History of Philosophy & Reading the Canon
Žižek's critical label for postmodern deconstruction, reading one philosopher through another without committing to any claim about how reality actually is.
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
Chesterton's philosophical policeman
Chesterton ironically proposed a corps of philosopher-policemen who detect dangerous ideas before crimes occur; Žižek argues this is exactly what liberal anti-totalitarians (Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksmann) do, tracing a straight road from philosophical totality to politic…
Wagner's Jesus of Nazareth: marriage is adultery
In Wagner's unpublished draft Jesus of Nazareth, Christ rewrites the commandment against adultery: the true adultery is not copulation outside marriage but a loveless marriage, which violates the law's spirit from within. Žižek reads this as a paradigm case of Hegelian negatio…
Lacan's dream / Cartesian monster
Žižek recounts Lacan's dream where the Cartesian subject is an 'inhuman monster,' arguing that the pure Cogito is not a human person but an abstract, depersonalized point of view.
Borges/Kafka: great writers create their own precursors
Borges observed that Kafka retroactively constitutes his precursors (Poe, Blake, Dostoevsky): you need Kafka to see the Kafkaesque dimension in them. Žižek uses this as evidence for the ontological openness of the past.
Mao's flatulence metaphor at Lushan conference
At the 1959 Lushan conference, after the Great Leap Forward disaster, Mao's self-criticism concluded with the metaphor that admitting guilt is like defecating or farting, 'if you feel the need to fart, fart; you will feel better', thereby framing mass death as a bodily relief …
Caesar crossing the Rubicon
Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon was contingent, he could have stayed, but once made it became his fate and appeared inevitable; illustrates how contingent decisions retroactively constitute necessity.
Where it comes up 17
18 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there