The End Times & Apocalypse
His definition: the end of the world changes not just local events within a situation but the very coordinates of the situation itself, the frame (big Other) in which events are measured breaks down.
In his words 14
“I think that *Handmaid's Tale* is basically a work of what Fredric Jameson called 'nostalgia for the present.' It paints a near future of fundamentalist rule, and it makes us feel well: 'You see, haha, we are not yet there.'”1:10:01 For a Left that Dares Speak its Name · nostalgia for the present / ideological comfort of dystopian fiction
“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch. Where the danger is the greatest, there also the saving redeeming dimension emerges.”13:52 Slavoj Žižek - 08/07/2013 · Hölderlin paradigm — danger and salvation
“The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice.”3:19 Courage of Hopelessness · courage of hopelessness
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
Fukushima and Tokyo evacuation
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Žižek's friend and theorist of catastrophes, reported that after Fukushima the Japanese government secretly panicked at the prospect of evacuating all 30 million inhabitants of the Tokyo area, illustrating the scale of trans-state action that contemporary cr…
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.
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.
Remote-controlled rat
Žižek describes experiments where rats are connected to machines and controlled like remote-control cars, illustrating the potential for direct neural control in humans without the subject feeling controlled.
Native Americans prefer 'Indians'
A Native American man in Missoula, Montana told Žižek he prefers 'Indian' over 'Native American' because 'at least that is a monument to white man's stupidity', and proceeded to demolish the left-liberal image of indigenous people as ecologically holistic, saying they burned m…
Marx letter to Engels about revolution interrupting Capital
In a late letter, Marx worries that a looming European revolution will force him to do revolution before he finishes writing Capital, showing that the theoretical work mattered most to him as an authentic end in itself.
Where it comes up 93
117 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there