Judith Butler drew long lines at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid on September 26, 2025, where the auditorium filled, many people stayed outside, and the room ended in thunderous, attentive silence, frequent ovations and shouts more typical of fandom than scholarship. The El País profile uses that scene to ask why some thinkers become fans’ favorites instead of just readers’ favorites. The answer, as the piece lays it out, has less to do with pure ideas than with visibility, packaging and the machinery that turns thought into a marketable product.
The Marketplace of Ideas
The article groups Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han among a wider set of “rock star intellectuals” that also includes Thomas Piketty, Yuval Noah Harari and Mark Fisher, who achieved great posthumous success. It asks what makes some authors cross out of seminars, conferences and scholarly papers and into the wider public arena. Originality and depth matter, the piece says, but so do other forces: the ability to generate useful concepts in a time of uncertainty and the ease with which an author moves in broader cultural circles.
Stefano Micali, whose forthcoming book is titled How to be a Successful Philosopher: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and is due in December 2026, gives the whole thing a sharper edge. “Thinkers behave like small businesses, seeking to maximize their visibility in the marketplace of ideas,” he writes, with what the article calls biting sarcasm. That line lands cleanly. The academy may still pretend it’s a temple. The profile treats it more like a shop floor.
Micali classifies bestselling authors into three “paths to success.” One is the path of prophets of dystopia, which he associates with Byung-Chul Han and Giorgio Agamben. Another is spectacular performance, which he says is typical of Slavoj Žižek, who constantly produces texts and lectures, improvises, mixes high and low culture, combines doctrines and is always present. The third is the path toward becoming a brand, which Micali attributes to authors like Butler, whose name becomes linked to a social issue. In Butler’s case, he says, that issue is gender.
Brands, Publishers and the Circulation Machine
Micali writes that the “brand-thinker” cannot help but address burning issues such as ecology or gender identity and, to gain visibility, must create the impression of having radically shifted the axes of discourse. The article says the three models are not mutually exclusive. That’s the trick, really: the same figure can be prophecy, performance and brand all at once, depending on what sells and who’s doing the selling.
Giselle Etcheverry, a curator of literary and intellectual projects, says these are authors whose general discourse resonates across different social strata and is sustained through frequent, short publications that capture the spirit of the times. She points to Han’s continuous flow of short essays and Žižek’s ability to analyze current events in books almost before they happen. Publishers, she says, play a role in popularizing authors, and the effect varies by country. Han, whose works are translated from German, receives attention in Spain that he doesn’t get elsewhere, while authors such as the Slovenian sociologist and philosopher Renata Salecl and the Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret enjoy great fame in Latin America. “And that’s the work of publishers,” she says.
The article also says social media, short videos and memes with pithy quotes help spread ideas, and that simple, clear concepts go viral more easily. So much for the old fantasy of merit alone. The circulation system matters. The platforms matter. The publishers matter. The rest is applause.
Javier Correa Román, editor of the popular magazine Filosofía&Co and founder of the Malaletra bookstore in Madrid, says these figures offer a toolbox for understanding the present. “They handle concepts very well, moving away from academic language: [their works and speeches are] aimed at an audience that seeks a useful diagnosis for understanding the world. [The audience] reads [and views] things that they then see in their daily lives,” he says. He adds that when theory is adapted to everyday experience, readers feel not only understood but also astute, able to interpret reality beyond its surface.
Performance, Persona and the Academic Snub
Correa Román says analyzing popular culture sells well when it is not treated as empty but as something in which certain forces operate. He gives Temptation Island as an example of something that could be analyzed beneath the surface. The article says Žižek is not the only one who likes popular culture; the late Mark Fisher based much of his discourse on the analysis of capitalist realism.
Micali identifies techniques that help an influential thinker succeed, including inversion, which means reversing the dominant thesis on a topic, declaring oneself the first to grasp the essence of an issue, and criticizing colleagues from a position of clear superiority. “The tone must be peremptory,” Micali writes. “One doesn’t make an argument, but rather states something as being obvious, an irrefutable fact.” The article says these techniques can also be useful in ordinary bar conversations. The academy, apparently, has competition from the pub.
Personal traits help make these thinkers recognizable, the piece says, including Žižek’s halting diction and frantic gestures, Han’s enigmatic image and his obsession with his garden and pianos, and Butler’s non-binary identity. These traits make them stand out among many essayists who lack notable attributes. The profile doesn’t hide the mechanism: in a crowded market, a distinctive persona helps as much as a distinctive argument.
The article says the most celebrated authors are often viewed unfavorably by academia, which considers their fame disproportionate to their original contribution to knowledge or judges them careless in their practice. Correa Román says that’s unfair. “These are authors with a high level of public exposure: many others probably wouldn’t withstand the scrutiny they’re subjected to,” he says. That exposure, though, is part of the whole arrangement. Public intellectuals are not just thinkers. They’re products of a system that rewards recognizability, repetition and the ability to turn a concept into a brand.
The piece ends by saying that in an era of overproduction of stimuli and ideas, when people are saturated with opinions and experts, these authors offer useful narratives about the world and our role in it. “And, at the very least, they make us feel smarter.” That’s the pitch. Not liberation, not collective power, just the comfort of feeling a little less lost in the noise.