1) Zizek notes that the problem of authority as played out in the King's Speech is the problem of assuming a title that is, paradoxically, a) absurd b) one which one does not feel adequate to fulfil.
The basis of authority is absurd, yet the kinds of responsibility that come with the title need to be assumed.
How is that assumption to take place? Zizek, as against the bourgeoisie current of the movie, notes that it is based on a stupid internalization of the values of the system which support that form of authority. Man is condemned into deception as a price for responsibility.
Maturity becomes a dependent on a form of ideology even as it builds the ground on which to act for the benefit for others.
Ideology is therefore a root: from it all living forces grow.
2) Fetishes can be brutal, cynical, realistic; but fetishes allow them to acquire a distance, to prevent themselves from fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. Brutal, cynical behaviors and attitudes rest on fetishes. What is the fetish?
Distinguishing subjective beliefs, and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it.
Acts embody beliefs. The father example.
A friend visited NB in his country house in a Central European home in the highlands.
There was a horseshoe to prevent evil spirits from entering the house.
Friend: Why do you have this here? Are you stupid, are you superstitious?
Niehls Bohr: No of course I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, I'm not stupid, but I have it there because I was told it works even though I don't believe in it.
3) Does philosophical totality lead to political totalitarianism?
Critical theorists show how society necessarily undermines its own basic premises.
The distortion of a noble idea, its falsification and misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself.
4) What we are witnessing (in higher education reform) is an attempt to change university as a space of freedom into a factory of experts. Post-industrial transition.
A true intellectual dosen't solve problems posed by others. It is to re-formulate and critique the formulation of problems.
The privatization of public space. The changing function of ideology.
Market power replacing education and law as a moral instrument.
Self-commodification; other-directedness the behavioral norm.
Passionate, narcissistic, solipsistic behaviors discouraged.
Spontaneity and love of self and animality as a necessary condition of freedom.
6) The innate bureaucracy (Platonic-Legalist totalitarianism) of the Asian.
Europe as true narrative flux. The arbitrariness of power, and external authority in that context.
Power as a negative notion of agency. Negative notions of agency as conditions to which maxims of inviolability adhere. Maxims as adopted, chosen, habituated, deemed useful or neccessary.
What kind of power as the pre-condition of Order is being recognized in the structural features of the phenomenological landscape of the Asian?
How are conceptual constituents of Order to be conceived, and in relation to what?
Specifically, the relations and order of the principles which underlie beliefs.
What are the parallel or differential understandings of features that condition orientative-being (of which power is one) to the organization (of which no discourse as yet exists to elucidate) of the mind of the European?
How is the societal instrumentality of individuals to be understood in relation to the underlying systems of beliefs?
7) The injunction to enjoy.
The reproach to psychoanalysis: it is only a theory of individual disturbances; applying psychoanalysis to other cultural, social phenomena is illegitimate.
But psychoanalysis asks in what way you as an individual have to relate to the social field, not just in the sense of other people, but in the sense of the anonymous social-as-such, to exist as a person. You are a "normal individual person" in being able to relate to some anonymous social field.
Everything is to be interpreted.
When Freud says, "civilisation and its discontents"; the uneasiness in culture, he does not just mean we socialize ourselves normally, and that there are some idiots didn't make it, and they have to be normalized.
No; culture-as-such, in order to establish itself as normal, what appears as normal, involves a whole series of pathological card tricks, distortions, so on and so on.
There is Unbehagen, an uneasiness, we are out of joint, not at home, in culture as such, which means that there is no normal culture, culture-as-such has to be interpreted.
"It is this paradox which defines surplus enjoyment; it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some normal, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus-value, because it is constitutively an excess."
"Systems cease to exist if they stay the same, if it achieves an internal balance."
"The surplus-value is the cause which sets in motion the capitalist process of production, and surplus-enjoyment is the object-cause of desire."
The merging of Marxist surplus-value, Lacan's objet petit, and the paradox of the superego.
What are the principles underlying the evolution of a phenomenology and psychology of the systems. Hegelian dialectics?
"A thousand people cannot have the same interest in Lacan as I do."
How is culture a disease? How is God a disease?
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