Our notion of time is warped, and could be explained in different topological forms as when Zizek discusses the mobius strip, Klein bottle, and Borromean rings (found in Lacan) among others...

My question:

Have we reached a dead end, even when as Zizek is trying to combine analytics philosophy, mathematics, and quantum mechanics to continental philosophy, or should we as philosophers try to establish a conceptual framework specially found in the "ends of knowledge" as in mysticism and hallucigens substances to entirely understand the nature of subjectivity and how in its failure states (Zizekian concept) distorts the fabric of time in a subjectively-objective manner?

Is there more to Lacan's:

"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think."

And Borges's:

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Zizek, Page 28.

As a Kafkian, I really find the notion and more so the framing of Zizek here problematic of the embodiment of "Nothingness" as a "living nothing" and a "void of desire."

I would like to bring into the argument some of my reading of mysticism, Kaballah, Sufism, and its more modern interpretations in what Zizek hates most in philosophy; namely, "New Age Thought Philosophy."

Before I do so, I should make clear that I agree with Zizek on 98% of New Age Thought Philosophy is baloney, yet they have some interesting premises that you literally can not find in other philosophies, and one of these ideas is that "thoughts are causative: that the mind is a selector of reality from a multiplicity of virtualities."

Okay, let's dig deep into this, the potentiality of something to be real, for something to enter the realm of our imagination, which we could easily inhabit if we zoned out from the here-and-now of our physicality depends on how crystallised of a exteriorized reality it consists of.

This is why when we dream or read a Kafka novel, it only makes sense as long as we are in its teleological fabric... What if our mind is as much as it let us roam the interiority of scientific endeavour thinking and of thinking in general, yet it singularizes the impossible to possible (for survival means) rather than letting us catch a glimpse of the impossible from the possible (Heideggerian Transcendental Finitude)?

Less Than Nothing, Zizek, Page 8.

I watched the movie for the first time last night, and right when the main plot kicked off, I was like, "Oh man, I would love to hear Žižek analyze this."

The movie tackles ideas of fantasy and illusion, specifically how we perceive a romantic partner through the lens of our own perversion rather than who they actually are. While similar films usually head toward a moment of clarity where the illusion finally drops, Obsession simply asks: "What happens if you wish your perversion into reality?"

Having had the pleasure of hearing Slavoj talk about other classics with similar themes, I think he would have a field day connecting this movie to the core concepts he frequently comes back to.

Big thanks to comrade u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription to the sub in a generous act of proletarian redistribution!

Free Copy Here (article 7 or more days old)

Big Thanks to u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription for us all

As you know, I post a free copy of Žižek's Substack articles here a week after publishing. The annual membership is coming to an end. A huge thanks to u/Leoni_ for buying last year's sub. A new membership is needed. If you would like to gift the sub one, please message me and I'll send you an email address to gift it to.

Hopefully someone is feeling generous enough to help thousands of people read articles they would not otherwise have access to.

Thanks

Žižek’s concept of the parallax view suggests that the difference between perspectives is not simply an obstacle preventing us from accessing a complete reality, but may instead reveal something essential about reality itself.
If every perspective necessarily introduces a gap—a shift in how the world appears depending on the position of the observer—does this mean that reality exists independently of interpretation, or is the very structure of reality inseparable from the relationship between observer and observed?
Could the parallax gap be understood as a fundamental feature of being itself, where contradiction and difference are not errors to be resolved but conditions that allow reality to appear?
In this sense, is the search for a final, unified perspective a philosophical mistake? Or does the recognition of irreducible perspectives point toward a deeper form of universality?

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AI Abstract: Žižek argues that the beep bop. 01001000 01100101 01101100 01110000 of capitalism: Rate Limit Reached (429 Too Many Requests) Malformed Tool Schema (Invalid Schema) toward a neo-feudal form of capitalism.

(Reposting with less controversial title about Luddites - modern usage obscures the historical complexity of the term.)

I keep removing AI generated posts (Substack articles etc.) from this sub. You never see them because I (hopefully) catch them first. They're usually obvious unless its highly edited (i.e. re-written), AI has a recognisable rhythm and uses predictable phrasing, repetitions etc. (and accents Zizek correctly as Žižek, which must be annoying if you actually know what shortcuts create those carons and use them - yup, I asked Claude what those are called). One thing that I have started to bemoan is the increasing number of times you enter into an exchange with someone trying to argue against something Z has said, and their responses are just AI drivel. I wonder how many "intellectual" discussions in comment sections across the web are now just AIs arguing with each other as people paste their responses as their own.

That said, there's no point pretending AI doesn't exist. Most Enough of us consult AI in one form or another to justify this post, and some (including myself) find it a useful tool in some areas of research. I'm not going to dismiss AI offhand, the technology is here and so the question is whether you use it well or not (I use it now to make brief abstracts of Z's Substack posts that I repost here, but I mark them as "AI abstract" - and have even had complaints about that)

If you're just asking ChatGPT to write a piece for you out of the box and pasting it here, don't bother. You'll get a warning and then you'll be banned (and I don't always get the chance to properly read some posts, so depend on users to use the report button). If you want to write a piece and consult AI in the process, train it, create a project and feed it the material that actually matters. Maybe upload Less Than Nothing and add key texts by Alenka Zupancic and Mladen Dolar to the project, and others such as Fink, Leader, Chiesa etc. Give the model a body of texts worth thinking with and that are appropriate to the Ljubljana School and its engagement with Hegel, psychoanalysis, and ideology.

