Not much more can be said than this: << the paranoiac idea that signifiers are hiding in the real meets here the perverse logic of forcing reality to itself produce what it is lacking.>>
I found my brain circling like a vulture over this, as if a third eye looking down from above trying to decide which carcass to tug at first to see if there were any living flesh to pull at.
The devastation is a complete do-loop. Naming it becomes shaming. Shaming it becomes giving it its name. It feels like every single thing these spoiled brats (I would use a more expletive b word there) churn out is a bad day they had with their nanny in the nursery turned outward for everyone else to pay the price tenfold: Emasculated boy angst turned into dictate. In order for them to wake up on the right side of the bed after an early life of frustrated wet dreams we all must become the bouncing toys circling suspended above the crib for them to take their BB gun to, pull the tails and ears off, spin into dizzy compliance.
The question of what to do, how to exist through it is on an LP skipping in my brain. This question bounces across from right brain in the abstract to logic in the left and back again like a rubber superball that won’t stop. It settles on nothing and everything. How do we become effective against this, now you have it so well defined? How do those who know and breath everything this is NOT maintain and preserve? Much of this has been expressed through my writings, both from historic example as I search for the creative catalyst to tip the scales back in history—AND—as I reach to the future to find paths which do not spiral downward.
This summary does indeed say it ALL. We have no choice but to recognize this. Now we must use similar analysis to strip it back down or understand what its culmination will be. There is a hint, in the phrase referencing how authoritarianism is its own ouroboros, it will devour itself. Perhaps there lies the solution. But the cost in the meantime as time winds the spinning top to exhaustion? Very dear.
Zupancic brilliantly establishes again why Lacanian psychoanalysis is crucial to the contemporary critique of ideology and philosophical truth-procedure: two vital critical thinking processes derided and largely absent in the Western social body. This essay by her achieves what the late Frederic Jameson ventured to do throughout his life - provide a clear cognitive mapping of our situation.
I thought her latest book, disavowal (2024) was uniquely profound, yet this essay matches its clarity and brevity in terms of properly interpreting our current fast-moving timeline. I hope someone is able to convince her to start her own Substack ASAP: politics needs her, metaphysics needs her, psychoanalysis continues to need her, Marxism needs her, the libidinal economy needs her - collective emancipation needs her.
Thank that divine big Other in the sky for her. Zupancic and Zizek are the most important Enlightment thinkers of our time: without them we are fucking lost amidst this topsy-turvy era. But as they well know: their knowledge arrives too late and will only be adequately appreciated in posterity by subsequent thinkers who apply their arguments back onto itself in order to dialectically produce new psychoanalytic theories that better analyzes subjectivity (because the owl of Minerva always-already flies at dusk and can only ever fly at night).
Thank you for being here. Thank you for condensing your vast knowledge and acumen for us. You connected so many disparate pieces of this puzzle that I have been feeling intuitively for a long time. The paradox of emasculation, castration, and policing of “real women” is the lever that keeps the “victim-perpetrators” trapped in that place. Never able to leave, like a psychological quicksand.
I have been saying that these unfortunate souls are beyond reproach for some time now. Do you think there is any form of extrication for these larger social structures beyond recovery after collapse? These leviathans seem to take on a life of their own and their supporters and participants only seem hell bent on one thing. The destruction of life.
Today, the fight against the “new antisemitism” has turned into a justification for the Israeli narrative of being a pariah state, by labeling any white person who merely voices criticism of Israeli policy as an antisemite. This is white racism – whites discriminating against other whites. In particular, the so-called “Antideutschen” practice white racism with their invented code-hunting against their own people, just to maintain their idiotic narrative of being the “good guys,” while today’s sense of security for Jews means supporting the “dirty work” against Iran. Because if Jews don’t “feel” safe, they are permitted to destroy the other side.
The antisemites are solely to blame – and if you happen to be white or, worse still, German, then you’re to blame for everything, namely for supporting evil.
And the funny thing about white-white racism is that it allows for whites to continue enjoying racism as a form in itself. Racism disguised as anti-racism.
Zupančič sidesteps the uncomfortable point that this very “emasculation rhetoric” is often fueled by mainstream feminist critiques of “fragile masculinity,” and that the recent obsession with a “biological definition” of Woman is itself a response to the symbolic crisis provoked by certain activist discourses. https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/slovenian-school-from-troika-dream-to-mediatized-regime/
Completely agree. I found this part of the essay to be the most problematic, or at least the most one-sided. By trying to prove her overall point by adding this angle, she might have devalued the whole essay to a certain extent.
