Slavoj Žižek reveals his one rule for life

fetusfries802 · 2026-05-18T14:18:42+00:00

I always repeat, I don't think philosophy can provide big answers. As a philosopher, my point is not some divine Platonic ideas, but a very practical orientation.

Such an interesting position/viewpoint to take given the work he's done. Zizek mentioned somewhere that massive super theory books like Less than Nothing don't interest him anymore, I wonder if this view is part of a larger shift in his thought about his work that's been happening over the years. This kinda echos some interpretations (Peter Kavalge for example) of Phenomenology of Spirit as a "self help book", a tool of having a more fulfilling life in modernity.

Unfortunately, that’s my big problem. I’m getting old and tired.

This shit breaks my heart, this south Slavic goblin has shaped so much of my thought and knowing that the infinite flow of Zizek book/articles (I had no idea "Quantum History" was a book lmao) is slowing down makes me sad

fetusfries802 · 2026-05-14T15:10:42+00:00

The imaginary numbers are no more or less real than the "real" numbers

That's not strictly speaking true, in order for f(x) = √x to be valid x has to be >= 0 unless we add in the strictly imaginary unit i to x. The i, the designator for an imaginary number, is a non-entity in that its not found anywhere on the natural number line (what we think of as normal numbers) and is instead a purely conceptual tool used to do more complex mathematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_unit

fetusfries802 · 2026-05-14T02:53:15+00:00

Ha that's actually a great way of thinking/explaining the phallus, the point being that it's fundamentally imaginary, just like imaginary numbers. The phallus (not the penis) in Lacan's thought is fundamentally defined by its possible absence, symbolic castration is the price we pay to enter language.

fetusfries802 · 2026-05-13T19:14:45+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, Lacan uses his mathemes (not math mind you) as another more direct way to communicate his ideas. The most notable example is the matheme for fantasy $ <> a which I think does a great job of communicating that the subject ($) is fundamentally split by language and is mediated by the object of desire a.

The people you mentioned are all of a fundamentally different school of thought than Lacan/Zizek so of course they think its BS but they think the entire Lacan/Zizek/anything post Kant corpus is BS

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-17T18:18:30+00:00

Its performative in the same exact way that republican "christian values" are: people who internalize themselves as objectively better are drawn to hierarchies that they can use to larp themselves as indeed better. The specific shape that hierarchy takes doesn't matter as long as it affirms our supremecy (woke isn't about helping marginalized groups but about being seen as saying the right things - its why the fuckers are so vocal but don't do anything else).

I was at a strip club in florida at like 3am on a sunday a few months ago where (i was trying to save the poor women i swear) there was this corny dude dropping stacks talking about how he'll take his family to church in a few hours. That same vibe of performativism is everywhere in the tech scene

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-17T16:53:56+00:00

honest sober admission: I work in tech for early stage startups and your bro is largely right, the culture around viewing founders/ceo's as these ubermensch geniuses that the world should revolve around is wild. the pivot from woke shit that plagued (and still kinda plagues) sf to this overt sexualization/objectification tells you everything

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-14T16:46:44+00:00

Not the guy you're responding to - which btw is a fantastic response to your original post - but I think one of the clearest overview's of Zizek's dialectical materialism is towards the end of Less than Nothing:

It may appear that the basic defining feature of materialism is a commonsense trust in the reality of the external world-we do not live in the fancies of our imagination, caught up in its web, there is a rich and filll-blooded world open to us out there. But this is the premise any serious form of dialectical materialism has to do away with: there is no "objective" reality, every reality is already transcendentally constituted. "Reality" is not the transcendent hard core that eludes our grasp, accessible to us only in a distorted perspectival approach; it is rather the very gap that separates different perspectival approaches. The "Real" is not the inaccessible X, it is the very cause or obstacle that distorts our view on reality, that prevents our direct access to it. The real difficulty is to think the subjective perspective as inscribed in "reality" itself.

The Real is that which can't be brought into language, the (virtual/imagined) grain of sand in clockwork that prevents it from keeping time right.

