Slavoj Zizek

In his 2020 work, _ Hegel in a Wired Brain_, Žižek explores whether digital machines can comprehend the unconscious as the surplus of language. According to him, even if future digital machines could decode and comprehend all human thoughts and discourse, they would remain incapable of capturing the unconscious dimension that is retroactively constituted within the chain of signifiers. In recent years, with the remarkable advancements achieved by large language models (LLMs) — such as ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) — in (...) the field of natural language processing, these models have emerged as the most promising approaches in artificial intelligence and have become significant subjects of philosophical reflection. Consequently, the pressing question now arises: Can LLMs comprehend, or even possess, their own unconscious?To address these questions,t his paper will first provide a brief technical overview of LLMs, then outline Žižek’s interpretation of the unconscious via Lacanian psychoanaly tic semiotics. Based on several intriguing experiments—such as questioning LLMs about their understanding of the coffee joke and requesting them to generate similar jokes—this study will analyze the unconscious of LLMs. The conclusion will be cautionary: while LLMs do not yet possess a human-equivalent unconscious, they can comprehend and partially access this paradoxical space.Rather than focusing on the traditional issue of whether AI can understand semantics as opposed to syntax, this paper centers on the unconscious third dimension of “ undead ” that lies between semantics and syntax, and whether LLMs can understand this retroactively generated paradoxical viod within the chain of signifiers. (shrink)

Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” is among the central contributions of _The Sublime Object of Ideology_, a reading abounding in importance throughout Žižek’s use of Lacan in his theory of ideology. A close reading of Lacan’s original paper, though, reveals numerous theoretical divergences. In this essay, I explore Žižek’s reading and critique his analysis on various points—including the priority of the cut, the dialectic of synchrony and diachrony, (...) and the relation of $♢D (the matheme for drive) to S(Ⱥ) (the matheme for the lack in the Other)—to suggest a foundational reinterpretation of the quilting point. With particularly the completed graph in mind, I contest Žižek’s reading of the primacy of fantasy, the definition of the sinthome, and the $♢D-to-S(Ⱥ) arrow, all of which are apotheosized in Žižek’s exposition on Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Benjamin, despite Žižek’s theoretical utilization of him, we find substantial divergence from Žižek: there is indeed a quilting point of the mo(ve)ment that takes the lessons of processuality, the cut, the synchrony/diachrony dialectic, and $♢D to S(Ⱥ) seriously—a quilting point that, contra its usual associations with closure, is radically open and revolutionary. (shrink)

The two main figures of authority in contemporary psychoanalysis are Freud and Lacan. Yet there is an intrusion that is missed in this utterance. Zhuangzi serves as this extra intrusion, the third figure of authority in psychoanalysis. Both Freud and Lacan arguably owe their existence to such a text. There is a gap, however, in that Freud and Lacan published limited engagements with Zhuangzi. This study aims not to plug the gap altogether, but to confront it. A close reading of (...) the text suggests a pairing of Zhuangzi with Lacan and not the other way around, in the precise sense that Lacan materialized Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Justice talk has come under criticism lately, facing trenchant refutations from decolonial activists, environmentalists, feminists, and indigenous voices. Yet, the need to develop universalist frames for building solidarity, combating violence, and repairing and restoring deteriorating Earth systems has never been more urgent. This paper seeks answers in the clarity of the voices of the worldwide youth climate justice movement (YCJM), which eschews arid abstractions around justice and instead situates universalist political aspirations in the material urgency of the climate crisis. By (...) identifying vital driving features of its assemblage in the power of interlocking elite networks of transnational mega-corporations and their supportive political routines and extractive regimes, the YCJM reminds us that it is no longer possible for these structures, first identified by Marx, to be hidden in the fog of philosophical charges of “onto-theology.” The Earth system catastrophe is a shared reality whose ethical demand is without doubt; it is no longer a choice between acting responsibly and remaining committed to one’s egotistical “life goals.” The search for authenticity, therefore, is in question; in its place, an ethic of universal responsibility has become inevitable. The YCJM cuts through the fragmented particularities of identity politics today and proposes strategies parallel to those of the divestment and Black Lives Matter movements. By directly confronting the inner circle’s capture of the world’s resources, its extractive methods, and cynical use of ‘universal justice’ frames under the cover of professional political philosophy, the climate justice alliance is pointing to far-reaching consequences entangled with the material effects of climate change. The networked coordination of the protagonists reproduces (capitalist) conditions of life and generates institutional path dependencies causing intersectional harms over the long haul. What needs special attention is the continual expression of these corruption syndromes in apparently stable cultural forms, along with practical trajectories for counterhegemonic strategy potentially guided by the movement. In this paper, I draw on Slavoj Žižek’s prodigious use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist political theory to develop a rough-cut strategic assessment of the YCJM’s chances for success. My aim is to explore whether the tragedy of the Anthropocene might find its redemptive power in the psychoanalytical rupture of children from adult entanglements in capitalist ideology. (shrink)