With that being said, I find the other parts of the essay to be excellent.
There’s something disarming about how much honesty lives here. Not in the drama of suffering, but in the direct confrontation with what happens when identity, beauty, and vitality collapse at once. The writing doesn’t ask for sympathy. It simply lays out what remains after the noise is gone: a raw catalog of losses, and a quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, something human still lives in the wreckage. You don’t have to be spinal, cathetered, or suicidal to feel it. Anyone who has lost their former self can find themselves here.
Everyone look up Charles Veitch on youtube. He is the current zeitgeist wrapped into a person. The interesting part is that he used to be a 9/11 conspiracy theorist until he was taken on a roadtrip and saw his paranoia in others and narcissistically recoiled, losing his girlfriend, his friends, and gaining enemies. He then went into a weird philosophical new-agey self-exploration phase and had kids with an allegedly abusive wife, who then took custody of his kids. That is when he became an angry right winger of the courrent kind (which goes beautifully with the theory of emasculation). He now has hired bodyguards to defend himself from violent crackheads and pro palestine protestors that he provokes because he is allowed to film in public (which mirrors the free speech defence). He shows us the solution and also the inevitable re-constitution of the problem into something worse.
I personally come from the same background (Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, etc) yet I ended up here, so there is hope I guess (but I do have this nagging feeling that one can be fully aware of their own descent into madness, the lastest trigger being my curiosity for the possibility that true clarity comes just before you cum--not after--which has ended in "gender" euphoria and crossdressing; it gets fucking weird). Basically narcisism is the weak point of paranoia. Attack it for massive damage.
By the time you get to the abusive wife who took the kids I must confess I have no desire to look this person up. Yet your point is well taken, there is a crucible of realization. You are a living example. Perhaps there is a way to bottle and package what transformed you, then find a distribution channel to place an ad on Alex Jones’ podcast?
Alejandro Juanez is cooked. Now it's all a bunch of smaller independent actors like asmongold. We must prove them not just wrong, but pathetic and enjoy pointing out how stupid they are. We need more thunderf00ts. More autistic, insistent, petty nerds on the left debunking out of a passion for precision, please. That way the right won't feel comfortable talking about chromosomes and gender, because they know a nerd will come out of the woodwork with an "akshually". What we don't need is more priviledged well-groomed academics not even engaging in dirty debates with the plebs because they are too busy going to therapy. Fuck you, life is meant to be traumatic. Basically that is my idea, a nerd army on youtube making video replies. Not tiktok, that's just pure brain rot.
I am 77 and Asperger’s Syndrome. I am inclined to trust Mark Twain in his observation that man is the lowest form in devolution. Even lemmings don’t commit suicide their stampedes are a logical biological response.
The Bible said be fruitful and multiply but failed to mention too many lemmings make life short and brutal.
If there are no lemmings for them to play mind games with and rule over do they all go away? You see, they need the masses. They cannot play god without them. They cannot show off without an audience. Crowd size envy was the first sign we should have all flagged, along with the manipulations to ‘be bigger’ by using a fat black marker to draw what a simple pen can handle—a name.
It’s all in the writing now, and has been right in front of us the whole time.
So much. Damn. Needs paper. I'm reading this on a bloody iPhone. (And composing). But a comment: how do we culturally construct a effective means to corrupt narrative? As America replaced manufacturing skills with marketing skills a lot of effort has seemed to me to be focused on constraining choice and compelling choice rather than proliferating an abundance of competing choices. Like a huckster salesman: you want this or you want that? Confining a choice to 2 where the reality is a proliferation. How do we return to youthful development and the shared cultural development the profusion natural to it? Every young person in America that isn't of a wealthy family feels to some degree cornered. I just appreciate that there are folks like you and Z and JB and others showing always creative thought brings new options. Now just package that sht and sell it.
Ob “Verlust – Ein Grundproblem” auch ein Problem auf der Liste für den Gulag bedeutet? Aber wie Žižek schon sagt: Ihr bekommt einen Suppenlöffel mehr am Tag.
Wenn man keine Dialektik oder die Begriffe von Lacan versteht, sollte man aufhören, so zu tun, als hätte man eine Ahnung, was Lacan da macht. Es ist peinlich, und du bist eine Schande für Deutschland und die Soziologie – du "neokonservativer" Hund.
I found this a fascinating take on what is happening now. Thank you for sharing this point of view.
