Ideological Specter of the Jew & Anti-Semitism

In his words 19

“His jealousy is pathological even if everything that he says is true about his wife.”
37:06 Poetry in the Round · pathological jealousy / anti-Semitism analogy

“Anti-Semitism in our Western societies was and is not an ideology displayed by insane people, but an ingredient of our spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people.”
31:51 Rules, Race and Mel Gibson · antisemitism as ideological normality

“you are anti-semitic if you say you are dirty exploiting because you are a Jew... that mysterious something in you more than you.”
40:02 The Reflection of Life in Hegel · antisemitism and the objet petit a

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 10 of its talks

Heydrich 1936 letter on Jewish emigration to Palestine

Reinhard Heydrich wrote approvingly of helping Jews emigrate to Palestine, seeing it as consistent with antisemitic goals of removing Jews from Germany, showing that the current far-right celebration of Netanyahu's call for diaspora Jews to move to Israel reproduces this same …

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.

anecdote · in 7 of its talks

Obsessional neurosis in psychoanalysis

Žižek recounts being diagnosed as an obsessional neurotic during his own psychoanalysis; he would talk non-stop in sessions to prevent the analyst from asking a difficult question, not to achieve change but to ensure nothing would change.

example · in 6 of its talks

Breivik: anti-semitic and pro-Zionist simultaneously

Norwegian terrorist Breivik's manifesto is openly anti-semitic (Jews are a problem, Hitler did the work in Europe) yet simultaneously pro-Israel (support them there, just not here), exemplifying the logic of politically correct anti-immigration that uses the 'other' as a conve…

anecdote · in 6 of its talks

Roma girl and arranged marriage in Slovenia

A Roma girl in Slovenia escaped to police claiming her father sold her into an arranged marriage; the Roma community leader argued this practice is essential to their way of life's reproduction, removing it destroys them as a community. Žižek presents this as a genuine deadloc…

example · in 6 of its talks

V for Vendetta morning after

In the final scene of V for Vendetta thousands of unarmed Londoners march on parliament and the people take over; Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part 2, what happens the day after the victory.

Martin Luther King and Tolerance5 Native Americans prefer 'Indians'5 coffee without cream / coffee without milk6 Proust's grandmother on the telephone4 Kansas: from populist left to Bible Belt4 Jaws shark as ideological condensation4 Marx letter to Engels about revolution interrupting Capital4 The Wolfman Case4 Afghanistan: from secular to fundamentalist4 Bakhtin and the Stalinist Purges4

Where it comes up 78

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

Poetry in the Round2018-10-24 · 1:44:48

1:33:55 Zionist anti-Semitism

… I’m not kidding when I use the term—uh—Zionist anti-Semitism.

~36:01 pathological jealousy

on and so on, in art, and so on and so on. So, again, all these data are true. And what should we do? If you say: "But we need other data which are more valid," and so on, you already need a certain theoretical …

Slavoj Zizek - Israel, Palestine & the Future2023-11-19 · 1:32:00

~54:22 Zionist anti-Semitism

So what I'm saying is please remain here! The the anti-Semitic strategy today tends to be Zionist, which means "We love Jews, but if you are there, don't be here." No! Jews are the ones who kind you know it's like salt pepper or what …

~58:35 Dark paradox of anti-Semitism

this all the time, is that till French Revolution the problem with Jews for anti-Semites was the one of conversion. "They converted, but should we believe them, do they still secretly...?" but with the 19th century when Napoleon whatever bad things you think about him …

~53:35 Jews as salt/pepper

Christina from Scotland, many others, they said "Cogito has no sex, we are finally equal with men." And this is a wonderful moment when in I don't know which one, Discourse of Method or the other book, Descartes says that first as a young kid …

+2 more in this talk

A Critique of Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism2015-04-01 · 2:06:44

~1:25:38 Zionist anti-Semitism

it from I think this is also maybe a too poetic way out but I think that there is no worse antisemite than Jewish person yeah but wait a minute they are in what precise sense do you mean this I develop this as a …

1:20:52 Selbstvernichtung (self-annihilation)

… in an obscenely pseudo-Hegelian way the elimination annihilation of European Jews must be understood as an act of Jewish self-annihilation Selbstvernichtung his word the Holocaust was ultimately an act of Jewish self-annihilation insofar as at Auschwitz and other death camps the Jews who were th …

1:12:21 Machenschaft

… reproach Hitler for was not the Nazi stance as such but the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to the technological nihilist what he calls Machenschaft this manipulative attitude technologically and so on manipulating reality becoming like America Great Britain I mean United States Great Br …

+1 more in this talk

Slavoj Žižek, Radical from Berlin, Babylon Exile2025-09-18 · 1:47:36

35:43 Zionist anti-Semitism

… rough emigration to Palestine they help to build their own Jewish state our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them end of quote Zionist anti-Semitism at its purest and clearest is this just a thing of the past and of European anti-Semites it's more complex please prepare first clip which …

33:12 Judeo-fascism

… t-quoted passage Seyla Benhabib pointed out that the members of the present government of Israel are quote the legataries of a long line of Judeo-fascism which none other than Albert Einstein joined by Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook denounced in their open letter to New York Times in they writ …

30:51 The stain on the Zionist project

… troying it as Tacitus the ancient Roman poet put it years ago they make a desolation and they call it peace now I come to the crucial point the stain on the Zionist project the link between anti-Semites and Zionists was here from the very beginning problems with Israel didn't begin after the war in which Israel …

+1 more in this talk

Anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite and Jew2009 · 1:12:54

19:26 Zionist anti-Semitism

… is uncanny Jew who is the object of what I think one cannot but designate as and I warn you, this expression brought me a lot of trouble as Zionist antisemitism.

46:50 Judeo-fascism

… And does again the same not hold for today's so-called by some people Islamo-fascism? Is the rise of radical Islamism not strictly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Today, when Afghani …

~33:23 anti-Semitism is socialism of the stupid

really be equality for those who for a limited part of society. But there is another mystification which would be the fetishist properly mystification as it is operative in antisemitism. This mystification proceeds in a different way. It concerns the false identification of the antagonism …

+1 more in this talk