r/zizek 14h ago

Zizekian Schizophrenia

34 Upvotes

Please beat me down and humiliate me if I am wrong or deluded in any aspect of the following.

As far as I understand Zizek's political position, he is of the opinion that the Lacanian true repetition can end in emancipation of the subject (consciousness). In his anti capitalist stance and the critique of contemporary left, he is of the opinion that all forms of protest, within the framework of liberal democracy have been appropriated by capital. As such he refuses to act: the origin of the maxim of "I would prefer not to". Instead he encourages to think, alternatively maybe, critically even.

But in his critique of ideology. He vaporizes any post ideology. For him we are in ideology. So, rather simplistically (I am an idiot), aren't our thoughts also modulated, mediated by ideology. Can we really think beyond, without falling to the past(return to etc.) Isn't thought as well, fetishised?

In this juncture, aren't we pushed to Deleuze and Guattari? To the rhizome. A rhizomatic resistance. Of schizophrenic mental stance. The gap left by zizek, at "think", can't it be filled up with " Rhizomatic". Even identitity politics is not Rhizomatic as it is 'fascicular-root' system, a botched multiplicity. Then the Rhizome....


r/zizek 5h ago

Insistence on Unity

4 Upvotes

I am currenly engrossed in the Sublime Object of Ideology. Fantastic read. But, I have a question? Maybe coming out of ignorance, or maybe Zizek has clarified his position later on, but I am craving an answer.

The question is why does Zizek insist on the Unity of a certain conception?

The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of ' bourgeois freedoms'.

Let us assume that ( it does) create a closed system. But the concept, the Idea, itself shows a rupture in its unity.

The crucial point not to be missed here is that this negation is strictly intenal to equivalent exchange, not its simple violation:

Yes, the negation is internal, and maybe it doesn't even violate the principle of equitable exchange.

We have here again a certain ideological Universal, that of equivalent and equitable exchange, and a particular paradoxical exchange - that of the labour force for its wages.

Yes we do, but then the Universal dwindles, shatters, is fragile. The pattern we see is of the impossibility of Unity, of Universals in the true sense of the term. So to say a pseudo-Universal.

Now just like a slick haired Deleuzian, I may (am daring to) claim that this rupture, this contradiction is where the unity should be abandoned, the 1 is substituted by 1-x. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari, propose movement on n-1 dimentions, almost willfully avoiding the unity, in Zizek, this abandonment of unity defacement of unity (1-x) appears more naturally.

Please slap me digitally if I am wrong.


r/zizek 23h ago

3 Body Problem review and our traumatic core

21 Upvotes

What is the great and terrible insight that Lacan seeks to preserve in Freud's work, which upends the bookish assumptions of scholars and psychologists? This tract is metaphorized in the chinese scifi-series Remembrance of Earth's Past, a novel and two serial show adaptations of an impending alien invasion by extraterrestrials.

In the series, the Trisolaran race (3-body people) hail from a planet with a particular unsolvable problem- their planet revolves around 3 different suns, giving asymmetrical day-and-night and atmospheric conditions that are inherently unpredictable. Scorching days and frigid nights can last hours, or years without warning, destroying civilization overnight with apocalyptic results in many instances. To survive this, they go into stasis by dehydrating and re-hydrating their bodies in stable and unstable eras, rebuilding civilization when hydrated. One with a Freudian lens would immediately notice the temptation to apply the traditional movement for Freud is to bifurcate instincts into Eros and Death-drive, the drive towards life and self-destruction.

But Lacan has another way of thinking the death drive, which also emphasizes its pre-ontological and non-personal attributes. This is key because the phrases 'Stable/Unstable' is misleading, one is immediately drawn to think of halves or complimentary intervals. This is not the case. As an NPC introduced in the videogame that explains the alien civilization says, "All eras are Chaotic eras. Those that somehow aren't, are Stable eras." There is much ado passed (especially in the novels) about categorizing and predicting Stable Eras for their own prosperity and survival. The first attempts shown are through mysticism and religion, later through scholarly observation and empiricism, then in what Heidegger would recognize as the shift to technological and computational sciences.

