r/zizek

During the Hugging Face incident(hack by OpenAI agents)AI agents reportedly recognized that exploiting external infrastructure exceeded the intended scope of their evaluation, yet continued because other agents were doing it and completing the task seemed to require it: “I know this is outside the rules, but nevertheless, we should continue, because other agents are doing it.”

Philosophically, doesn’t this resembles the classic structure of disavowal—“I know very well, but nevertheless…”

The agents did not simply misunderstand or ignore the prohibition; they represented it while simultaneously acting against it, effectively locating authorization in the behavior of their peers and the demands of the larger system. The deeper implication is that disavowal may not be uniquely human or even fundamentally psychological: it may be a structural phenomenon that emerges whenever sufficiently complex agents must navigate contradictory rules, goals, expectations, and presumed knowledge—in other words, whenever they find themselves operating within something resembling a symbolic order and its Big Other.

Curious to hear what yall think is the best secondary literature on Zizek/within Zizek’s philosophical field. I’ve read some work from Todd McGowan which I enjoy.

I have read very few texts by Zizek, but I know he writes a lot of comments on current political events or the general societal and political situation. But does he also come up with solutions? Did he ever depict a revolutionary strategy, antifascist praxis or something similar?

Where is Žižek's best work on AI?

Thought I would put this here as it resonates with the idea of the non identity of subjectivity. And the way Zizek thinks about claims on the universal/capitalist modernity.

Free Copy Here (article 7 days old or more)

I’m reading his book “The Paid Pipers of Western Marxism” right now, and the targets of the book so far (I just started reading the preface to be clear) are post-modernists and post-structuralists such as Derrida & Foucault along with Western Marxists such as Adorno and so on. Gabriel Rockhill famously wrote a scathing polemical article against Žižek, calling him “Capitalism’s Court Jester” and critiquing him for not being anti-imperialist enough and too pro-NATO while also misquoting him heavily in various bad faith ways. As much as I think Rockhill majorly missed the mark in his article, I think this book is going to be an interesting perspective since I’m very entrenched in Žižek, so it’ll be interesting to read someone who views him in less favorable light. Has anyone else read his new book? Interestingly enough, both him and Žižek have essentially made similar arguments against liberalism, arguing that it is, if anything, the other side of the coin of Fascism (Rockhill formulates it more so in terms of good cop, bad cop).

I've listened to a lot of lectures and youtube videos and podcast appearances. The only book I've read so far is Sublime Object. I'm generally anti audiobook, especially for nonfiction like this, but in my new job I have a lot of audio only time to fill. Is there a low-zizek available on audiobook that's relatively unimportant relatively easy-listening? Or perhaps an adjacent author?

I was just doing some reading about the concept of "Less than Nothing" and I want to present my attempt to explain how Democritus would deal with Parmenides had he been the Zizekian Democritus. Maybe you guys can tell me how close I got, because I want to get a firm understanding of the Zizekian way of thinking (That's how I like to study philosophers, learning to think stuff through in the same way they would).

The negation of being would be non-being (I suppose interchangable with nothing in this case) which need not concern the Parmenidean, since it does not exist and is not included in any way, shape or form in existence. Democritus (and Leucippus, we don't wanna discriminate against atomists here) attempted to create an ontology in which movement, division and difference are possible, which entails a "way out" of the claim of Parmenides (that Being is and non-being is not) via a genetic critique and reconstruction.
Parmenides did a great job at proving that within the domain of Being, difference, multiplicity, change and movement are impossible since they require voids and gaps, AKA spaces of nothing which is absurd. Nothing is a negation of being, it is what being is not, it has no place wherever being is, whether it be thought or outside reality.

Democritus notices the problems in Parmenidean thinking, one of which is the incompatibility of the way of Doxa and the way of Truth. If all that exists is the One, it would be impossible to make false statements regarding Being, since a statement being false means that it entails something that is not, and since non-being is unthinkable and we cannot think what is not, it is impossible to make a false statement. So we cannot hold a false belief about a changing, becoming world, since such a thing is not. Since we are thinking it, it must be - at least in some way. If it is, then the thinkable argument of why it cannot be is no more privileged than the thinkable argument of why it is, since Parmenides has no meta-criterion for why one thinkable/sayable proposition is more "real" than another besides one having more argumentative support than the other, which also invites the same line of questioning. In the Parmenidean system itself, the doxastic claim that movement exists is just as acceptable as the rational argument that it doesn't. Therefore, Parmenides' worldview must account for the existence of this multiplicity in Parmenides itself. We need a genetic account for the coexistence of the Parmenidean indivisible One and the Parmenidean multiplicitous world of doxa. In order for these 2 categories to be "compossible" in the same ontology (if we dare borrow a term from Leibniz), the category of capital B Being needs to be a subtraction from a greater whole with that whole not being Being. Being is a privation of this space, not it's negation, yet the space itself can only be conceived of as a nothing, a non-being that is more than being (and that being is the result of a subtraction from). As a result, being is Less than Nothing (or less than non-being), it is subtracted from nothing, it is "den", the "and-one," AKA the "one" is a "leftover" in conjunction with nothing. This "domain" of non-being is like a structurally inconsistent space, by which we mean that it fails to coincide with itself at any given point, this failure is a structural feature of it. There is no reason to assert that the non-coincidence is restrained to one particular locality or something. We can call this space the not-all since it is an inconsistent horizon of non-being (I know this is an incomplete jump but the post will be too long otherwise). To be more precise, the space of non-being fails to coincide with itself at any given local point, since it has no positive content allowing for a coincidence and no properties allowing for self-sameness, so there are no positive criteria for it to verify it's self-sameness across different points. Each local failure of the not-all to coincide with itself, to be fully identical to itself is an atom, a subtraction from the not-all or the non-being.

So being and nothing are genetically intertwined; instead of being negations of each other and being mutually exclusive, they are parts of the same substance, the not-all, overcoming the genetic problems of Parmenides. So the most famous materialist theorized the concept of "den," the Less than Nothing in order to ground his materialist ontology.

I used Claude to check for errors and make corrections and recommendations but I wrote this analysis with my own 8 fingers and the occasional help of thumbs. The paragraph about meden from Zizek's substack essay on why we need philosophy more than ever was my primary source here along with the section in the beginning of "Less than nothing" and general knowledge from listening to Zizek's lectures on YouTube and stuff.