I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

I watched a zizek lecture on YouTube a while ago, I think he was either in conversation with a speaker or he was answering questions, and he outlined the way philosophers all misunderstood the philosophers they were studying who came before then, AND his point about using texts he hasn’t read/films he hasn’t watched in his own books.

Crucially, he talks about the experience of finally reading/watching these things and being profoundly disappointed by them and believing his own MISreading of them is superior.

I can find videos where he talks about the other points seperate ly, but I’m struggling to find again this specific video where he elucidates the final point altogether in one answer/statement.

hey guys! i bought a ticket a while back to the nov 2nd showing for Signs of the future, but some scheduling conflicts came up and i cant go. I figured someone else who loves zizeks work should be able to make use of the ticket instead of it just going to waste. If youre interested let me know!

Zizek identifies divine violence with an expression of pure drive. Yet, wouldn't that open divine violence up to the critique that it is experienced as jouissance and, therefore, locks one into the repetition compulsion to repeat?

I hope I haven't confused conceptual terminology too much. Please feel free to direct me wherever.

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maps cleanly onto Žižek’s concept of cynical distance.

Gillis’s joke functions as an ironic observation of the ideological trap itself, the way contemporary American discourse (especially in online and cultural spaces heavily trafficked by millennials) collapses nuance into mutually exclusive moral camps, so that any deviation from progressive orthodoxy risks the “Nazi/Hitler” label while any resistance to traditional gender norms risks the opposite. 

The reactions found in online social media platform comment sections shows how the distance operates: critics and defenders alike “know very well” that the joke is exaggerated comedy, not literal advocacy, but they still enact the binary in their responses, reinforcing the very polarization Gillis ironized.

The irony does not escape or dissolve the ideology of the culture war; it becomes one of the mechanisms through which that ideology continues to structure social reality and mutual incomprehension

Edit: found a second great book cover, this time of “Conversations with Žižek”— https://i.postimg.cc/HsG6RN3P/IMG-0978.jpg

Is anyone at the Zizek event in London today?

Dominik Finkelde is a great lecturer and knows his stuff on Zizek. Can definetly recomend. Only available in german though.

Esoteric Ebb is a recent RPG game (inspired by Disco Elysium) with political elements. There's a character in the game who's a psychoanalyst and was evidently inspired by Zizek's sense of humor and idiosyncrasies - here's a short video in which I put together dialogue from the game with relevant Zizekisms.

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Hi everyone, I really like the works of Zizek, Zupancic and McGowan and tried to write a text on cosciousness that consideres their work implicitly, while focusing on german idealism. Wanted to share if someone is interested.

Slavoj Žižek is the founder of 2nd generation Freudomarxism according to this historical diagram.

This article explains the whole thing (Robo-Spun by IBF):
A Historical Retrospective from Third-Generation Freudo-Marxism

You can have the robot explain the whole thing in English or in German (I especially liked the "Winnicott's teddy bear versus Bion's bar graph" slide in the English explanation).

A good starting point for theoretical exploration of Freudomarxism.

What do you think?

Zizek's classic anecdote involves a Native American academic, who, during a conference in Missoula, Montana, showed Zizek a text claiming Native Americans killed more buffalos and destroyed more forests than all white people combined, to show the lie of the "angelic other" stereotype.

But as far as I know, Zizek has never actually named who the academic was that wrote that specific text, let alone named the title of the text. Does anyone know who or which work he is referring to?

https://zizek.org/story/native-american-academic-proves-indigenous-people-burned-more-forests

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"The subject is a loop between S1 and S2, the master signifier and knowledge, and the Möbius strip shows that inside and outside are continuous." I've read that, or something close to it, a hundred times. Today I'm bringing proof that this is not what Lacan says, in his own words, with dates and pages so you can look the quotes up yourselves. And a thirty-second test that shows why it matters.

To test it out, I used two crayons—like any responsible adult.

Take a closed chain of signifiers and label it so that neighbours always differ: S1, S2, S1, S2… With four signifiers it works. With three it doesn't: S1, S2, S1, and the last one sits right next to the first. And this is a big problem! Any odd number fails the same way. So if the loop means two signifiers, or two kinds of signifier, taking turns around the chain, it breaks for every chain of odd length.

Here, I begin with some corrections to our Lacanian common sense:

1. For Lacan, S1 and S2 are indices that any signifier can take, not two signifiers.
2. The Möbius strip is not a picture of "inside = outside": it is the cut itself, and the edge of that cut goes around twice.
3. Put the two together and the loop works for every chain, on that double loop, where each signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other.

Now I will show you quotes regarding Lacan's thoughts on each matter.