Slovenian political philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, in the documentary _The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology _(2012), examines various films and their ideas. Among the movies, he discusses the film _Titanic _(1997). His overall arguments about the movie move toward the opinion that _Titanic_ is a capitalist movie. Hence, in this article, I have converted his statement into my research question, and I enquire whether _Titanic_ is a capitalistic movie or not. If capitalistic, what kind of capitalistic elements that the film (...) shows? And how far is the movie capitalistic in nature? If not capitalistic, what elements or ideologies does the film show? (or) Is Žižek wrong about the movie? With the help of these research questions, I analyse the movie in this article to find out whether the film _Titanic_ is a pro-capitalist movie or not. (shrink)

_Abstract_ The title of this essay owes it to Slavoj Žižek. In 2009 Žižek published an essay in _London Review of Books_titled: ‘Berlusconi in Tehran’. It was an ingenious title. He wrote his provocative essay shortly after the ‘Green movement’ in Iran which protested against the rigged election which secured a second term of ‘presidency’ for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Žižek aptly called him “a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi”. At that time, millions of protesters poured onto the streets (...) of Tehran, marching in silence, holding up placards with noticeable words that read ‘where is my vote?’ Only fifteen years later, that silence has turned into a loud and courageous voice: ‘_We do not want the Islamic republic_’. It is on the occasion of this radical political motto that I have emulated Žižek’s title but going beyond it by bringing it to date and calling the entirety of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a ‘fascist theocracy’. In this essay, I attempt to analyze the Islamic fascism in the structure of the Islamic Republic by tracing its roots to the historical fascism in Europe. __. (shrink)

This article explores the dynamic interplay between Korean shamanism and capitalism, arguing that the shaman’s (or _mudang_’s) _gut_ rituals, far from being relics, are very active agents in South Korea’s neoliberal landscape. Drawing on the psychoanalytic framework of Slavoj Žižek, it posits that shamanism externalizes the unconscious drives—desire, trauma, power—fueling capitalism, offering commodified hope while critiquing its disavowals. Rooted in Korea’s animistic theology, the _mudang_ mediates between sacred and profane, her rituals (as with every capitalist service) priced yet resonant with (...) a surplus meaning that resists full market assimilation. This study parallels Korea’s private, market-driven shamanism with state-managed belief systems, highlighting adaptation over resistance. Films like _Exhuma_ and_ Dark Nuns_ amplify this, staging shamans as healers of modernity’s fractures—alienation, loss—amid material excess. Historically, shamanism’s survival—from colonial suppression to postwar miracles—reflects Korea’s own reinvention, its entrepreneurial mudang mirroring capitalist ingenuity. As a Žižekian symptom the _mudang_ sustains capitalism’s illusions while exposing its limits, her chants echoing a past that haunts Korea’s future. Globally, this sacred-profane tension invites comparisons—Malaysia’s _bomoh_, America’s televangelists—suggesting the persistence of the system’s unconscious in tandem with its successes, dooming its subjects to the perils begotten of prosperity. (shrink)

Bertrand Russel asked in a newspaper column (1932) of astrologers: “Do they believe themselves in the sciences that they profess?” This paper asks whether academic psychologists believed the science that they professed. The replication crisis—researchers do not obtain results comparable to the original when repeating that study—has, in the past decade, seriously challenged psychology's status as a science. Most of the social and behavioral sciences have been invalidated by the replication crisis, but I focus on psychology because of my personal (...) involvement in this field. I draw on the work of Žižek and Zupančič on denial and disavowal to approach the question of what we believed. I will argue, contra Zupančič, that disavowal is not necessarily a phenomenon of mass individualism. As doctoral students, we learned to transgress scientific norms, and then to act as if this transgression had never happened. To enter the community of scientists, we had to disavow that psychology is not a science. After running enough studies—falling on our knees and praying—some of us came to believe that psychology is a science, whilst others held on to a more cynical position. Subjectively some of us believed, some did not, objectively we all believed. I also pursue the related questions of why we did what we did—why was it, for psychology as a field, necessary to break scientific norms and what enjoyment did we, as subjects, derive from what we were doing? (shrink)

Se sostiene que en los protagonistas de las novelas _El idiota_ de Dostoievski y _Don Quijote de la Mancha_ de Cervantes se presentan encarnados respectivamente los dos momentos de la destitución subjetiva psicoanalítica. Por un lado, el momento de la _afanisis_, vaciamiento o desaparición de los contenidos subjetivos: el príncipe que acaba en el manicomio. Y por otro, el momento del “muerto vivo”, que contaría con dos modalidades básicas, la del “muerto vivo” como sujeto post-traumático, que vive con un mínimo (...) de funcionalidad social –planteado por Žižek–, pero también habría la posibilidad de que el “muerto vivo” se despliegue intrusivamente en la sociedad a la que asume caída (en cuanto que la destitución subjetiva es la consecuencia o lo correlativo de la inexistencia del “gran Otro”), en el límite, que intente imponerle una ley política o de gobierno sobre la realidad. Esta última posibilidad encontraría como paradigma la figura de don Quijote, que cuando se vuelve “loco” en vez de internarse en alguna parte más bien sale al mundo como caballero andante, en contra de la sociedad española quinientista, pero interpretando este proyecto como el de la construcción de una comunidad desde el horizonte de la destitución subjetiva, juntos con otros que se unan a su visión, la visión de un “muerto vivo”: una comunidad _destituida_. (shrink)

