Žižek And So On

Alright, you've been asking for it, and here it is... Adrian Johnston is back talking about his new book INFINITE GREED: THE INHUMAN SELFISHNESS OF CAPITAL.

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Adrian says, “The capitalist socioeconomic system in its entirety thus resembles a person who shoves his own head up his own ass precisely in order to eat his own shit, or a snake that swallows its own tail specifically so as to consume its own feces.”

That’s right, we’re talking Marxian enjoyment as it corresponds to Lacanian pleasure, and Marxian enrichment as it corresponds to Lacanian enjoyment.

We all know by now that Marx created the symptom, but did he also create the Drive? Is selfishness essential to capitalism? Why did Marxism move away from economism? Are we technofeudal, neo-feudal, or post-capital? Where the hell are we? Find out as we go down the toilet with Adrian.

STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO!

Enjoy!

Alright, we’re back…plumbing the depths of psychoanalytic marxism! This week we discuss Slavoj Žižek’s Scatology through Adrian Johnston’s most recent book Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital.

Jacques Lacan points out that we are born between urine and faeces, and that man is the only animal for whom waste disposal is a problem. What is the relationship between money and waste? Freud points out this strange coincidence of the highest form (gold) and the lowest (shit), so why is shit a gift that keeps on giving? What does all of this have to do with Japanese hamburgers & Marx? 

We’re talking the political and libidinal economy of shit from the Scatalogical Rites of Nations & the Interpretation of Dreams to Uncut Gems, Cool Runnings, & Laporte’s History of Shit. 

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Up next we have two interviews with Adrian Johnston, & we’ll see you in Paris. 

Aufhebung(hole)!

Alright, Todd McGowan is back again on the podcast to talk more about his most recent book Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves.

⁠TO HEAR OUR FIRST CONVERSATION WITH TODD ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK YOU CAN LISTEN HERE!⁠

⁠⁠You can also listen to our episode on Alienation as a concept in Żižek's work here!⁠⁠

Are there good and bad forms of alienation? We're talking the politics of non-belonging, alienation in cinema, the defence of lost causes, Friends and the failure of beginnings and the impossibility of endings, Lacan's debt to Jean Paul Sartre, identitarian politics, and Slavoj Žižek.

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Up next we have a new SHORT SESSION on Žižek's recent Substack which you can find here!

Enjoy!

Alright this week Todd McGowan is back on the podcast to talk about his most recent book Embracing Alienation Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves.

SUPPORT OUR PROJECT ON PATREON!

You can also listen to our episode on Alienation as a concept in Żižek's work here!

The subject is divided from itself even in the form in which it is completely at home...so in this first episode we're talking the status of alienation in our current context of serial crisis and what Anna Kornbluh describes as cultural immediacy.

What does a politics of alienation have to say about ‘the day after’ or how would it look in the day after? What is the significance of place and community? Why is the violence of the death drive and its self-sabotage the first emancipation that subsequently establishes the pattern for all later political acts of emancipation?

We also get into Žižek's ontology & fate, determinism, and the forced choice of alienation.

Part two will be out next week...

Enjoy!

Alright, we’re back…LET'S GET ALIENATED! This is a PATREON PREVIEW of this weeks episode where we discuss Todd McGowan's latest book Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves.

TO LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE SUPPORT OUR PROJECT ON PATREON!

We’re talking the Politics of Alienation, Separation, What’s in a Name, Failing with Style, Toy Story, & so on…

Up next is our two part interview with Todd...so stick around!

More info on Todd's book here!

See you in Paris.

Enjoy!

Exciting news! For the first time Bloomsbury has published a book length overview and guide to Slavoj Žižek's 1989 text The Sublime Object of Ideology and we're talking with it's author Rafael Winkler about his reading of Slavoj Žižek's famous text.

Rafael is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He’s the author of Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), Philosophy of Finitude: Heidegger, Levinas, and Nietzsche (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), Identity and Difference (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), Phenomenology and Naturalism (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), and Identity and Difference: Contemporary Debates on the Self (ed.) (London: Palgrave, 2016)

More on the book from Bloomsbury.

First published in 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology was Žižek's breakthrough work, and is still regarded by many as his masterpiece. It was an iconoclastic reinvention of ideology critique that introduced the English-speaking world to Žižek's scorching brand of cultural and philosophical commentary and the multifaceted ways in which he explained it. Tying together concepts from aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies and the philosophy of belief, it changed the face of contemporary commentary and remains the underpinning of much of his subsequent thinking.
This compelling guide introduces all of the influential thinkers and foundational concepts which Žižek draws on to create this seminal work. Grounding the text's many and varied references in the work of Peter Sloterdijk, Saul Kripke, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, amongst others, helps students who are encountering this mercurial writer for the first time to understand the philosophical context of his early explorations. Each of Žižek's key arguments are unpacked and laid out, alongside an invaluable account of how The Sublime Object of Ideology impacted the critical terrain on which it landed.

Enjoy!

Alright, this week on our PATREON we’re talking Fantasy & reading from Slavoj Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies. It’s coffin pillows, being there at your own conception, roguish reporters, and the most famous blanket in cinema. 

HEAD TO OUR PATREON TO LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE!

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Next week we have Rafael Winkler on to discuss the new Bloomsbury Reader’s Guide to Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology.

Enjoy being dead,

and we’ll see you in Paris.

Alright, we’re trying something different, a brand new monthly – or thereabouts – PATREON series on the podcast called SHORT SESSIONS…This week we're talking disaster films and the 2024 Netflix American adult animated apocalyptic comedy drama Carol & The End of the World.

Is it subversive to NOT enjoy the end of the world? Through the usual suspects like Alenka Zupančič and Slavoj Žižek we discuss the ongoing Serial Crisis, Whistleblowers, the Biden v Trump debate, Bartleby Politics, Disavowal, the Production of Community, the Popular Attachment to Catastrophe...and why you should tell your loved ones you hate them when you're going to die in a plane crash.

Big thanks to our Patreon @shitforbrains for the episode request, and if any of you out there have an idea for an episode email us at [email protected] 

…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…

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See you in Paris,

Enjoy!

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE!

Welcome back...is it the Same Shit on a Different Day or Different Shit on the Same Day? This is PART TWO of our interview with ALENKA ZUPANČIČ on the undeadness of crisis, adaptation, Boredom, Bartleby Politics, the Right Words at the Right Time, Masters, Żiżek’s Frankfurt Book Fair Speech, Whistleblowers & Julian Assange, and if we can still Handle the Truth!

LISTEN TO PART ONE HERE!

Big thanks to all our PATREONS for their support, up next we have some really big interviews and so on and so on.

Enjoy!

Alright, the End is Near and this week we're talking with Alenka Zupančič about her latest book Disavowal with Polity Press that came out this week.

In this first installment we're talking serial crisis, the Fire Within the Fire, knowledge, belief, deception, and the indispensability of concrete analysis.

HEAD TO OUR PATREON TO HEAR THE SECOND PART OF OUR INTERVIEW!

See you in Paris.

Enjoy!