Žižek as Short-Circuit
Or/Also: Towards Dolar's Beach Ball Philosophy and Zupančič's Creative Spit Drinking
This year at Philosophy Portal
Crooijmans of will be leading a Reading Group focused on the works of the Slovenian School. To get involved, you can register as a paid subscriber on his Substack or Patreon, or become a member at The Portal. For more information, see: Slovenian School Reading Group.Žižek suggests “short-circuit” as a philosophical method is not meant to teach something new, but rather to reveal something disturbing that is already known.1
What I am increasingly reflecting on as my own unknown known is related to the mission of Philosophy Portal to reveal the disturbing truth that Žižek himself is a philosophical short-circuit. I think we can feel into the strength of a philosophy on the basis of the proportion of the unconscious/unreflective negative energy that it attracts. It is on this basis that we should think about the current moment of philosophy as precisely “Žižekian philosophy”.
However, it must be increasingly noted, and this is also key to the work of Philosophy Portal, that Žižek and his work does not stand alone, but in proper context, must be situated within the “Slovenian School” or the “Troika of the Real”, including the works of Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar. While there is certainly a dense academic core orbiting and learning how to work with their thought, it is still not ripened to its moment, and those who come too close, often end up falling out for a more distanced reflection on their influences: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, etc.
It is almost as if the density of the Slovenian School’s work is too much to bear, following through to its results would not only require too much arduous labour, but also too much confusion and disorientation. To read and understand their work is not only an intellectual enterprise, but also an enterprise that involves the sacrifice of one’s own current subject position.
First, let us develop further this point of becoming a negative point of reference. There are many philosophers who are either simply ignored (disappearing in relation to a vast indifference), or very simplistically affirmed (in the sense that it is not really clear what their followers are really learning by way of the adherence to their work). However, when a thinker becomes a persistent repetitive negative point of reference, you can be sure that there is something important being developed there (although exactly what that something important is, requires further attention). You could even say, when we find in philosophy a persistent repetitive negative point of reference: “A Father is being born”.
Consider the following:
creationists/intelligent design “theorists” who circle/orbit the negativity of Darwin (“natural selection leaves no room for a designer/big Other”);
or Darwinian evolutionary theorists circling/orbiting the negativity of Plato (“metaphysical reality of ideal forms leaves no room for thinking genesis of species”);
or cognitive scientists circling/orbiting the negativity of Freud (“subjectivity cannot be reduced to unconscious libidinal dynamics”),
or much of modern philosophy circling/orbiting the negativity of Descartes or Hegel (“Cartesian subject opens an impossible dualism between mind-matter”; “Hegelian dialectics functions like a monstrous conceptual apparatus repressing concrete experience”).
All of this means we should spend more time reading the original source work of Plato, Darwin, Freud, Descartes, and Hegel (all “Fathers” of their respective fields); and less time reading the derivative literature that functions on the basis of a simple negation. If we are really at a time between worlds,2 we have to re-read the works that allow us to found and build worlds.
Today, I think what is most instructive for us philosophically, is to pay attention to the way the function of negation operates as it relates to Žižek, and by extension the Slovenian School. I still remember when I started to get into their work at the beginning of my doctorate, the reaction to this interest was met immediately with hostility. Even in the context of an interdisciplinary and generally open philosophy environment, the work of the Slovene School was seen as obscurantist nonsense. However, even in circles that are in principle dedicated to the study of materials that are directly relevant to the Slovenian School, those intellectuals who self-identify as “Hegelians”, “Marxists,” or “Lacanians”, often also relate most negatively to Žižek and the Slovenian School.
Again, perhaps it really is because “A Father is being born”. One cannot quite help but also situate this idea in relation to Zupančič’s brilliant question: “Where Do Adults Come From?”3 In the context of I would say both Fathers and Mothers, the answer to that question is distinctly related to processing forms of negativity, which is perhaps the underlying reason why affluent well-developed Western societies are having trouble re-developing new relations to these categories.