Through an examination of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, this book demonstrates the ability of cinematic fictions, and other complex narrative fictions, to contribute to meeting the climate challenge by shaping the desires of audiences. What if there was a single feature film that showed us everything we need to know about climate catastrophe culture? What if that same film also made the philosophies of Slavoj Zizek, Mark Fisher, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson accessible? Identifying the climate challenge as a (...) cultural challenge, this book provides an unprecedented criminological analysis of both Children of Men and Fisher's oeuvre from 1998 to 2022, and demonstrates the capacity of cinematic narratives to shape climate catastrophe culture. Seeking to be part of the solution to the climate challenge, it is the first criminological study to link the capacity of cinematic fictions to shape desire to solutions to the climate crisis. It is also the most detailed, and most rigorous criminological case studies of a cinematic work to date. Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology will be of great interest to students and scholars of green criminology, cultural criminology, narrative criminology, film theory, philosophy of film, and ecocriticism. (shrink)

Th is discussion review appeals to a minimal militant comradeship across struggles. Theory is also a struggle, and solidarity is always key. It agrees with Slavoj Žižek’s main argument: the critique of Eurocentrism cannot sustain itself without acknowledging the positive influence of the Enlightenment radical tradition. It also underlines that particular emancipatory projects set against universalism fail to properly problematise political subjectivity. This is not to coalesce with certain Western/European metropolitan intellectual and political inclinations, not least in the Left, particularly (...) prone to lay down the correct and rightful terms of anybody else’s struggles. Various examples from different historic and contemporary contexts illustrate and clarify this point. In the process, some hints are also given on possible theoretical and political reconciliations between Decolonial Theory and the Idea of Communism or between Žižek’s “possibilism” and Alain Badiou’s politics of the impossibl e. (shrink)

Author Marc James Léger responds to Elias Khoury’s review of his book _Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism_, which was published in volume 17 of the _International Journal of __Žižek Studies_. While Léger accepts the one mistake in the book that Khoury correctly identifies, he takes issue with nearly everything else in Khoury’s review, which involves fallacies, misquotations, reductive arguments, misdirection and failure to mention anything that would contradict Khoury’s generally false claims. Léger describes the possibility of academic foul (...) play in the context of a public secret directed against him and that he has been struggling against since the late 1990s. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's main work in political philosophy, the _Social Contract_, contains two beginnings; on the one hand, it commences, quite conventionally, with a social contract between individuals, on the other hand it also states that a lawmaker needs to precede the agreement of such a contract. This curious co-existence of two beginnings in the text has usually been ignored or played down by interpreters. This article, on the other hand, presents a reading of their interplay inspired by Zizek's theory of (...) ideology. It demonstrates how one of the beginnings, if seen from this point of view, may be understood as the truth about the other, and how the figure of the lawmaker specifically reveals the text as torn apart by contradictory internal tendencies. (shrink)

Hegel, in his work _Philosophy of Right_, defines ownership through three elements: acquisition by occupation, use, and transfer. To own something involves mere acquisition and encompasses its appropriate use and potential transfer to others. Subsequently, the final aspect mentioned was the concept of infinite judgement. The acts of owning and transferring to others are diametrically opposed, and Hegel’s unique logic forcibly connects these opposing concepts. This form of infinite judgement was advocated by the young Hegel during the era of _Phenomenology (...) of Spirit_. There, he stated, “Spirit is a bone”. However, when he later wrote _Science of Logic_ or _Encyclopedia_, the formulation of infinite judgement changed to “Spirit is not something that is bone”. This shift was influenced by Kant. In _Logic_, the discourse advances into syllogism, inferential theory, leading to “Spirit is a bone for such-and-such reasons”. In essence, Hegel binarily connected spirit and bone in his youth and introduced a mediating term in this connection later in his life, establishing inferential links. However, the notion of forcibly connecting opposing concepts remains. Therefore, the statement “Ownership is transfer” represents an infinite judgement while simultaneously signifying syllogism that “I truly own this object if I can transfer it to others”. This contributes to the reasoning that “I and objects can be connected through the intermediary of others”, progressing to the inference that “I and others can be connected through objects”, thereby laying the foundation for society. (shrink)

This article is a cross-disciplinary investigation into the role of political violence, in the present era, from a progressive’s viewpoint. Starting from the view that explanations of the rapidly changing politics in the West must take account of an often unconscious, emotional landscape, it invokes Lacanian concepts and artistic representations, including references to Anthony Burgess’s classic novel of dystopian ultra-violence, A Clockwork Orange. Here, I review a long history of the enjoyment of violent performance in politics, from the arenas of (...) Ancient Rome to extremist right-wing websites. Along the way, we hear from neo-Nazis, political activists, stand-up comedians, satirists and philosophers. My aim to prevent an increasingly polarised society descending further into authoritarianism and eventually outright warfare, provokes a surprising final reversal: resistance, sometimes violent (both to self and others) must be protected, in order to lead progressives to those “excluded” from our demos and towards what Connolly (2017) refers to as “multifaceted democracy”. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to develop a comparative analysis of the discursive structures that underlie the socialized formation of the interpretative paradigms of reality. We analyse how both political ideologies and the so-called “conspiracy theories” can be understood starting from the structure and functioning of Marc Augè's ideo-logic, namely the systemic-discursive device that defines the field of all possible sentences defining the real. -/- .

