Love (Imbalance, Betrayal & the Couple)

In his words 6

“God is just this absence, the empty place… The basic divine dimension is this void… something is terribly wrong with this reality.”
1:02:42 Christian Atheism · void as divine dimension / materialist negative theology

“love, authentic, passionate love is a catastrophe.”
35:25 Down with ideology? Talk with Slavoj Žižek | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur · love as catastrophe

“I think that love, and I'm talking now about erotic love, is, is a catastrophe, literally.”
0:59 Slavoj Zizek on Love & Sex · love as catastrophe

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 2 of its talks

Anna Netrebko's Name

Žižek puns on the Russian name Netrebko ('she doesn't need it' or 'she needs it like the Sahara needs water') to illustrate the 'fatal beauty' who pretends to be bored or superior.

example · in 2 of its talks

Cindy Crawford beats Claudia Schiffer because of her mole

An opinion poll found men preferred Cindy Crawford to the 'too perfect' Claudia Schiffer; the mole is the index of imperfection that triggers love. Žižek uses this to illustrate the objet petit a logic: one falls in love in spite of an imperfection, which crystallises the 'som…

example · in 2 of its talks

Wagner's heroes as Wandering Jew figures

Wagner's male heroes, the Flying Dutchman, Amfortas in Parsifal, Wotan the Wanderer, are all representations of the Wandering Jew: damned to roam eternally, longing for death they cannot achieve. Žižek uses this to show how an antisemite produced artwork whose deepest subject …

example · in 2 of its talks

Hegel on death penalty as respect for the criminal

Hegel argues that punishing a criminal, up to capital punishment, is the highest recognition of their freedom and autonomy; not punishing them is the true humiliation, treating them as less than a full moral agent.

example · in 2 of its talks

Borges Chinese classification of dogs

Borges (cited by Foucault at the start of The Order of Things) proposes a Chinese encyclopedia classifying animals, the last category being 'all those not included in this classification.' Lévi-Strauss uses this to show that every symbolic system needs a paradoxical stand-in f…

anecdote · in 2 of its talks

Freud and the SS man on Berggasse

SS thugs entered Freud's apartment; the image is read as dignified old European culture (Freud) facing the new barbarism (SS). But the SS man saw himself as defending European culture against the barbarism of modernity epitomized by Freud, showing that the civilization/barbari…

Judith Butler: 'be one species among many', Žižek's respectful refusal2 Fight Club: beating oneself as first step of liberation2 Christ heals the wound / Mary Magdalene2 The Wolfman Case2 The Yugoslav Army Oath2 Jaws shark as ideological condensation2 European Toilet Designs2 Lenin's Wife and Mistress2 Obsessional neurosis in psychoanalysis2 Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point2

Where it comes up 20

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

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

27:36 love as the descent of drive into the symbolic

… But later Lacan changed the view, claiming that in love, love is as he puts it very nicely, love is the way the real of drive descends or gets into the symbolic order.

1:33:25 patient work of love

… ent only retroactively through its nomination and through fidelity of its followers, what Badiou calls in this religious-Marxist terms "the patient work of love" where you work to inscribe the event into the order of being? Here I claim he is looking for different ways like sometimes he sounds almost for me a little bit too close to deconstructionism in the sense that an event is only a retroactive effect of its nomination.

23:05 love is mutual masturbation in manure

… I heard Yevtushenko recite and he said "love is mutual masturbation in manure." In what? Manure, like shit.

The Reflection of Life in Hegel2009 · 2:11:29

27:36 love as the descent of drive into the symbolic

… But later Lacan changed the view claiming that in love love love is as he puts it very nicely love is the way the real of drive descends or gets into the symbolic order.

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

1:13:18 love as the descent of drive into the symbolic

… I think that love for me means precisely true love: drive enters symbolic order and so on and so on.

XLII Sigmund Freud Lecture by Slavoj Žižek: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive2015 · 1:49:50

1:42:17 divine dimension

… That's why we should stick to in the terms that I developed here, the divine dimension and Kierkegaard, another of my favorite ones, put it nicely, he said God simply means a possibility of radical otherness in the sense of a possibility for things to be radically different.

The Uses and Misuses of Violence2009-11-17 · 1:32:03

1:26:35 patient work of love

… o read this in conjunction with with his love your neighbor and so on and so on? I claim that we need, this is what in Christianity we call work of love.