But, perversely, without this surplus, we wouldn't be able to enjoy, what is substantial and necessary. But he also has genuine enthusiasms that constantly surprise the reader, such as a brilliant few pages on Shostakovich and, later, on the film Joker … Žižek is at heart really a close reader and a seriously inventive one. That said, always be cautious when downloading files from the internet, especially from sites external to Anna’s Archive. I read one of Zizek’s books (Like a Thief in Broad Daylight) a couple of years ago, because it was recommended in reviews.

Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

Given their persecution of political opponents and the censorship of those that don’t support it, the Biden regime is going the same way. There is desire and its object (or its cause) and then there is the enjoyment gained in the path of its maintainance. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy—from disinformation fighters to a leader of Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cor . While he makes the usual distinction between enjoyment and pleasure, and then mediates those in a second, Hegelian step, the object petit a and whatever excessive or surplus enjoyment, as developed in this book, shouldn't simply be equated, that reads as an obscuration of the entire issue for me.You can only enjoy human rights in certain material conditions: healthcare, education, and so on and so on. And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognise that the nuggets of ‘enjoyment’ we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out? Global cooperation, regulating the consumption of certain things such as oil, coal, beyond market necessities and so on. Surplus-Enjoyment is the author at his most supple, addressing urgent current concerns and the need for a global solidarity that cannot be divorced from egalitarianism. Read enough Zizek (which I probably haven't) and you could probably predict his next book since certain parts of this book are pretty much repetitions of things he has said in previous works.

Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

Nothing earth-shattering, a bit unnecessary, but for someone who still hasn't read a lot of foundational psychoanalytic texts, I enjoyed it (though I guess Zizek would say that what I really enjoyed is the fact that I enjoyed it, but I digress). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLAMOUR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A hilarious new essay collection from Samantha Irby "engages readers with her characteristic combination of laugh-out-loud moments, heartfelt passages and plenty of awkward experiences. While I agree with Žižek's key insight here that enjoyment is always excessive, so surplus and enjoyment can be equated in this way, the object of desire itself is fundamentally at a different level as the derivation of enjoyment. I know so many examples, friends are sending them to me all the time from United States, where – this is no big corporate practice – you find somebody not quite on the top, but a little bit below the top of a corporation who did something inappropriate and with all the pomposity, you fire him, and then you did your great duty and nothing changes in real exploitation.Remember, one of the most disgusting events that I witnessed in the last year – I wasn’t there, I saw it on the media – was that Glasgow [COP 22] meeting against global warming.

Slavoj Žižek: We are addicted to chaos - The Post - UnHerd

In the sense of those who resisted wearing masks, vaccination, social lockdowns had an implicit idea: state authority encroaches upon the limits, so in some basic sense, what does it mean to be a human being? The best part of the book was definitely the last third (excluding the bits about Covid, which, for someone so opposed to ideology, seemed very ideological). Don’t implicitly make them guilty, as if, if you are straight, you somehow participate in oppression. There are still guys being given the pulpit who believe that, if you re-jigger the language of Communism ( “communism” ) it’s really not so bad, and really the inevitable direction the world must travel.And if we begin, even a little bit, to recognise that the nuggets of 'enjoyment' we find in excess are as flimsy and futile, might we find a way out?

Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed - Goodreads

Global cooperation and controls for the greater good sound enticing when looking from the bottom up ‘for someone’ to do this but from the top down, history shows over again this is open to abuse. Slavoj Žižek’s guide to surplus (and why it’s enjoyable) begins by arguing that what is surplus to our needs is by its very nature unsubstantial and unnecessary. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992). In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist".

Is there any escape from the vicious cycle of surplus enjoyment or are we forever doomed to simply want more? The first part of the book is a bit of a drudge if you aren't a Marx fanatic (I am not), but Zizek has the occasionally sharp insight about climate change. If there are multiple source libraries, know that we pull metadata from top to bottom, so the first one might be sufficient. A "file MD5" is a hash that gets computed from the file contents, and is reasonably unique based on that content.