Philosophy of History & Interregnum
Walter Benjamin's phrase ('dialectics at a standstill'), applied by Mladen Dolar to the pandemic: the feeling of suspended, numb standstill that paradoxically masks unprecedented social transformation already underway.
In his words 1
“today the point is no longer to ride the train of history, we are all on that train, but to pull the emergency brake. So that it stops.”46:52 Slavoj Žižek - 08/07/2013 · Benjamin's emergency brake
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
Havel's greengrocer
From Havel's Power of the Powerless: a shopkeeper puts a 'workers of the world unite' sign in his window he doesn't believe, and the system persists through this mass ritual participation in known falsehood.
Porn actor consults Pornhub mid-scene
A porn actor loses his erection and, rather than re-engaging with the real naked woman below him, grabs his phone and searches Pornhub for phantasmatic support, illustrating that even 'real' sex requires fantasy as its supplement.
Bill Gates as rent-extractor from general intellect
Gates became the world's richest person not through standard Marxist exploitation of workers (who are actually better paid than average) but by charging rent for access to the digital space, the internet commons, that we all share.
Heydrich 1936 letter on Jewish emigration to Palestine
Reinhard Heydrich wrote approvingly of helping Jews emigrate to Palestine, seeing it as consistent with antisemitic goals of removing Jews from Germany, showing that the current far-right celebration of Netanyahu's call for diaspora Jews to move to Israel reproduces this same …
Stephen Hawking's brain-wired wheelchair
A man who knew Stephen Hawking told Žižek that in his last years Hawking no longer needed to move his finger, his brain was directly connected and he just thought 'forward' and his chair moved. If the signal goes out, it can also go in: who will control this?
Obsessional neurotic enjoying pandemic hand-washing
Žižek confesses he is an obsessional neurotic who enjoys excessively washing his hands, far beyond any rational pandemic requirement. This illustrates that one can enjoy not just transgression but oppression and compliance itself.
Where it comes up 14
15 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there