The Event (Badiou) · žižek archive

In his words 27

“The first shock of the event is anxiety, always. Christ has arisen from the dead. The first reaction is anxiety, shit what is going on.”
1:28:01 Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern · anxiety as the universal first reaction to any event

“Mieux vaut un désastre qu'un désêtre. Better a disaster... than to persist in a non-evental empty lifeless life.”
55:15 Anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite and Jew · Badiou's motto / fidelity to the event

“A typical radical capitalist is not a hedonist. He is ready to ruin his life, work, everything—it's a perverted fidelity to a perverted event.”
1:07:53 The Big Other and The Event of Subjectivity · capitalism as perverted Badiouian event / death drive

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

joke · in 9 of its talks

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.

example · in 6 of its talks

Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios

Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He us…

example · in 5 of its talks

American hotel 13th floor

American hotels skip the 13th floor for superstitious reasons, but Žižek asks: whom are they cheating? If there is a spiritual agency dealing with bad luck, doesn't it know the real floor count? The gesture illustrates magical thinking and the structure of the Big Other.

example · in 6 of its talks

Starbucks ethical consumerism

Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same…

example · in 5 of its talks

Dating agencies: 'find love without the fall'

French and American dating agency advertisements promise busy women that they can 'find yourself in love without the fall', for Žižek the very thing these agencies eliminate is what makes love love.

example · in 5 of its talks

Brassed Off coffee invitation

A woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't like coffee; she says she has none, the double withdrawal of coffee produces erotic meaning far more charged than a direct proposition.

Zeuxis and Parrhasius4 Christ's Abandonment4 The Wolfman Case4 Jaws shark as ideological condensation4 James Bond Quantum of Solace, no sex at the end4 Apartheid justified in multiculturalist terms4 Kurosawa's Hamlet4 Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the fourth term4 Niels Bohr's horseshoe5 Native Americans prefer 'Indians'4

Where it comes up 80

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

Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern2009 · 2:04:53

1:22:06 event

… You can be a direct partisan of the event, that's the authentic blah blah.

2:02:28 symptomal point

… Or the entire symptomal structure, you know when he talks about this non-existence of a world as its symptomal point and so on and the reversal of as he puts it the reversal of non-existence into the most intense existence.

1:27:38 fidelity to the event

… Uh, with Badiou it gets— Badiou's fidelity to the event would have been somehow on the side of enthusiasm.

+3 more in this talk

Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 2 [Remaster]2009-08 · 2:36:06

1:16:16 event

… [Interjection from audience: "The event would have been the inception I guess."] But why? What give me a precise definition, what is what makes inception— [Interjection from audience: "Of life...

1:16:44 symptomal point

… t's related to..."] Yeah, but again for Badiou, again I'm returning to my old point, for Badiou to have an event it must intervene into the symptomal point, this torsion whatever of a situation.

1:00:04 evental site

… to catch him, but this is Badiou at his best—when he distinguishes within the multiplicity of a world what he calls a "world," a so-called "evental site." What what he called minimally "the non-existent." The—he once even sometimes uses the wonderful name of symptom of of "symptomal torsion." An element which is formally part of the set, but lacks any definite properties to be properly located within the set.

+3 more in this talk

The Big Other and The Event of Subjectivity2012 · 1:30:08

1:16:42 event

Badiou for me he goes a little bit too fast the evental enthusiasm is always there and anxiety is just like retroactive shadow of the event you know anxiety is a sign that the situation is open event is possible.

1:00:48 fidelity to the event

… t for me something is missing you have this hedonist as he calls it human animal human individual and then you have subject in the sense of fidelity to the event and so on I claim that within this logical space there simply

1:16:29 evental site

calls evental site the site of potential event you have to have terror and anxiety there.

+2 more in this talk

Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 2pub. 2018-11-28 · 1:56:22

1:51:45 symptomal point

… s very formal even answer that event intervenes at what he calls that evental site, you know that or as that symptomal Badiou's term is the symptomal point of of a situation and so on.

1:50:18 fidelity to the event

… One thing that Badiou has even more than Lacan is he always emphasizes that event is nothing in itself, what counts is fidelity to the event.

1:51:42 evental site

… So Badiou's I am convinced by Badiou's very formal even answer that event intervenes at what he calls that evental site, you know that or as that symptomal Badiou's term is the symptomal point of of a situation and so on.

Being and Subjectivity: Act and Evental Enthusiasm2012 · 1:22:32

17:39 multiplicity is original

… Multiplicity is always is, you got it, is multiplicity without one.

10:07 count-as-one

… The one: there's the one of the count-as-one but then there's the one of "the one is not." Do you, actually, do you understand those as two different senses of one? And this at two Alenka talks about.

53:32 communist hypothesis

… I claim that what Badiou calls the communist hypothesis, my god it must be a hypothesis that discourse of the master, the link to a master is not the ultimate social link, that there is a possibility of being together collectively which is not as it were sustained by a master.

+2 more in this talk