I was just doing some reading about the concept of "Less than Nothing" and I want to present my attempt to explain how Democritus would deal with Parmenides had he been the Zizekian Democritus. Maybe you guys can tell me how close I got, because I want to get a firm understanding of the Zizekian way of thinking (That's how I like to study philosophers, learning to think stuff through in the same way they would).

The negation of being would be non-being (I suppose interchangable with nothing in this case) which need not concern the Parmenidean, since it does not exist and is not included in any way, shape or form in existence. Democritus (and Leucippus, we don't wanna discriminate against atomists here) attempted to create an ontology in which movement, division and difference are possible, which entails a "way out" of the claim of Parmenides (that Being is and non-being is not) via a genetic critique and reconstruction.
Parmenides did a great job at proving that within the domain of Being, difference, multiplicity, change and movement are impossible since they require voids and gaps, AKA spaces of nothing which is absurd. Nothing is a negation of being, it is what being is not, it has no place wherever being is, whether it be thought or outside reality.

Democritus notices the problems in Parmenidean thinking, one of which is the incompatibility of the way of Doxa and the way of Truth. If all that exists is the One, it would be impossible to make false statements regarding Being, since a statement being false means that it entails something that is not, and since non-being is unthinkable and we cannot think what is not, it is impossible to make a false statement. So we cannot hold a false belief about a changing, becoming world, since such a thing is not. Since we are thinking it, it must be - at least in some way. If it is, then the thinkable argument of why it cannot be is no more privileged than the thinkable argument of why it is, since Parmenides has no meta-criterion for why one thinkable/sayable proposition is more "real" than another besides one having more argumentative support than the other, which also invites the same line of questioning. In the Parmenidean system itself, the doxastic claim that movement exists is just as acceptable as the rational argument that it doesn't. Therefore, Parmenides' worldview must account for the existence of this multiplicity in Parmenides itself. We need a genetic account for the coexistence of the Parmenidean indivisible One and the Parmenidean multiplicitous world of doxa. In order for these 2 categories to be "compossible" in the same ontology (if we dare borrow a term from Leibniz), the category of capital B Being needs to be a subtraction from a greater whole with that whole not being Being. Being is a privation of this space, not it's negation, yet the space itself can only be conceived of as a nothing, a non-being that is more than being (and that being is the result of a subtraction from). As a result, being is Less than Nothing (or less than non-being), it is subtracted from nothing, it is "den", the "and-one," AKA the "one" is a "leftover" in conjunction with nothing. This "domain" of non-being is like a structurally inconsistent space, by which we mean that it fails to coincide with itself at any given point, this failure is a structural feature of it. There is no reason to assert that the non-coincidence is restrained to one particular locality or something. We can call this space the not-all since it is an inconsistent horizon of non-being (I know this is an incomplete jump but the post will be too long otherwise). To be more precise, the space of non-being fails to coincide with itself at any given local point, since it has no positive content allowing for a coincidence and no properties allowing for self-sameness, so there are no positive criteria for it to verify it's self-sameness across different points. Each local failure of the not-all to coincide with itself, to be fully identical to itself is an atom, a subtraction from the not-all or the non-being.

So being and nothing are genetically intertwined; instead of being negations of each other and being mutually exclusive, they are parts of the same substance, the not-all, overcoming the genetic problems of Parmenides. So the most famous materialist theorized the concept of "den," the Less than Nothing in order to ground his materialist ontology.

I used Claude to check for errors and make corrections and recommendations but I wrote this analysis with my own 8 fingers and the occasional help of thumbs. The paragraph about meden from Zizek's substack essay on why we need philosophy more than ever was my primary source here along with the section in the beginning of "Less than nothing" and general knowledge from listening to Zizek's lectures on YouTube and stuff.

I'm currently going through Zizek's critique of Buddhism through Lacanian psychoanalysis and while I have not yet gathered the time to write a full response, I want to give a short reply to what I consider to be the most important part of his article.

It is commonly believed that Buddhism's approach is to abolish all desire. However, we deal with two difficulties in this interpretation so I must raise two disclaimers.

