Astral Codex Ten

Zizek

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Zizek

Article

Zizek is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 30, 2023 and October 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “To put it in an even more Zizekian fashion, I have to quote Zizek himself (in “The Plague of Fantasies,” 2009)”; “If you made Zizek write fiction”. It most often appears alongside 2020 election, 23andme, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 30, 2023
  • Last seen: October 17, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
August 30, 2023 · Original source
I find it remarkable that, even though he’s somebody who has written somewhat disparagingly of Slavoj Zizek in the past, the study of fetishes has led Scott to arrive at an understanding of sexuality not unlike Zizek’s. The way Zizek sees it, sexuality has a universal surplus, a capacity to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation. And this is not a sign of its preponderance, but one of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal or never-ending reproduction and because – as Alexander argues – sexuality is continuously thwarted by evolution – condoms, porn, etc – so, in Deleuzian terms, “perversion enters the stage as an inherent reversal of this ‘normal’ relationship between the asexual, literal sense and the sexual co-sense.” In perversion, even light perversion such as the one expressed by foot fetishes, sexuality becomes one desexualized object among others. To put it in an even more Zizekian fashion, I have to quote Zizek himself (in “The Plague of Fantasies,” 2009): “This link between sexualization and failure is of the same nature as the link between matter and space curvature in Einstein: matter is not a positive substance whose density curves space, it is tied to the curvature of space. By analogy, one should also 'desubstantialize' sexuality: sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity. So, again, when we are engaged in an activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized - a rather vulgar everyday example: if, instead of simply shaking my friend's hand, I were to squeeze his palm repeatedly for no apparent reason, this repetitive gesture would undoubtedly be experienced by him or her as sexualized in an obscene way.”
Book Review: Deep Utopia
October 17, 2024 · Original source
If you made Zizek write fiction, you would get Deep Utopia. The book takes the form of a story. The story is: some young people go to a lecture series by Nick Bostrom. At the lecture, Bostrom says [commence 468 pages of Bostrom describing his theory of purpose in utopia]. Then the young people go to a party, then go home. The end.