Paranoia & Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theories, which Žižek defines as a compensatory construct for when people do not know what is going on due to a lack of cognitive mapping.
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
Lanzmann on burning Auschwitz footage
Claude Lanzmann said that if he discovered documentary footage of the most brutal moments inside Auschwitz (gassing, panic), he would burn it immediately. Žižek endorses this: some phenomena are real but cannot be integrated, making them 'impossible phenomena.'
Ben-Hur censorship in Yugoslavia
Yugoslav censors cut the religious ending of Ben-Hur, stopping the film after Ben-Hur's triumph in the chariot race when he learns his mother and sister still have plague, accidentally transforming kitsch religious propaganda into a bleak existential drama where triumph and lo…
Batman: The Dark Knight Rises
A 'disgusting', 'contradictory' film he likes because it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan, but symptomatically can only imagine it through the film's ideological frame.
Pokémon GO as ideology
Žižek uses the augmented-reality game Pokémon GO, where players overlay virtual creatures onto physical reality via a smartphone screen, to illustrate how ideology functions as a fantasmatic supplement that makes bare reality meaningful and desirable. Nazi antisemitism made Ge…
Lacan's dream / Cartesian monster
Žižek recounts Lacan's dream where the Cartesian subject is an 'inhuman monster,' arguing that the pure Cogito is not a human person but an abstract, depersonalized point of view.
Art biennales, anti-capitalist manifestos within capitalism
Contemporary art biennales (Venice, etc.) publish totally anti-capitalist programmes while functioning perfectly within the capitalist commercial art system, paradigmatic of cynical ideology.
Where it comes up 6
6 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there