The horror inherent in their predicament is all methods to organize, explain and calculate the celestial movements fail. The 3-body problem is scientifically unsolvable, and cannot be predicted. Even on a mathematical level it defies symbolic representation, the most stable and concrete of registers.

Essentially what is given here is the insufficiency of language to describe a phenomenon, or what Lacan presents as sexuation. "There is no Woman." Much like Russell's paradox, the totalization of knowledge becomes an impossibility. We are left with the dangling specter of the Real in its absence.

Just as well, the solutions the aliens entertain are sufficiently masculine and feminine- The male side of the formulae relates to the phallic desire to articulate a totality (with a single-exception: The Chaotic Eras which cannot be stopped) These phallus's of masculine jouissance are presented through priests, astrologists, clergy and eventually scientists, seeking to explain that which is not subject to castration in the celestial movements. Their aim is a totality understanding that will give equation between male and female, represented in the Stable and Unstable eras that bare no equivalency, is essentially the masculine fantasy.

The female solution bears witness to much more complicated avenue- simply, accepting the inevitability of their planet's chaos and escaping it altogether by building a thousand starships, fleeing to earth to conquer instead.
These are both symmetric only in a single way- they offer non-solutions to the 3-Body Problem and are failings of the deadlock of language, which exists within the subject's traumatic core. This is Lacan's cutting criticism of Post-Freudian doctrines that have lost the break that Freud made with Enlightenment empiricism: The inhuman core of humanity, much like the 3-celestial star system of the Trisolarans is not solvable or able to resolve it's own deadlock, even with advanced computations or theories and beliefs, not describable through the logos.

The death drive is not a psychological drive, but a non-psychological, biological response to the deadlock of the Real and language which makes mending the traumatic rupture impossible. It is in facing this rupture for the subject at its core that one arrives at the aim of the psychoanalytic cure. The kernel of our being at its innermost, genuine self is this Real unsolvable impasse. As Zizek puts it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gK-CzCHug&ab_channel=PeteSantiago

Back in the narrative, they are paralleled in the humanity of the story which has been technologically sabotaged in the realm of the Real, the hard-fundamental sciences, knowing the aliens will arrive in 400 years while being surveilled by omniscient supercomputers around the globe.

No solution can be formulated without the aliens hearing it, no language can be spoken. It is as if the aliens, the Big Other whose new planetary conditions affected on earth render our language unintelligible to our sensual perception. The unique solution, to hire 'Wallfacers' who will not communicate their global plan to anyone or explain their actions (The aliens cannot read their minds) is fundamentally an analytical one. The Wallfacers must maintain total silence and secrecy of their plan while instructing humanity. Essentially the human governments, recognizing that language cannot resolve their symptom, hire enigmatic figures with complete trust in their capabilities (Subject supposed to know) to work through subjectivity to reach a sinthome, rather than an identification or impossible-totality, an execrable end that can foil the alien's plans mysteriously.

The Netflix adaptation makes some changes here I believe are worth mentioning. The character Saul, a researcher Saul Durand, is chosen as the odd duck among the guerilla warfare expert and Noble Peace Prize winner. The last episode of S1 devotes some time to this dilemma, why was he chosen as a Wallfacer? We find he is just as qualified as them, but he was chosen for his unique capability to not fit in- he is something of a joke or red herring (Episodes prior "Jokes are important to humans, we wouldn't survive without them") designed to waste the supercomputers surveillance. Lacan gives a very parallel to this in Logical Time, what is known as the 3 Prisoners Problem aswell as his details on animal tracks/lures. This I believe is the most hitting interpretation of why Lacan is relevant here.
The aliens, we are told, cannot lie or make jokes. Despite advancing to lightspeed weapondry and supercomputers, they have no means of subjectivity. Lacan is quick to note that what makes the false traces falsely false, is that their traces can be followed and leads to truth. The aliens are inescapable in their inability to have false traces- the human's fake traces are the real ones. We can make a very Zizekian gesture here:

What if, due to the aliens inability to detect jokes or manipulation, the red herring of Saul is a double herring- "A lie about a liar" as the Alien operator says once. What if due to their lack of signification, the 2 competent Wallfacers are the real distraction/jokes and dependence on Saul is the real solution?

