Charity as Bribery (The Antidote as Poison)

In his words 9

“Today's publicity for Land Rover would have been something like, do you feel constrained by your alienated office life? Drive to the countryside with Land Rover, you will feel free.”
6:21 The Role of Culture in Knowledge Society · experiential advertising / cultural capitalism

“The point is not to reject this. Beat the opponent at his own time here. We can give a different twist to it.”
7:51 The Role of Culture in Knowledge Society · immanent subversion of cultural capitalism

“Cultural production is part of the base today. The battles have to be fought here, not to play this game of subtraction or whatever resistance and so on.”
35:16 The Ideology of Neo-Stalinist Architecture · cultural capitalism requires political engagement not withdrawal

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 15 of its talks

Starbucks ethical consumerism

Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same…

example · in 10 of its talks

Organic apples as ideology

Žižek confesses he buys organic apples not because he is convinced they are better but because it makes him feel good, as if he is doing something for Mother Earth. The purchase functions ideologically regardless of sincere belief.

anecdote · in 11 of its talks

Niels Bohr's horseshoe

Niels Bohr had a horseshoe on his country-house door; when a scientist friend asked why a scientist would keep a superstitious charm, Bohr answered 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it', Žižek's model for ideology today.

example · in 6 of its talks

They Live / critique of ideology glasses

In John Carpenter's They Live, aliens live among us and special glasses reveal the alien/robot behind the human face. Žižek calls this the 'critique of ideology glasses' and uses it to read Biden-era capitalism.

example · in 5 of its talks

Toms Shoes 1-for-1 formula

For every pair of shoes you buy, another pair goes to a child in need, the formula lets consumerism present itself as philanthropy, so the more you consume the more virtuous you are.

joke · in 8 of its talks

coffee without cream / coffee without milk

A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.

Santa Claus Belief6 Montenegro earthquake masturbation joke5 Lenin's Wife and Mistress5 Da Vinci Code / Da Vinci, sex displaced onto Jesus5 Heydrich playing Beethoven string quartets5 Sam Harris's Truth Pill4 Starbucks / Ethos water ethical consumption4 Catholic Church pedophilia as institutional unconscious4 Karadzic's permissive poem4 Marx letter to Engels about revolution interrupting Capital4

Where it comes up 65

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

The Ambiguity of Obscenity2009 · 2:13:18

~1:57:18 charity as ideological function

second even more dangerous message is depoliticization. Which is why I think charity is so fashionable today. The message of charity is always let's depoliticize it. Like you know all the big guys of charity from Bill Gates downwards, they all repeat the same mantra: …

~2:00:36 cultural capitalism

really read all of it. Or if you know philosophy that Pittsburgh Hegelian Michael Brandom making it explicit. Habermas, theory of communicative justice, pages. These are classics they are interpreted widely. Von Mises [unintelligible] "Human Action." Ah really? I didn't know. I know that Sloterdijk …

Slavoj Zizek Zero Level of Fundamental Belief2006-05-01 · 1:59:22

1:25:48 charity as ideological function

… ning of today's global system itself, is in a false way counteracted by not subjective violence but subjective how should I put it charity, charity activities.

1:27:04 false sense of urgency

… unnecessarily dying of diarrhea and so on and so on?" What's the function of this humanitarianism? I'm more and more convinced to create a false sense of urgency, whose target is "do not think, act." But act so that what do I mean by this? Wendy Brown in her one of her recent essays did a wonderful analysis of this false sense of urgency.

1:48:28 humanitarian mystification

… Then we fall into this humanitarian trap where we at the end we end up like Bono or Bill Gates or what, you

Slavoj Zizek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce2010-03-10 · 29:25

0:39 cultural capitalism

… i would like to start with the feature of so-called cultural capitalism, today's form of capitalism, and then develop how the same thing applies also to economy in the narrower sense of the term.

5:18 chocolate laxative

… ironically, in some of my books, i call this the logic of chocolate laxative, you know, like chocolate is usually supposed to give you constipation.

21:11 general economy of sovereign expenditure

… aware of all this and referring to georges bataille's notion of the general economy of sovereign expenditure which bataille opposes, as you probably know, to so-called restrained economy.

We’re Only Human2009-10-20 · 1:20:27

57:58 cultural capitalism

… I think what is—the reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism.

59:43 semantic density

… So you know the idea being all this—I cannot but call it—semantic density.

~32:28 humanization as ideology

side of the story, I see you are human like me, you have your dreams, your fears and so on, and I see you as a human being. This is all very nice. It has a limit. The limit is what? Well, we reach this …

No Sex please, We are Post-Human2009-01-20 · 1:20:27

57:59 cultural capitalism

… The reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism.

59:43 semantic density

… So you know, the idea being all this, I cannot but call it semantic density.