As it relates to Žižek as a Father of contemporary philosopher, I would simply ask: what thinkers have been able to both forward Hegelian, Marxist, and Lacanian discourses, while also engaging the necessary work of popularising (vulgarising) them?
There simply are no others.
However, instead of actually trying to understand the way in which the Slovenian School’s philosophical thought represents a necessary truth of our historical moment — insofar as philosophy must both reconcile with 20th century psychoanalysis (Freudo-Lacanianism) and post-Cold War political-economy in the real of history (Hegelo-Marxism) — people very quickly dismiss their fundamental insights about ideology and the political unconscious, either to continue thinking as they do, or to forward their own work as its alternative.
I find that in applying the work of the Slovenian School to contemporary culture war thought movement, you can start to form interesting and insightful questions that may even birth new fields. For example, why do so many people in North America, or even the West as a whole, orbit/circle Jordan B. Peterson as a popular intellectual figure? Is it rational? Is it because his paradoxical Nietzschean and Jungian inspired Christianity is the most rational way to interpret the modern history of philosophy and psychoanalysis for contemporary theopolitical orientation? Or is it because we are living in a culture that actively avoids reconciliation with 20th century psychoanalysis (Freudo-Lacanianism) and post-Cold War political-economy (Hegelo-Marxism)? That is why, for most intellectuals, it is pretty clear that Peterson’s very virtual performativity fills the void of a strict disciplinarian authority figure (here are 12 rules, here are 12 more rules, here are some Bible stories as moral compass, etc.). What we thus get is an unreflective traditional transcendental Father figure in the chaotic and confusing multiplicity of secular post-modernity.
Maybe it is in its own way necessary, but it is not enough for the world we inhabit or the world that is coming.
Here it may be most instructive to further explore the differences in negative form as it relates to the birth of a Father. Indeed, a quick reader will have already noted that what I claim about negativity and the birth of the Father also applies to Peterson. The crucial difference is on the level of “culture” and “philosophy”. “Peterson as Father” plays into the oscillations of the culture war — between woke politicos or pop-right politicos (scapegoating the former for an identification with the latter) — and leaving a certain repressed political core on the level of the necessity of socialism.4 Žižek, and by extension the Slovenian School, on the other hand, sees through this towards the philosophical necessity of thinking the future of socialism or communism. Žižek’s current political stance, which neatly unites and neutralises culture war oscillations, is “moderately conservative communist”. Thus, the Slovenian School’s work as a whole occupies the extraordinarily difficult position of actual philosophical cognition that allows us to think beyond the coordinates of culture war.
Thus, if indeed a radical philosophical-political “Father” as alternative to the “Father” of culture war has been born, we can actually make a structural distinction on the form of the negativity at work behind both figures. The negativity behind Peterson is often a negativity that expresses as one-half of the culture war between woke/pop-right, namely Peterson activates the “psychosis” (foreclosure of the paternal father figure). Peterson furthermore plays into this psychosis by performing as a neurotic transcendental father figure of the pop-right (which supports a new cognitive science repressing the libidinal dynamics of the unconscious, as well as a new American Orthodoxy reifying the structure of the Church Fathers). Žižek, on the other hand, tends to ignite a negativity that could be seen as positively perverse as a structure, which would suggest that his negativity is more global, an expression that can be found within both woke politicos and pop-right politicos. In response to this perversity, he maintains a strict hysterical stance which is designed to hystericise subjectivity beyond his necessity as a concrete world historical figure.5
If we are to mobilise the axiom of perverse disavowal, it appears something like:
“I know very well that Žižek (Zupančič, Dolar) represent an essential moment of contemporary philosophy, but I am going to pretend that I can just continue thinking as if I don’t already know that.”
As alluded to above, even people who have seriously studied their work ultimately tend towards a position of escape: how can I exit the pressure of the influence that they have exerted on my thought? It is like one is watching the impossibility of a photon trying to escape the density of a black hole singularity on the other side of an event horizon.
