Philosophy of Language, the Signifier & Writing

In his words 1

“What you are not is part of your identity. You are not just what you are, you are what you are not. And this is how symbolic space works.”
17:55 On Melancholy · Hegelian differentiality

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 3 of its talks

Sherlock Holmes and the dog

Paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes: 'To the curious thing I noticed between her legs.' 'But there was nothing hanging out between her legs.' 'That was the curious thing.'

example · in 2 of its talks

The famous line from the Philosophy of Right: the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, a social-historical order can only be grasped once its time is over, which also holds for Hegel's own Philosophy of Right.

anecdote · in 2 of its talks

Avital Ronell / Badiou catches her on betraying the master

At Saas-Fee, Avital Ronell praised Nietzsche for betraying Wagner as the authentic lesson of a pupil; Badiou immediately asked 'Your master is Derrida, where did you break with him?' She was caught speechless, and Sam Weber's defence ('Derrida is already self-critical so we do…

setpiece · in 2 of its talks

Badiou’s stages of philosophy

Žižek maps Alain Badiou’s three truth domains (Science, Politics, Art, Love) onto German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) to argue that contemporary philosophy is the culmination of this tradition.

anecdote · in 2 of its talks

Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Bayard's book defends the intellectual value of not reading books in full; Žižek uses this to argue that comprehensive scholars of Hegel often produce worse interpretations than partial readers.

anecdote · in 2 of its talks

Hanif Kureishi and the Nurses

Writer Hanif Kureishi, paralyzed from the neck down, discovered that his nurses, despite low pay, stayed due to a 'sense of vocation', a profound inability to not care for him, transcending rational egoism.

Asking Occupy Wall Street 'what do you want?'2 God as Lazy Programmer2 Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point3 Light at the end of the tunnel is another train2 Bakhtin and the Stalinist Purges2 Apartheid justified in multiculturalist terms2 coffee without cream / coffee without milk4 Starbucks ethical consumerism3 Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios2 Organic apples as ideology2

Where it comes up 20

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

Why Radical Politics Needs Philosophy? A Masterclass With Slavoj Zizek. Day 12023-11-21 · 2:21:23

1:37:26 language against language

… logical biases and so on and so on which is why as Hegel put it wonderfully we think in language but a true dialectician learns to think in language against language that's why Hegel surprisingly hated this idea of pure neutral

1:35:58 language is self-contradictory

… erent ways so what I'm saying is that that's the problem of language that it I'm not saying language is a homogeneous ideological entity no language is self-contradictory because returning to Habermas yes I'm against Habermas because unfortunately he also now fell into this trap Habermas and two of his younge …

Slavoj Zizek On Jacques Lacan (Full Lecture)pub. 2017-01-05 · 4:34:05

57:34 differentiality

… So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature.

Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 3 [Remaster]2009-08 · 2:42:02

16:01 différance

… but no already somewhere in his early works I don't know where forgot Derrida says that sublation what Hegel calls aufhebung is so close to différance that the line is almost imperceptible sometimes so again Derrida always emphasized that he even says sometimes that maybe Hegel is not the …

Slavoj Žižek, "'Unbehagen in der Natur': On Thinking the End of Nature"2022-11-02 · 2:25:59

~1:34:16 language as instrument to lie

carry on my back all this mega-shit and I still survive. So I like this idea that there is a certain as it were very primitive aesthetic logic at work there. Also, I like the theory of some serious evolutionary theorists that language, even Daniel …

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

14:57 transcendental linguistic turn

… For example, one of the commonplaces of the so-called linguistic turn is to emphasize how language is not a neutral medium of designation, it is a practice embedded in a life-world, we do things with language and so on and so on.