Not much more can be said than this: << the paranoiac idea that signifiers are hiding in the real meets here the perverse logic of forcing reality to itself produce what it is lacking.>>
We are in some pickle 🥒
I found my brain circling like a vulture over this, as if a third eye looking down from above trying to decide which carcass to tug at first to see if there were any living flesh to pull at.
The devastation is a complete do-loop. Naming it becomes shaming. Shaming it becomes giving it its name. It feels like every single thing these spoiled brats (I would use a more expletive b word there) churn out is a bad day they had with their nanny in the nursery turned outward for everyone else to pay the price tenfold: Emasculated boy angst turned into dictate. In order for them to wake up on the right side of the bed after an early life of frustrated wet dreams we all must become the bouncing toys circling suspended above the crib for them to take their BB gun to, pull the tails and ears off, spin into dizzy compliance.
The question of what to do, how to exist through it is on an LP skipping in my brain. This question bounces across from right brain in the abstract to logic in the left and back again like a rubber superball that won’t stop. It settles on nothing and everything. How do we become effective against this, now you have it so well defined? How do those who know and breath everything this is NOT maintain and preserve? Much of this has been expressed through my writings, both from historic example as I search for the creative catalyst to tip the scales back in history—AND—as I reach to the future to find paths which do not spiral downward.
This summary does indeed say it ALL. We have no choice but to recognize this. Now we must use similar analysis to strip it back down or understand what its culmination will be. There is a hint, in the phrase referencing how authoritarianism is its own ouroboros, it will devour itself. Perhaps there lies the solution. But the cost in the meantime as time winds the spinning top to exhaustion? Very dear.
Zupancic brilliantly establishes again why Lacanian psychoanalysis is crucial to the contemporary critique of ideology and philosophical truth-procedure: two vital critical thinking processes derided and largely absent in the Western social body. This essay by her achieves what the late Frederic Jameson ventured to do throughout his life - provide a clear cognitive mapping of our situation.
I thought her latest book, disavowal (2024) was uniquely profound, yet this essay matches its clarity and brevity in terms of properly interpreting our current fast-moving timeline. I hope someone is able to convince her to start her own Substack ASAP: politics needs her, metaphysics needs her, psychoanalysis continues to need her, Marxism needs her, the libidinal economy needs her - collective emancipation needs her.
Thank that divine big Other in the sky for her. Zupancic and Zizek are the most important Enlightment thinkers of our time: without them we are fucking lost amidst this topsy-turvy era. But as they well know: their knowledge arrives too late and will only be adequately appreciated in posterity by subsequent thinkers who apply their arguments back onto itself in order to dialectically produce new psychoanalytic theories that better analyzes subjectivity (because the owl of Minerva always-already flies at dusk and can only ever fly at night).
Thank you for being here. Thank you for condensing your vast knowledge and acumen for us. You connected so many disparate pieces of this puzzle that I have been feeling intuitively for a long time. The paradox of emasculation, castration, and policing of “real women” is the lever that keeps the “victim-perpetrators” trapped in that place. Never able to leave, like a psychological quicksand.
I have been saying that these unfortunate souls are beyond reproach for some time now. Do you think there is any form of extrication for these larger social structures beyond recovery after collapse? These leviathans seem to take on a life of their own and their supporters and participants only seem hell bent on one thing. The destruction of life.
Today, the fight against the “new antisemitism” has turned into a justification for the Israeli narrative of being a pariah state, by labeling any white person who merely voices criticism of Israeli policy as an antisemite. This is white racism – whites discriminating against other whites. In particular, the so-called “Antideutschen” practice white racism with their invented code-hunting against their own people, just to maintain their idiotic narrative of being the “good guys,” while today’s sense of security for Jews means supporting the “dirty work” against Iran. Because if Jews don’t “feel” safe, they are permitted to destroy the other side.
The antisemites are solely to blame – and if you happen to be white or, worse still, German, then you’re to blame for everything, namely for supporting evil.
And the funny thing about white-white racism is that it allows for whites to continue enjoying racism as a form in itself. Racism disguised as anti-racism.
Zupančič sidesteps the uncomfortable point that this very “emasculation rhetoric” is often fueled by mainstream feminist critiques of “fragile masculinity,” and that the recent obsession with a “biological definition” of Woman is itself a response to the symbolic crisis provoked by certain activist discourses. https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/slovenian-school-from-troika-dream-to-mediatized-regime/
Completely agree. I found this part of the essay to be the most problematic, or at least the most one-sided. By trying to prove her overall point by adding this angle, she might have devalued the whole essay to a certain extent.
With that being said, I find the other parts of the essay to be excellent.