Slavoj Žižek is an extremely interesting philosopher of our time who translated the philosophy of Hegel, Marx and the psychology of Lacan into a formidable scholarship and activism. Importantly, his philosophy participates in Alain Badiou’s conviction that the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth, to alienate them from the hegemonic ideologico-political order, to spread radical doubts, and enable them to think unconventionally, boldly think dangerously.

This engaging book explores Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, a radical movement that represented a diverse voter base. As such, it had to navigate the complexities of class, identity, and their interrelation. The thesis author Marc Léger seeks to defend is that the campaign ultimately failed in this endeavor. Rather than reassert the centrality of class in socialist politics, he argues, the campaign indulged a dubious politics of division.

Some evidence indicates that redundancy (superfluous repetition of an idea, word, phrase, sentence, etc. in a text) is not just an editorial error but also a symptom (a form of compulsion to repeat). To understand why there is so much redundancy in the works of many writers in Iran, we may need to delve into the social link between educators and students in Iranian education institutions. The educator is raised to the position of the Knower who not only demands that (...) the student acknowledge that he knows something about her desire, but also that she still has not learnt that he knows. The student, however, distances herself from her link to the educator, claiming an independence from him. This social link between educator and student is reproduced in the written works of many writers in Iran: they either posit themselves as the student, thereby unconsciously compelled to repeat their gesture of independence from the Other; or as the Knower, thereby unconsciously compelled to repeat that they know. However, because, at some level, redundancy is what we want and enjoy, but nonetheless cannot enjoy enjoying it, the true question is how to enjoy the enjoyment of redundancy; the answer is found in act and love, as understood by Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)

White liberals like to claim that they live in a post-racial society. Furthermore, they believe that most people do not sympathize with the far-right. However, it is not racism fueling right-wing extremism in North America and Western Europe but the dominant ideology, liberalism. Consequently, Slavoj Žižek argues that racism is a problem concerning “objective violence,” which he further breaks down into “symbolic violence” and “systemic violence.” These primarily target minority groups. Thus, “objective violence” best explains the West’s problematic views of (...) Muslims and Islam since it supports what Edward Said refers to as “Orientalism” and reproduces racist depictions of racialized communities. These are incredibly harmful since the West still perceives the Orient and its residents as violent, strange, and backward. These Orientalist attitudes ultimately lead to discrimination against Muslims and Arabs. Furthermore, this ideology naturalizes and legitimizes capitalist social relations while concealing racialization processes. (shrink)

_Resumo_ Este artigo tem por objetivo problematizar a ideia de ser a América Latina um espaço do _puro contingente_, como defende o filósofo argentino Enrique Dussel. Recorrendo a um evento extraordinário do século XIX, a Revolução Haitiana, defendemos a ideia que, mesmo no espaço colonial, é possível encontrar a circulação e a defesa de ideias universais. Mais do que isso, essa revolução apresenta um bom exemplo de como podemos refletir sobre a _universalidade hegeliana_, elaborada por dois grandes pensadores contemporâneos: Susan (...) Buck-Morss e Slavoj Žižek. _ _ _Palavras-chave: _Dussel; Buck-Morss; Žižek; universalidade hegeliana. _ _ _Abstract_ _ _ This article aims to problematize the idea of Latin America being a space of _pure contingent_, as defended by the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel. Using an extraordinary event from the 19th century, the Haitian Revolution, we defend the idea that, even in the colonial space, it is possible to find the circulation and defense of universal ideas. More than that, this revolution presents a good example of how we can reflect on the _Hegelian universality_, elaborated by two great contemporary thinkers: Susan Buck-Morss and Slavoj Žižek. _ _ _Key-words: _Dussel; Buck-Morss; Žižek; hegelian universality. _ _. (shrink)

The ontological incompleteness revealed by quantum physics and the ontological stability imposed by the “augmented reality” of games such as _Pokémon Go_ have become increasingly important references in Žižek’s materialist assessment of the contemporary Other. This paper analyzes a current online phenomenon, known as “the Backrooms,” that converges with these recent concerns in ways that are perhaps more interesting and provocative than films such as _The Matrix _and _The Truman Show _that, Žižek contends, lead one to a conceptual dead-end. That (...) is, we might conclude that there is an authentic reality beyond the simulation or that there is no ‘real’ reality, just a variety of semblances – either way, we foreclose the real that, according to Žižek, inheres as incompleteness and inconsistency. “The Backrooms,” which began life as a cryptic and disquieting post on the forum _4chan _before inspiring subreddits, video games and _YouTube _videos – content that is predominantly created and shared by the ‘gen x’ demographic – ex-sists in a reality that is unstable and, so goes its lore, can be accessed through glitches and ‘quantum tunnelling.’ With this one example, we shall see how culture is responding to the same political and scientific developments that Žižek’s materialism is also working through. (shrink)

