Toilet Ideology & Cultural Excrement
Žižek’s triad of toilet designs (German: shelf/examination, French: black hole, British: middle way) used to illustrate cultural attitudes toward shame and the body.
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
Yugoslav student newspaper treats fake elections as real
Žižek and colleagues on a Yugoslav student journal found the perfect subversive act: not attacking fake elections but reporting on them AS IF they were real, 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power', which so disturbed the Party that they were called to the…
Alien and the imaginary real
Sci-fi/horror's 'the thing', terrifying creatures in films like Alien, images too strong to be directly confronted, but still images: the imaginary real.
Vertigo, Scottie loses what never existed
When Scottie discovers Madeleine was always already Judy in disguise, he doesn't merely lose Madeleine, he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before. A paradoxical, more radical loss.
Bergman's Persona: beach orgy narrated in words only
In Persona, Bibi Andersson narrates a beach orgy to Liv Ullmann using only words, no flashback, Žižek reads this as the purest illustration of jouissance of the Other, demonstrating that women can achieve jouissance through the symbolic/narrative act of telling.
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Žižek praises Tarkovsky’s Stalker for depicting a post-industrial wasteland where nature reclaims civilization, finding a 'divine sacred' in the filth of the earth rather than pristine nature.
Killings of Indigenous women in Vancouver reserves
A male ritual of killing Native American Indian girls on Vancouver-area reserves is systematically treated by police as isolated family matters or attributed to the girls' own families, suppressing its ritualized, symbolic nature.
Where it comes up 6
6 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there