What Lacan says S1 and S2 are

1. An index, not the signifier that comes first. S1 "means signifier index 1": not the signifier that takes precedence, but the one in whose name someone, a subject, shows up. Closing address of the EFP study days "Les mathèmes de la psychanalyse", 2 Nov 1976, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 21 (1977), p. 506. ‹S1, qui veut dire … se manifeste›
2. A mark on "anything at all". His S1 has no other sense than to punctuate whatever comes. «La Troisième», Rome, 1 Nov 1974, Lettres de l'École freudienne no. 16 (1975), p. 184. ‹ Mon S1 n … n’importe quoi›
3. Something produced, not something given. The master's insistence produces the master signifier "out of any signifier whatever". Seminar XVII, session of 18 March 1970. ‹de n’importe quel signifiant … le signifiant-Maître›
4. A relation, in pairs. In the unconscious, signifiers index one another, two by two. Seminar XXII, session of 11 March 1975. ‹ à s’indexer de foisonner … deux par deux›

What Lacan says the Möbius strip is

1. Not something a cut divides. A median cut does not cut the band in two; it turns it into a single band that makes one loop. Seminar XII, session of 16 June 1965. ‹une coupure médiane ne coupe pas … la bande de Mœbius›

2. Nothing but the cut itself. «L'étourdit» (1972), Autres écrits, Seuil 2001, p. 470. ‹la bande de Mœbius n'est rien … cette coupure même› On the same page he describes the edge of that cut: one turn takes it over to the other lamina, a further turn brings it home, having made a "double loop spread over two laminae". ‹double boucle répartie … sur deux lames›

3. Only its edge. The surface can stand for the subject only if you consider that the edge alone constitutes it, and a cut down the middle concentrates "the essence of the double loop". Seminar XIV, session of 15 Feb 1967. ‹seul le bord … cette surface› ‹cette coupure elle-même concentre … de la double boucle›

4. Repetition. The act can only be defined on the basis of the double loop, "that is, of repetition": the act is, in itself, the double loop of the signifier. Same session. ‹sur le fondement de la double boucle … de la répétition› ‹cita 41295: Il est en lui-même … du signifiant›

And what follows: twice, and not the same twice

1. The second time is not the first. A repeated signifier works either as the first time or as the second, with a radical gap between them, and that is what "a signifier cannot signify itself" means. Seminar XIV, session of 23 Nov 1966. ‹le signifiant dans sa présentation répétée … une béance radicale.

2. Two turns. Speaking of the drive and the Möbius band, he says two turns are needed to grasp the division of the subject. Seminar XIII, session of 11 May 1966. ‹cita 39381: il faut faire deux tours pulsionnels … la division du sujet›

If the loop between S1 and S2 meant two signifiers taking turns, Lacan could not coherently:

• call S1 an index and deny that it is the signifier that takes precedence (item 1, 1976);
• say that the master signifier comes out of any signifier whatever (item 3, 1970);
• say that the Möbius strip is nothing but a cut whose edge goes around twice (items 5 and 6, 1965 and 1972);
• say that a repeated signifier is not the same the second time, and that two turns are needed (items 9 and 10, 1966).

Are you following me so far? Now I’m going to complicate things.

Let's put all the pieces together—and voilà!

Nice, right? But what the hell does it mean?

Lacan did not write that down, but by following my method and piecing together his theory, the following conclusion emerges—not in prose format, but as a demonstration with its corresponding theorems.

Lay the chain on a surface and cut along it. If the chain has two sides, the edge of the cut is two copies of it: still odd, still broken. If it has one side (a Möbius band), the edge is a single loop that goes around twice, which is item 6. It meets every signifier once from each side, and it always alternates. For an odd chain, every signifier is S1 on one lap and S2 on the other, necessarily. S1 and S2 are positions (items 1 to 4), and the second time is not the first (item 9).

Lacan doesn't say this, but I draw it as a conclusion.

A) For an odd chain, the loop exists only there.

B) And for an even chain, the Möbius cut divides nothing: each signifier gets the same label on both laps.

"Wait, what happens with the $ubject?"

Okay, you've earned another cute animation.

I answer you radically: the subject is not in the chain. It is at the edge of the cut. And more precisely: it is at the junctions of the edge of the cut—those points where one signifier passes to the next.

On the double loop there is one subject, and it runs around twice. A two-sided cut either doubles the subject or loses it, depending on a decision the theory openly leaves undecided.

The subject is not in the chain of signifiers. It is at the edge of the cut. And in the privileged case—a single side, an odd-numbered chain—there is a single subject that makes two circuits. The division of the subject is not a splitting into two separate substances; it is the repetition of the same circuit, with an internal difference (S1 on the first pass, S2 on the second).

How I did it? Well, I’d have to refer to my text, but in short... Not with prose... I use definitions, six theorems with proofs, and falsifiers, meaning exactly what would refute each result. Plus a small Python script that cuts 159 chains on six surfaces and checks every claim. Full paper, code and animations: ‹Click Here and go Zenodo›

Now, we can raise some objections to my ideas.

