Hollywood Ideology, Cinema & The Gaze

In his words 35

“A Master is a kind of vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who precisely delivers you to the abyss of your freedom.”
1:00:43 The Vicious Cycle of Capitalist Reproduction · the true Master as vanishing mediator

“The good idea is that once things get moving, you kill the master.”
1:11:44 The Vicious Cycle of Capitalist Reproduction · Master as vanishing mediator to be surpassed

“The function of Europe is to be vanishing mediator. We invented some great things centuries ago, now we have to pass the torch to another one.”
43:09 The Guardian Live Event · Europe as vanishing mediator

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

joke · in 14 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.

example · in 10 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…

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 8 of its talks

Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the fourth term

Rumsfeld articulated three epistemological categories before the Iraq war (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns); Žižek argues he missed the crucial fourth, 'unknown knowns' (unconscious fantasies), which is what the U.S. lacked awareness of, making the Iraqi Ministe…

example · in 8 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 7 of its talks

Kinder Surprise Egg

Wanting 'coffee without milk' is like wanting 'that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing.' The structure involves a void in the core that must be supplemented by a figure (object small a).

Lenin in Warsaw7 Lacanian jealous husband7 Brassed Off coffee invitation7 Deep Impact as Incest6 Darian Leader patient / 'Bed for two please'6 Babylonian Talmud, rabbis defeat God in argument6 Tom and Jerry6 Žižek's father dying, no deathbed reconciliation6 Primo Levi's Selekcja6 Heydrich playing Beethoven string quartets6

Where it comes up 168

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

Vintage Slavoj Zizek Predicts the Future Need for the Phantasmic Guise #web3 #reality #crypto2004-06-08 · 1:56:12

25:01 truth has the structure of a fiction

… a game," there I as it were bring out my, whatever this means, true self? This is, I think, what Jacques Lacan meant when he said that the truth has the structure of a fiction.

1:04:41 fantasy as constitutive of reality

… Fantasy is closer to the real than reality.

~18:49 fantasy as the imagined gaze

this non-existent gaze. And it is only in a secondary moment that we can assume the position of those who look at the stage. So again, I think that our primordial position is "I am doing it for the gaze." Which is why for Lacan, …

+3 more in this talk

Slavoj Žižek "To be or not to be”2015-11-21 · 38:01

17:03 truth is in the mask

… Your truth is in your mask.

20:02 truth has the structure of a fiction

… You know, and this is what Lacan meant, that truth has the structure of a fiction.

5:20 comedy as the only honest form for extreme horror

… That for the horror which reaches beyond tragedy, because you know tragedy is never really terrifying to the end.

+3 more in this talk

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

0:59 vanishing mediator

… And from, I don't know when I identified with this role of, you know, you’re just this lit, quite literally, vanishing mediator.

17:26 exaptation

… You know this beautiful notion in evolutionary biology developed by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould of exaptation.

~1:22:39 Reflexively redoubled appearance

on. It's a self-relating zero in the sense that the subject appears to itself but not in the sense that something deeply hidden appears is in the subject. The subject is its own appearance which is why appearance is reflexively redoubled. What do I mean …

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

1:07:25 exaptation

… Maybe you know about Gould's great polemic with Dawkins apropos of of so-called notion of exaptation.

11:47 return of the repressed

… There is a coded message in an architectural formal play, and the message delivered by a building often functions as the return of the repressed of the official ideology.

17:13 uncanny (unheimlich)

… In this sense the *unheimlich*, uncanny character of the film's end means that in his full identification with the mother, Norman Bates finally found his *Heim*, his home.

+3 more in this talk

The Interaction with the Other in Hegel2009 · 2:07:30

43:46 exaptation

… tory it's it's it's it's history is as Hegel would at as Gould Stephen Jay Gould the Marxist Darwinian would have put it one big process of exaptation Hegel I think is the arch theorist of exaptation you do something meant for a certain goal it's exapted it's but in a in a improvised open …

1:54:56 truth is in the mask

… and those guys like as if you know tear down the masks act out your true impulses but what if we define authenticity as a kind of a tragic full identification with the mask itself I'm talking here maybe you know it about a really nice film by Roberto Rossellini maybe you know it I think it's available now diffi …

~1:43:53 lying in the guise of truth

cheat in such a way that you say A because you you count on the fact that the other will think that this is only a mask for B but you cheat by telling the truth that only humans can cheat by telling the truth …

+2 more in this talk