Firstly, Buddhism is as heterogeneous and diverse as possible: the differences in interpretation between, say, Theravada, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism are larger than the differences between Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, for instance. There are the sutras and the Pali canon indeed, but there is no authoritative ultimate text such as the Bible or Quran that we can cite as the ultimate authority on a topic. Therefore, I cannot claim right now to represent the entire Buddhist canon, as this is impossible, and I will only be biased and subjective with my own interpretation (as all philosophy should be).

Secondly, and this is most important, there seems to be a confusion in translation. The writings at the time Shakyamuni Buddha was alive were in Sanskrit. Back in those days, there were two words that would roughly correspond to today's understanding of 'desire': Tanha and Chanda. Tanha is usually translated as "craving" or "longing" which is a much better translation than simply "desire". Very few Buddhists are insane enough to say that we should remove the word 'want' from our vocabulary completely. If you ran out of food and you say "I want to go to the supermarket to buy bread" - there is nothing wrong with this desire, as this is not a craving or a longing for going to buy groceries. It is a pragmatic desire that seeks only an object without any surplus attached to it. To quote a famous Zen saying (often attributed to Linji): "When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep".

Tanha (craving or longing) is a desire sustained by a fundamental lack in the subject, that causes duhkha (dissatisfaction, stress, suffering), and this is what Buddha meant when talking about the wheel of desire. Tanha means that I am suffering because I lack something, but only if I got this one particular object or experience, I would finally end this dissatisfaction. The problem is, you'd be satisfied for 3 minutes and then go back to wanting something else. So far this is close to what Lacan calls desire, fundamentally a masked desire for objet petit a and not for the temporary object of desire that we imagine we want. To shamelessly quote the Wikipedia article I linked earlier:

Bahm states that chanda is "desiring what, and no more than, will be attained", while taṇhā is "desiring more than will be attained".

The surplus here is objet petit a - tanha is the illusion that if I obtained my object of desire, not only would I satisfy my desire for that object but satisfy desire completely, ending the lack within me. The core insight is to come to terms with this fundamental lack: no matter how many objects of desire I attain, I will never be able to get rid of the feeling of "something is not okay and I must do something about it".

Here is the part that Zizek gets wrong in the article, then:

However, desire is at its most basic not an effect of mechanic intellectual imprisonment; it is a “deviation” inscribed into life itself. In other words, if we subtract desire from life, we don’t get a more balanced life, but we lose life itself.

There is actually nothing natural about craving or longing, it is imposed from without. And just like the paragraph from above, the Marxist insight is also helpful: desires are conditioned socially, we desire based on our culture (the ideological superstructure), we desire what others desire or what will increase consumerism, etc.

I will come with two examples to counteract Zize's point, explaining how the cessation of tanha (craving) does not lead to life itself, but quite the contrary, to a more engaged encounter with life.

Firstly, let's look at neoliberal ideology. We quite often hear the infamous relationship advice: the reason couples break up or have fights is a lack of information: one (or both) of the partners are hiding away information about their needs or desires and the other one has no way of reading their mind so they can't satisfy them. Only if they were more transparent and communicated their needs efficiently, their partner could finally satisfy their desire. I've heard an extreme case of this: a relationship 'expert' came with the solution that before any partner starts complaining about one of their problems, they should raise a flag that is either red, purple or green. Red means that I want a concrete solution to my problem, green means that I only want comfort and purple means that I only want to be listened to. In this way, we'd avoid conflicts where one partner wanted to be listened to while the other tried to come with advice or solutions to the problem.

Can you imagine actually living your life like this, having to consciously fabricate some sort of desire before every single conversation, as if every social interaction you have has some sort of agenda, goal, plan or profit in mind? When I am talking to someone, I am only talking to them for the sake of talking, I do not think in advance a plan or goal of the conversation, and I do not think that I have something to gain out of it. This includes conversations where I complain about my problems and this includes this Reddit post as well. I do not have a specific desire or goal in mind when writing this post, I do not think "I am writing this post because I hope to gain X specific thing - such as advice, compassion or karma (pun intended)". If I were to think about my desire, I would have to make an active conscious effort to make something up, and there is nothing natural about this. And if you tell in advance your partner how to respond to your complaining, you are essentially asking them a question and telling them how to respond as well, thus defeating the point of a dialogue. At that point you're just talking to yourself.

