Metaphysics & Logic of Capital (Capital as Automatic Subject)
Marx's account in Capital of how money becomes capital, formulated in explicitly Hegelian terms as the passage from substance (money as embodied value) to subject (capital as self-relating process).
In his words 35
“Capital is ein automatisches Subjekt — an automatic subject. Beyond schlechte Unendlichkeit, self-relating, but at the same time automatic.”45:40 Is It Still Possible to be An Hegelian Today? · capital as automatic subject — the horror Hegel couldn't think
“It's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”4:15 Žižek, 2005 — an archival compilation · ideology's blockade of capitalist alternatives
“The morning is chocolate, the afternoon it's laxative.”59:39 The Reality of the Virtual · Soros — speculative capitalism and humanitarian philanthropy as one circuit
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
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…
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.
Srebrenica 'with or without bones' land joke
A Stanford friend's research on how survivors of the Srebrenica massacre and the Holocaust coped by telling dirty jokes about themselves, an admission the trauma is too great to mourn properly; Wiesel, whom Žižek otherwise dislikes, collects such theological and Bosnia jokes.
Goebbels's Totaler Krieg speech
After Stalingrad, Goebbels held a mass rally at the Sportpalast and promised the crowd not victory but ever greater suffering, deprivation, and total war, and the crowd shouted 'Yes!' Žižek reads this as surplus enjoyment at its purest: consent to suffering as a form of libidi…
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.
Postmodern permissive father and grandmother visit
The old-fashioned authoritarian father says 'you must visit grandmother'; the tolerant post-modern father says 'only go if you really want to', which secretly contains the stronger command 'you must go AND you must want to go'.
Where it comes up 42
47 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there