia! --mav

Hi Brian, thanks for fixing frigatebird, I've been away for a few days, so only just seen message, Jim

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called BrianHansen. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name BrianHansen~enwiki that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name. If you think you might own all of the accounts with this name and this message is in error, please visit Special:MergeAccount to check and attach all of your accounts to prevent them from being renamed.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 22:41, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:BrianHansen~enwiki


text:
Talk:Spoof

some notes:

"Nose-picking in the Pongidae and Its Implication for Human Evolution", said to be from the American Journal of Nasal Anatomy, (1987)
 * Nose-picking spoof

 * Georges Perec's (excellent!) "Cantatrix Sopranica L.", a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, eg "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)"

Request for semi-protection
This article should be semi-protected. Anonymous _anonymous_  Have a Nice Day  12:36, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Other meaning for spoofing
in australia spoofing is slang for ejaculating--220.245.74.93 (talk) 09:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Definition of 'spoof'
How 'bout starting off with a definition of this article's topic?? Niccast (talk) 00:35, 27 January 2019 (UTC)niccast

title: Talk:Spoof


text:
Korçë District

Korçë District (Rrethi i Korçës), was one of the 36 districts of Albania, which were dissolved in July 2000 and replaced by 12 counties. It had a population of 143,499 in 2001, and an area of 1752 km2. Its capital was the city of Korçë. Its territory is now part of Korçë County: the municipalities of Korçë, Maliq and Pustec.

Korçë District was considered one of two main minority regions of the country's south. During World War I the French created the Republic of Korça in the area.

Geography
It had an area of 1752 km2, making it the largest district in Albania. It was situated in the southeastern part of Albania, from lat. 40°27'N to lat. 40°57'N and from long. 21°4'E to 20°19'E.

It was bordered by Pogradec District to the north, by Greece with the Florina regional unit (Greek Macedonia) to the east, Devoll District to the southeast, by Kolonjë District and Përmet District to the southwest, and by Gramsh District and Skrapar District on the west.

19th century
Yuriy Venelin (1802–1839) a Russian scholar who specialised in Bulgarian studies noted that the Korçë District in 1833 (at which point its boundaries were quite different from the modern district, including all of Devoll and various other differences) had 50 villages with two thirds being Muslim and a third being Christian. Settlements of significance during that time were Moscopole, Vithkuq, Kamenicë, Floq, Boboshticë, Drenovë, Borje, Voskop and so on. Houses of the area numbered a total of 2400 containing some 22,000 people according to the Ottoman census. The Muslims and Christians of the region were noted as being "Albanians by nationality — speaking the same language, having the same customs" involved in agricultural employment, many unskilled and illiterate apart from those in Korçë and Moscopole that conduct trade. The villagers of Moscopole were mainly Aromanians in addition to Greeks and Albanians, while some Bulgarians living nearby.

20th century
In the 1908 statistics of Amadore Virgili as presented by Nicholas Cassavetes for the Pan-Epirotic Union of Northern Epirus showed the entire kaza of Korçë, which also included surrounding rural areas as well as the modern Devoll District as having a Muslim majority which was not differentiated by nationality alongside a Christian minority of which there were 43,800 Albanian speakers and 1,214 Aromanians (Vlachs), with no Greek speakers found, while Bulgarians were not counted for. For the same area, the 1913 statistics of Destani, which did not differentiate subjects by faith but only language, found 89829 Albanian speakers, 3190 Aromanian speakers, 3985 Bulgarian speakers, no Greek speakers and 527 "others". With regard to the Aromanian population, Lambros Psomas argues the study of Virgili likely undercounted the Aromanian speakers while the study of Destani is more reliable with regard to the Aromanians but he also argues the study of Destani was pro-Albanian in motive and drastically undercounted the number of Greek speakers in the Himara and Leskovik kazas, while Psomas also excludes Korçë from the collection of regions with notable Greek-speaking presence. British historian Tom Winnifrith states that during the delineation of the Greek-Albanian border a part of the local pro-Greek element included communities whose native speech was Greek.