Here perhaps those who have been captured by the Slovenian School should take the same stance as Lacan with Freud, and follow one’s intellectual love adventure to the end, as opposed to betraying the transcendental idealisation after it breaks (consider the axiom: “true love does not idealise the other”). After all, Lacan did not become Lacan by pretending he was not captured by the unbearable density of Freud, he affirmed the capture and let it carry him into deeper confusion and disorientation. The late Lacan is not some wisdom teacher of the Real as if he knew what he was doing; as he reached the end and limits of his teaching, he likely had no clue what he was doing, and that makes his late writings all the more fascinating. In Žižek’s later work we see an invitation into more confusion and disorientation:
What is really happening to our sexual lives/nature of sexuality in liberal society? (Sex and the Failed Absolute)
How should we think the actuality of technological singularity in relation to concrete technologies like neuralink? (Hegel in a Wired Brain)
Should we expect the introduction of communism, not as a positive utopia, but as a pragmatic response to global negativity? (Pandemic!)
Why are we drowning in an exploding excessive surplus and how to reintroduce lack/negativity? (Surplus Enjoyment)
Does radical emancipatory politics require an underlying theological foundation? (Christian Atheism)
All of these texts are designed, not to provide final answers, but to spark new thinking processes beyond the coordinates of contemporary ideology. Consequently, the proper stance or response to these texts is not strict adherence or simplistic dismissal, but rather a tarrying which opens to new projects and possibilities. We arguably see a model for how this is done in the work of someone like Michael Downs at Theory Underground, who is actively exploring the tension points between the work of Žižek and the work of Land.6 As I have said before, it is one thing to be captured by a dead Father, another thing to be captured by a living Father, and quite another thing to be captured by a living Father whom one knows and has a relation. I suspect the real work unfolds in a commitment/fidelity to a living Father whom one knows and has a relation, not towards transcendental reification, but in a way that points beyond the necessity of the relation itself, i.e. to true independence.
In this sense, it is not only not that the Žižekian/Slovenian School moment is over, it is that it is only properly beginning (works like Philosophy Portal point to this proper beginning). If my experience of the Slovenian School is anything like the experience of others who have fallen close to their circle/orbit, it is something like realising that the impossible has happened. Here “the impossible” represents a real hysterical rupture from university discourse within university discourse itself. The Slovenian School does not just represent another academic paper or theorist in an endless spurious chain of institutional liberal “chronic crisis”,7 and it is not just a psychotic anarchic outburst against institutional liberal decay. The Slovenian School represents the genesis and the signs of a new discourse that actually “hits the mark” in “repetitively missing it”, and thus shows the place where new seeds can grow.
When the impossible happens we have two choices:
we can either repress the impossible, pretend it didn’t happen, and fall into the mode of desire supported by a transcendental ideal (some new dead Father), which will forever keep us at a distance from the thing under the presupposition that the impossible is simply impossible;
or we can accept the impossible and fall into the mode of the drive without transcendental guarantee (the destiny of the Son), which will demand of us an unbearable labour but also a loving acceptance of our own confusion and disorientation (this can’t be real is real)
In this spirit, what the Slovenian School Reading Group is trying to do — like the “Short-Circuit” book series whose works it focuses on — is not teaching you something you already know, but rather making you aware of something disturbing that you already know. Two notable examples of ways great theorists have made us aware of something disturbing that we already know, from the Short Circuit book series:8
Marxist realisation that the real of theology persists after traditional religion as political-economy (e.g. commodity fetishism, surplus-value/M-C-M’)
Nietzschean/Freudian realisation that real morality persists after traditional religion in libidinal-economy (e.g. unconscious problems of modern sex relations)
Here from Žižek on the short-circuit:9
This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy).