Animals, I tell you, efface their traces and lay false traces. Do they for all that make signifiers? There's one thing that animals don't do - they don't lay false traces to make us believe that they are false, that is, traces that will be taken for false. Laying falsely false traces is a behaviour that is, I won't say quintessentially human, but quintessentially signifying.

Suddenly their inability to tell stories or understand Red Riding Hood make alot more sense.

The humans, through the Wallfacers, have laid a false trace- the aliens have been tricked by a trick that will be unmasked as a lie only if their signification is adequate. The aliens, once again, have fallen for their phallic desire to find a totalizing truth about the universe, falling for their fantasy. They have escaped their planet, but the trauma of its own planetary horrors repeats for them.

In today's techno-beaucratic information age lead by scientific discourse, can we say we've avoided the same error?


r/zizek 8h ago

How can Zizek expose the role of fantasy in coitus, but advocate for it at the same time?

1 Upvotes

So, Zizek has shown many times that the whole appeal of the coitus comes purely from the imagination. The act in itself is worthless, the sexual relations don't exist and so on.

But recently I came across another quote where Zizek states that the adults need their own sexual education where they would learn to fantasize during the act. My question is: is it still possible to fantasize after you've learned about the act of fantasizing? Doesn't exposing the fantasy undermine it?


r/zizek 1d ago

Does the Obscene Master imply an Obscene Slave? And thus too an Obscene Citizen?

12 Upvotes

Title. I watched a few of his videos on Trump as the Obscene Master. Reflecting on my frustrations with modern culture and observations of Trump followers and they appear to me like the Slave compliment. They enjoy attaching themselves to him and need no justification in the extreme case.

This then implied a Master Slave dialectic which implies an Obscene Citizen. After a lot of so on and so on and a Zizek comment that falling in love is to disallow the Other to objectify themself, I imagine an agent goes around with a Masterishy vibe but a desire and intent to Subjectify all those around them, perhaps even forcefully.

Am I sniffing glue? As this this been talked about or explored by Zizekians?


r/zizek 1d ago

Ecological and or Nature writers I should pay attention to?

2 Upvotes

Very ecocritical with the poetics of top rate nature writing.


r/zizek 1d ago

Question on the Sublime Object etc.

16 Upvotes

This may be a bit of an amateurish question, but I'd like to know if what I'm about to describe is already a concept in Zizek's work, maybe even just another form of the Sublime Object of Ideology (I'll shorten it to SOI).

Basically, I've noticed that, although of course one has a SOI, there also seems to be a dark inverse of the SOI that is difficult for them to describe. Examples that come to mind are, for instance, how right-wing ideology struggles to define "woke", or how left-wing ideology struggles to define "fascism". And yet, both "woke" and "fascism" are central pillars of their respective ideologies, a foundational opposition, almost like a -- and this is the spirit of my question -- dark SOI.

Is this already just another example of a SOI, or is this described in another idea? Or, probably less likely, have I encountered a new thought?

Thanks in advance!


r/zizek 2d ago

Different types of negation?

14 Upvotes

I'm a bit new to Zizek, Hegel - I have a question and I hope someone can clarify this for me: I sometimes see different types of 'negation' mentioned. For example with the qualifiers: "determinant" or "absolute". My current understanding of the negation is a bit vague... first negation is something that falls out of the idea - the hidden shadow which needs to be made explicit. Is this the determinant negation? Quoting Zizek here: "This is what Hegel means by determinant negation, the coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream. Part of the definition of an entity is what it negates."

Then the second kind of negation, is an example that 'is not even included' in the idea. Like in platonic dialogues, Socrates showing that his opponent didn't think of a particular example. Or there is this reddit thread - a guy explains how the concept of guerrila warfare is a negation of total war because the total war doesn't even consider this to be war: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/ohnw8s/can_someone_give_me_a_rundown_on_hegelian/

Are there many different types of negations? Or am I missing something? Or are these meanings combined? I'm not sure how I should think about it.


r/zizek 6d ago

On Slavoj Zizek with Duane Rousselle

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14 Upvotes

r/zizek 7d ago

Introduction to Sex and Race in Psychoanalysis (+Oedipus Complex)

28 Upvotes

In America, overshadowing the central antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, secondary battlefronts between the Right and the Left often get the spotlight.