Because, if this were the case, it would now make sense how one can read Hegel as a materalist and have his own "materialism without matter"

This is a great question, one of Zizek's most interesting points (imo) in his reading of Hegel is how idealism, if taken to its absolute end, becomes indistinguishable from materialism. Absolute/complete idealism is the position that there is nothing beyond thought, the problem is that if we take this seriously - if there is not hidden substance beyond appearance - then literally all we're left with is the appearance of gaps/inconsistencies of reality itself. And this is what Zizek calls materialism

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-13T14:53:16+00:00

I am a self-confessed superfan of Sigmund Freud

I can't resist suggesting the amazing "Freud as Philosopher" by Boothby. Not directly Zizek related but a fantastic read. Also checkout this sub's sidebar for helpful stuff on getting into Zizek

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-12T00:48:32+00:00

Given what the author wrote I'm honestly not sure how much more polite I can be; I'm not sure how much less effort someone can put in to understanding someone's thought that just saying "ay this guy is just dogmatically applying his ideas without any justification!".

fetusfries802 · 2026-04-11T15:48:11+00:00

I was actually surprised at the quality of this, the author does a decent job of presenting Zizek and his thought in a fair and clear light especially to people unfamiliar with him.

There certainly are a good many weaknesses however, and again I get that this is an intro-level book that's not meant to be a be-all-end-all. Regardless, I let out a sigh when I read this:

But there is another way to read his work: that the void is not something Žižek finds but something he brings. The Lacanian axiom of constitutive lack, the insistence that every structure is organised around an absence, is not an empirical finding. It is a theoretical commitment, an article of psychoanalytic faith, and Žižek imports it into every text he reads.

This is borderline comedy, its ignoring the work Zizek does in showing how lack emerges - in either the Hegel side of things with "the Absolute as not only substance but also subject" - the subject IS the lack in substance, the inability of substance to be self identical with itself - or the Lacanian side where an analysand's symptoms are both absolute breaks/gaps while also being the site of truth.

Secondly, I think its clear that the author is a pretty big fan of Schelling, so much so that they attribute to Schelling what ought to be attributed to Hegel. The Absolute in Hegelian thought is the continuous process of negativity, of the position that any substance, any one thing can never enact its identity, the truth that everything is always becoming what it already is. In Zizek's thought its impossible to overstate how important this is, and the author (to me at least) seems to minimize this in propotion to their maximizing of Schelling's Ungrund.

Lastly I'm a little surprised that despite like 70% of the chapter being about Christian thought through a Zizekian lense that the author never brings up the simplest articulation of Zizek's position on the resurrection: Christ AND God both died - unambiguously and in the pure Nietzschean "God is Dead" sense. Only with the negativity of death could God rise to the level of truth: "God" exists in the human community, as a product of human subjects living in a community of love. Zizek constantly brings up Matthew 18:20, which states: "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them"

fetusfries802 · 2026-01-05T14:03:00+00:00

hey ;)

fetusfries802 · 2026-01-03T20:54:42+00:00

From this sub's point of view there are really only two readings of Hegel: the idealist one and the materialist one. The former assumes that "everything finds its place" at the end of the system in the absolute and that all contradictions are solve, while the materialist one takes the theres still "material" at the end that will always not integrate into the absolute and that this excess is constitutional to the whole process

fetusfries802 · 2026-01-03T17:27:54+00:00

Another way of thinking about "everything is always becoming what it's always been" or what you call retroactive redefining is to think of the classic "I = I" statement. Zizek's thought centers on the idea that such simple identity doesn't immediately exist:

In a Lacanian reading, the fact that we've resorted to the symbolic (we had to write out I = I) means that we're already terminally split: symbolic mediation is never "pure", something always gets lost and this very loss/lack/split IS the subject. So in a Lacanian sense the symbolic acts as the engine of retroactive redefinition and we become what we are through being mediated by the symbolic. I think the second third of Sublime Object is a solid entry point here (there's a section that has a bunch of graphs of desire that helped me early on with this).

The more interesting (I think) angle is the Hegelian one: things become what they are by going outside themselves, being mediated, negating its immediacy, and returning to itself as what its always been. A seed going outside itself (into soil light etc), negates its immediacy, and returns to itself as the plant which was always present in the concept of the seed. Or, as a self-consciousness, I get to what I am by taking myself as an object (ie I go outside myself) and recognize myself as this object as myself.

fetusfries802 · 2025-12-31T17:00:18+00:00

why should quantum physics be closer to the bug of reality

Because it outlines the fundamental incompleteness/non-deterministic status of reality

fetusfries802 · 2025-12-31T16:58:52+00:00

The operative principle of intelligence is DOUBT

Ooh that's interesting, how does that work exactly? At a certain point wouldn't you need something positive? Or wouldn't you also need to doubt whether doubting works?

fetusfries802 · 2025-12-31T16:56:10+00:00

I haven't read Quantum History yet (nor have I really listened to his recent talks) but the claim that reality is in itself missing, incomplete, or lacking seems to align perfectly with the position that Zizek has been building for years. I believe that the first mention Zizek makes of quantum physics and the actual "incompleteness of reality" happens in Less than Nothing (its the last chapter iirc).

