Tim, do you want to follow up on what Adrian was saying with some questions about the AISA and techno-feudalism, etc.?

Just firstly to say, Michael and I were talking about your, this is the AI, sorry, the article called A Coming of Age of Leisure is a Dangerous Myth.

And it was on the IAI TV.

Yes.

channel.

We both loved it.

Oh, thanks.

And I think that these techno fantasies of geoengineering, AGI, solving our problems, including our environmental problems for us, etc., are more, I think they're more likely to prove to be ways to avoid confronting the necessity of a post-growth economic logic.

The chorus punishes Antigone.

I think, I think, I, I think the important part though with the chorus though is like the chorus is performing the emotional labor.

So like the spectators can talk about random stuff, eat their dull mothers, you know?

Yeah.

Um, while the chorus is performing all this sort of emotional labor of, of trying to work out what's happening in the play.

So the audience doesn't actually have to really engage closely and observe-

Hmm

[outro jingle]

"But as a means of interposing between necessity and contingency, the dimension of truth as that which becomes true only in its consequences." Interposing between necessity and contingency, right? Yeah, guys, it's all on page 80.

Hmm.

Can I just add there, um, so again, going back to the video that we were talking about when EGS did that seminar on Alenka's book, at one point she refers to d- like, you know, opening remarks she refers to desire and maybe we need to think about it more or rethink it, and she said, "This is what I'm currently working on." And I happened to do one of her EGS seminars or classes, uh, somewhere around that time where it was on desire, and one of the articles she shared as part of that was this one, and I've got it open here.

I'm gonna butcher this lady's name completely.

But the title of the article is Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gender Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace, and it's by Nazan Ustundag.

That's what I'm gonna say.

I apologize for butchering that because it's a brilliant article.

Bye-bye.

Mm-hmm.

But Hey, you know, again, going ...

We, we talked about it before with the necessity of war.

Um, Žižek does it all the time through his books about uncovering this contradiction or the antagonism.

Kind of with a...

I don't know, it's almost, it's almost...

Well, I gue- and I guess this is where necessity comes in.

Also go on

Mm-hmm.

Um, and if you have a look at the opening two sentences of this book, and I, I'll quote now, "This book claims that there is a negativity at the core of all social articulations that provides the basis for a universal politics." And they b- they openly say, "Drawing principally on the work of Slavoj Žižek, our book suggests that the social as much as the subject is punctured by an impossibility, an incompletion, which rather than serving as a barrier to politics, lays the foundation for shared struggle." And so really, I think in particular to the first reading on Three Fragments, and particularly the third section of that Fragments paper, um, as you alluded to, was the really important one, that I think he really tries to emphasize this point of, of the foundation of shared struggle through this negativity.

And yeah, so through, through that article, through that paper, he provides, I think, a clear example of how Žižek thinks through this, this universal act, negativity as a basis for shared struggle.

And then, I, I think throughout the first parts of his lecture, I think Zahi said up front, the first part was showing how Žižek kind of supports this thinking and his, his i- um, the way Zalouar develops Žižek's thinking on racism.

But then the second half is where he wanted to challenge that a little bit-

Objective violence, right? Or systemic violence.

And that, in a way, it ties it back into where we were.

It kind of closes the loop on our discussion in a way because you can see the way that a lot of conflicts are around identity.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so Frank then says that through this course, and he's directing the course, we're offering a different reading protocol, which, you know, he describes as, well, at least in my notes, jumps and short circuits, less about method, more about a psychoanalytic reading method.

But anyway, he then said the course is thinking about the relevance of a system through a cast of thinkers with singular interpretations, all approaching a crucial aspect of Zizek's thought.

So I just found all that very interesting just as a way to think, okay, there's actually something they're trying to hint at-

Mm.

Although I'm more and more self-critical of the first one.

It's still too, too lib- ...

I'm for democracy there.