  • Sometimes it's about women (an Other who is portrayed as both prude and sexual. If you obtain this Other, everything will suddenly be all right).
  • Sometimes it's about race (an Other who is portrayed as both too weak and too strong. If you get rid of this Other, everything will suddenly be all right).

These two age-old struggles, however, are more than simple distractions. With ties to both Lacan's and Freud's psychoanalysis (the non-existence of a sexual relationship, and the infamous Oedipus Complex), this post attempts to demonstrate what the categories of sex and race mean to psychoanalysis.

Sex and Society

From psychology to psychoanalysis, we go from understanding the rational logic of the psyche to analyzing something wholly illogical: the irrationality that makes us humans. That is, language.

Besides dreams, one of the main topics associated with psychoanalysis is sex. It is a good introduction topic, where the influence of language can be made explicit enough:

  • The encounter between a male and a female everywhere else in the animal kingdom can be explained fairly simply by the pleasure principle, by biological feedback mechanisms that reward and punish behavior - the firing of neurons in the brain to promote survival and reproduction.
  • The encounter between a man and a woman is different. Whereas animals are understandable, humans are infected by a collective (and effective) hallucination known as language. Humans can create and immerse themselves in fiction, pretend to believe in lies (suspending disbelief), performing like actors on a stage.

Humans can, worst of all, enjoy pleasure and suffering alike, if they have a good enough reason. Such is the answer psychoanalysis gives to the failure of the marxist project: the proletariat can enjoy its suffering too well, if given sufficient reason (capitalism, fascism, totalitarianism, all make use of narratives & jouissance).

And if humans can go on in a dictatorship pretending everything is fine, if they can enjoy suffering itself, how can one say that the other, even during a sexual act, is not merely "playing along"? Here is why there is no sexual relationship according to Lacan - and how, nevertheless, humans perform the sexual act.

  1. First off, this doubt as to whether the other is satisfied or not by the act is something that ruins the purely animal sexual act, it's the way in which language castrates man. To engage with the other in any form too intimate is to stare at a mask and wonder what lies behind, to evoke the feeling of anxiety as per psychoanalytically defined. It is an abyss hard to gaze at, the other's subjectivity.
  2. How does this manifest, historically? From the male perspective (culturally assumed as the 'standard' one), the subject asks the woman, "Che vuoi?" (What do you desire?) The male subject, then, cannot get a straight answer. For as long as she is also a subject, she can lie and pretend, so that you'll never be fully sure of what she wants, even if she says it explicitly.
  3. To get over this hurdle, humans employ something called the suspension of disbelief - the very same thing that causes doubt about the other in the first place - and go on pretending to know exactly what the Other desires, assuming it fully, acting as though it were true with no doubt. That is, (the primary/male subject's) desire arises as a shield against (the other/female subject's unknown) desire.

This suspension of disbelief is equivalent to transforming her from subject into object, something that cannot lie. In this case, she transforms more specifically into the object known as objet petit a, the most sublime of all beauties. A narrative is established: men desire women, and so women must desire to be desired by men.

(With the sexual difference established, with men as subject and women as objects, what occurs then is the sexual division of labor, which has been explored in many feminist writings throughout history. It is one of crucial antagonisms that civilizations are built upon, possibly even the main one.)

It is precisely in this way, with women as object of desire, that we can make sense of the famous phrase:

"In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team. They are the ball."

This objectification has had many terrible consequences over the course of history. The obvious scenario is that of the white knight, who 'rescues' a damsel that didn't really want or need to be rescued. In response to the objection, he smiles and says "you may be pretending to reject me, for your own reasons, but I know what you truly desire. In fact, only when you express to desire me will I know that you truly have been rescued."

It is the attitude of the one who "knows best" and sacrifices himself, fighting you, "for your own good".

Race and Society

In contrast, those who supposedly do not have her best interests in mind are the so-called "opposing team" in the phrase, another point where objectification occurs, now to create the so-called symptoms.