This is pure ideology
There’s something disarming about how much honesty lives here. Not in the drama of suffering, but in the direct confrontation with what happens when identity, beauty, and vitality collapse at once. The writing doesn’t ask for sympathy. It simply lays out what remains after the noise is gone: a raw catalog of losses, and a quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, something human still lives in the wreckage. You don’t have to be spinal, cathetered, or suicidal to feel it. Anyone who has lost their former self can find themselves here.
Everyone look up Charles Veitch on youtube. He is the current zeitgeist wrapped into a person. The interesting part is that he used to be a 9/11 conspiracy theorist until he was taken on a roadtrip and saw his paranoia in others and narcissistically recoiled, losing his girlfriend, his friends, and gaining enemies. He then went into a weird philosophical new-agey self-exploration phase and had kids with an allegedly abusive wife, who then took custody of his kids. That is when he became an angry right winger of the courrent kind (which goes beautifully with the theory of emasculation). He now has hired bodyguards to defend himself from violent crackheads and pro palestine protestors that he provokes because he is allowed to film in public (which mirrors the free speech defence). He shows us the solution and also the inevitable re-constitution of the problem into something worse.
I personally come from the same background (Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, etc) yet I ended up here, so there is hope I guess (but I do have this nagging feeling that one can be fully aware of their own descent into madness, the lastest trigger being my curiosity for the possibility that true clarity comes just before you cum--not after--which has ended in "gender" euphoria and crossdressing; it gets fucking weird). Basically narcisism is the weak point of paranoia. Attack it for massive damage.
By the time you get to the abusive wife who took the kids I must confess I have no desire to look this person up. Yet your point is well taken, there is a crucible of realization. You are a living example. Perhaps there is a way to bottle and package what transformed you, then find a distribution channel to place an ad on Alex Jones’ podcast?
Alejandro Juanez is cooked. Now it's all a bunch of smaller independent actors like asmongold. We must prove them not just wrong, but pathetic and enjoy pointing out how stupid they are. We need more thunderf00ts. More autistic, insistent, petty nerds on the left debunking out of a passion for precision, please. That way the right won't feel comfortable talking about chromosomes and gender, because they know a nerd will come out of the woodwork with an "akshually". What we don't need is more priviledged well-groomed academics not even engaging in dirty debates with the plebs because they are too busy going to therapy. Fuck you, life is meant to be traumatic. Basically that is my idea, a nerd army on youtube making video replies. Not tiktok, that's just pure brain rot.
Absolute masterpiece, but I was wondering: what can we do politically to fight this “paranoiac power”?
So basically they resemble that general from the Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...
🤪 yes.
I am 77 and Asperger’s Syndrome. I am inclined to trust Mark Twain in his observation that man is the lowest form in devolution. Even lemmings don’t commit suicide their stampedes are a logical biological response.
The Bible said be fruitful and multiply but failed to mention too many lemmings make life short and brutal.
If there are no lemmings for them to play mind games with and rule over do they all go away? You see, they need the masses. They cannot play god without them. They cannot show off without an audience. Crowd size envy was the first sign we should have all flagged, along with the manipulations to ‘be bigger’ by using a fat black marker to draw what a simple pen can handle—a name.
It’s all in the writing now, and has been right in front of us the whole time.
So much. Damn. Needs paper. I'm reading this on a bloody iPhone. (And composing). But a comment: how do we culturally construct a effective means to corrupt narrative? As America replaced manufacturing skills with marketing skills a lot of effort has seemed to me to be focused on constraining choice and compelling choice rather than proliferating an abundance of competing choices. Like a huckster salesman: you want this or you want that? Confining a choice to 2 where the reality is a proliferation. How do we return to youthful development and the shared cultural development the profusion natural to it? Every young person in America that isn't of a wealthy family feels to some degree cornered. I just appreciate that there are folks like you and Z and JB and others showing always creative thought brings new options. Now just package that sht and sell it.
Sieht so aus als hätte ein komischer Soziologe Zizeks Abteilung übernommen
Ob “Verlust – Ein Grundproblem” auch ein Problem auf der Liste für den Gulag bedeutet? Aber wie Žižek schon sagt: Ihr bekommt einen Suppenlöffel mehr am Tag.
Wenn man keine Dialektik oder die Begriffe von Lacan versteht, sollte man aufhören, so zu tun, als hätte man eine Ahnung, was Lacan da macht. Es ist peinlich, und du bist eine Schande für Deutschland und die Soziologie – du "neokonservativer" Hund.
This is so excellent. Thank you.