Žižek has asked us to consider when we should care about the _tyrant’s bloody robes_. He was asking whether we should show restraint in responding to terrible injustice. The unsettling depiction of ‘Joker’ in Todd Phillips’ (2019) film of the same name goes some way to answering this question. We witness in this film a Joker unlike the many others we had seen in the Batman cinematic universe. Arthur Fleck is not a villain, at least not when he sets out (...) to live in our world. In his own words, he is just a man with ‘nothing left to lose’ living a life that has become ‘nothing but a comedy’. He is not the chaos spreading sociopath depicted in _The Dark Knight_ (2008). He is a man with a mental health condition. An outcast. Pushed around by society until he decided to do something about it. But why is a vigilante in a bat mask acceptable, but one in clown make-up is not? Maybe our traditional understandings of “right” and “wrong” and our childish cultural tropes about “good” and “evil” no longer serve us as they should when our heroes are greedy corporatists and our villains are the marginalised, disabled and mentally ill. Could it be that the Batman stories we have heard since we were children are designed to make us fret about the tyrant’s bloody robes? In this paper I explore Žižek’s analysis of Joker alongside his accounts of surplus-enjoyment with particular reference to Arthur Fleck’s life whilst living with a disability. (shrink)

Often cited quotation from the Communist Manifesto that capitalism can have an anti-racist, anti-sexist bourgeoisie is the starting point of this analysis. Deploying Žižek's work on the "rotary motion" in the Indivisible Remainder, along with aspects of Marx's analysis of Ideology in the German Ideology to give readers a deeper analysis of Trump's exploitation of white voter's 'new racism as the fear of the 'theft of enjoyment' pinned on the Other' who either threatens to snatch from "us" the treasure of (...) our 'way of life', which conceals a deeper ressentiment which exploded on January 6th, and circulates through the back corners of the internet in white supremacist chatrooms. While these reports have been widely covered in mainstream news sources, a psychoanalytical treatment of "Replacement Theory" through Žižek's work (alongside a deeper reading of Marx, which would take much further work beyond the scope of this paper) reveals that the ideology behind so-called "Replacement Theory" is grounded in a metaphysics of scarcity, which would not exist in a truly communist society of automatic production, plenitude, and common property rights. (shrink)

In chapter four of his latest book, _A New German Idealism _(2019), Adrian Johnston seeks to clarify the meaning of ‘materialism’ in Žižek’s philosophy and questions what he sees as potentially problematic aspects of Žižek’s ‘materialism without materialism’. In this article, I propose a possible reply to three problematic aspects of Žižek’s materialism identified by Johnston. First, that Žižek risks losing his materialist credentials by appealing to a Pythagorean-Badiouan mathematical idealism to define matter. Second, that Žižek’s account of the emergence (...) of the subject from substance relies on the idea of a pre-subjective Nature that is whole and balanced, contradicting the key tenet of Žižek’s dialectical materialism that nature is a non-all. Third, that Žižek projects features of human subjectivity onto natural substance, and so problematically anthropomorphizes the pre-human Real, which is evident in how Žižek argues that there are similarities between the behaviour of particles in quantum physics and features of the Lacanian symbolic order. (shrink)

Žižek s work on Heidegger has not been examined in the same way as his work on Hegel, Lacan, Marx and Kant. In order to shed light on his political thought – oscillating between a heroic Leninism and a subversive _ Ideologiekritik _ – we are reconstructing his critique of Heidegger as it follows from the first chapter of _ The Ticklish Subject _. In that we want to show how his critique is essentially Kantian – Which means for Žižek: (...) A critique that doesn’t retreat from the full consequences of the subject’s finiteness. That is excactly what Žižek traces in both Heidegger and Kant, focussing around the role of transcendental imagination. In a last step we are showing how his doubled political position follows from this and hint at the intuition that his heroic Leninism itself could be conceived as a sort of retreat from those very consequences. (shrink)

_. _El concepto “Fantasía” se vuelve central a la hora de pensar o re-pensar en nuestra época, puede ser pensado como uno de los conceptos característicos y descriptivos del sujeto contemporáneo producto del devenir histórico-social. En las siguientes paginas se realizará una revisión bibliográfica acentuada en el libro _“el acoso de las fantasías”_ del intelectual Slavoj Zizek. El objetivo de la investigación es identificar algunos de los aportes teóricos-conceptuales que se han incorporado a los debates actuales del campo psicoanalítico. En (...) el transcurso de la revisión se pondrá en evidencia el resultado entre la mixtura de la filosofía, sociología y el psicoanálisis como mixtura necesaria a la hora de estudiar la coyuntura global del siglo XXI. (shrink)

There are scientists that have speculated that, since science involves abstraction, generalizations across facts, and the generalization of causes and theories across empirical phenomena, the direction of science is to increasingly unify forces and causes until there is a single general theory unifying all of the forces of nature. The most prominent contemporary example of this attempt to unify all of the forces of nature in a single theory is string theory or superstring theory. String theorists have attempted to emulate (...) Albert Einstein’s call for physicists to attempt to unify all of the forces of physics in a single theory, sometimes called a “theory of everything.” String Theory has been called “untestable,” empirically unverifiable, and “post-empiricist,” and I use another standard by which String Theory might be evaluated, a _Standard of Instrument Design and Technological Productivity. _Moreover, I seek to show that, instead of attempting to unify all of the forces of nature in a single theory or “theory of everything,” it is possible to identify and separate the forces of nature in relation to each other, and order and rank the forces of nature by their capacity to generate branching patterns in the biological sciences or the physical sciences. Ranking forces by their capacity to generate branching patterns (or other shapes or patterns), in the biological sciences or in the physical sciences, is more positivist and testable than attempts to unify all of the forces of nature in a single theory. (shrink)

This commentary provides a critique of Žižek’s 2021 article on the catastrophe of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan with a focus on Zizek’s nostalgic moment of the fully engaged subject. The commentary deploys the actual and possible scenarios of the form of subjectivity in association with the cynical subject and the sadistic superego; and suggests the possibility of an alternative ethical subjectivity.

