NEW INTERVIEW W/ SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
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We sat down with Slavoj Zizek in NY to talk Christian Atheism, Judith Butler, Trump, the Mafia, how Quantum Physics can help us read history, & where to find a good diner in New York.
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When you are in trouble, read Hegel’s Logic! Not Hegel’s historical texts like Aesthetics, Philosophy of History, or even Phenomenology of Spirit. No, read Hegel’s Logic. It is still, I think, the greatest book about the pure art of thinking.
Slavoj Žižek:
The past itself is open towards the future, that is, it is not simply "what really happened" but full of cracks, of alternate possibilities - the past is also what failed to happen, what was crushed so that "what really happened" could have happened.
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The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present - it is always already made. At a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I've already chosen.
Slavoj Žižek
…
#Zizek
tells us, we are always connected with the social precisely because we are split, i.e. because we are never really connected with ourselves.
Fabio Vighi - Žižek’s Dialectics
Excited to announce that we’re interviewing Slavoj Žižek this Friday with
@BloomsburyPhilo
for the offical BOOK LAUNCH of Žižek’s new book, ‘Freedom: A Disease Without A Cure’.
LISTEN;
Žižek’s Hegel is the exact opposite of what he usually is conceived to be - not an idealist metaphysician of the all-consuming conceptual synthesis of a thereby totalised reality…
This Friday we're talking to Adrian Johnston, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque about his ongoing work on Slavoj Žižek and his own philosophical project. Comment or DM any questions you'd like us to ask!
Therefore, the medium, I agree, is the metaphor; however, my argument here is that the medium stands as metaphor for the existing form that ideology takes in the context of the present relations of production. That is, it helps to represent the dominant form of consciousness.
When Lacan defines himself as an anti-philosopher, as rebelling against philosophy, this is again to be conceived as a Kantian indefinite judgment: not "I am not a philosopher," but "I am a not-philosopher," that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself…
The only way for us, humans, caught in the parallax gap, to break out of it is through the experience of sexuality which, in its very failure to achieve its goal, enables us to touch the dimension of the Absolute.
Slavoj Žižek: Sex & The Failed Absolute
…we need the Internet, digital culture, social media & smartphones to understand Žižek; to understand how his thought is structured; how his books work; how his reputation, controversies, & ideas circulate, are debated, disagreed with, dismissed—but never ignored - Clint Burnham
LISTEN to our new interview with the wonderful Alenka Zupančič on sex, conspiracy theory, & her forthcoming book on disavowal!
We’re talking Don’t Look Up, Rowan Atkinson, and the Austrian town of Fugging.
Fantasies always involve an act that deprives us of the object before we obtain it, and it is in this deprivation that we enjoy in the fantasy. We fantasize the object at a distance in order that we can properly enjoy the object.
#toddmcgowan
@DanielTutt
Žižek in 1993 on the ecological crisis
The crucial hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the "collapse of the big Other" part of our everyday experience, ie to sap this unconscious belief in the "big Other" of power.
...there are no lost causes, in the sense of causes that were originally lost. There are only refound causes, causes found again, causes that emerge at the site of something that never was—that never existed—but which we are nevertheless able to recognize. - Alenka Zupančič
When the subject endeavours to interpret (its own or, originally, the Other’s) desire & never finds the ultimate point of reference, when it forever slides from one reading to another, this very desperate attempt to arrive at ‘what one really wants’ is desire itself. - Žižek
Slavoj Žižek: Lacan’s point is even more radical: the object-cause of desire is something that, when viewed frontally, is nothing at all, just a void – it acquires the contours of something only when viewed sideways.
Disparities 2016
It might not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that the discovery of repetition, or of a specific dimension of repetition, is the Event that inaugurates so-called contemporary philosophy and gives a meaning to this designation.
Alenka Zupančič
We’re preparing for our next interview with Alenka Zupančič on her work, Lacan, Hegel, and Slavoj Žižek. Reply or DM us any questions you’d like us to ask!
Part one this Thursday!
We're talking Žižek's principle philosophical sources of inspiration, the equivalence between the German idealist & especially Hegelian conception of negativity and what is designated in psychoanalysis under the heading of Todestrieb, the core of what...
Žižek & So On Podcast Presents:
For They Know Not What They Do: A Reading Group with Matthew Flisfeder
To register: zizekandsoon
@gmail
.com
Seven fortnighly sessions held over Zoom organised by Ž&…
Q: How does (Lacanian) psychoanalysis relate to philosaphy at a more general level? Why-if at all-does it need to relate to philosophy?