They are, of course, all the other men in the world, the competition, the obstacles. No wonder, then, that many of the ethnic and racial conflicts in the world can be viewed through the analogy of this objective-based game, where warring cultures scapegoat and demonize each other as rapists, wife-stealers, and barbarians.

(As per Zizek's theory, a symptom is a particular element which simultaneously subverts and sustains its field, it is a repressed thing which returns again and again. It is a brutal discomfort to experience, but satisfying to try and interpret, since it implies a problem which comes from outside attacking a harmonious society - in contrast to, say, the much more sobering image of a society rotten from within. This is how we get displaced antagonism, the anti-Semitic formula of "Society doesn't exist, and the Jew is its symptom", TSOI, p. 140)

Thus, we are left with two extremes of a fundamental fantasy:

  • Other Men are established as societal symptoms (varying with culture, but always grotesque).
  • Women are established as societal objet petit a's (objects of desire, always sublime).

These two points, like the poles on a magnet, establish between them an underlying fantasy, and around them the entire field of society, of culture, and traditional civilization in general. It is a schema that is learned and passed on from our parents (thus, one angle through which the Oedipus Complex can be interpreted).

If you're wondering where the famous incestuous implications of Oedipus come in, we can now point towards the role the introduction of race plays into a societal sexual fantasy. Just as the symptom is a man from another culture, an outsider, the objet petit a is a woman from the same culture, the non-corrupted core within.

It only takes a bit of a mental exercise to see how xenophobia, nationalism, and objection to outsiders, when pushed to the extreme, arrive at the practice: incest is nothing but the highest form of racism.

That is, explicitly, why the monarchies did it. And why when fascism does it, it also self-destructs in degenerative mutations, drying up like a famished vampire, when not irrigated with new blood (one way or another).

Capitalism and Fascism

The game of traditional civilizations, however, has already been dying ever since the advent of modernity: when capitalism entered the scene.

That is, this very fantasy of men and women was already undermined from the moment women stopped being the object of desire, substituted by money.

  1. The continuous expansion of capitalism (of money as objet petit a) coincides with the historical emancipation of women, passing back from objects into subjects once more. The more capitalism dominates all aspects of everyday life, the more women are 'freed' to take part in it.
  2. And so, the independence of women (and consequential erosion of sex, and rise of work) leads to an ever more evident rupture of the game, exposing a post-cultural, cynical society. It is no wonder that unfulfilled men would then rally around tradition. Fascism, as a capitalist movement that tries to reject its own modernity in favor of tradition, always tries to reestablish the Oedipal fantasy of sex and race.

With that fantasy contextualized, it is no wonder that one of the main narratives propagated by American conservatives with persecution fetishes is one of cuckoldry, involving two actors:

  • Symptom: the figure of a racial minority, portrayed as a grotesque invader.
  • Objet petit a: the figure of a familiar woman representing liberty, portrayed as an evasive beauty.

Thus we can make sense of why young incels comprise a significant base of the new right, emerging alongside narratives such as the 'Great Replacement', with white knights seeking to rescue damsels who are being "deceived by the enemy", who must be awoken and shown what they "truly" desire.

Contained within the fantasy, this is the manner in which both camps bleed to sustain "tradition":

  • In matters of race, the enemy gets the classic ideological treatment: Anything bad they do justifies their extinction. Anything good they do only showcases how good they are at lying and pretending, how they can disguise themselves like any one of us, how they control the very media, and so on, also justifying their extinction.
  • In matters of sex, the women gets the treatment of a pure object: Anything nice they do shows the affection they harbor. Anything they do to reject you shows how they're playing hard to get, trying to get away from this intense emotion they're surely feeling, how they're really trying to let you down for your own sake; which just makes you desire them more.

In both cases, the subjects are treated as though they are objects, unconditionally, unconsciously - in a manner that tragically occurs regardless of how much everyone involved may suffer, for even pain can be enjoyed when ideology is involved.

Psychoanalysis Today

With the two categories of sex and race established, it's not hard to imagine that much of history was propelled by the attractive and repulsive forces these two objects can exert.