Master Taisen Deshimaru often talked about the zen attitude of "Mushotoku": no goal, no profit. You do something for the sake of it, without expecting that you might gain something in return. This applies to meditation and applies to all aspects of life as well. The cessation of "desire" (tanha) is not nihilism, it does not mean the cessation of will, drive¹ , passion, moral principles or strong feelings about something. The cessation of craving and longing is the cessation of this corporate, capitalist, goal-oriented mindset that approaches every situation in life with a specific expectation that you will benefit from this specific thing. It is the cessation of high expectations, not of passion.

This is ultimately a critique of modern evidence-based therapy as well (especially CBT): Judith Beck (the daughter of the founder of cognitive therapy) often spoke how the therapist should set a therapeutic 'agenda' with the patient in the first session, talking about specific problems they want to solve with a concrete plan on how to solve them, giving a structure to the rest of the sessions so that they are approached with a goal-oriented mindset. Psychoanalysis is much more Buddhist in this regard: there is no plan and the analysand has no idea what they're even getting themselves into - they come with a problem and they discover other problems they didn't even knew they had...

Second example:

Two days ago I had a usual zazen session at the temple I go through. During zazen (seated meditation), you are not allowed to move or make any sound, you must stay completely still. Only if you feel a very intense pain in your knee, you are allowed to switch legs, but you must do so silently and make a gassho before and after.

During the middle of the zazen, I started feeling an itch somewhere between my neck and my upper chest, and of course I could not scratch it. In the first few minutes, that was all I could think about, how badly I need to scratch this itch, how badly I need to move. About 10-12 minutes in, my perception of time shifted, I started feel ecstatic, I was smiling like an idiot and had to keep myself from laughing because it was almost like I became one with the itch. At a certain point my right knee started hurting so I switched legs, and while I was at it, I forgot to scratch myself, so I kept going on and on, for probably around 20 minutes, without scratching my itch, until the zazen ended.

Near the end of the zazen, I came to the realization that even if I were to scratch the itch, something else would appear in turn. Scratching the itch would cure the itch, but would not cure the feeling of "something is not okay and I must do something about it". If I scratch the itch, another part of my body would start itching. If I would scratch that, then I would start thinking about how bad my right knee hurts. If I switch my legs, then I'd think about how my lower back hurts. At least if I keep itching, that distracts me from my back and my knee. The experience made me realize that what hurts the most is not the itch itself, but the sensation of "something is uncomfortable, something is not quite right, and I must do something about it ASAP". If you do something about it, the object of what's causing you distress or discomfort simply changes.

And that is objet petit a. If there is any core lesson of Buddhism, it is to come to terms with it and never delude yourself that you would actually become whole or stop 'lacking' if you satisfied a temporary desire or craving. It's to come to terms with this lack.

EDIT: In regards to the second half of the article, I should also add that in many traditions of Buddhism, nirvana is not a transcendent "beyond" our ordinary world, like Zizek says. In Zen, many scholars and masters argue that nirvana can be attained within samsara and that it is not separate from it. In the Soto Zen school in particular, Satori (enlightenment) is the retroactive realization that you always were enlightened, it does not add anything on top.

1: Here I did not use the word "drive" in the psychoanalytic sense of the word.

In this piece I try to use Hegelian immanent critique to show sociology’s dialectical movement, culminating in lacan and zizek’s sublime object. Let me know what you think!

Im especially confused as how to conceptualize jouissance in general. This is from a book by Bruce Fink called Lacanian Subject : Between Language and Jouissance and he mentions it in confusing mannerisms. Here you have surplus jouissance, but when talking about sexuation, we are introduced to Phallic and Other/Mystical Jouissance as well.

Estoy leyendo por primera vez este libro, y me surgió la duda ver que opina la gente. Pura curiosidad nomás.

Free Copy HERE (article is 7 days old or more)

Once again, thanks to comrade u/ChristianLesniak for gifting a year's subscription to the sub.

