#Zizek-Quantum-History
30 notas · última:
Žižek on three nightmares of the modern world
Mekong scam compounds, neo-slavery with organ-harvesting quotas, and Libyan torture-ransom camps — the industrial horrors Žižek wants at the front of Western attention.
An alliance of those who refuse to pretend the exit is already known
Host's closing reading: a politics whose starting assumption is that the situation is genuinely deadlocked and no existing tendency — liberal, left or right — has the resources to unlock it.
Neo-slavery: the dark side of global digital capitalism
Tens of thousands enslaved in Mekong scam compounds with organ-harvesting for quota failures; concentration camps in southern Libya running weekly torture-ransom videos.
The left's operational lessons: from Trump to Singapore
Trump won by stating his extreme position; Mamdani's 'radicalism' is old moderate social democracy; Switzerland and Singapore model organic unity 'in a good sense'.
There is no future: from despair to avenir
Hope is deferral; you only act in despair. 'There is no future' — the Democratic 'party of the future' is Fukuyamaism; Bernie Sanders alone at Biden's inauguration was avenir.
Stalinism, Luxemburg, and the Frankfurt School's blind spot
Luxemburg's 'socialism or barbarism' is wrong because Stalinism was both at once — a lesson the Frankfurt School, fixated on Western fascism, never processed.
We don't know where we are: no hologram for the present
Today we lack the kind of totalizing hologram that capitalism retroactively imposed on all prior history once it contingently emerged. We are in the interval.
Ideology as controlled hallucination — but socially
Reframing Anil Seth's cognitive theory as ideology critique: reality is a construction, but the feedback loop runs through the symbolic order, not an individual brain.
Trump as symptom of a dead democratic-welfare center
Trump is real and dangerous but not the primary enemy. He is a symptom of the democratic welfare-state center that lost its ideological content and instinct for self-preservation.
Marx on Balzac: intelligent conservatives see the deadlocks
Žižek's dreamed coalition: renewed left plus intelligent — not reactionary — conservatives, the Balzac type who see the deadlocks and know there is no easy way out.
US tripartite landscape: Democrats, Trumpians, democratic socialists
The coming American contest is three-sided: absorbed Republican-Trumpians, old-center Democrats, and a democratic-socialist current deciding whether to split.
Trump opened a space the left tried and failed to open
Žižek grants that Trump did what the anti-globalization left tried and failed to do: disrupted global capitalism as we knew it, opening a new space.
What if you can deceive all the people all the time?
Žižek inverts Lincoln: authentic mass awakenings are rare and usually end in catastrophe. What politics remains once the myth of the clear-eyed people falls?
Wang Huning: America Against America as CCP bible
Wang Huning, senior CCP ideologist: the soft-fascist question of preserving capitalism's productive energy while suppressing the social disintegration it causes.
Capitalism works — but must be controlled
Denying that capitalism organizes productive activity is a fantasy; but free markets exist only when a strong state breaks the monopolies capitalism generates.
Does the left need a Lee Kuan Yew?
Žižek backs Sloterdijk's prediction that Lee Kuan Yew will be the figure of this era remembered in 100 years — the left needs comparable social cohesion.
War communism: obligatory international cooperation
Against both voluntaristic cooperation and world government: 'war communism' as enforced coordination for the emergency state already arriving.
Every epoch reinvents its Shakespeare
Shakespeare's greatness is his ontological incompleteness: each epoch legitimately re-constitutes Hamlet from its own position.
T.S. Eliot: a new work rewrites the whole past
Eliot's retroactive causation: a radically new artwork reorganizes the entire tradition that precedes it — retroactivity at the level of ontology.
Marx's communism: capitalism without capital
Marx's communism kept capitalism's engine of ceaseless expanded reproduction while removing only surplus value — ecologically incoherent.
Heidegger's historical horizon — and why QM goes further
Heidegger: reality is always disclosed within a historical horizon. Quantum physics asks what stands outside every such horizon — the Lacanian Real.
Paraconsistent logic as the lesson of quantum mechanics
Paraconsistent logic is the formal shape of a materialism adequate to QM: time, space and causality cease to hold without remainder.
The Holocaust: reality vs. the Real
The Real of the Holocaust is non-negotiable; its reality — the meaning installed in collective life — can still be rewritten by ideological shifts.
Feynman's 'nobody understands' taken seriously
Žižek reads Feynman literally: QM discloses a stratum whose structure is incompatible with the grammar of our reality.
Modernity begins after Renaissance (Pascal)
Modernity begins not with the Renaissance but with the Pascalian cut: a subjective interior facing a gray, infinite cosmos.
Subjectivity requires the impenetrable other
With Hegel, Freud and Lacan: a subject emerges only through encounter with another subjectivity whose interiority is a priori opaque.
Malebranche and the rational core of occasionalism
Malebranche's radical split between ideas and matter anticipates a modern insight: their interaction is always mediated by a third term.
Epistemological limitation defines the thing itself
Žižek's core inversion: quantum incompleteness is not a gap in our knowledge of reality but a feature of reality itself.
We are back in Socratic times
Contemporary crises — ecology, AI, abortion — force a Socratic reflexive stance: before deciding what to do, ask what our concepts mean.
Nature is a dirty bitch of a mother
Žižek contra deep ecology: nature is not a homeostatic mother but the source of the very catastrophes that buried the oil and coal we now burn.