Se hace un esfuerzo por interpretar el supuesto fenómeno de los raptos de individuos por naves extraterrestres desde conceptos teóricos žižekianos como _afanisis_, “destitución subjetiva”, “Cosa” de la libido, trauma y “mediador evanescente”.

Ralph Ellison’s _Invisible Man_ is a violent text. It is unflinching in its confrontation with the violence at the heart of the (African-)American experience. In exploring the central role of violence here – narratively, within the novel; politically, within the culture that the novel explores – the recent work of Slavo Zizek is useful. Zizek posits a critical language which makes an important distinction between systemic violence (of the order of economic and political systems), objective violence (of the order of (...) discriminatory patterns of behaviour), and subjective violence (of the order of individual, often spontaneous, sometimes self-directed acts – which have the effect of misdirecting and obscuring our awareness of these other two more insidious forms of violence). And, in a dialectical spirit of which both Zizek and Ellison might approve, _Invisible Man_ will here reciprocally suggest an interrogation of Zizek’s theories of revolutionary violence. (shrink)

“Woke” and cancel culture have become mainstream methods for ideological leftists to express their sense of hopelessness and frustration. And while many agree that improving social harmony is an admirable goal, policing the use of pronouns while carefully maintaining the status quo of capitalism’s production, destruction and inequality does little to address the underlying structural problems that create the conditions for social disharmony. It is on this point that Žižek finds agreement with commentators on the ideological right. But at both (...) ends of the ideological spectrum we find little to hope for. This paper is about what happens when important discussions are hijacked by extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. Surely, there must be more than politically correct totalitarianism and the irrational outbursts of conspiratorial fanatics. As Žižek has long argued, we should, perhaps, hold out for the worst option in the hope that real change might still be possible. I make this case with reference to popular events and culture, and a wide array of Žižek’s scholarly and popular works. (shrink)

Contribution to a collective work called “Manifesto: A Struggle for Universalities” to be published soon and edited by Nicol A, Barría Asensio & Slavoj Zizek: _Foreword:_ Yanis Varaoufakis: _Epilogue:_ David Pavón-Cuellar and over 40 other contributors. In the words of Nicol A, Barría Asenjo: “The present Manifesto arises as an attempt to respond to the current political, historical, social and economic situation. The 21st century prevails, containing within itself the antagonisms, challenges and debates that the history of humanity has tried (...) to overcome. The 21st century is a repetition of systematic failure, a living symptom of past epochs that have not learned to re-elaborate and re-signify their own symptom. We are and live in a repetition that must be stopped, if our goal is that the signifier "humanity" remains in the following centuries, the time has come to work in the present.”. (shrink)

Hablar del poder comunista significa estudiar el “poder” como potencia, que esconde, de hecho, una cuestión central que aleja a Marx y a la teoría materialista de las diferentes formas de idealismo político, viejas o nuevas, tanto como aleja a la teoría dialéctica de sus muchos enemigos. Y esta es precisamente la cuestión de la posibilidad, o de la correcta comprensión de la categoría de posibilidad, o la relación entre lo posible y lo imposible, posibilidades materiales y posibilidades meramente subjetivas. (...) Esto nos llevará también a la cuestión de la _contradicción, _la de la organización (como poder comunista en acto), y de la idea de negación determinada, o de la Revolución como “negación de la negación” —que es como Marx se refiere a esta tanto en los _Manuscritos de París _(1980: 164) como en _El Capital _(2013: 535). (shrink)

Agamben is hard to pin down both theologically and philosophically. He attempts to construct miraculous minutiae out of un-miraculous things. Hence this work is the act of profaning the unprofanable. What ontological stature, what imaginative configuration and what spatio-temporal coordinates this move articulates are less than forthcoming. Indeed it is possible that Agamben disavows these entirely in favour of a Benjaminian eternal 'as if' structure, one which sees in the most mundane the traces of an eternal and secular redemption. But (...) this remains problematic; this idiosyncratic moment seems devoid of any real comprehension or description of themes concerning the rest of us mortals, such as temporality, finitude or the spatial and imaginative presentation of that which promises to redeem us. (shrink)

The term ‘reflexivity’ continues to maintain an interpretive hegemony in discussions on modernity and the Self. As a form of praxis, applications of reflexivity frequently rely upon an acknowledged awareness of one’s self-conscious attitudes, dispositions, behaviors and motives. This paper will take aim at such contentions, exploring the extent to which examples of racism rely upon a level of reflexivity, best encapsulated in Žižek’s ‘reflexive racism’. Specifically, it is highlighted how examples of non- racism/anti-racism assert the formal promotion of a (...) monadic subject, solely adept at ‘uncovering’ and ‘relinquishing’ their racism (disavowal); and, an equally unhelpful social constructionism, which depoliticizes racism by relocating and relativizing it to a particular socio-historical context (deferment). In outlining this response, specific attention is given to Lacan’s subject of enunciation and subject of the enunciated, from which it is concluded that it is in the obfuscation of one’s ‘position of enunciation’ that examples of reflexive racism reside. (shrink)

