Slavoj Žižek

So you can sort of listen to Ryan Grim's rehash.

He doesn't mention Rockhill by name, but I heard compatible left, and then I heard that outline of that story, which is exactly the sort of the story Rockhill's been developing in the last couple years, like in his takedowns of Žižek and his repudiation of French theory and his sort of, yeah, takes on this strange segment of the left that seems to exist in these, like, minority conference circles and in kind of humanities university departments, which we, some of us here are on the podcast are, are definitely familiar with.

Um, but I mean, the, it's not as big a deal anymore 'cause Marxism isn't this huge phenomenon.

People are turning to socialism, yeah, and then they see this and they're like, "Well, is this what socialism is? No, it can't be." But after World War II, you know, socialism Was huge.

You don't have to take everything from it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zizek said some brilliant stuff and some absolutely imbecilic shit.

So you like the alien

dolphins, but you don't like the nuclear bombs.

Yes, that's the one.

With an interview I'd read with Slavoj Žižek.

Oh, yeah,

yeah, yeah.

And Slavoj Žižek has just been interviewed by our great John Bleasdale.

Which I would love to have been a fly on the wall

there.

It's fresh on my mind.

And that is The Pervert's Guide to Utopias, directed by Sophie Fiennes and starring Slavoj Žižek.

I was quite excited because I saw The Pervert's Guide to Cinema in college and actually did not like it that much then and wanted to see kind of how the conceit plays out for me now, both as like someone who's older, but also the world is very changed now.

And it's interesting, you know, cinema, the first one was called Pervert's Guide to Cinema.

I'm trying to remember who pointed this out to me however long ago.

But as I say this, it sounds like Slavoj Žižek, and maybe it is.

But ideology functions at an invisible level.

The things that become, quote-unquote, "ideological" are unexamined beliefs that structure reality.

Right.

So let's say to get back to Lacan, Lacan's, not Lacan, Zizek's reading of Lost Highway.

Right.

Is relates to the interpretation of.

Right, right.

And then the movie picks up after that.

And after that, he contends, Zizek contends, and as is perhaps represented by the sort of identity schism in Lost Highway, that there are now two or three different movies happening simultaneously.

There's the movie where half the audience knows that they fucked and half the audience doesn't.

And we don't really think of it as a philosophical question, although some modern philosophers are starting to turn to it as well.

Zizek just wrote a book about it.

And so what got me thinking about this and what I found so interesting about the ancient thought, as was already mentioned, there's a lot of different theories of the end of the world, right? We don't have to just take the Bible as telling us how the world is going to end.

If you don't like one idea, if you don't like eternal return, you can go to the Epicureans.