In other words, even though we all “know” that traditional religiosity is no longer tenable in the modern (or post-modern or meta-modern) world, opening the possibility for an absurd cynical stance, or a reactive anachronistic performativity, the knowledge which supported traditional religiosities concrete actualisation still remains in its most sincere form in how we act in libidinal/political-economy. In other other words, the theological dimension of our lives can be found in our dating/intimate relations, as well as in our relation to our social/political-economic relations (in a concrete sociology).
As it relates to the “meta-short-circuit” of this reading group: what people already “know” is the influence of the Slovenian School on contemporary thought (one can read it in all of the direct or indirect negations that orbit/circle their influence). What people “don’t know that they know” is how disturbed they are by that fact (“do I really have to put up with the obscene vulgarisation of philosophy through psychoanalysis and Marxist politicos?” or alternatively: “do I really have to put up with the obscene vulgarisation of the way I have come to understand academic philosophy independent of psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis independent of German Idealism/Marxism?”).
Consider that one cannot simply superficially skim Wikipedia entries about Alenka Zupančič’s The Ethics of the Real,10 or ask ChatGPT what Mladen Dolar’s obscure paper on “atoms and the void” is about.11 One has to actually tarry with their texts in a way that brings one to face the idea that one’s ethics represses rather than includes radical disruption of one’s own subjective positionality, or that one’s knowledge of physics and philosophy alike have been absurdly separated so conversations about quantum mechanics cannot meaningfully interface with contemporary philosophy. Alternatively one cannot simply read Zupančič’s What Is Sex? once,12 or watch Dolar’s lecture “Substance Is Subject” casually,13 and then go about one’s life; one has to start wondering about how one’s sexuality is not in the physical act itself but politically wedded to every discursive interaction, or that one’s own metaphysics is a reflection of one’s own historical subjectivity.
Here Philosophy Portal is designed to hold the unbearable density of this thought, and is learning how to work with it innovative ways.14 At Philosophy Portal, you will not find either a cheap superficial negation of the Slovenian School, nor will you find a simplistic affirmation. As Žižek said at the end of the Christian Atheism Q and A at Philosophy Portal,15 his experience of the line of questioning from our students avoided both:
Simplistic attacks/negations of his work
And simplistic identification (ass kissing)
This is the line we try to walk.
Consequently, at Philosophy Portal we have worked with both the core influences of the Slovenian School, from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic; Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Freud’s foundational writings and Lacan’s Écrits; to the Slovenian School’s work directly, including Zupančič’s What Is Sex?, to Žižek’s Christian Atheism.
There is a foundation here, but there is also the challenge of learning how to think with these texts. That is why at Philosophy Portal we have also developed anthologies which attempt to actively think something new with these works, see: Enter the Alien as an invitation to think spirit science today,16 Abyssal Arrows as an invitation to think spiritual leadership in a void,17 and Logic for the Global Brain as an invitation to think the unity of singularity and universality.18
Dimitri Crooijmans’s own contributions to these anthologies represent an example of how someone walks the line without simplistic attack or negation, and without simplistic identification. His first work on “tantric subjectivity” experiments with both theory and practice totally alien to the Slovenian school, namely the forms of tantric sexuality/libidinal energy which are rarely if ever included in theopolitical analyses by the Slovenian School;19 his second work on the “spirit child” interfaces with Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses that bring Nietzsche’s thought closer and not further away from its unconscious Christian metaphysics;20 and his third works on “infinity”21 and “love”22 demonstrates how useful philosophical reflection can be to forward contemporary theopolitical discourse.
In general, the work as a whole at Philosophy Portal is leading to the emergence and connection to something new: most notably the connection of our work to active radical theology work with Peter Rollins and Barry Taylor, but also the unknown dimensions of how this theological work connects to the future of emancipatory politics. There are also new related theoretical connections emerging, whether in the mystery of how Holy Spirit as “community of belief” is related to the idea of network as the “multiplicity of communities” (potentially offering a new way to think the tension of Hegel-Nietzsche); or whether in the mystery of how Žižek’s reinvention of death drive points towards a new understanding of immortality that embraces heightened intensities of tension (potentially offering a new way to think the tension of Lacan-Deleuze).
