Asking Occupy Wall Street 'what do you want?'
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 6 talks
At Occupy in New York and Frankfurt Žižek kept asking protesters the stupid question 'what do you want?', paraphrasing Freud's 'Was will das Weib', and nobody could answer.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 5
“I insistent asking them a stupid question what do you want”
“Do you want just a little bit more honest capitalism? Do you want some Keynesian state capitalism? Do you want radical nationalizations? Do you want some kind of a self-management?”
“I was always asking the demonstration there the simple Freudian question that Freud was asking women, you know 'What do you want?'... I think it's much more difficult to answer what do the protesters want.”
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
Wolfgang Streeck2Eric Ambler1Gong Li1Garry Kasparov1John Rawls3Dmitri Shostakovich2Frankenstein (Monster)1Nathan Robinson1
alongside works
Every retelling 5
At Occupy in New York and Frankfurt Žižek kept asking protesters the stupid question 'what do you want?', paraphrasing Freud's 'Was will das Weib', and nobody could answer., illustrating the left's lack of a positive program
Žižek repeatedly asked Occupy Wall Street protesters whether they wanted Keynesian capitalism, nationalizations, or self-management and received no coherent answer, illustrating the left's lack of a positive alternative program beyond critique., illustrating new leftist international,interregnum / when the old is dying but the new is not yet born
At Occupy Wall Street, Žižek asked protesters the Freudian question, 'What do you want?', and found it far harder to answer than Freud's original question about women, pointing to the absent positive program of the movement., illustrating crisis of revolutionary agency,desire and political will
At Occupy Wall Street, Žižek kept asking protesters what they actually wanted, finding only vague anti-corruption sentiments, a position any honest moderate fascist could endorse, illustrating the left's lack of a distinct positive vision., illustrating cognitive mapping,false opposition,trust in theory
Žižek describes asking protesters at Occupy Wall Street and Frankfurt what they actually want and getting no answer, illustrating that the Left has no positive programme and escapes into moralism., illustrating left's programmatic vacuum,communism as name of the problem,political correctness as substitute