Interview with Slavoj Zizek: Death Drive and Dialectics 

such a wholesome guy, thank you

this is brilliant, so cool that y’all got this interview with Zizek. I really hope you get to do the follow up interview he suggested too

That was amazing guys, can't wait for the next one. I worked for Uber for a couple of weeks, long enough to see that "gig work" was just another way to screw the working class. Plenty of great stuff here for fans of Zizek, thanks!!!

Jordan Peterson trolls aside, this is a great interview, thank you!

Death Drive is the Ultimate Reality Drive

He just keeps doing it

god bless you for getting him to talk on these topics

The thought that humanity was born out of a madness of animals (roughly, what Slavoj said) reminds me of Stanisław Lem's explanation why humans get sick much more often than animals - and he gave a slightly anthropocentric answer, tickling the ego, that we are the more complicated organisms. But at the same time he seemed to think that it was humanity's curse.

I really enjoy learning and listening to philosophy and sociology and I’ve been doing it for most of my life. I’m no PHD but I do have say I don’t understand why throughout history philosophers and sociologists have “searched through the wreckage of our past mistakes” to try and find the reasons for inequality etc. As far as I’ve ever been able to determine is that there is very little “humanity” in humans, especially in our new digital age. We are all consumed with ourselves, our lives, our hopes and dreams. We’ve little to no concern about the rest of humanity that is not within our direct sphere. Think of the homeless we pass, the sick and dying we charge to cure for profit. We’re animals and I think we a tribute too much of “divine” in us where it does not exist.

Woah

Zizek and Andrew Tate the meeting we all needed

Is it me or did Slavoj have a glow up? 😍

Screaming

52:22 The problem of the privatization of public space is that the public sector (state/local government) has become totally hamstrung-their money/power vampirically drained by private enterprise. Now government is increasingly indebted to/reliant on contracting private corporations to manage (with their major profit seeking conflicts of interest) our health care, public water supplies, infrastructure/transportation, criminal justice, education, prisons, parks, policing, sanitation, libraries, weather services, etc. And to add insult to injury, the spin put on governments inability to provide for the common good is that "government can't get anything done-they're too inefficient!" Private entities have a death grip on a majority of financial power now, and once they strangle our democratic institutions in the cradle they come marching into town dressed like heroes, telling us to trust them to finally get the job done. It's a sick market strategy to distort our view of the massive protective power of a strong public sector and gaslight us into transferring our commons into the hands of profit maximizing private barons.

And its all true

neo feudalism, not neo federalism

*Promo sm* 🏃

The toad looking guy got really nervous when zizek talked about South Africa 😂

Good interview in general, but try to avoid „you know“ as a filler word. Embrace the 0.5 seconds of silence if you not find the right word. Its not only more pleasant to listen to, but also increases your „authority“ of everything you say.

I never understood why a gender dynamic existed prima facie between the far left and the far right. Germany, it is well known, was the "Fatherland." The Soviet Union, of course, was the "Motherland." It isn't until I was much older that I finally understood the point Freud was making, which explained the binary within politics itself. Feminine morality is fundamentally more concerned with the means than the end, but dishonestly so. It worries that speaking certain unpopular truths will be emotionally hurtful to some people - on the basis of the overarching belief that it doesn't really matter - since what ultimately matters is that state of being we shall arrive at after all this, which is merely a distraction. The cultural issues are merely distractions, the means of production are what ultimately matters, is how Marx was able to escape the matriarchal virtue trap. This phenomenon is so powerful and so fundamental, so at the core of our being that it can be shocked into recognition. The matriarchs establish certain moral positions that are obviously irrational, and stem from that feminine irrationality. But at a more profound level, are devious and deceptive tricks that benefit only one gender at the cost of the other, whose compliance is not only demanded, but additionally enforced by men. In this way, even minds like Zizek cannot resist the compulsory prostration before the matriarchal shrine of virtue - where emotions override all sensibilities by a compelled reactionary fascistic demand that everyone observe and pay homage to the feminine privilege irrationally sourced. An example of this is age of consent. In most countries, the age of consent today is 16. It used to be 14 until the same matriarchal paranoia compelled it to be raised. We also have the arbitrary number of 18 as the age of adulthood - even though you can drive a car at 16. So in many jurisdictions, you can operate a motor vehicle - a veritable weapon of death - and most certainly are permitted to use a knife, power tools, saws and even own guns, but you are not permitted for another several years to decide to have sexual relations with someone, even of your own age. At 17 years of age and 364 days you are not of capacity to decide. But the next day, you are. In this way the matriarchal (I don't say feminine, but rather mothering) oedipal phenomenon functions as the actual ideological bureau of the patriarchal order - it establishes all the social conventions and norms of social relations and acceptability, but then simultaneously implicates and blames the so-called patriarchal order which is, in a completely incoherent way, both required to stop oppressing and execute the demands of the matriarchal feminine. It is additionally required to sacrifice of itself, both in means and in life, to protect and assure the survival of the feminine, while also accepting onto itself all the faults and blames that the feminine doesn't do it themselves. And thus we arrive at someone who is incredibly brilliant and insightful saying things like "9 billion dollars went missing in Ghana after the French left, but I'm saying it is our fault that the French were there to begin with." The actual culprit of a theft can never be the party with the direct responsibility and blame, but always the patriarchal order of tradition, even when it has been dead for a century. In that way, the criticism of colonialism, which emerges from the European Academy in the French school, is used today in full - philosophy, nomenclature, methodology - by all sections around the world - to call out Europe collectively for its folly in historical interventionism, such that even the methods demonstrate the ideological fallacies they espouse and prove that even in the critique of colonialism a colonial methodology was required to be developed by the colonialists and then provided to the colonials. And that is simply by another word the dynamic between the matriarchal and patriarchal forces - where the mother must remain always holy even when she is heating up the oven to cook Hansel and Gretel while fattening them up. The greatest cause of the demise of the left is the adoption of lies everyone knows are lies, in order to preserve and protect the survival of the irrational matriarchal value system - a scapegoating method conjured by an unbelievably entitled position - where, not required to actually build, create and fight, the veritable matriarch can simultaneously embody completely self-contradicting paradoxical positions, while demanding at the threat of complete hysteria, that it never be acknowledged as false; one must accept that the French are both required and obligated morally to get involved in helping people (which was the original argument for colonialism) and simultaneously leave them alone because interventionism is colonialism. One must simultaneously accept the Indigenous Americans demand that "the white people get out and leave us alone," while flaggellating the Canadian government for simultaneously not assuring that the people who demanded more than anything to be left alone are, in fact, not left alone, when it comes to countless demands their own failures cause - such as not providing clean water on reserves - which is then the responsibility of those same white people who were asked to leave, for having left. Anyone who has ever dated a woman has experienced precisely this in their own life. And that is why I cannot consider myself a leftist anymore, since its position is today completely incomprehensible. What was always a more complex dynamic than the claim of oppression, is today just another method of scapegoating others, in everything, the default position of the feminine since it is not required to take any risks, but always simply make demands and criticize.

zizek is one of these new school youtube/digital marxists, a lot like the people Lenin complained about which he called acadrmic marcists, and, btw, he is an academic.

Dude you really got to work on your fluency. So many ‘you know’.