A: What Lacan is aiming at is neither a 'philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis' nor the reverse operation of a psychoanalytic…
…in the Möbius strip, we pass from one to the other side of the strip, or from one term to its opposite, while in the Klein bottle we pass from the hole in the midst of a circular body to the substance of this body itself i.e. the void returns as the very body that envelops it.
Todd McGowan:
The Racist Fantasy
@BloomsburyPhilo
“Thanks to Slavoj Žižek for bringing the importance of enjoyment in racism to the fore and opening the door for so many of us. If I've stolen some of his ideas here, it's only fair.”
…the basic feature of the dialectically materialist vision is that of irreducible reflexivity inscribed in the universe: the external difference (say, between content & its form) is inscribed in content itself, so that external difference coincides with the internal one - Žižek
Cunning is something other than trickery. The most open activity is the greatest cunning (the other must be taken in its truth). In other words with his openness, a man exposes the other in himself he makes him appear as he is in and for himself, & thereby does away with himself.
Now if one had to summarize Žižek’s philosophy in one sentence, or “to put it in a nutshell,” it would certainly not be wrong to claim that his texts are something like introductions to developing or even training an anamorphic view of reality.
- Dominik Finkelde & Todd McGowan
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But let's go back to belief, to the cliché that today we have lost belief. This is nothing more than a pseudo-debate: today we believe more than ever--and this is the problem, as Robert Pfaller has shown.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask
#Zizek
w/ Russell Sbriglia
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We’re talking Lacan & literature, bad taste in novels, toilets, objects from inner space, Beckett over Joyce & what Tony Soprano's major was.
We’re Interviewing Mladen Dolar in a few hours about his intellectual history, Slavoj Žižek & Alenka Zupančič, Rumours, Gossip, Conspiracy, Authority, the Voice, Opera, Lacan, Hegel, and the decline of symbolic efficiency.
Episode out soon!
The act of "I think” is trans-phenomenal, it is not an object of inner experience or intuition; yet for all that, it is not a noumenal Thing, but rather the void of its lack:
Žižek & So On Podcast:
How is Lacan Hegelian?
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We’re talking Hegel's influence on Lacan from Zizek's Most Sublime Hysteric. The fellas find themselves in Germany, a dance club in Argentina, & experience a perfect day with Lou Reed & Pavaratti.
To loosen the grip of disavowal and conspiracy thinking, we might need to introduce some alienation and negativity in the midst of all this immediacy. Because that's what both disavowal and conspiracy thinking ultimately thrive on: Immediacy. - Alenka Zupančič.
Listen to part one of our conversation with director Sophie Fiennes on her work with Slavoj Žižek. We discuss The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology & touch on the early stages of the third instalment: The Pervert's Guide to Utopia.
PART ONE of the official book launch & interview with Slavoj Žižek on his new book ‘Freedom: A Disease Without A Cure’ is out now on podcast platforms.
Thanks to
@BloomsburyPhilo
for their support!
Freedom: A Disease Without Cure
What the notion of fully knowing a catastrophe misses is the fact that, when we get too close to a catastrophe, the distance necessary for knowledge breaks down. We cannot combine the real of a full catastrophe with the safe distance of knowledge.
Enjoy(!) our interview from April last year with
#Zizek
ranging from the pandemic and
#Rammstein
to
@gtupinamba
’s recent book The Desire of Psychoanalysis.
Part One:
Part Two:
Žižek: …the choice ‘Do you love me for myself or for my contingent external features?’ presents a false choice since you can never fall in love with ‘what I am in myself’: what I am in myself is a void filled in precisely by the reflection of my ‘contingent external features’
Join us for our Reading Group with
@MattFlisfeder
on Slavoj
#Zizek
’s For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Seven sessions covering the whole book from October 12 to January 4. To register: zizekandsoon
@gmail
.com
UNLOCKED EP: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? The fellas talk the concept of the Beautiful Soul in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, it's political position, and place in
#Zizek
's work.
Listen here:
Only a few days left to register for the reading group with
@MattFlisfeder
on Žižek’s 1991 follow up to Sublime Object of Ideology, ‘For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor’.
Register here : zizekandsoon
@gmail
.com
#zizek
#žižek
#ftknwtd
Far from returning to pre-critical rational metaphysics (as Kantians accuse it), the whole of Hegelian dialectics is a kind of hysterical undermining of the Master, the immanent self-destruction and self-overcoming of every metaphysical claim.
- Slavoj Žižek
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What one encounters in tautology is thus pure difference, not the difference between the element and other elements, but how the element is different from itself.
