For the video lecture look on the side panel under Žižek London 2011
King’s Speech: the cause of his stuttering is his inability to identify with his symbolic function. The movie is how to make this intelligent guy, stupid enough so that he is able to become King.
Black Swan: while a man, even if he becomes stupid, can still retain his title and have a private life, but a woman needs to make a choice, if you withdraw from a public career you will die.
– Can I please have a coffee without cream.
– Sorry we have run out of cream, we only have milk, can I bring you a coffee without milk?
A customer enters a store and asks, “You probably don’t have butter or do you?” The clerk replies, “Sorry we are not the store that doesn’t have butter, we’re the store that doesn’t have toilet paper. The store that doesn’t have butter is down the street.”
Catastrophic but serious: we know about the impending catastrophe, but don’t take it seriously, this is what psychoanalysis calls the fetishist split. I know very well, but nevertheless.
We believe much more than we know that we believe. I am a totally cynical person I don’t care, but in your actions, in what you do, we see your beliefs. Niels Borg and the horse shoe.
The first one to provide the right direction: GK Chesteron, The Man Who was Thursday.
It is not enough to say, “Communism was a noble idea, it was just a contingent distortion of Stalin that ruined it.” No, the misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself. I’m not anti-capitalist in a naive sense, but in the sense that when you talk about taoday’s global capitalism, don’t just mention Western countries in the G8 doing bad stuff, mention the Congo, that doesn’t function as a state, its a basket case. The Republic of Congo is not a deviation but is precisely a part of today’s totality of capitalism. TOTALITY this is one of the crucial critical notions we should rehabilitate today.
The Hegelian notion of totality, to observie it in its totality, you should include its antagonism, inconsistencies, in other words you cannot say that Congo and China are inconsistencies that don’t count, no these have to be included in the notion.
Necessary Inner Distortions: Things go wrong for necessary reasons. Public use of reason subtracted from authority etc. We are witnessing an attempt on public use of reason, in University institutions, the space of freedom is being convereted into production of expert knowledge, factory for producing experts.