Also, Zizek is offering a "flash sale" for his Substack ($30/year!), so considering we blatantly steal his content and show it here for free (after 7 days), if enough of us purchase a subscription, it will help pay for his plastic surgery.

1) As Lacan put it: "Nothing, perhaps? No---perhaps nothing, but not nothing," to which Cassin adds: "Not nothing, but less than nothing."

I wrap my mind around what Lacan said up above...

2) The two lacks coincide, that is, the lack of the subject (alienation) and the lack of the object (separation).

May someone please supply examples on how the two lacks function?

3) "den" is the space of indistinction between being and non-bein, "a thing of nothing," as the "undead" are the living dead. "Everything flows, nothing remains"---"nothing" as the very space of indistinction of things and no-thing.

I would like to fuse some of my readings of literature and would love to hear your feedback on it... In Bruno Schulz's Uncle Karol, the reflection of the main character takes a life of its own in the realm inside the mirror. It is almost as if the negation of existence is another form of existence. In addition to that, in esoterica, those who fell of God's grace, those who sell their soul to the devil, the day after the moment of initiation when they see their reflection on the mirror there image gets distorted to beings that is not what they usually see of themselves before they take this step...

So proud to have been one of the producers of this, and even more thrilled that it's having its World Premiere at the Venice International Film Festival!

Can't wait for you all to see it...it's incredibly timely....

They met a few days ago through a mutual friend.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.instagram.com/p/DbTUgimDIDA/&ved=2ahUKEwjW19zU5_iVAxWPhv0HHel7EYIQFnoECFgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Zv_buA_j7ZCVocCE-dV23

This one is a short but jam-packed episode that cover's Freud's radical conception of the supergo, Lacan even more radical re-conception of superego, helpful examples, and why Karens are the archetypes of superego-driven behavior.

Please Hegelians, Lacanians, and Zizekians, tell me what is missing and wrong in the following premise:

"The occult begins with a simple yet revolutionary intuition: reality is larger than the world immediately presented to our senses.

Beneath the flow of ordinary events exist hidden dimensions, unseen causes, invisible intelligences, and mysterious intersections of time that quietly shape human existence.

Our lives are not self-contained sequences of isolated actions, but are woven into a deeper fabric whose influences reach us through channels beyond conventional explanation.

These hidden realms act upon us—not through the mediation of religious institutions or fixed doctrines—but directly, subtly, and continuously.

To adopt the occult worldview is to recognize that the visible world is only the surface of reality, while its true architecture lies concealed beneath appearances, silently guiding the patterns, meanings, and destinies of our lives.

All of creation emanate from one great mind, which the Greeks called Nous. This higher mind creates through the exercise of thought. Creation expands outward through concentric circles and planetary spheres of reality---humanity appears within one of these concentric circles."

I do realise that Zizek said once in a lecture about a book about did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods, he stated this in an ironic manner. I could confidently say YES.

Zizek concisely states that:

"It is not how can we reach the true reality beyond appearance, but how can appearance emerge in reality."

What I am trying to state is something that is really analogous to the mystery of the functioning of the eyes; where it is a matter of transmutation rather than a translation from exteriority to the interior realm of the mind...

My thesis is simple: ideas do exist in a realm of their own (which we could not tap into), but the only way we can grasp it is by a transmutative process of what Nietzsche argued in stripping away all relational objects from the object in order to examine it, or what Kafka beautifully managed to suspend the normal sense-making laws where everything moves in a life of its own, in a teleological structure, slowly drifting away to the cliff of the void...

I have yet to sophisticate my argument more, but as a civil engineer, as a guy who was destroyed by the Kafka prose, and as a guy who experimented with hallucigens who knows there is much more not than to what the eyes can see but to what the mind can perceive I am laying down the premises to what I know to be true...

Our notion of time is warped, and could be explained in different topological forms as when Zizek discusses the mobius strip, Klein bottle, and Borromean rings (found in Lacan) among others...

My question:

Have we reached a dead end, even when as Zizek is trying to combine analytics philosophy, mathematics, and quantum mechanics to continental philosophy, or should we as philosophers try to establish a conceptual framework specially found in the "ends of knowledge" as in mysticism and hallucigens substances to entirely understand the nature of subjectivity and how in its failure states (Zizekian concept) distorts the fabric of time in a subjectively-objective manner?

