American hotel 13th floor
example · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 6 talks
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.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 6
“I always ask myself a strange question whom are they cheating?”
“you cheat mostly you don't have a thirteenth floor you know it's twelve fourteen but from my naive European approach like whom are you cheating”
“But wait a minute, whom are you cheating? God knows that your fourteen is really thirteen.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Paul Auster1Helmuth Plessner1Igor Bavčar1Jim Jarmusch1Kirsten Dunst1Gabriel García Márquez1Juan José Saer1Pablo Neruda1
alongside works
Every retelling 6
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., illustrating the Big Other,magical thinking,superstition
American hotels skip the 13th floor (listing 12 then 14), prompting Žižek to ask whom are you cheating, every observer knows 14 is really 13. Yet this 'cheating' is closer to Lacan's inexistence of the big Other than the European pretense of a symbolic ground., illustrating inexistence of the big Other,groundlessness of the symbolic order
Hotels with more than thirteen floors label floor 13 as 14 to avoid the unlucky number. Žižek asks: whom are you cheating? God knows. This illustrates subjectivist idealism's futility and the American cultural refusal of the zero/void., illustrating the Big Other,subjectivist idealism
Most American hotels skip the 13th floor, jumping straight from 12 to 14, apparently to avoid bad luck, Žižek finds this horifying because it is as though they are trying to cheat God, who obviously knows the real floor number., illustrating American individualism and superstition,Sittlichkeit,ideology
Žižek arrives at his Korean hotel and is disappointed to find it skips the 13th floor, the same superstition as in the United States, illustrating how ideology functions even when one consciously knows the act is irrational: you play the game anyway., illustrating materiality of belief,ideology
American hotels skip the 13th floor to avoid bad luck, as if God is so stupid he cannot count. A Slovenian lady paints over her house number for the same reason but finds it 'doesn't work,' revealing that proper luck requires bureaucratic state sanction, a richer notion of the big Other., illustrating big Other,collective substance,objective belief