Fluid Subjectivity & Performative Identity

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 5 of its talks

Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios

Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He us…

example · in 4 of its talks

Billy Bathgate / bad novel and bad movie generating virtual ideal

Both the Doctorow novel and its film adaptation are bad, yet through their repetition a third purely virtual entity emerges, the ideal novel that should have been. This is Žižek's model for the unconscious as a virtual, non-substantial entity.

anecdote · in 4 of its talks

Bernie Sanders at Biden's inauguration

Žižek notes that Bernie Sanders 'stole the show' at Biden's inauguration just by sitting there with his gloves, while Trump's shooting photo never became legendary, meaning millions sensed the inauguration was a fake return to normalcy.

example · in 3 of its talks

Eliot on Artistic Change

T.S. Eliot’s claim that new art changes the past, which Žižek uses to argue the past is 'open' and actualized by the present, not just re-interpreted.

example · in 3 of its talks

Zeuxis and Parrhasius

Two painters compete; one paints grapes so real birds peck them; the other paints a curtain. The second wins because he organizes the surface to generate the appearance of something behind it.

anecdote · in 3 of its talks

God as Lazy Programmer

God is described as a 'lazy programmer' who left reality 'non-all' (incomplete) not out of ignorance, but because it is ontologically undetermined, allowing for the gap of subjectivity.

V for Vendetta morning after4 Radio Yerevan / Rabinovich and the car3 Jewish 'nobody' joke / synagogue self-humiliation3 Darian Leader patient / 'Bed for two please'3 Starbucks ethical consumerism4 Heydrich playing Beethoven string quartets3 Stalin's dialectical synthesis on money in communism3 Remote-controlled rat3 Stalin joins the applause3 Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point3

Where it comes up 49

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

Zizek Studies Conference2018-05-19 · 1:01:00

~38:01 plus (in LGBT+)

then everything will be okay, everyone can choose. And here the infamous plus enters, which I think is the most interesting part of LGBTQ+ movement. I'm really for them here. This is Hegel in practice. We just should not read it in an empiricist way. …

~28:13 performative identity

bitch of a mother. It is crazy. There is—we don't have any natural balance to return to. Going back to this fluidity of sexual identities, here I again had a very friendly debate with Judith Butler. The problem years ago, the problem was this one: …

29:34 protean subject

… It's—she is simply, for example in Gender Trouble, describing the predominant form of, let's use this bombastic term, late capitalist mode of subjectivity.

+1 more in this talk

Moebius Strip, Cross Cap, Klein Bottle: The Twisted Space of Subjectivity2017-10-20 · 2:30:44

~30:18 plus (in LGBT+)

some debates, do you leave out Q, do you add even more, but the point is this plus which serves to include all those left out. It's a kind of a nominalist-empiricist modesty. Our classification is never exclusive and to be open to new discoveries …

Populism as a way to disavow social antagonism2017-05-24 · 2:24:54

~2:08:37 plus (in LGBT+)

LGBT plus. Did you notice the nice ideology of plus? The list is never complete, so now the finally established formula is LGBTQ plus. Yes. And for me plus is Lacanian Object a, you know. That you don't know what it is but you have …

Modalities of the Absolute2018-11-05 · 2:01:44

~36:59 plus (in LGBT+)

such—it’s not one among particular objects, but an object which is just a stand-in for a void, for the impossibility to specify an object. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a simple example. Let’s take another example which I already used …

Slavoj Zizek lecture Totality or Assemblage 03pub. 2022-02-25 · 1:50:52

~1:05:17 plus (in LGBT+)

I cannot because we don't know them yet or I cannot because we didn't yet even constitute them but like an ersatz signaling a possible but never actualized full list or and that comes here here comes the beauty or is plus an identity of …