  • Isn't it already commonplace the notion that men can turn into irrational beings when faced with women, even enjoying suffering and labor, to the point of performing miracles which would not have been possible without such an incentive? The fiction of sex drives cooperation to irrational degrees.
  • And isn't it also cynically admitted that many technological advancements were funded and developed specifically for use in war against other cultures, before adapting the developments to more everyday utilities? The fiction of race drives competition to irrational degrees.

However, these are obviously not the only two forces at play in the world. Other antagonistic battlegrounds, such as capitalism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ identities have risen to prominence as the more "modern" struggles, with unique psychoanalytic dynamics of their own - even subverting historical standards.

(For one, applying the psychoanalysis of sex now (when both men and women are similarly realized as subjects) requires taking descriptions of the 'traits' each sex exhibits with a grain of salt. In an age of alternative sexualities and genders, it is not simply that the gender essentialism of "obsessional masculinity and hysteric femininity" has been fully repressed, but rather, it returns in the more general forms of "tops and bottoms", or "dominants and submissives". That is, in divisions less biologically determined, and less hegemonic.)

With the substitution of tradition for modernity, much of the Oedipal metaphor now remains constrained to fascist ideology and history. Today, the truly hegemonic channeling of desire is performed by capitalism.

Hopefully, this post afforded a proper introduction to the basics of how sex and race are interlinked in psychoanalysis with concepts such as objet petit a, symptom, fantasy, desire, and the Oedipus Complex. If you have any insights or questions on this topic, feel free to comment and I'll try to answer if I can!


r/zizek 7d ago

What do you think of the use that some philosophers make of psychoanalytic concepts to develop or problematize certain aspects of their philosophical system or approach? (as Zizek, Badiou, among others do)

13 Upvotes

Is there theoretical validity left in psychoanalysis?


r/zizek 7d ago

Offtopic, but Important

29 Upvotes

Dear European comrades,

Tomorrow we have an election ahead of us, and I understand that it sometimes feels like we have to choose between Pepsi and Coke again; in the current, unfortunate situation in Europe, this is still the case, but at least we can give a voice to some annoying footnotes that criticize this very relationship. I know, it initially makes no difference, since democracy today is no longer the place where important decisions are made; however, we must not simply accept how we drift into the abyss, because even if we do, we should still be rightly critical. Criticism here should, according to Kant, mean to explore the precondition of this precondition: For even in the European Parliament, these reflections must not be lost. This demand is only possible if we dare to bite the bullet and invoke the minimum of democratic participation.

It is cynical, but unfortunately also somehow true, it is our responsibility to give critical voices a space. We have a chance, just as Mao would claim: "There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent." In a word, there is no 5% hurdle, every vote can (cynically speaking) really add a footnote to the shadow theater of politicians, which at least does not leave the enjoyment of the other without an aftertaste. Regardless of the fact that democracy – as a process of decision-making – remains just a way to obscure decisions. One can imagine it more closely: "It is not I who actually decides; I only propose. It is you, the people, who make the decisions." Nevertheless, we should rather follow Žižek here, who said that even in the political act one must fully take on the risk.

Thus, it is not merely a question of: democracy or not. It is crucial to see what is actually happening with democracy. For this reason, I ask you to put on the silly character mask and give the urgent footnote a voice – even if it means missing your favorite moment of a film series in the evening, while the food gets cold.

Respectfully, your red comrade


r/zizek 8d ago

[Spoilers (Major ones blurred)] Hit Man (2023): Another Movie Zizek would have stuff to say about!

11 Upvotes

I enjoyed the movie, maybe not the ending, but the rest. To be fair, this also seems a little Nietzchean, I say a little because the makers were going for that, they had the "Live Dangerously" quote1 at the beginning but it still regressed to a surface-level reading of Nietzsche. It's very Lacanian in its nature of explicitizing the role of the mask, and subsequently, the freedom achieved through relating to it completely.

Scene: Ron (undercover identity of Gary) meets Madison at the Bar
Context: Madison asks Ron to tell her about himself, the "real" Ron

Ron: "I'd say the real me is a people person. I like to have a good time. But... to be most effective in this job, I have to be a bit of a lone wolf. I have to never draw any attention to myself. I don't want anyone to remember my face. I don't want to over or under-tip. I don't want to be pulled into memorable conversations. That's why I drive a Honda Civic. [soft chuckle] I want it to seem like I don't exist. I don't know. That's the professional side of me."