We are beholden to the postmodernists for their unwavering fidelity to Virginia Woolf’s legacy and the resultant popularity it continues to enjoy. This should no longer be the case. As postmodernism’s import is increasingly outflanked by the enterprises of Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and the resuscitated Hegel, we ought to rescue Woolf not only from the poststructuralists, but also from herself. I claim that another reading of Woolf is overdue, one which breaks with the general consensus. Such a reading is (...) not a disproving of the latter, but rather an illumination of its concealed underside which it vehemently disavows. I use the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek to illuminate this underside in Woolf’s Orlando, and demonstrate how Woolf shares more with Hegel and Descartes than Deleuze and his disciples. Rather than reading Woolf as a champion of connection, affectivity, and desire, we ought to read her as a writer of abstraction, negativity, and failure. (shrink)

Although exercising torture has been a commonality between the previous regime in Iran and the Islamic Republic, based upon Zizek’s reading of the discourses of the master and university we can detect a qualitative difference in the two regimes’ approach to torture. During the Shah, torture complemented the Shah’s gesture of the symbolic father of the nation, thereby desexualized even in cases where torture involved prisoners’ sex organs, whereas in the Islamic republic era, torture complements conservative hardliner’s lesson that Islamic (...) teachings are not dictated by them but, rather, are neutral knowledge about innate inclinations of human beings. In the conservative hardliner’s version, western culture, apart from its science and technology, leads people astray as it propagates animality in human beings, especially when it comes to sexuality. Our efforts to learn the lesson are doomed to failure, yet because the unconscious remains unarticulated this failure is embodied including in the figure of the Islamic Republic’s interrogator who knows something about us, especially about our sexuality, which we ourselves can never know; hence torturing political prisoners is sexualized in the Islamic Republic even in cases where it does not involve physically or verbally prisoners’ sex organs. In this situation, a political act involves a hyper-agreement with the interrogator: we wouldn’t mind making confessions to anything attributed to us by the interrogator if he is included in the confessions as the one who told us to do it. (shrink)

This essay is an exegetical work, the primary intention of which is to present and interpret Hegel’s notion of the “understanding” in the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The presentation and interpretation at hand takes as its starting point the work of Slavoj Žižek, who the author feels has begun a new and exciting era of scholarship on Hegel. The overall aim of the essay is modest: to develop the Žižekian reading of Hegel at the micro level. My (...) thesis is that Hegel’s initial development of the “understanding” demonstrates how, from the very first, subjectivity grabs a hold on the incompleteness of reality—a notion that is essential to Žižek’s work. Specifically, I show that the understanding realizes itself, against its will, as an accident of the world, upon which it previously depended for its illusory neutrality. The first chapter of the Phenomenology culminates in the problem of consciousness confronting itself as an accident. Ultimately, I show how Hegel’s accidentality of consciousness, since it is determined by the world, coincides with Žižek’s teaching about the identity of the subject precariously established on the incompleteness of reality. (shrink)

Violence has always accompanied human societies, and appeared in various forms of artworks such as movie, painting, and even cave art, but Persian painting by showing the utopian calm images surprisingly kept itself away from representing the violence, even in the scenes of war and slaughter. This paper aims to study the Persian painting –with focus on the early Safavid dynasty as the age of glory of Iranian art- on the basis of Žižek’s theory, to show that invisible violence floated (...) in Persian painting regardless of its extreme calm beauty and its different context from contemporary philosophy. Žižek categorizes the violence into three modes: visible subjective, and two modes of objective violence -Symbolic and Systematic - which are invisible and flow in latter layers. By going to deeper level of creation and content of Persian images which were illustrated in the court and on the command of rulers of the time, it is concluded that some elements of invisible violence such as strict law, visual symbols like “Qizilbash Hat”, the issue of the language, neighbor, fear of error, repetition of historical characters, extremism and nonviolent situation can be analyzed in the content or illustration of Persian Painting. (shrink)

Much has been written about Žižek’s critique of ideology and its theoretical boundaries. Beyond the critical aspect of Žižekian philosophy, the desert of Žižekian politics lies in the way subjectivity persists even at the end of great revolutionary mobilizations. In this essay, I deal with the implications of a Žižekian politics based on the theory of subjectivity and the problem of the “morning after”. His rejection of the main currents of leftism opens up the discussion whether Žižekian politics is a (...) call for pragmatism or as a provocation to revolution. To address this issue, this essay proceeds in two ways. First, we study how Vladimir Lenin and Deng Xiaoping gives us two lessons in socialist pragmatism; the lessons we draw from Lenin and Deng allow us to study the problematic faced by the post-revolutionary politics: the need to arrive at a concrete plan to govern the nation and resuscitate the economy. Second, from what we learn as the audacity of Lenin’s strategic retreats and the missed political opportunities in Deng’s economic reforms, I argue that in a politics of militancy, collectivism is complemented by the rigorous study of our present situation. Militancy is an attitude of guarded optimism that complements communist optimism with a critical edge and a level-headed approach to dealing with political problems. (shrink)