In 1919, US diplomat Joseph Emerson Haven on special detail in Albania wrote a detailed report regarding the political circumstances in the country. Haven wrote that the province of Korçë numbered some 60,000 people of whom 18% had a preference for union with Greece and within that group half were doing so from fear or from being promised financial gain through attainment of Muslim properties and land. Haven also noted that in 1919 there was a degree of antipathy shown by both Muslims and Christians in the district toward Greece, and an ethnic affinity among Albanians that, at the time, came before religious affinity. At the Peace Conference in Paris, the Greek delegation argued that all Christians in North Epirus, including those that spoke Albanian, should be classified as Greeks because, they argued, their sentiments were Greek, and they had a common religion with Greeks; Lambros Psomas, however, argued that this did not apply in Korçë kaza, where there were many Orthodox Albanian nationalists.

Ethnicity
According to the 2011 Albanian census most of the population of the district of Korçë are ethnic Albanians, while a significant number of ethnic minorities such as Aromanians and Greeks also inhabit the district. Nowadays, Aromanians are found mainly residing in rural communities surrounding Korçë and according to the Albanian government census number some 5,000 people.

In 2002 it was reported that Greek-speakers were also present in the city of Korçë and in the area surrounding it. A Slavic minority most concentrated in the municipality of Pustec also exists, as does a scattered presence of Romani people.

Religion
The largest religions in the district of Korçë are Orthodox Christianity and Islam. The Muslims are mainly ethnic Albanians and are divided between Sunni, Bektashi and Halveti groups. The Orthodox Christians are mainly Greeks, Orthodox Albanians, and Aromanians. Additionally, among the Christians, there is a presence of Protestants, dating back to the actions of Gjerasim Qiriazi. Finally, a presence of Catholics was detected in the 2011 census.

Economy
During the 20th century, Korçë gained a substantial industrial capacity in addition to its historic role as a commercial and agricultural centre. The plateau on which the city stands is highly fertile and is one of Albania's main wheat-growing areas. Local industries include the manufacture of knitwear, rugs, textiles, flour-milling, brewing, and sugar-refining. Deposits of lignite coal are mined in the mountains nearby such as Mborje-Drenovë. The city is home to the nationally famous Birra Korça.

Administrative divisions
The district consisted of the following municipalities:

 * Drenovë
 * Gorë
 * Korçë
 * Lekas
 * Libonik
 * Maliq
 * Moglicë
 * Mollaj
 * Pirg
 * Pojan
 * Pustec (Liqenas)
 * Qendër Bulgarec
 * Vithkuq
 * Voskop
 * Voskopojë
 * Vreshtaz

Other communities and settlements

 * Baban
 * Bickë
 * Boboshticë
 * Burim
 * Cerja
 * Dardhë
 * Diellas
 * Drenovë
 * Cangonj
 * Ekmeçi
 * Floq
 * Gollomboç
 * Goricë e Madhë
 * Goricë e Vogël
 * Kallamas
 * Kamenicë
 * Kapshticë
 * Kozeli
 * Kreshpanj
 * Lajthizë
 * Mançurisht
 * Pilur
 * Plasë
 * Progër
 * Pustec
 * Rakickë
 * Shtyllë
 * Sinicë
 * Voskopoja (Moscopole)
 * Vreshtas
 * Vranisht
 * Zaroshkë
 * Zëmblak
 * Zvezdë

Notable residents

 * Pellumb Kulla (born 1940), diplomat and author
 * Ibrahim Agha Father of Muhammad Ali Pasha
 * Mustafa Naili Pasha (1798-1871) Born in Pojan near Zëmblak, Ottoman statesmen who held the title of Grand Vizier twice.
 * Megi Pojani, Albanian actress

title: Korçë District