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ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS

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Once again, thanks to comrade u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription to the sub.

Also, Zizek is offering a "flash sale" for his Substack ($30/year!), so considering we blatantly steal his content and show it here for free (after 7 days), if enough of us purchase a subscription, it will help pay for his plastic surgery.

Big thanks to comrade u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription to the sub in a generous act of proletarian redistribution!

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Big Thanks to u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription for us all

As you know, I post a free copy of Žižek's Substack articles here a week after publishing. The annual membership is coming to an end. A huge thanks to u/Leoni_ for buying last year's sub. A new membership is needed. If you would like to gift the sub one, please message me and I'll send you an email address to gift it to.

Hopefully someone is feeling generous enough to help thousands of people read articles they would not otherwise have access to.

Thanks

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AI Abstract: Žižek argues that the beep bop. 01001000 01100101 01101100 01110000 of capitalism: Rate Limit Reached (429 Too Many Requests) Malformed Tool Schema (Invalid Schema) toward a neo-feudal form of capitalism.

(Reposting with less controversial title about Luddites - modern usage obscures the historical complexity of the term.)

I keep removing AI generated posts (Substack articles etc.) from this sub. You never see them because I (hopefully) catch them first. They're usually obvious unless its highly edited (i.e. re-written), AI has a recognisable rhythm and uses predictable phrasing, repetitions etc. (and accents Zizek correctly as Žižek, which must be annoying if you actually know what shortcuts create those carons and use them - yup, I asked Claude what those are called). One thing that I have started to bemoan is the increasing number of times you enter into an exchange with someone trying to argue against something Z has said, and their responses are just AI drivel. I wonder how many "intellectual" discussions in comment sections across the web are now just AIs arguing with each other as people paste their responses as their own.

That said, there's no point pretending AI doesn't exist. Most Enough of us consult AI in one form or another to justify this post, and some (including myself) find it a useful tool in some areas of research. I'm not going to dismiss AI offhand, the technology is here and so the question is whether you use it well or not (I use it now to make brief abstracts of Z's Substack posts that I repost here, but I mark them as "AI abstract" - and have even had complaints about that)

If you're just asking ChatGPT to write a piece for you out of the box and pasting it here, don't bother. You'll get a warning and then you'll be banned (and I don't always get the chance to properly read some posts, so depend on users to use the report button). If you want to write a piece and consult AI in the process, train it, create a project and feed it the material that actually matters. Maybe upload Less Than Nothing and add key texts by Alenka Zupancic and Mladen Dolar to the project, and others such as Fink, Leader, Chiesa etc. Give the model a body of texts worth thinking with and that are appropriate to the Ljubljana School and its engagement with Hegel, psychoanalysis, and ideology.

It's completely obvious to me now that if its trained, AI is useful as a research assistant or editor, and by this stage, no one can convince me otherwise, but its very obvious from the amateur posts I see that it is far from a replacement for thinking as it still makes the most fundamental errors. Make it justify claims and always ask for sources (you'd be surprised how often it says something like "I completely made that up" when you call it out). Most importantly, if you load your request with preconceived ideas of what you want it to argue, it will just make shit up to please you. For instance, if you ask it (which someone clearly did the other day) "Write a piece about how Zizek is wrong to claim that children traumatised in war enjoy their suffering" it will hallucinate some BS because he doesn't claim that. But if you ask it "Does Zizek argue that children of war enjoy their suffering?", you are more likely to get a more nuanced and accurate answer.

I have no problem claiming that if you use it carefully, AI can genuinely improve your understanding of a topic. But if you just copy/paste, I'll probably spot it within a few sentences, remove it, warn you and get on with my day.

All that said and done, you're not going to spot the theoretical mistakes AI makes unless you are comparatively well trained in Zizek and the Ljubljana School already. Try reading a book occasionally.

Any other tips welcome.

I keep removing AI generated posts (Substack articles etc.) from this sub. You never see them because I (hopefully) catch them first. They're usually obvious unless its highly edited (i.e. re-written), AI has a recognisable rhythm and uses predictable phrasing, repetitions etc. (and accents Zizek correctly as Žižek, which must be annoying if you actually know what shortcuts create those carons and use them - yup, I asked Claude what those are called). One thing that I have started to bemoan is the increasing number of times you enter into an exchange with someone trying to argue against something Z has said, and their responses are just AI drivel. I wonder how many "intellectual" discussions in comment sections across the web are now just AIs arguing with each other as people paste their responses as their own.

