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The Sacred Crime & Profanation

Violence, Terror & The Sacred · 12 concepts · 19 talks · 29 hours · 2006–2023
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The sacrificial violence or 'sacred crime' required to establish a new social order, which must be forgotten or repressed for the order to function.

2006: 2 talks 2007: 1 talk 2009: 3 talks 2010: 1 talk 2012: 2 talks 2014: 1 talk 2016: 1 talk 2017: 1 talk 2018: 2 talks 2020: 1 talk 2022: 1 talk 2023: 3 talks
≤2000talks carrying this idea, per year2026

In his words 1

“it is that law itself is a moment of crime... law is universalized crime. Law is the crime.”
2:05:26 The Reflection of Life in Hegel · Hegel: law as universalized crime

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

example · in 3 of its talks

Borges Chinese classification of dogs

Borges (cited by Foucault at the start of The Order of Things) proposes a Chinese encyclopedia classifying animals, the last category being 'all those not included in this classification.' Lévi-Strauss uses this to show that every symbolic system needs a paradoxical stand-in f…
anecdote · in 3 of its talks

The Wolfman Case

Freud pays the Wolfman, losing his neutral position and triggering paranoia ('che vuoi?'); the patient is later cured by Muriel Gardiner, an American psychoanalyst.
joke · in 3 of its talks

Lenin's Wife and Mistress

Žižek notes Lenin’s specific term for the woman helping in the kitchen, which he uses to pivot to Lenin’s vision of post-revolutionary polite communication.
anecdote · in 2 of its talks

The Polish Communist and Stalin

An old Polish Jew explains his support for Stalin: despite Stalin's purges, the Communist Party was the only group that shook hands with Jews in pre-war anti-Semitic Poland.
example · in 2 of its talks

Anna Netrebko's Name

Žižek puns on the Russian name Netrebko ('she doesn't need it' or 'she needs it like the Sahara needs water') to illustrate the 'fatal beauty' who pretends to be bored or superior.
example · in 2 of its talks

Cindy Crawford beats Claudia Schiffer because of her mole

An opinion poll found men preferred Cindy Crawford to the 'too perfect' Claudia Schiffer; the mole is the index of imperfection that triggers love. Žižek uses this to illustrate the objet petit a logic: one falls in love in spite of an imperfection, which crystallises the 'som…

Khrushchev Report: Fadeyev's suicide2Titanic and the novel Titan, catastrophe in the air2Hegel on death penalty as respect for the criminal2The Međugorje Miracle2Asiatic Mode of Production2Oil as evidence of nature's catastrophism2Jaws shark as ideological condensation2Himmler's Posen Speech2Bakhtin and the Stalinist Purges2Book of Job as first critique of ideology2

Where it comes up 19

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

God Without the Sacred2010-11-09 · 1:40:54
26:35 anti-sacrifice
… precisely to demystify the sacred does it mean that no sublime shattering experience remains it does but not that of sacred in the sense of sacrificial scapegoating let me evoke to you one such experience I will quote Jorge Semprún who reported how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews …
19:17 mark of the sacred
… e and still are for animals maybe this is what we should read in the perplexed animal gaze and now this brings me to the topic of this talk the sacred maybe in this sense what the animals see in us is something sacred sacred in its very monstrosity here I ask you to do what I did although …
~22:43 Christianity as epistemology, not morality
step towards this reversal can be discerned of course already in the Book of Job where the story is told from the standpoint of the innocent victim of the divine wrath once the innocence of the sacrificial victim is known the efficiency of the entire …
Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 2 [Remaster]2009-08 · 2:36:06
2:05:27 law as universalized crime
… No, it is that law itself is a moment of crime, in the sense of law is universalized crime.
The Reflection of Life in Hegel2009 · 2:11:29
2:05:26 law as universalized crime
… No, it is that law itself is a moment of crime in the er er er sense of law is universalized crime.
Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 5pub. 2018-11-28 · 2:04:45
~1:33:05 law as universalized crime
the dialectic of law and its criminal transgression would have been that of course Hegel admits that the law can reproduce itself only through criminal transgression that law always involves the dialectical movement of the negation of negation law is negated in the criminal transgression …
A Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism2017-06-28 · 2:16:05
37:57 divine obscenity
… that is emerging, populism versus establishment, is the saddest thing maybe i claim, is what some people call great regression, the rise of public obscenity.

The company it keeps

thought with
Benedict XVI4Tom Cruise3Teresa of Ávila3Pat Robertson3René Girard3Paul the Apostle5Lars von Trier4Yevgeny Yevtushenko2Euripides2Adolf Eichmann3Heinrich Himmler5Naomi Wolf2John Robert Nicholson2Rafael Trujillo2Frantz Fanon3Anna Netrebko2
alongside works
Black Skin, White Masks3Jesus of Nazareth3The Order of Things3Jaws3Sex, Lies, and Videotape2Pentimento2L'Amour et l'Occident (Love in the West)2The Illusion of the Others (Die Illusion der Anderen)2Falling in Love2The Monstrosity of Christ3Melancholia3She2L'être et le néant2Coriolanus2Bacchae2Antigone5

Nearest in meaning

Christian Atheism & The Death of GodRadical Evil & Diabolical EthicsObscene Underside of Power & Dirty JokesDivine Violence & Mythic ViolenceSystemic vs. Subjective ViolenceMysticism & The AbsoluteThe Act & Subjective DestitutionThe Neighbor as Monstrous Abyss

Concepts in this idea 12

3
anti-sacrifice
A Girardian concept referenced in the context of collective murder and divine sacrifice, where the sacrifice paradoxically serves to sustain the social order.
 3
divine obscenity
The libidinal logic by which right-wing figures like Trump and Kaczyński gain popularity precisely through vulgar, transgressive behaviour, with which constituents identify because it mirrors their own actual enjoyment beneath official morality.
 3
law as universalized crime
Žižek's Hegelian thesis that law is not merely opposed to crime but is itself crime imposed as universal by founding heroes-criminals; crime is not a subspecies of law but law a subspecies of crime.
 2
desublimated sacred
The idea that the sacred is not merely a sublime ideal but can include horrible, vulgar, or compulsive forms of enjoyment, fitting modern secular contexts.
 2
eating the last cannibal
The paradoxical founding act of civilization: a community constitutes itself as non-cannibal only through one last act of cannibalism that must be rendered invisible, the sacred violence at the origin of every legal order.
 2
founding crime
The sacrificial violence or 'sacred crime' required to establish a new social order, which must be forgotten or repressed for the order to function.
 2
mark of the sacred
Dupuy's thesis (title of his book): reason in its highest forms, economic, military, scientific, political rationality, is always already contaminated by the logic of the sacred.
 1
Aztec sacrifice for the ordinary
The interpretation of Aztec human sacrifice not as a transaction for a specific benefit (rain, sun), but as a ritual to ensure the most ordinary, expected thing (the sun rising) happens, highlighting the Real.