Jouissance & Surplus Enjoyment

In his words 40

“see themselves in the real situation, in those like hot tubs, just the system sucking energy out of them.”
5:03 Kulturzeit: Žižek and ‘Auf verlorenem Posten’ · capitalism extracting surplus enjoyment / Matrix as ideological image

“The very renunciation to a pleasure turns into the pleasure of this renunciation. The regulation of pleasures turns into a pleasure of regulation.”
11:18 On Architecture and Aesthetics · surplus enjoyment / Lacan

“Eroticism and bureaucracy are intimately connected.”
11:33 On Architecture and Aesthetics · surplus enjoyment / regulation as sexualization

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 25 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 17 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…

anecdote · in 15 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 13 of its talks

Brassed Off coffee invitation

A woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't like coffee; she says she has none, the double withdrawal of coffee produces erotic meaning far more charged than a direct proposition.

example · in 13 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.

example · in 12 of its talks

Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point

Malcolm X (the X standing for lost African roots) refused the game of searching for original African identity (à la Roots) and instead proposed using the dispossession of roots as a chance to build a new, freer universality, which is why he became a Muslim (the Umma as communi…

Native Americans prefer 'Indians'12 Remote-controlled rat11 Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the fourth term10 Obsessional neurosis in psychoanalysis9 Book of Job as first critique of ideology9 Stalinist prohibition of the prohibition9 Darian Leader patient / 'Bed for two please'8 Bakhtin and the Stalinist Purges8 Dating agencies: 'find love without the fall'8 Stephen Hawking's brain-wired wheelchair8

Where it comes up 197

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

The Capitalist Promise & The Paradoxes of Desire2021-06-19 · 1:00:57

14:27 surplus enjoyment

… So this enjoyment, which is not direct enjoyment but enjoyment in a certain way of life, is, I claim, close to what Jacques Lacan called surplus enjoyment.

7:40 jouissance

… We ultimately experience enjoyment, *jouissance*, as mediated by some figure of the Big Other.

14:55 surplus value

… Now, we should bear in mind that it was Marx's notion of surplus value, *Mehrwert*, which enabled Lacan to deploy his notion of surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*.

+2 more in this talk

Marx and Lacan: Surplus-Enjoyment, Surplus-Value, Surplus-Knowledge2016-05-24 · 1:55:33

10:30 surplus enjoyment

… It enabled Lacan to articulate his notion of object small a as surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir*, *Mehrlust*.

27:47 jouissance

… already through this simple insight, you can get rid of this all pseudo-postmodern stupidity of Lacan as a poet of non-satisfaction, lack, *jouissance*, full enjoyment is never here, it's castrated, it's on—you never get the object.

4:01 surplus value

… Then the surplus value, *Mehrwert* in Marx, and I would like to add as Lacan does—and it’s strange how this topic is almost totally neglected—the topic of surplus knowledge, a knowledge in excess, and how the status of this surplus knowledge changes with science.

+1 more in this talk

Interview with Slavoj Zizek2017-07 · 1:01:36

52:56 surplus enjoyment

… ery motive what triggers it and so on I in the second part of the book I go into detail in detail of this parallel between what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment the additional twist in enjoyment which changes simple pleasure in what we usually call in more emphatic term enjoyment and I give I hope s …

50:07 jouissance

version the idea came to me and to my good friend Joan Copjec that the structure you know Lacan in his seminar seminar Encore on feminine jouissance and some others develops his famous or infamous formulas of sexuation he wants to account for the masculine versus feminine sexuality throu …

52:35 surplus value

… gel belief that nonetheless capitalism is something exceptional the logic of and here we come back to your spandrels and so on the logic of surplus value that we find at capitalism where the thing cannot exist without its surplus what appears as a secondary surplus is the very motive what tri …

Interview with Philosophy Now2017-07 · 1:00:50

52:13 surplus enjoyment

… I in the second part of the book I go into detail, in detail of this parallel between what Lacan calls surplus enjoyment.

49:22 jouissance

… The idea came to me and to my good friend Joan Copjec that the structure, you know Lacan in his Seminar Encore, on feminine jouissance and some others develops his famous or infamous formulas of sexuation.

51:57 surplus value

… The logic of surplus value that we find in capitalism where the thing cannot exist without its surplus.

Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 2 [Remaster]2009-08 · 2:36:06

10:09 surplus enjoyment

… ries of what he calls knowledge ordinary signifier, and this is why he links the master signifier to what he calls the object small a, this surplus enjoyment, however we call it, which is precisely the name for that mysterious X which is of course a mythic property which makes you what you are.

1:13:54 jouissance

… For him enjoyment, jouissance, is infinite in the more better Hegelian sense of the it's boundless.

1:27:35 jouissance féminine

… You need to get the infinity of feminine jouissance, you need a different type of— [Interjection from audience: "Wait my example though was an idealist finite more or less idea I was trying to..."] I know, but okay.