Communism: Collective Life, the New International & Soviet Utopianism
Žižek's self-description: a communist who supports radical change out of despair and necessity, acknowledging the historical failures of past communism but seeing no viable alternative to global capitalism.
In his words 1
“i'm a very strange communist. i'm a negative communist. i think commons are our problem today.”6:01 The New Sacred · negative communism defined by commons problems
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
Stephen Weinberg on religion making good people do evil
Žižek cites physicist Steven Weinberg's quip, without religion, good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but religion is needed to make good people do bad things, as containing an element of truth even though Žižek elsewhere celebrates Christianity.
Himmler's Posen Speech
Himmler told SS officers at Posen (Poznań) in 1943 that any idiot can sacrifice his life for his country but it takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing, to kill, torture, suppressing even moral sentiment, for his country. The trick is to present your natural ethical resi…
Titanic and the novel Titan, catastrophe in the air
Before the Titanic sank there was a novel about a mega-ship named 'Titan' hitting an iceberg; this near-coincidence illustrates Žižek's limited sense in which 9/11 'had it coming', not moral deserving, but that the event was structurally anticipated.
Hegel and the English Reform Bill
Žižek notes that the last text Hegel published was an analysis of the English Reform Bill moving toward universal democracy, and Hegel was horrified by it, showing his awareness that a new epoch was beginning and that his own model of the state was already disintegrating.
The Three-Body Problem (Trisolaris)
Cites Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel about a planet with three suns causing chaotic weather, as a metaphor for Earth's current state where nature itself is chaotic and unpredictable.
Remote-controlled rat
Žižek describes experiments where rats are connected to machines and controlled like remote-control cars, illustrating the potential for direct neural control in humans without the subject feeling controlled.
Where it comes up 24
24 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there