Architecture as Symptom & Insulated Envelopes

In his words 4

“all our sympathy to the people of paris because what you experienced for one night that was our permanent life.”
13:00 Europe is Kaput – Long live Europe! · Western cupola and refugee reality

“The effective message of the political unconscious of these performance arts venues is democratic exclusivity. They create a multifunctional egalitarian open space but the very access to this space is invisibly filtered and privately controlled.”
1:02:17 The Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space · democratic exclusivity as the ideology of performance venues

“It is not that they are secretly elitist—it is their very anti-elitism, its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism.”
42:28 On Architecture and Aesthetics · democratic exclusivity / anti-elitism as ideology

The stories that teach it

the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page

example · in 4 of its talks

Casa del Fascio vs. Stalinist Architecture

Contrasts Mussolini's fascist architecture (neo-imperial pastiche vs. modernist glass) and Stalinist 'wedding cake' buildings. Argues that architecture reveals the 'truth' of the ideology (hierarchy/authoritarianism) even when the official ideology claims equality.

anecdote · in 4 of its talks

Asking Occupy Wall Street 'what do you want?'

At Occupy in New York and Frankfurt Žižek kept asking protesters the stupid question 'what do you want?', paraphrasing Freud's 'Was will das Weib', and nobody could answer.

anecdote · in 5 of its talks

Fukushima and Tokyo evacuation

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Žižek's friend and theorist of catastrophes, reported that after Fukushima the Japanese government secretly panicked at the prospect of evacuating all 30 million inhabitants of the Tokyo area, illustrating the scale of trans-state action that contemporary cr…

example · in 4 of its talks

Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point

Malcolm X (the X standing for lost African roots) refused the game of searching for original African identity (à la Roots) and instead proposed using the dispossession of roots as a chance to build a new, freer universality, which is why he became a Muslim (the Umma as communi…

anecdote · in 3 of its talks

Roma girl and arranged marriage in Slovenia

A Roma girl in Slovenia escaped to police claiming her father sold her into an arranged marriage; the Roma community leader argued this practice is essential to their way of life's reproduction, removing it destroys them as a community. Žižek presents this as a genuine deadloc…

example · in 3 of its talks

Stephen Hawking's brain-wired wheelchair

A man who knew Stephen Hawking told Žižek that in his last years Hawking no longer needed to move his finger, his brain was directly connected and he just thought 'forward' and his chair moved. If the signal goes out, it can also go in: who will control this?

Remote-controlled rat3 Santa Claus Belief3 Hegel's owl of Minerva2 Korean DMZ theater / North Korean fake village2 Stalin's question-and-answer style2 Psycho / architecture tension: mother's house vs. Bates Motel2 King Kong and the Palace of Soviets2 Central African Republic oil and French intervention2 Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read2 Orwell on the radical intelligentsia's superstition (via Dolar)2

Where it comes up 35

72 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there

Slavoj Žižek: Architecture as a Critique of Ideology2009 · 1:46:39

3:30 political unconscious

… e recently I discovered that I simply missed the point the way I was dealing with what? With the famous example from Fredric Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" about the unique facial decorations of the Caduveo Indians from Brazil.

1:10:07 spandrels

… His original example is so-called spandrels in architecture.

54:48 spaceship Earth

… agents to develop and maintain: gardeners, event managers, private security agents are part of the design of these atmospheres." Koolhaas's junkspace is another description of the same phenomenon of sanitization of ever larger areas of the city, providing a safe environment assuming we are prepared to surrender police duties to private security services.

+3 more in this talk

The Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space2009-06-16 · 1:15:32

3:30 political unconscious

… use recently I discovered that I simply missed the point the way I was dealing with what with the famous example from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious about the unique facial decorations of the Caduveo Indians from Brazil.

1:10:07 spandrels

… His original example is so-called spandrels in architecture.

54:59 spaceship Earth

… Koolhaas's Junk Space is another description of the same phenomenon of sanitization of ever larger areas of the city providing a safe environment assuming we are prepared to surrender police duties to private security services end of quote.

+3 more in this talk

On Architecture and Aesthetics2010-06-10 · 1:06:36

1:05:13 spandrels

… For example what I tried to develop is the idea which Stephen Jay Gould to explain evolution took from architects, the so-called notion of spandrels, these empty non-functional spaces which open up when you apply different structuring principles.

24:41 skin separated from the body

… en inside and outside and the third space, they exemplify it perfectly I claim with their famous gap between skin what some architects call skin and structure.

31:10 deterritorialization

… How? The main feature of globalization is the unheard of unleashing of the powers of de-territorialization.

+3 more in this talk

Europe is Kaput – Long live Europe!2015-11 · 1:53:00

13:48 cupola

… cupola that's the temptation that you mentioned, not to close our cupola, not the automatic anti-immigrant reaction of closing of the cupola.

Žižek Interview on Singularity, China & the Limits of Capitalpub. 2023-06-03 · 1:08:39

48:21 cupola

the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote a wonderful book where he said that we in developed capitalism live in a kind of a cupola, protected.