In his article How Did Marx Invent the Symptom? Žižek discusses his project of a critique of ideology, he proposes, since the concept of real abstraction by Sohn-Rethel, that are a virtual dimension that structure the practices, which, in turn, the beliefs or the subjectivity is submitted to. On contrary to the classical critique of ideology, that step in the levels of practices or the subjectivity, in Žižek’s project the subjectivity is just a rebound effect of the practices and the (...) the practice is what are ideological, then the critique of ideology must to act over the practices, nor on the believes. And, the way to do this is acting over the real abstraction, or, the phantasy, the ideological phantasy. Our propose in this article is to show how this project of a critique of ideology fits in the lacanian structure known as Graph of Desire. In this way, the lacanian graph will be a generic topology to a critique of ideology or phantasy. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek and Violence -/- Žižek’s book is fundamentally about understanding violence and the way it is represented in global society, especially in relation to economic interests. He draws a distinction between what he calls subjective violence and objective violence. Subjective violence refers to violence that is inflicted by a clearly identifiable agent of action, as in the case of criminal activity or terrorism. Objective violence, on the other hand, has no clear perpetrator and is often overlooked in the background (...) of subjective violence outbreaks. For example, the objective violence of global poverty cannot be blamed on any one entity and, even if financial elites were to be identified as culpable, they could still be exonerated by their subjugation to a system of capitalist finance that makes the rise of an elite financial class inevitable. While Žižek further subdivides objective violence, the core difference illustrated here reflects Žižek’s interest in establishing the way certain forms of violence are represented and perceived in the general social consciousness. -/- . (shrink)

In the three previous chapters we mapped out Žižek’s philosophical thinking—territory in which we situated his critique of “postmodern historicism”, as well as his bleak assessment of the struggles of the contemporary left. We have also examined his theory of revolution and his recourse to Christianity as a paradigm for communist brotherhood that may well function as a real alternative to capitalism. Throughout this interpretative and reconstructive exercise, I subjected Žižek’s proposals to a hail of critical questions and commentary, on (...) which I have not yet adequately elaborated. This will precisely be the task that I will undertake in the last two chapters of the book. Our starting point will be to pick up on some of Žižek’s central ideas with which I agree, while taking them to a philosophical terrain that will help us avoid their fatidic consequences: the avowal of subjectless revolutions. I am referring to two Žižekian motifs that are worth reconsidering: the ontology of incompleteness and the universal dimension of politics. Our goal is to “de-Lacanize” those concepts and to see how they could operate in a different kind of political ontology that does not resort to the figure of a transcendental subject, and that renders power as an inescapable condition of experience. I would then like to articulate the two aforementioned concepts with a third one—the Gramscian notion of hegemony—but read alongside the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The purpose of this exercise is to create the conceptual conditions to formulate an emancipatory theory of democracy—a matter that will be taken up in the following chapter. (shrink)

The problem which is both created and tackled by this article is that although it advocates the Iranian progressive reformism as the most preferable political force in Iran, it simply does not find reformists’ own formulation of their “competitive advantage” convincing enough. Thus, to provide an argument for Iranian progressive reformism this article not only strives to explain one of the latest Iranian reformists’ mistakes through the Lacanian concept of imaginary identification as elaborated upon by Slavoj Zizek, but also to (...) illuminate precisely at formulation of what that mistake was an attempt. In doing so, it conducts a comparative analysis of the funeral processions for General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and for Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, and then proceeds to draw some perhaps neglected points from the moment of the Islamic revolution of 1979 as well as from the period of Khomeini’s leadership. However, far from being just a more elaborated explanation of Iranian reformism, an attempted reformulation like this of Iranian progressive reformism hopes to pave the way for creating new spaces for political act in Iran. Key Words: Iranian progressive reformism, Slavoj Zizek, Ayatollah Khomeini, Qassem Soleimani, imaginary identification, political act. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence (...) of modern technology determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages. (shrink)

I will look at and discuss the ideological-subject position of the ‘sympathetic’ slave-owner by employing Žižek ’s specific conception of ideology across two varying slave-narratives. I attempt to uncover how this ideology operates within the social-material reality in the texts Our Nig and Minnie's Sacrifice and the ways that the authors employed tropes in depicting this particular archetypal figure in slave-narratives. These charachter's exhibit an ideology remarkably aligned with Žižek ’s: that a certain non-knowledge of the proper logic of an (...) ideological reality is what sustains it. This suggests not only that such an archetypal figure exists across slave-narratives, but also that they deploy a communal ideology that attempts to conflate unwillingness with inability. They enable the perpetuation of the institution by their unwillingness to reject the economic benefits of slavery, which they conceive of as an inability. (shrink)

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek tells a story about Buddhist prayer wheels in Tibet as a model of secularization: a belief machine. When routine actions are being performed, the animating principles or belief are no longer foregrounded in the process. While the developers of the scientific method were mostly devout Christians and believed in God’s direct involvement in the affairs of earth, carefully repeating situations through controlled experiments convinced them any potential variance in the processes they investigated (...) could be ignored. Applied generally, through the process of secularization, religious acts are automated so that people can go about their business without requiring constant awareness of God’s presence. While the foundations of science and innovations in healthcare have many connections with religion, the professionalization of medicine acts as a superstructure supporting the belief. A Christian hospital today is like a prayer flag in the wind: operating automatically through set policies but actualizing theology through its repetition of care. (shrink)