#zizek
Alright, we're back! We’re talking with acclaimed director Sophie Fiennes about her work with Žižek. We discuss film, ideology, AI, politics, Slavoj's close encounters & the early stages of the third instalment of her series The Pervert's Guide to Utopia.
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Just as film noir is not a category of American cinema, but primarily a category of French cinema criticism and (later) of the historiography of cinema, 'poststructuralist deconstructionist' is not a category of French philosophy, but primarily a category of the American
As the other side of repetition as technique there exists—or so I shall try to argue—repetition as constitutive of the comic genre as such it is on account of this that comedy is not simply an anecdotic problem of philosophy but also an immanently philosophical problem.
#Zupan
čič
The common notion of “subjective view” is that of the partial distortion of the objective state of things: our subjective approach distorts the balance of how things really are and privileges one element over all others, allowing it to project its “specific color” over them.
This week we present the 3rd episode in our series of interviews with the Troika — after Slavoj Žižek & Alenka Zupančič. We’re talking the voice, may 68, the early days in Ljubljana, Lacan, rumours & gossip, what’s in a name & the decline of paternal authority with Mladen Dolar.
Chatting with Professor Russell Sbriglia tonight about Slavoj Žižek, literature, the sublime, Melville, New Materliasms and more!
DM any questions you’d like us to ask!
Ž&…
Alenka Zupančič on her book, What is Sex? — My claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, in its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way.
The most dangerous threat to freedom does not come from an openly authoritarian power; it takes place when our non-freedom itself is experienced as freedom.
#zizek
#hegel
Life is like a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death...& so on.
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks to all supporters, friends, & guests of the Žižek & So On Podcast.
Big announcements coming & we'll see you all again next year.
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Ž&...
This week, the second half of our conversation with Mladen Dolar! We talk about the early days of the Ljubljana school, the structuralist revolution, the choice to read Hegel through Lacan, and the Frankfurt school. Mladen was there for it all.
Hence, as in Žižek’s own style & method of philosophical (& political) practice, properly dialectical-speculative thinking necessarily involves moving directly in & through, rather than evasively around, black-&-white mutual exclusivities.
Adrian Johnston: A New German Idealism
1/4
The focus of psychoanalysis resides elsewhere: the Social, the field of social practices & socially held beliefs is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate, which the individual himself has to…
…for what is in philosophy more than philosophy (which is why his main references are philosophical— in the index of Écrits, Hegel outnumbers Freud!). - Slavoj Žižek
LISTEN:
Clint Burnham is author of The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street, Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture, Lacan and the Environment.
Ž&…
The Cause is real, the presupposed reef which resists symbolization and disturbs the course of its automaton, yet the Cause is simultaneously the retroactive product of its own effects. In the case of the Wolf Man, Freud’s most famous patient, the Cause, of
course, was the…
Philosophers had only interpreted the world, in various ways. Then, there was Slavoj Žižek who has changed our understanding not only of the world but also of what it means to change or interpret the world & thus, of philosophy.
Happy birthday, tovariš!
Ideology Critique: Frankfurt School & the Slovenian School.
Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek, Rainer Forst, Regina Kreide, & Martin Saar, moderated by Frank Ruda.
In our conversation with Alenka Zupančič she told us to speak with Anna Kornbluh about her new book “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism” and it will be out this week!
The Real “in itself” is virtual (a panoply of superposed possibilities), while our “hard” reality of things is subjectively constituted—this Kantian lesson remains valid for Schelling and Hegel. More precisely, even if we are not dealing with subject in the standard sense…
Our interview with Mladen Dolar on his work, relationship with Slavoj Žižek, and the founding of the Ljubliana School of Psychoanlysis is now up on YouTube:
Did Marx Invent the Symptom?
Unlocked ep while the fellas dillydally in the Big Apple for #Žižek's first in-person appearance since the pandemic. We’re talking The Sublime Object of Ideology Marx Freud the Symptom & the Commodity Form
Listen:
Enjoy!
Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?
[…]a reading of Hegel in the light of Lacan[…]would make visible a Hegel of the logic of the signifier, of a self-referential process articulated as the repetitive positivization of a central void- S Žižek
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NEW BOOKS!
Žižek’s ‘Freedom: A Disease Without A Cure’ AND ‘Politics, State, Communism’
by Álvaro García Linera,
@Agonhamza
& Frank Ruda.
Thanks
@timbryar
&
@BloomsburyPhilo
…but instead a materialist thinker of (in Lacanese) a not-All Real shot through with antagonisms, cracks fissures, and tensions."
Adrian Johnston: Adventures in Transcendental Materialism