Jacobin Terror & Radical Emancipatory Violence

In his words 4

“True subtraction for me: when you pull out the right card, they all fall down. Not just establishing a free space outside.”
~7:15 Object a and the Function of Ideology · subtraction as decisive collapse vs. withdrawal

“Badiou says he never understood what it means to fight capitalism. He said capitalism is like the air we are breathing, how can you fight it.”
~0:00 First as Tragedy, Then as Farce · limits of subtraction strategy

“we have to act in a voluntarist way”
38:22 Slavoj Zizek - Por qué soy comunista (subtitulado EN ESPAÑOL) · voluntarism

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

anecdote · in 5 of its talks

Gulag birthday telegram to Stalin

Žižek cites Anne Applebaum's Gulag book: once a year on Stalin's birthday, all prisoners collectively signed a birthday telegram to Stalin, a practice unimaginable in the Nazi universe, illustrating the perverted Enlightenment logic of Stalinism.

example · in 4 of its talks

Karadžić the poet and the Rwandan poet

The Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was a poet, and a Rwandan poet spent years laying the ideological foundations for the slaughter, founding poetry desensitizes people to ethnic cleansing.

anecdote · in 3 of its talks

General von Moltke and the Prussian king

During the Austro-Prussian war, the Prussian king watched what seemed like defeat from a hill while General von Moltke actually commanded. Moltke turned to the king and said 'May I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory?' The king is the embodiment o…

example · in 3 of its talks

Shouting at the TV during football

Žižek uses the image of shouting at a television during a match, 'boys!', knowing the players cannot hear you, as an analogy for the meaningless performativity of individual recycling gestures.

joke · in 3 of its talks

Light at the end of the tunnel is another train

Žižek subverts the reassuring proverb 'there is a light at the end of the tunnel' by adding: of course there is, it's another train coming towards us. Used to reject cheap optimism while not endorsing total pessimism.

anecdote · in 3 of its talks

Dinner invitation: paying the bill ritual

An older man invites someone to dinner; both know he will pay; the guest must nonetheless briefly resist when the check arrives. Once Žižek resisted too long and had to pay. The ritual illustrates offers that must be made knowing they will (and must) be refused.

Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios3 Stalin joins the applause3 Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point3 Starbucks ethical consumerism3 Coetzee's Disgrace as Hegelian reconciliation2 Hegel's owl of Minerva2 Žižek debates Bernard-Henri Lévy at NYPL2 Adorno on Schoenberg and Rachmaninov2 Argentina pays off IMF debt, IMF panics2 Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read2

Where it comes up 56

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

Slavoj Zizek: Redeem the Jacobins!2021-07-14 · 30:48

15:41 voluntarism

… First, voluntarism in a progressive sense, like we cannot justify measures of how to re-orient our production to fit the ecological goals, protecting environment.

8:00 Bonapartism

… They were aware of what Marxists later conceptualized as the gradual shift from republican form to some form of personal dictatorship, Bonapartism.

4:33 Thermidor

… Terror, numbers of terror: my God, according to some data, Thermidor, when oh, the terror was over, people were dancing on the streets and so on.

+3 more in this talk

The Legacy of the French Revolution w/ Slavoj Zizek on Bastille Day | Jacobin Show2021-07-14 · 1:47:12

1:19:26 voluntarism

… And I’m just saying that the same thing is here, that voluntarism is needed.

36:55 Bonapartism

… ots, they were aware of what Marxists later conceptualized as the gradual shift from republican form to some form of personal dictatorship, Bonapartism.

33:28 Thermidor

… My God, according to some data, Thermidor, when 'oh the terror was over, people were dancing on the streets and so on,' no, in the first two, three weeks of the Thermidor terror aft …

+1 more in this talk

Is there a Post-Human God?2017-03-02 · 1:47:36

9:24 subtraction

… egimes, Gulag and so on, instead of this real of purification—let's get rid of false semblances and so on—has to be replaced by the real of subtraction.

8:20 passion of the real

… , unfortunately into English, I hope it will be, it's a short book—after rejecting the 20th century what Badiou calls *la passion du réel*, passion of the real.

Slavoj Žižek, "'Unbehagen in der Natur': On Thinking the End of Nature"2022-11-02 · 2:25:59

1:21:13 voluntarism

… Are we aware that we are talking here about something that historically was associated with terror? Third thing, voluntarism.

1:19:51 eternal idea of revolutionary justice

… To resuscitate what Alain Badiou, with whom I disagree but here I still agree with him, called the eternal idea of revolutionary justice.

2:21:27 Thermidor

… it's like Thermidor, no? No no no I so I don't have big original idea, I just like to think in these terms you know how to change this how to change that.

Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 9 (Q & A)pub. 2018-11-29 · 1:59:32

1:37:32 political suspension of the ethical

… What I am saying, what what interests me and there is that I believe in political suspension of the ethical, but as an ethical act.

1:30:47 dictatorship of the proletariat

… But it seems that it's quite a long way from that ethics of truth-telling and responsibility to the dictatorship of the proletariat.