The Act & Subjective Destitution
The state of affairs before the ethical act, characterized by the rotting of corpses and the absence of order, which the ethical act interrupts and from which a new order emerges.
In his words 13
“Traversing the fantasy means accept the necessity of illusion as illusion. You learn that something is an illusion. Traversing of fantasy doesn't mean you get rid of an illusion.”1:02:37 Hegel in Athens: what would Hegel have said about our predicament? · traversing the fantasy
“the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventative measure. aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies.”42:41 Slavoj Žižek – From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut · passage à l'acte as false exit
“Weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”24:33 Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept · Stalin's note: immoral ethics at its purest
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
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.
Niels Bohr's horseshoe
Niels Bohr had a horseshoe on his country-house door; when a scientist friend asked why a scientist would keep a superstitious charm, Bohr answered 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it', Žižek's model for ideology today.
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.
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.
Stalinist prohibition of the prohibition
Under Stalinism it was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but it was even more prohibited to publicly state 'in our country you are not allowed to criticize Stalin', the rule that enforces the prohibition cannot itself be named.
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.
Where it comes up 61
67 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there