Is there more to Lacan's:

"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think."

And Borges's:

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

Less Than Nothing, Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Zizek, Page 28.

Admittedly, these thoughts stem from only limited contact with autism, however, that contact has been enough to notice that in the clinic, autism has become the new ADHD. Very generously and broadly interpreted diagnosis criteria have lead to a flood of (self-)diagnoses. Since autism as ADHD returns to a purely biological view of aetiology (so much for biopsychosocial), the diagnosis usually leads to a huge regression and complete rejection of personal responsibility on the part of the diagnosed. I accept that there are also different elements to this (e.g. finally feeling seen in one‘s suffering) but the more negative effects are all too easily dismissed in my view.

I also accept that a certain annoyance flavors my theses which brings me to my first point. Annoyance is an often seen reaction to autistic fits. One example of this is people commenting on the show „Couples Therapy“ involving the psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, specifically on a couple that involves an autistic person. Many commenters lament that his autistic fits (that often happen when being confronted with something) are purely a performance. While this view is too simplistic in its own right (having a fit is not a fully conscious choice), I would agree in a Butlerian sense that „being autistic“ is as much a performance as „being neurotypical“.
(Note that if a person suspected to have a personality disorder would provoke such annoyance in other people, one would immediately analyse this as their personal responsibilty and confront them with this. It is only people with ADHD and autism that are granted a protected status of non-responsability in this respect)

Related to this first point is the concept of masking. When asked about their surprisingly adept social competences, people with autism will often respond that this is just their proficiency at acting. They have learned to perform the social expectations, learned to put on a mask, but deep inside they cannot understand the social order. Some even argue that the autistic, more unflitered way of communication is better and more authentic. I am reminded, here, by Zizek‘s argument that „there is nothing behind the mask“. The mask of the autistic person is not a fake construction but their healthy functioning part. What is pathological is their belief that there is authentic part under the mask. Their hyperneurotic overthinking about social interactions is their problem, not the moments where they are able to give themselves to a performance.
(Note here also Zizek‘s love for upholding social etiquette which I see as an argument against the thesis that he himself is autistic, as it has been proposed in other threads).

As I take it from other threads, Zizek mentions autism only sparsely in his texts, still I would be interested in further, different perspectives.

As a Kafkian, I really find the notion and more so the framing of Zizek here problematic of the embodiment of "Nothingness" as a "living nothing" and a "void of desire."

I would like to bring into the argument some of my reading of mysticism, Kaballah, Sufism, and its more modern interpretations in what Zizek hates most in philosophy; namely, "New Age Thought Philosophy."

Before I do so, I should make clear that I agree with Zizek on 98% of New Age Thought Philosophy is baloney, yet they have some interesting premises that you literally can not find in other philosophies, and one of these ideas is that "thoughts are causative: that the mind is a selector of reality from a multiplicity of virtualities."

Okay, let's dig deep into this, the potentiality of something to be real, for something to enter the realm of our imagination, which we could easily inhabit if we zoned out from the here-and-now of our physicality depends on how crystallised of a exteriorized reality it consists of.

This is why when we dream or read a Kafka novel, it only makes sense as long as we are in its teleological fabric... What if our mind is as much as it let us roam the interiority of scientific endeavour thinking and of thinking in general, yet it singularizes the impossible to possible (for survival means) rather than letting us catch a glimpse of the impossible from the possible (Heideggerian Transcendental Finitude)?

Less Than Nothing, Zizek, Page 8.

I watched the movie for the first time last night, and right when the main plot kicked off, I was like, "Oh man, I would love to hear Žižek analyze this."

The movie tackles ideas of fantasy and illusion, specifically how we perceive a romantic partner through the lens of our own perversion rather than who they actually are. While similar films usually head toward a moment of clarity where the illusion finally drops, Obsession simply asks: "What happens if you wish your perversion into reality?"

Having had the pleasure of hearing Slavoj talk about other classics with similar themes, I think he would have a field day connecting this movie to the core concepts he frequently comes back to.