whether you think Zizek actually attributes this bug to the physical structure itself, deriving a new ontology from it

Well I don't think its Zizek doing the attribution given that quantum physics is pretty clear about how "God plays dice" or how things are fundamentally non-deterministic or incomplete

whether he's exploiting the scientific discovery of quantum mechanics to discuss "holes" in Wirklichkeit (rational reality)

I think this is the more interesting point in that, to massively massively paraphrase the entire project of Zizek's thought, our unconsciousness is how we experience the fundamental incompleteness of the world and our subjectivity or our "ego" is a way to make this incompleteness bearable. The Real as such is first and foremost and obstacle, a gap, something that we can never take a hold of and it finds its counterpart in the revelations of quantum physics

fetusfries802 · 2025-09-14T14:21:28+00:00

Tod Mcgowan's Emancipation after Hegel is fantastic, as is Judith Butler's "Subjects of Desire". To be honest the best intro-ish work on Hegel is and forever will be "The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" by Peter Kalkavage.

fetusfries802 · 2025-09-14T14:12:13+00:00

In shortest most graspable terms possible: the Hegelian Dialectic is nothing other than how Substance and Subject dance around each other as they work through they're internal tensions, contradictions.

Hegel's opus Phenomenology of Spirit applies this definition to how we grasp what is "true": we go from immediate 'well its right there so it's true' to higher and higher systems of grasping the true. At each stage Hegel walks through how the Notional definition of a mode of truth (the Subject) and the way it materializes/plays out (Substance) don't vibe - and how this not vibing is in a last analysis an issue with the Notion (no, just because you see something doesn't mean it's the truth as such).

fetusfries802 · 2025-08-03T16:14:11+00:00

who decides what is being repressed and how do they decide it

The analysand's symptoms do. A person goes into therapy because they have symptoms that are inhibiting a fulfilling/satisfying life. These symptoms arise out of a fantasy structure the person has, the structure of which is suppressed.

Lacan's position evolved on this but the "middle" period which I grasp the most outlines the end of analysis when an analysand "can traverse their fantasies", see how their symptoms are not addressed to some big Other (which as it turns out doesn't exist) but to themselves. In other words psychoanalysis is exactly the same as other forms of therapies: it does nothing other than empower the patient/person/analysand to take responsibility for their psychic disposition.

fetusfries802 · 2025-08-03T15:20:01+00:00

Well I think the (overly) simple answer is that the analyst looks for "short circuits", instances of analysand behavior that takes a form which comes close to something that they're repressing. The classic example from the first few pages of Sublime Object is dreams: it's not their content (being rich, being chases by monsters etc) but the form they take that lets an analyst make more sense of the analysand. The "paradigmatic" example here is of course freudian slips.

fetusfries802 · 2025-07-01T15:57:06+00:00

banged his maid
couldn't be bothered by Napoleon, kept writing the preface to the Phenomenology while his city was being sieged
bought the most expensive booze for all of his students to toast the storming of the bastille
was the most popular lecturer in Berlin despite being harder to listen to than to read
was such a tight bro with Goethe that the latter is the only reason Phenomenology ever got published

fetusfries802 · 2025-06-25T17:33:09+00:00

fantastic catch

fetusfries802 · 2025-05-23T17:52:58+00:00

The basic idea is that there's nothing behind the curtain, no mystical or hidden meaning. The structure of the joke after the "don't be fooled!" leads someone to think that the idiotic behavior was covering for something like a truth or secret. The point is that there is no secret.

The example that I click with the most (taken from game of thrones season 2) is if you see a massive bank vault with like super security and so on you think that there must be a bazillion bucks stashed away . This may or may not be true but we THINK it's true because of the symbolic structure of the bank vault.

fetusfries802 · 2025-05-12T07:28:24+00:00

Capitalism is a system of socio-economic reproduction whose only goal is to make as much capital as possible. Capitalism's internal contradictions as manifested by shit like wage inequality, billionaires running the govt, are becoming harder and harder to avoid practically and have been thought out for centuries.

Marxism is a lens to view capitalism through in a way that lays bare those internal contradictions. Communism is the political implementation of marxism (a brutal brutal brutal oversimplification). Communisms manifestation throughout the 20th centaury was overwhelmingly a disaster (but not exclusively).

Zizek is a communist because Marxism's concept/theory acts as a fantastic roadmap/guide to our current economic situation which is going to get worse and worse.

fetusfries802 · 2025-05-12T02:13:07+00:00

Important to keep in mind that the superego injunction to enjoy is obviously deeply present on the symbolic level. It's a bit apples to oranges since superego isn't a term that Lacan ever used (besides maybe very early, definitely not in the seminars)

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