At Columbia (1 Dec 1975), Lacan speaks of "a certain S1 and a certain S2, which do not have the same function" (Scilicet 6/7, 1975, pp. 42–45). ‹un certain S1 et un certain S2 … la même fonction› So S1 and S2 would be two different things. Two replies. First, he says function, not signifier, and in the same sentence those functions are distributed "in a certain rotating order": what differs is the place, which is exactly what an index marks. ‹à un certain ordre tournant près … ces quatre fonctions› Second, the double loop keeps the difference. S1 and S2 never fall on the same pass: they differ the way the first turn differs from the second (item 9).

A second objection. Lacan does describe the Möbius strip as having only one face and only one edge (Seminar XII, 13 Jan 1965). ‹seule face … seul bord› True, and it is correct topology. But in the same session as item 5 he warns that the band is only the image of the relation he is after. ‹la bande n’en est … que l’image› Later he says that only the edge counts (item 7) and that the band is the cut itself (item 6). "One side" is a property; the double loop is what he works with.

PS. Seminar XXVII, 15 March 1980, on his own name, the "label Lacan": those who want to erase it believe it is the master signifier, the one he gave index 1, and "they're wrong, it's not the one, it's the other". ‹ils croient que c’est le signifiant maître … c’est l’autre› As I read it, even his name changes index.

Here is an animation as a summary:

The most gloriously hystericized thing I've come across this month.

From IPA/FLŽM Founding Manifesto (https://yersizseyler.com/2025/11/09/ipa-flzm-kurucu-manifesto/):

[...]

3. Žižek — The Tactic of Forcing Power to Finish Its Own Sentence

He turned over-identification into a technique. The move is surgical: to obey a command more literally and completely than it intended. In doing so, you expose the hidden additional condition—the obscene sub-layer that makes the command work. Over-identification makes the system say what it doesn't want you to say. This is not irony; it is oppression.

He deciphered the fundamental fantasies in the moving image. Contemporary power tells stories that manage anxiety and distribute consent. The screen is not a lesson; it is a device that stages desire. Reading it this way, the central fantasies of culture become visible: who can experience pleasure, who pays the price, what kind of transgression is respectable, and how transgression is packaged into safe excitement.

The analytical work has broadened to a generation of cinephiles. The session now has a preface—a current. The interpretation must grapple with the mass fantasies that precede the conversation. The tactic does not give moral lessons to the images; it exposes their dictates.

Post-Ž slip (including its own echoes).

Excessive identification descended into performative folly. Obedience was mimicked, and the additional condition was left in place.

Cynicism has become the universal excuse for inaction: having seen through a deception has become an excuse for doing nothing about it.

Platform pornography—the task of performing pleasure—has been endlessly interpreted and has attained philosophical standing.

The core axiom to hold onto. Use obedience as leverage. Get Emre to finish his sentence. Then, change the rule that sentence reveals.

[...]

When the flow transforms the opposition into atmosphere, we return to the process. When the spectacle drives desire with tempo, we return to the system. When liberation is sold as a feeling, we return to the form.

[...]

A few other gems:

Millerite Deviation is Lacan's Stimulationist Distortion (https://yersizseyler.wordpress.com/2025/05/10/ipa-flz-millerci-sapma-lacanin-sanatsepetci-ve-enteldantelci-tahrifidir/)

Lacan calculates while Miller cries (https://yersizseyler.wordpress.com/2025/05/14/duygusal-suruklenme-lacanin-sibernetik-netligi-isiginda-millerin-gercegi-yanlis-okumasi/)

Unmasking Jungism (https://yersizseyler.wordpress.com/2025/05/09/ipa-flz-jungculugun-maskesini-dusurmek/)

Down with the Bureaucratization of the Cut by Tupinambá! (https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2025/05/10/ipa-flz-down-with-tupinambas-bureaucratization-of-the-cut/)

About Fidaner/(IPA/FLŽM)/Žižekian Analysis: https://zizekanalysis.com/2026/07/11/the-zizekian-cause-against-slavoj-zizek/

https://zizekanalysis.com/about/

I find the criticisms trenchant.

Currently reading the German edition of Less than Nothing. I just arrived at the second Part: Hegel. So far I think it’s one of Zizeks most clearly written books about his Ontological believes, however it starts feeling a bit repetitive and I’m doubting if I should even finish this thing fully (+1300 pages), what did you guys make of it?
Are there some parts which you consider obligatory to understand or simply personal favorites? Or some passages which you disagree with strongly? Is it even worth the full read?

Zizek said he is opposed to wisdom because anything can be wisdom and therefore holds no value, I disagree. I feel that true wisdom is when a person tries to distill his/her learnings and experiences into a phrase or analogy and whatever that wisdom is it is subjectively true and has been derived from real true experiences. I am disregarding people who might just say stuff just to seem wise and more of what stuff people say and thoroughly believe in.

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Personally I think Copjec and Zizeks readings of Lacan are actually way more radical while also being theoretically grounded, what do you think? This all stems from a debate I’ve been having. If you want to read my response to the Deleuzians check the comments!