Žižek

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How do memes function today?

We are certainly entertained

A pink heart-shaped meme photo of Trump and Mamdani that reads: "Memes no longer function as critique. Instead, they are the audience's contribution to the political pantomime; we are entertained and impotent. Yet unlike a pantomime, where our voice is a staged repetition, the voice of the meme is more ambiguous. Today, when we share a meme, we do not really know if we do so ironically, or if part of us identifies with its perverse imagery."
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Mamdani’s Big Bet — Slavoj Žižek ( www.project-syndicate.org )

The United States is transforming from a two-party political system into one comprising establishment Republicans, establishment Democrats, alt-right populists, and democratic socialists. In confronting all those who will try to derail him, New York’s mayor-elect will need to keep this big picture in mind.

The brilliance of Kafka (the foundation of power is absence)

"Kafka himself pointed out how the ultimate secret of the Law is that it does not exist—another case of what Lacan called the inexistence of the big Other. This inexistence, of course, does not simply reduce the Law to an empty imaginary chimera; it rather makes it into an impossible Real, a void which nonetheless functions, ...

A glass-shattering moment surely, but hope is not yet lost

Ideology is the symbolic structuring the imaginary (both the constitution of the Other and its occlusion) as well as intervening in the real (we actually landed Perseverance on Mars). The Real shows up in contradictions between and within ideologies, and in the astronaut's traumatic realization that his world, both mediated and ...

Always-has-been-meme.jpg with text 1 reading: Wait, it's all ideology? And text 2 reading: Always has been.
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When the pressure to satisfy the other is lifted...

much more can be achieved or revealed, if we don’t do things for the sake of ritual (a thing we must do according to status quo). Its a sort of stretching of the bounds or going beyond the horizons of ontology

A social post which reads: Zizek: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which as been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want
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Overtime and so on...

Don't be afraid to bend the rules and the meta-rules!

A social post which reads: My friend said they went to a Zizek talk and eventually the moderator interrupted him saying "I think it's time for questions" and Zizek was like "Ok, I will ask the first one. 'Professor Zizek what would you say if you had more time?' and then he proceeded to continue the talk as if nothing happened"
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