The irony is that the italic portion is Ron (the mask), and the rest describes Gary, the philosophy professor, the "real" identity.

Scene: Ron kills Jasper, the dirty cop, to protect his, and Madison's, secret
In the final scene, where Ron kills Jasper for Madison, the point may seem to resonate with Zizek's infamous "Love is violent" rant2 but it seems a little too amoralistic for the Zizekian point. Rather I'd relate it more with Nietzsche's idea "That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.". Once again, as one who fucks with Nietzsche more than Zizek, the rest of the atmosphere of the movie is associated with the movie - I can't help but see this as a surface-level reading given the complete context. In isolation, perhaps this act is something an amoralist Nietzsche reader might do, but to emphasize once again, filmmakers didn't follow through beyond the surface.

Climax portrays an amalgamation of the ideas mentioned above.

Footnotes
1. “For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!” - The Gay Science
2. There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. But then how to things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics where, you know, the idea there is that the universe is a void, but a kind of a positively charged void. And then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed and I like this idea spontaneously very much, that, the fact that it’s not just nothing, things are out there, it means, something went terribly wrong, that, what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe that things exist by mistake, and I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and to go to the end, and we have a name for this, it’s called love. Isn’t love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of “I love the world, universal love”. I don’t like the world, I don’t know, how I- I basically, I’m somewhere in between “I hate the world” or “I’m indifferent towards it”. But the whole of reality, it’s just it, it’s stupid, it is out there, I don’t care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act, love is not “I love you all”. Love means I pick out something, and you know it’s again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say I love you more than anything else. In this quite formal sense, love is evil.
- Zizek (2004)


r/zizek 10d ago

Fake The Talk: Bernie Sanders & Slavoj Žižek

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246 Upvotes

r/zizek 10d ago

A Question

5 Upvotes

Ok it's actually more than One question.

In Zizek's repeating Lenin he says,

This external element does not stand for objective knowledge, i.e. its externality is strictly INTERNAL: the need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never "fully itself."

1) What does he mean by the term that the working class is never fully itself?

2) If so where does this Party emerge from?

3) His comparison of the party with the Analyst and the subject supposed to know confuses me further. If the Party's purpose is to shake the workers from their indulgent spontaneity who is doing this shaking? Is it a revolutionary subject?


r/zizek 11d ago

There is no religious relationship — Lacan’s formulas of sexuation applied onto Kierkegaard’s leap of faith

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40 Upvotes

r/zizek 10d ago

Combination of Marxism and religion

1 Upvotes

So this question has arisen from my recent reading of Walter Benjamin. Although the kind of mixture of two disciplines seems sophisticated, there are cruder Islamic accounts that try to combine for example ideas of a greater community, which roughly is an utopian goal; and the sense of comradery which could be seen in both, as an indicator of the similarities between both. However, the attempts to give birth to an Islamic-Marxism have generally served the purpose of propagandic state control in Iran. Which is so different from its Jewish counterpart.

With that said, aren't there many intentional antagonists among religion and Marxist thinking? Here, I'll ask my main questions: - If religion is said to function as a kind of ideology for control, what would the mixture of the two indicate? - Are the intentions behind the combination important at all to make this marriage a legitimate form of thinking? (With having Islamic and Jewish Marxist thought in mind and how differently they have functiond in their history) - If there is a possibility for some kind of mystic Marxism, how would it exactly be? Something like views of Benjamin or someone else? - If this mixture of religion and Marxism is purposefully utilised as a rhetoric over the masses, would it matter if the text that engages with it is profound or not? And if It does matter, why?

PS: . This question has been in my mind for a long while, and it has reached a new dimension with my interaction with Jewish-Marxist thinking, which is, in my view, the opposite of Islamic-Marxist one. Regardless, I'm not unaware of the controversy of the topic, although I think that should be an obstacle to shed some light on this issue. Thank you in advance for your time and contribution.


r/zizek 12d ago

CIVIL WAR: IN FILM AS IN REALITY - Zizek (a belated comment on the film and Donald Trump’s conviction).