Now the Slovenian School Reading Group is the newest and most explicit attempt to continue the work of this drive. The hope is that this drive will take us deeper into a reconciliation with the confusion of the crisis of our moment (and not a new clarity meant to resolve the confusion and the crisis); the hope is that this drive will take us deeper into a recognition of our inner contradictions so that they can be worked with directly (and not into an identitarian formation that supports itself via an enemy-obstacle).
Towards that end concretely, in 2025, Philosophy Portal hopes to be a space that can actually “build a milieu”.23 This requires both:
The capacity to build community inclusive of the real of intergenerational dynamics, while also interfacing with other communities and their differences in the real of network dynamics;
And the capacity to affirm higher order tensions of the immortal drive, inclusive of all their unpleasure and inefficiency, as opposed to recoiling/withdrawing towards a tensionless state of “nirvana”
For both challenges, we cultivate a practice at Philosophy Portal, in both our live events and course work, towards “beach ball philosophy” and “creative spit drinking”:
Beach ball philosophy is inspired by Mladen Dolar’s ethics of dialogue, of the voice, that we aim to both avoid “dialogues of dominance” where the aim is a zero-sum competition of humiliation, as well as “quasi-consensus dialogue” where we are trying to build some collective academic discursive structure that we all a priori agree upon; in-between both dead ends we are trying to “keep the ball in the air (abyssally)”, like playing with a ball at the beach; the abyssal nature of this is that the discourse does not require or depend on a transcendental support, like a clear religious communal boundary
Creative spit drinking is inspired by Alenka Zupančič’ idea that to be a creator is to withstand the capacity to spit and to drink one’s own spit; if one cannot withstand this capacity one will stop creating, simply because to look at or reflect on what one has created gives one the feeling of drinking one’s own spit. Here the double trap for creativity involves the transcendental ideal: (1) one can never come to terms with the fact that one’s creativity is spit (and not the perfect thing); and (2) seeing one’s own creative results out in the wild/autonomous and independent of one’s self is like drinking one’s own spit in the sense that people (or you yourself) can think it is garbage, be indifferent to it, simply ignore it
If you like “beach ball philosophy” as an abyssal open-ended attempt to keep the dialogue, to keep the voice, alive; and if you are trying to build the capacity to come to terms with your own creativity as “drinking spit”, check out the Slovenian School Reading Group. The reading group starts January 22nd, but one can sign up and get involved at anytime throughout the year (2025). See also: Actual Spirit, or watch my discussion with Dimitri Crooijmans below:
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. viii.
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 8.
This can be explicitly found in Peterson’s early writings where he too easily creates a scapegoat out of socialist politics, see: Peterson, J.B. 1999. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge. p. 8.
To reference the work of Benjamin Studebaker, see: Studebaker, B. 2022. Legitimacy crises in embedded democracies. Contemporary Political Theory, 22, p. 230–250.
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. vii-viii.
Ibid.
Zupančič, A. 1995. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso.
Dolar, M. 2013. The atom and the void: from Democritus to Lacan. Filozofski vestnik 34.2.
Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press.
Dolar, M. 2019. Substance is Subject.
Consider how our course with Deleuzian pluralist Terence Blake attempts to build the bridge between Lacan and Deleuze towards the Slovenian School, see: Deleuze and Analysis.
Crooijmans, D. 2022. Hegelian Tantra: Edging the Absolute. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 107-132.
Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.
Crooijmans, D. 2024. Hegel's Concept of True Infinity. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 267-292.
Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.
Originally inspired by David McKerracher’s contributions to Logic for the Global Brain: ““Theory Underground” gets its name from the fact that it aims to serve the emerging scene of underground theory. Its name and existence are owed to the fact that this scene exists. The question is, can this scene rise to something more?”, see more: McKerracher, D. 2024. Scenes vs. Intellectual Milieus. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 185.
Philosophy portal is able to Short Circuit AI
This reads like a good gothic love song.👍👍