I only tried reading Double Blackmail, most of his work I follow through public talks whilst driving or playing dad games. I'm mostly interested in geopol. What should I get?
Free Copy HERE (article is 7 days old or more)
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.
Yeah I'm being hyperbolic I know, from the directors pov its probably just a good use of the old "Be careful what you wish for haha" trope for a scary horror movie plot. But then there's the liberal movie critics, projecting onto it:
This movie could easily be read as a woman's fear of not being able to negotiate her own desire and getting obsessed with a guy she logically shouldn't.
Slavoj Zizek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Page 434 ✍️
In the attached screenshot, in what sense we should preserve our "respect" to the law and what it imposes on us in order to "enjoy?"
Slavoj Zizek, Freedom a disease Without a Cure, Finale: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse, Page 273-274 ✍️
I saw this new Coke and I instantly remembered Žižek talking about how nowadays everything is sold without its essence: coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, and so on. I can't remember the context or why he thought this was important, but I remember it being a significant point in his argument. Does anyone know where he discusses this?
Žižek often argues that ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but the symbolic framework through which reality becomes intelligible. This made me wonder whether ideology functions as the final “interface” between consciousness and the Real.
Suppose increasingly advanced AI systems begin to perform ideological critique better than humans—identifying contradictions, exposing fantasies, and revealing unconscious assumptions. Would this diminish ideology, or would it simply generate a new ideological layer in which we outsource self-critique to machines?
From a Žižekian perspective, perhaps the issue is not whether AI can “understand” ideology, but whether ideology itself continually reconstitutes the subject through the very attempt to escape it. Every critique risks becoming another fantasy that conceals the Real.
Could it be that the most advanced ideology is the belief that we have finally become non-ideological? If so, AI might not dissolve ideology at all—it could become its most sophisticated expression.
How do you think Žižek would respond to the possibility that algorithmic systems become participants in, rather than merely objects of, ideology?
In the image attached, what does Lacan mean by the negative? (Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, English Translation Page:266)
What does it mean in philosophy that we are literally less than nothing in our being or in relation to nature (negativity of our being).
What did Zizek mean by the "Negative Theology" of Kafka?
Why would a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission produce Oedipus?
I read before that sad people listen to sad music because they want to find an expression, a relief, and a release of it, but in this case, it amounts to what in psychoanalysis as well as in philosophy to Oedipus, so what is it?
Please explain it to me, and I will take my sweet time reading every comment, much appreciato.
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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.