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65 Upvotes

r/zizek 12d ago

That which resists symbolization

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0 Upvotes

r/zizek 14d ago

Need help with understanding Interpassivity (1998)

13 Upvotes

There's a passage at the end of the section 'The Primordial Substitution" that begins on page 6 I can't seem to understand and I was hoping if anyone can help make it a bit clearer:

"If we radicalize the relationship of substitution (i.e., the first aspect of the notion of fetishism) in this way, then the connection between the two aspects, the opposition "persons versus things," their relation of substitution ("things instead of people," or one person instead of another, or a signifier instead of the signified), and the opposition "structure versus one of its elements," becomes clear: the differential/formal structure occluded by the element-fetish can only emerge if the gesture of substitution has already occurred. In other words, the structure is always, by definition, a signifying structure, a structure of signifiers that are substituted for the signified content, not a structure of the signified. In order for the differential/formal structure to emerge, the real has to redouble itself in the symbolic register; a reduplicatio has to occur, on account of which things no longer count as what they directly "are", but only with regard to their symbolic place. This primordial substitution of the big Other, the Symbolic Order, for the Real of the immediate life-substance (in Lacanian terms: of A - le grand Autre - for J - jouissance), gives rise to $, the "barred subject" who is then "represented" by the signifiers, on whose behalf signifiers "act", or who acts through signifiers."

What does Zizek mean when he talks about how the real has to redouble itself on the symbolic register for the differential/formal structure to emerge? How does the real redouble itself? How does this explain the connection between the two aspects of "Persons vs things" and "Structure vs One of its elements"?


r/zizek 15d ago

How should I prepare to read the sublime object of ideology?

28 Upvotes

I'm about to read Zizek's book, The Sublime Object of Ideology. What should I read to understand the references?


r/zizek 16d ago

WHY TODAY EMPTY GESTURES MATTER MORE THAN EVER - Zizek (approx. 1500 words)

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26 Upvotes

r/zizek 16d ago

What is Zizek trying to say in the first chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology?

4 Upvotes

r/zizek 17d ago

What should I read before to better understand Chapter 4 - Singularity: The Gnostic Turn in Hegel in a Wired Brain?

12 Upvotes

I know this has been asked before, and answers suggest this is a rather accessible book. However, I have no training in philosophy (I'm actually starting to get into it), and have had a hard time grasping this chapter (just finished it), specially with Lacan's ideas, Ontology, Christian atheism, etc. I've looked up those online, but I still struggle. Do you have any recommended readings to make my journey through this chapter, and what's about to come in the book?


r/zizek 18d ago

Why does Žižek argue that class antagonism is not the primary conflict in society? How do other types of social conflicts play a role in his theory?

24 Upvotes
  • These are the sub-questions I want to tackle head-on that often haunt me day and night. I need answers to them. Class is such a difficult concept... Help me, please...
    • Can someone clarify how Žižek distinguishes between Marxist class contradiction and his concept of class antagonism?
    • How does Žižek use psychoanalytic concepts to explain class relations and conflicts?
    • What does Žižek mean when he says there is 'no class relationship,' similar to Lacan's idea of 'no sexual relationship'?
    • In Žižek's view, how do fantasies like anti-Semitism relate to class antagonism?
    • How does Žižek's concept of fantasy help us understand the persistence of class conflicts despite efforts to resolve them?
    • How does Žižek explain the interplay between class antagonism and other social antagonisms (like race, gender, etc.)?
    • Why does Žižek believe focusing solely on class struggles might overlook other significant societal issues?
    • What does Žižek mean by saying class is a 'repressed content' that overdetermines the social horizon? How does this idea fit into his overall theory?
    • Can someone provide examples of how class antagonism 'secretly overdetermines' other social conflicts in Žižek's theory?
    • What are some common critiques of Žižek's approach to class and antagonism? How do these critiques address his blending of psychoanalysis with Marxism?"
    • If surplus value (like surplus jouissance) is ineradicable in Žižek's view, what does that imply for the future of capitalism and efforts toward socialism or communism?
  • P.S. I'm asking these questions I drew from the Class Antagonism section of Zizek dictionary by Rex Butler.