Žižek And So On

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. As part of our ongoing series on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought we are once again talking to the brilliant Adrian Johnston.

We’re talking RoboMarx, AI and the general intellect, why the coming age of leisure is a dangerous myth…and how the technofeudal hypothesis is not pessimistic enough! 

Do we need some Cyber Leninism? What is the duty of a public intellectual? What comes after Slavoj Žižek?

PART TWO will be out next on PATREON.

To follow along with all the episodes in this series and to get access to all our interviews, Patreon episodes, and SHORT SESSIONS please support us here!

See you in Paris, 

Ž&…

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This week continues OUR SERIES on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought & we’re taking a look (once again) at the logic of interpassivity in Žižek through the work of Robert Pfaller.

What the fuck is interpassivity? We’re talking why commodities are the real fetishists who do the believing for us, hired mourners weeping at funerals so you can plan the inheritance, brushing your teeth by moving your whole head, and why the Greek chorus was just performing emotional labor so the audience could eat dolmathas in peace.

Was your Tamagotchi maintaining your belief in the Big Other?

To follow along with all the episodes in this series and to get access to all our interviews, Patreon episodes, and SHORT SESSIONS please SUPPORT US to keep the project going.

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE!

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This is another PATREON EPISODE in our ongoing series on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought & we’re taking a look at Adrian Johnston’s critique of Slavoj Žižek.

Can you have a materialism without matter? Does a genuine dialectical materialism need a detour through theology and the mystical "Night of the World"? What happens when you try to ground the emergence of subjectivity in the bizarre realities of quantum physics?

Along the way we get into the transcendental ontological parallax, Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, the crisis of the disappearing electron, Penrose's microtubules, and why kicking away the theological ladder might be harder than it looks.

Up next we move from the quantum void to the delegation of enjoyment with Robert Pfaller on Interpassivity.

To follow along with all the episodes in this series and to get access to all our interviews, patreon episodes, and SHORT SESSIONS support us here!

See you in Paris or the Urgrund, 

Ž&…

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This week continues our NEW SERIES on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought & we’re taking a look at Danny Nobus’s session on Žižek’s reading of Sophocles' Antigone.

Can a revolutionary subject ever be an isolated individual? What happens when an act suspends both public law and private family ties without any guarantees in the Big Other?

Along the way we get into Alenka Zupančič’s reading of Antigone, Bartleby politics, Žižek’s three Brechtian rewrites of the play, the structural role of the chorus, and alternative models of materialist ethics in Paul Claudel’s The Hostage and Agota Kristof’s The Notebook—where taking a bullet for someone you hate might just be the purest ethical gesture available.

What is the dialectic of contingency and necessity in Antigone's double burial? Will we get two crates of Danny’s champagne? How does a groundless act retroactively posit its own presuppositions and transforms into symbolic law?

Make sure to check out Russ Sbriglia’s new album Critique of Pure Desire here!

Up next we move from the tragic act to Žižek’s Quantum History with Adrian Johnston.

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE!

Alright, this week we’re back with another SHORT SESSION in our ongoing series exploring the systematic aspects of Slavoj Žižek’s thought, working alongside the European Graduate School's Leading Thinkers course.

Frank Ruda is back on the menu, and this week we’re talking Žižek’s second doctoral dissertation, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Why do certain contingent historical anomalies arrive "right on time"? We look awry at the bizarre historical phenomena of Kaspar Hauser and the 1898 novella Futility and ask why weren't they just a random bum and a stupid ship? 

We also take a look at Hegel’s famous essay Who Thinks Abstractly? to show why Reason isn't Understanding plus something else.

Short sessions, variable length sessions, however you wanna put it, in these episodes we’ll wrap them up because of something that is said, rather than the tyranny of the clock.

See you in Paris,

Ž&...

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This week continues our NEW SERIES on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought & we’re taking a look at the work of philosopher Berta M. Pérez focusing on her essay “The Courage to Hold onto a Paradox” and her book The Dialectical Gaze: Hegel with Žižek. 

Why does every apparently coherent order depend on an excluded element? 

WTF is the transcendental turn? Along the way we return to some of Žižek’s key examples: Lévi-Strauss’s divided village, Hegel’s monarch as the empty point of decision, & the strange loop of subject and substance.

The European Graduate School are running a Leading Thinkers Course on Slavoj Žižek and I know a lot of our listeners are attending the course which is exciting and a big thanks to all of you who have been reaching out to us over the course of the series so far!

