What is a symptom? Luís and Björn continue their journey through Slavoj Žižek’s first book “The Sublime Object” traversing Freud, Lacan and plenty of social and cultural examples from Kafka, Wagner, Joyce, Josquin Desprez and theorists like Carlo Ginsburg, Erwin Panofsky, Georges Didi-Huberman, Mladen Dolar, Robert Pfaller, Gilles Deleuze and Lawrence Kramer…They explore ways of interpreting the symptom from meaningful to meaningless and its relation to enjoyment.

Taking as a lead the idea of IMMEDIACY, theorised in a new book by Anna Kornbluh, Luís and Björn talk about immediacy-jargon, speed-reading, the aleph of Borges, sunflowers and Van Gogh immersion, opera, museum practice, ethnomusicology, auto-theory and auto-fiction, meister Eckhart, mysticism and beatific vision, Cusanus, art curators, once-in-a-lifetime-experience, church interior paintings, Bruegel, grey in grey, iconoclasm, Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Carl Sagan, palazzo entrances, Pliny, Roland Barthes, trompe l’oeil, sprezzatura, anachronism, ocenaic feelings, ostranenie... Sir, this is an Arby’s!

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In this episode, Björn and Luís dissect the concept of interpassivity as developed by Robert Pfaller, Slavoj Žižek, and Mladen Dolar. Traveling from contemporary art to morning breakfast cereals, and from beer advertising to the music of Josquin Desprez, they trace the strange detours, displacements, and substitutions through which enjoyment circulates.

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Björn and Luís stumble through the first chapter of Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology - "How did Marx invent the Symptom?"

The talk explores the short-circuit happening between Marx' critique of capitalism and Freud's discovery of the unconscious, tracing how this dynamic interplay stages a theatrical unfolding of concepts like commodity, real abstraction, symptom, and objective belief, among others.

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Luís and Björn continue the celebration of 35 years of The Sublime Object of Ideology, the first English book by Slavoj Žižek, diving into the INTRODUCTION!

The talk tackles the idea of SUBJECT through Habermas, Foucault, Althusser and Lacan, and engages in a second part with the notion of ANTAGONISM.

In the first episode Björn and Luís kick off with a celebration-reading of Slavoj Žižek's first English book, "The Sublime Object of Ideology", published in december 1989, exactly 35 years ago. They discuss their approach, the importance of the past to the present times, and how all this becomes visible through the "miracle" operated by Slavoj Žižek in "The Sublime Object".