Poetic-Military Complex
Žižek's coinage for post-Yugoslav ethnic violence, where the pairing of the poet (Karadžić) and the general (Mladić) replaced the industrial-military complex: poets prepared the ideological ground for cleansing by sowing nationalist dreams.
In his words 1
“Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified by the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić the poet and Ratko Mladić the general.”26:23 Plato’s Critique of Poetry · poetic-military complex
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
Karadžić the poet and the Rwandan poet
The Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was a poet, and a Rwandan poet spent years laying the ideological foundations for the slaughter, founding poetry desensitizes people to ethnic cleansing.
Stephen Weinberg on religion making good people do evil
Žižek cites physicist Steven Weinberg's quip, without religion, good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but religion is needed to make good people do bad things, as containing an element of truth even though Žižek elsewhere celebrates Christianity.
Daisetz Suzuki's Knife
Žižek quotes Zen master D.T. Suzuki, who justified killing in war by claiming enlightenment allows one to see the 'dancing knife' as a phenomenon without substantial reality, thus bypassing ethical guilt.
Father Joseph / Père Joseph, Gray Eminence
Father Joseph, Richelieu's right hand who engineered Thirty Years' War policy and organized murders, simultaneously wrote mystical letters to a convent at the level of Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, authentic spirituality alongside absolute political evil.
Himmler's Posen Speech
Himmler told SS officers at Posen (Poznań) in 1943 that any idiot can sacrifice his life for his country but it takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing, to kill, torture, suppressing even moral sentiment, for his country. The trick is to present your natural ethical resi…
Heydrich playing Beethoven string quartets
Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the Wannsee Conference, played violin and held private string quartet evenings with his SS friends playing late Beethoven, an 'ontological scandal' showing that authentic aesthetic appreciation and absolute evil can coexist.
Where it comes up 19
19 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there