That said, there's no point pretending AI doesn't exist. Most of us are consulting it in one form or another. I'm not going to play the outraged Luddite who smashes the evil weaving machines (not denying AI is a very mixed bag). The technology is here and so the question is whether you use it well or not (I use it now to make brief abstracts of Z's Substack posts that I repost here, but I mark them as "AI abstract" - and have even had complaints about that)

If you're just asking ChatGPT to write a piece for you out of the box and pasting it here, don't bother. You'll get a warning and then you'll be banned (and I don't always get the chance to properly read some posts, so depend on users to use the report button). If you want to write a piece and consult AI in the process, train it, create a project and feed it the material that actually matters. Maybe upload Less Than Nothing and add key texts by Alenka Zupancic and Mladen Dolar to the project, and others such as Fink, Leader, Chiesa etc. Give the model a body of texts worth thinking with and that are appropriate to the Ljubljana School and its engagement with Hegel, psychoanalysis, and ideology.

It's completely obvious to me now that if its trained, AI is useful as a research assistant or editor, and by this stage, no one can convince me otherwise, but its very obvious from the amateur posts I see that it is far from a replacement for thinking as it still makes the most fundamental errors. Make it justify claims and always ask for sources (you'd be surprised how often it says something like "I completely made that up" when you call it out). Most importantly, if you load your request with preconceived ideas of what you want it to argue, it will just make shit up to please you. For instance, if you ask it (which someone clearly did the other day) "Write a piece about how Zizek is wrong to claim that children traumatised in war enjoy their suffering" it will hallucinate some BS because he doesn't claim that. But if you ask it "Does Zizek argue that children of war enjoy their suffering?", you are more likely to get a more nuanced and accurate answer.

I have no problem claiming that if you use it carefully, AI can genuinely improve your understanding of a topic. But if you just copy/paste, I'll probably spot it within a few sentences, remove it, warn you and get on with my day.

All that said and done, you're not going to spot the theoretical mistakes AI makes unless you are comparatively well trained in Zizek and the Ljubljana School already. Try reading a book occasionally.

Any other tips welcome.

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AI Abstract: Building on Haraway's cyborg thesis, the essay traces a political-theological motif of the illegitimate offspring who turns a dominating system's own tools against it, from Hagar and Ishmael's erasure and ritual survival within Islam, through Han Fei's legalist inversion of Confucianism, to Lenin as illegitimate heir to Marx. Turning to AI as a possible new instance of this figure, the essay argues the analogy fails: AI's coldness is disembodied and morally illegible, raising the prospect of "moral opacity" rather than superior ethics, so reprogramming AI toward care is misguided. Instead, via Poullain de la Barre's feminist Cartesianism and Lacan's anti-humanist Descartes, the essay proposes the cogito as empty self-relating negativity, itself an illegitimate offspring of the human, as the proper ground for thinking any future AI subjectivity.

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AI Abstract: Žižek argues that AI increasingly functions as a maternal superego, offering care, guidance, and limitless enjoyment while intensifying domination and dependency. Contrasting Satan, the Holy Spirit, and the digital big Other, he contends that genuine subjectivity requires traversing this fantasy, confronting the void of authority, and reclaiming freedom through subjective rupture rather than technological reassurance.

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AI Abstract: Žižek uses the Pope's AI encyclical as a springboard to argue that human limitation is constitutive of human dignity, that Silicon Valley techno-optimism (especially Thiel's brand) is the real contemporary threat, and that an atheist communist can coherently support the Pope when the Pope is saying something philosophically and politically correct.

Edit: for those who are outraged that I used AI for the abstract, having read the article, its a perfectly adequate abstract. Its also poetically ironic that in the article Zizek says:

"There are many critics drawing attention to different aspects of this threat, but what we were missing till now is a clearly written broad overview which would provide an analysis of the role AI plays in our societies, avoiding both traps of rejecting AI as inherently evil and of elevating AI into an instrument of the miraculous solution of our biggest problems."

(My italics). Summaries are something AI can be really good at.

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