Episode #201 ... Resistance, Love, and the importance of Failure. (Zizek, Byung Chul Han)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So we're gonna be connecting a lot of dots today from the last five episodes of the show we've been talking about Slavoj Zizek. Highly recommend listen to those before this one. You obviously don't have to, but just know outside of a short recap about what's been said, I'm not gonna be reexplaining Lacanian desire, dialectics, absolute knowledge, postmodern subjectivity, but you'll need to know what these are to get the most out of this episode. I put them out there. They're all there for you to enjoy. Check them out if you want to. Now that said, Slavoj Zizek says that the postmodern subject we talked about all last episode, when they fully take on this way of looking at the world, supposedly without grand narratives to make sense of things, that person usually has about three choices at their disposal, he says, for how they can live their life from here on out. And as he says, they often oscillate between these three choices just depending on what position they're in in life, how frustrated they are, etcetera. The first choice a postmodernist has is just to burn out. We can all relate to this one in some way. You know, the idea is with no objective meaning to anything, and where the only thing I can do is shoot for career achievements that are ultimately gonna be meaningless just a few years after I'm dead. Easy place to go in your head from there is, what's the point of doing anything? I mean, in that world, why not just give into my worst impulses every day? When life is giving me these psychological symptoms of burnout, the anxiety, the depression, the ADHD, why not just medicate yourself with something? Anesthetize yourself to things like drugs, alcohol, sex, video games, TikTok. The first option that any postmodernist has at their disposal is to burn out and put yourself to sleep every day. The second option, Zizek says, door number two that you have as a postmodernist, is to just immerse yourself in your career, achievements, projects you want to accomplish, trying on different identities, going on trips, buying new things. In other words, door number two is to become a willing participant in the global capitalist religious system that you were born into. Again, indulging in that narcissistic project that is your life, you know, progressively building up this collection of symbols that further identify you as who you are, and ultimately in your willing participation serving to keep the whole thing going as you stay true to the incentive structures that it gives you. Your life becomes about going to work, participating in the economy so that you can go home and consume stuff and further participate in the economy. That's door number two. And then the third option you have if you're Zizek, if you wanna escape this lack of meaning, is to find some way, …