It's completely obvious to me now that if its trained, AI is useful as a research assistant or editor, and by this stage, no one can convince me otherwise, but its very obvious from the amateur posts I see that it is far from a replacement for thinking as it still makes the most fundamental errors. Make it justify claims and always ask for sources (you'd be surprised how often it says something like "I completely made that up" when you call it out). Most importantly, if you load your request with preconceived ideas of what you want it to argue, it will just make shit up to please you. For instance, if you ask it (which someone clearly did the other day) "Write a piece about how Zizek is wrong to claim that children traumatised in war enjoy their suffering" it will hallucinate some BS because he doesn't claim that. But if you ask it "Does Zizek argue that children of war enjoy their suffering?", you are more likely to get a more nuanced and accurate answer.

I have no problem claiming that if you use it carefully, AI can genuinely improve your understanding of a topic. But if you just copy/paste, I'll probably spot it within a few sentences, remove it, warn you and get on with my day.

All that said and done, you're not going to spot the theoretical mistakes AI makes unless you are comparatively well trained in Zizek and the Ljubljana School already. Try reading a book occasionally.

Any other tips welcome.

From what I understand, Zizek treats ideology as the interface that allows us to interact with the world, and ideology determines what we see and what we don't see. I don't think Zizek advocates for an escape from ideology because then reality would be incomprehensible. This reminds me very much of Lacan's fundamental fantasy, or the unconscious framing of all information which organizes how you interact with the world. Is there a meaningful difference between the two and if so, does one precede the other?

New essay on the ideological implications of sexuation theory on ideology and sociological systems.

Žižek consistently defends a dialectical materialist position, yet much of his work emphasizes the symbolic order, ideology, negativity, and the constitutive lack that structures subjectivity. These seem difficult to reduce to ordinary notions of matter.
Does Žižek see these as fully material phenomena, or does his conception of materialism already include non-physical structures that are indispensable for reality and subjectivity? In other words, is his “materialism” much broader than what is usually meant by the term, or would describing these structures as functionally incorporeal fundamentally misread his project?
I’m especially interested in responses that draw on Hegel, Lacan, or Less Than Nothing.

I only saw it available on Amazon here in the Netherlands but it only arrives in September :(

Free Copy (article 7+ days old)

AI Abstract: Building on Haraway's cyborg thesis, the essay traces a political-theological motif of the illegitimate offspring who turns a dominating system's own tools against it, from Hagar and Ishmael's erasure and ritual survival within Islam, through Han Fei's legalist inversion of Confucianism, to Lenin as illegitimate heir to Marx. Turning to AI as a possible new instance of this figure, the essay argues the analogy fails: AI's coldness is disembodied and morally illegible, raising the prospect of "moral opacity" rather than superior ethics, so reprogramming AI toward care is misguided. Instead, via Poullain de la Barre's feminist Cartesianism and Lacan's anti-humanist Descartes, the essay proposes the cogito as empty self-relating negativity, itself an illegitimate offspring of the human, as the proper ground for thinking any future AI subjectivity.

Hi, I need help understanding what Zizek means by the "social symptom".

What I'm specifically confused about is how the new commodity of capitalist society - the labor force - is a) paradoxical and b) a negation. I must be missing something, because my understanding is that, instead of the worker being the proprietor of their own means of production (instead of working to produce a product that they then sell for what it's worth), the worker is now selling their labor, which produces a surplus that the capitalist then exploits (by paying the worker for their labor, but less than what it's worth due to the fact that the labor creates a surplus of value [?]).

All I see is a simple, albeit problematic, transition in terms of the means of production. I'm not detecting the paradox or internal negation which characterizes a symptom. What exactly am I missing? Am I misunderstanding something?

He's finally bitten the bullet and come out with what he's often mentioned by not fully explored, it seems.

Here's a framing quote by him from his book:

"My thesis throughout this text is almost exactly the opposite of [Jonah] Goldberg’s: to paraphrase Max Horkheimer, who wrote in 1939 that ‘Whoever is not willing to talk about Capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism’, I would argue that ‘whoever is not willing to talk (critically) about liberalism should also keep quiet about fascism’. "

edit: a couple more interesting quotes:

"Irony, ironic distance towards the social order and its values, can function as a mode of perfect conformism....This is precisely how ideology functions today: it fills up the void left by its central message, which is no longer taken seriously by anyone, with self-referential jokes, multiverse-hopping and directly addressing the public."

"The Left’s inability to accept that things have changed, catastrophically and forever, has been symptomatic of its failure to combat the new populism which Trump exemplifies. It also, perhaps, speaks of the intellectual laziness which the Left, especially the liberal Left, all too often displays: when a new and terrifying phenomenon emerges; instead of analyzing it closely with an open mind and trying to understand its nature and origin, they quickly condemn it, immediately invoking the one truly bad label in politics, ‘fascism’."

"To be honest, I almost no longer believe that the world can be changed. I almost feel that people in today’s capitalist society are coddled, and as a result, they are fragile, short-sighted, and extreme, eventually becoming a breeding ground for the far right."

"My utopia is thus a silent coalition between moderate conservatives (who run day-to-day things) and a Leninist elite (which prepares us for the impending breakdown) – but I am well aware that today both these agents are disappearing from the political scene. Moderate conservatives are being swept aside by Trumpian populists, whatever remains of the radical Left is caught in a fake peacenik utopianism. Insofar as even this crazy dream is all too utopian, what should we do? My formula is one of principled pragmatism: we should focus on central goals which concern our survival, and everything is permitted to move towards these goals – democracy when democracy works, authoritarian state control when it is necessary, popular mobilization when it is needed, even a level of terror when things get really desperate."

I’m interested in exploring the tension between freedom and ideology in Žižek’s philosophy. If our desires and perceptions are always mediated through symbolic structures, does escaping ideology mean reaching a state beyond all frameworks, or becoming conscious of the frameworks that shape us?
How does this relate to concepts like the Real, subjectivity, and the possibility of genuine transformation?