The Divided Subject & The Cogito
The Cartesian subject is a purely non-substantial point of excess/madness; this pure subjectivity is feminine, whereas the male position is always already substantialized.
In his words 22
“Love's highest need is to renounce its own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration.”1:07:43 Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative · renunciation motif as symbolic castration
“Thanks very much for a castrating experience. That's what one gets from friends.”0:49 Ecology Without Nature · symbolic castration as ironic opening
“Language is at the same time a torture house. That we are never at home in language.”1:05:51 A Reply to my Critics · Lacanian insight that symbolic castration means no language is truly a home
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.
Postmodern permissive father and grandmother visit
The old-fashioned authoritarian father says 'you must visit grandmother'; the tolerant post-modern father says 'only go if you really want to', which secretly contains the stronger command 'you must go AND you must want to go'.
Stalin joins the applause
When a fascist leader finishes speaking the crowd applauds and he simply accepts it. In Stalinism the leader joins in the applause himself. Žižek (drawing on Dolar's work) reads this as the difference between the fascist structure of voice, charismatic reception, and the Stali…
Malcolm X and the loss of roots as emancipatory starting point
Malcolm X (the X standing for lost African roots) refused the game of searching for original African identity (à la Roots) and instead proposed using the dispossession of roots as a chance to build a new, freer universality, which is why he became a Muslim (the Umma as communi…
V for Vendetta morning after
In the final scene of V for Vendetta thousands of unarmed Londoners march on parliament and the people take over; Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part 2, what happens the day after the victory.
Where it comes up 143
176 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there