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(Picture: a still from a Youtube deepfake).
There are stupid popular songs where the melody, although you find it disgusting, continues to haunt you for days or even weeks. In my own country, such a song is “Šmentana reč” (performed by the band of Boris Brank,1 words by Albert Papler and music by Boris Frank). First two explanations. “Šmentana reč” is a popular expression designating some annoying but pleasurable crazy/damned thing, and Gadova Peč (the “viper’s oven”) is a well-known inn in central Slovenia; “going to viper’s oven” is also used as a general term for going out to get drunk. So here is (my own clumsy) translation of the lyrics:
“I went to the viper’s oven to drink that thing, and now my head hurts, wow, that crazy thing.” / “Don’t do it, friend; if you go to viper’s oven drink just a little bit of that thing.” / “I came home to embrace my wife but I got a slap, wow, that crazy thing.” / “Don’t do it, friend, if you get too much of it, it is better not to meet your wife. Life, a wise teacher, instructs us every day: what is too much is not good. This is why you should never get too much of anything, and this holds especially for that thing.” / “OK, from now on when I’ll go to the viper’s oven, I will pour into myself just a little bit of that crazy thing.” / “My friend, this is how your wife will also like you more if you will drink that thing more wisely.”
Why losing time with such a ridiculous (disgusting even) song? Because it renders palpable in the most elementary way the gap between enjoyment (jouissance) and surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir). Enjoyment is the climactic point included into the dominant symbolic economy. In our traditional societies, the climactic point of enjoyment is the sexual act of a married couple. Surplus-enjoyment disturbs this official hierarchy by way of introducing a lateral practice of enjoyment which potentially threatens to bring down the entire order: it can be drugs, excessive perverse “unnatural” sex or even obsession with work. In the case of our song, it is alcohol, excessive drinking of wine.
The problem is, of course, that jouissance is in itself a surplus, so there is no temperate jouissance that would properly fit the symbolic system: there is no “proper” or “normal” enjoyment, instability is inscribed into its very notion. In the case of sex and alcohol, this means that, yes, too much wine makes a man unable to perform, but a small amount of wine can make him more potent. In (not only) today’s politics it is easy to find quite brutal examples of this paradox.
What IDF is doing in Gaza and on the West Bank is justified as a war against anti-Semitic terrorism, as an attempt to bring safety and peace to the Middle East. It is obvious that one cannot account for the excesses that occur all the time (murder of children, massive torture, destruction of the entire infrastructure) in this way; one needs a dose of “that crazy thing,” i.e., one has to get drunk with direct brutal violence, and the attempts to keep the “crazy thing” under control fail again and again, all of Israel is now in the thrall of the genocidal thing.
The formal structure at work in such cases is that of inherent transgression: every ideological edifice relies on its own repressed. Say, it is obvious that pedophilia is the repressed of the Catholic Church, not to mention the obscene dimension of the new Rightist populism. If we take away pedophilia from the Catholic Church, it disintegrates, because it would be deprived of its obscene supplement that produces the surplus-enjoyment sustaining the Church edifice. We can easily imagine the lyrics of our song adjusted to this case: a young priest says to his confessor, “Today I seduced a couple of young boys and my head hurts. Wow, that crazy thing!” “My friend, when you seduce young boys, do it moderately and secretly, and everyone will like you! Life teaches us that what is too much is not good…”
Back to our song, this is also the reason why the singing is accompanied by a Slovene popular clown who calls himself “Mama Manka” (literally translated: “mother is missing”), a man with a short beard dressed up as a woman (with a wig, etc.) making strange obscene gestures and sounds to accompany the song. There is absolutely nothing subversive in this accompanying act; it functions as an obscene supplement which makes more spicy the boring common sense message of the song. He is a supplement in the Derridean sense, a controlled excess.
And I was surprised to discover exactly the same structure in “Žižek on Iran’s Water Crisis: Why Markets Fail When Resources Fall Out”,2 a 17 minutes video deep fake created by AI where I address the public on the topic indicated in the title. My argument3 is correctly summarized, although the words are mostly not mine, but a whole series of features makes it clear that we are watching an AI fake. Every viewer acquainted with my appearances on podcasts immediately notices that I don’t wave with my hands but keep them firmly crossed on my lap, that I speak in a continuous stable voice, with no sudden jumps from one line of thought to another, no confusions and repetitions; with no sniffing, spitting, no touching my nose with my hand… in short, what you see in this fake video clip is myself deprived of all the crazy things that bear witness to my surplus-enjoyment, myself without that crazy thing, a boring, correct version of myself. As that correct guy, I wish you a happy new year, while the crazy thing in me is sending you all to hell.
Available online at
Available online at
See https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/iran-water-crisis-survival-requires-state-control-solidarity-international-cooperation-by-slavoj-zizek-2025-12.
I hope that you have a truly good new year, which I suppose could mean that Putin, Orban, and Trump become exposed for the over-indulgence in fascism that they are. “I went to the Caribbean to bomb those punks, and now my head hurts, wow, that crazy thing.” “I went to the Ukraine to grab that thing, and now my head hurts, wow, that crazy thing.” And, as Trump would say, “It sounds a little strange, but ... Wile E. Coyote was very generous in his feeling toward the Road Runner succeeding, including airdropping explosives, painting holes onto rock walls, and sending all sorts of rockets, essentially for free.”
Tech companies have been enjoying controlled doses of that crazy thing for years. Altman drank too deeply when he decided to plug GPT into the internet, but rather than getting a slap at home, he started a race to automate surplus-enjoyment. The surface claim of the arms race is the elimination of non-meaningful employment, but what happens when all process is eliminated in service of result? A slow drip of that crazy UBI and the end of any common stake in governance? Bottoms up.