The course runs for ten weeks or so with Frank Ruda, Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, Dany Nobus, Alenka Zupančič, Berta Perez, and at the end Žižek…on…himself….so we’re going to be doing these episodes alongside the course.

Up next we stay with Žižek’s Hegel, but move from Pérez’s account of the Dialectical Gaze to the early Žižek of The Most Sublime Hysteric with Frank Ruda.

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This week continues our new series on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought, & we're bringing you another PATREON SHORT SESSION.

This episode is a special one because we managed to get a copy of Žižek’s Masters Thesis from the early 1970’s which became his second book (Znak, označitelj, pismo) published in 1976.

So once again we begin at the beginning…again, looking at repetition in Zizek’s oeuvre with his initial turn to French structuralism with the help of Mladen Dolar.

We’re talking Žizek’s thesis defence where he had to outline his relationship to Marx, why the split precedes the whole, why animals can’t wear masks, and universal signifiers today.

The European Graduate School are running a Leading Thinkers Course on Slavoj Žižek and I know a lot of our listeners are attending the course which is exciting and a big thanks to all of you who have been reaching out to us over the last few weeks of the course!

The course runs for ten weeks or so with Frank Ruda, Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, Dany Nobus, Alenka Zupančič, Berta Perez, and at the end Žižek…on…himself….so we’re going to be doing these episodes alongside the course.

Up next is Berta M Perez and her reading of Žiżek and the Dialectical Gaze!

Short sessions, variable length sessions, however you wanna put it, in these episodes we’ll wrap them up because of something that is said, rather than the tyranny of the clock.

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On, this week continues our NEW SERIES on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought as we work through some of his foundational texts together.

To follow along with the series head over to our PATREON where you can listen to all our other interviews, episodes, and SHORT SESSIONS!

In this episode we’re taking a look at Žižek’s work on race, racism, anti-racism, concrete universality, and symbolic suicide through the work of Zahi Zalloua and we’re joined by Tim Bryar and Dimitri.

The European Graduate School are running a Leading Thinkers Course on Žižek with Frank Ruda, Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, Dany Nobus, Alenka Zupančič, Berta Perez, and at the end Žižek…on…himself….so we’re going to be doing these episodes alongside the course.

Up next we have an episode on some of Žižek’s earliest work from way back in 1968, twenty years before the publication the Sublime Object of Ideology, and his Masters Thesis from 1976 Znak, Označitelj, Pismo which we take a look at with the help of Mladen Dolar.

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On, this week is the beginning of a NEW SERIES we’re doing on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought as we work through some of his foundational texts.

The European Graduate School are running a Leading Thinkers Course on Slavoj Žižek and I know a lot of our listeners are attending the course which is exciting. Thanks to everyone who has reached out recently, we really appreciate it.

For this first episode we’re taking a look back at Žižek’s first book in English, the Sublime Object of Ideology, and Frank Ruda’s lecture on it . We’re joined by Dim and Tim Bryar to work through it with us and we're talking ideology, the curious incident of the Laclau that didn’t preface, the homology between Freud and Marx, and objective illusions.

The course runs for ten weeks or so with Frank Ruda, Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, Dany Nobus, Alenka Zupančič, Berta Perez, and at the end Žižek…on…himself….so we’re going to be doing these episodes alongside the course.

Up next we have an episode on Zero Point, Zahi Zalloua, and Three Fragments on Suicide as a Political Factor!

See you in Paris,

Ž&…

Alright, today’s episode is part of our SERIES on Žižek’s Quantum History and we’re taking a look at superpositions and enlightened doomsaying.

How does Žižek's work on Quantum Physics relate to his political work? Was Žižek just "wrong" about the pandemic? At the level of factual truth, maybe.

What is Enlightened Doomsaying? To prevent the end, do we have to act as if it has already happened? Does the collapse of the wave function come first? Is history just a "premiere" that retroactively creates its own rehearsals? Why do we fail to prevent catastrophes we already know are coming?

We’re discussing War Communism, the Doomsday Clock, and why "knowing" isn't the same as "believing" through the work of Slavoj Žižek, Agon Hamza, Alenka Zupančič, and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, where subjective truth often requires the form of factual untruth.

Short sessions, variable length sessions, however you wanna put it, in these episodes we’ll wrap them up because of something that is said, rather than the tyranny of the clock.

Up next we’re continuing the series...with some special guests!

See you in Paris,

Ž&...