Alright, welcome back to Žižek & So On. This week continues our NEW SERIES on the systematic aspects of Žižek’s thought & we’re taking a look at Danny Nobus’s session on Žižek’s reading of Sophocles' Antigone.
Can a revolutionary subject ever be an isolated individual? What happens when an act suspends both public law and private family ties without any guarantees in the Big Other?
Along the way we get into Alenka Zupančič’s reading of Antigone, Bartleby politics, Žižek’s three Brechtian rewrites of the play, the structural role of the chorus, and alternative models of materialist ethics in Paul Claudel’s The Hostage and Agota Kristof’s The Notebook—where taking a bullet for someone you hate might just be the purest ethical gesture available.
What is the dialectic of contingency and necessity in Antigone's double burial? Will we get two crates of Danny’s champagne? How does a groundless act retroactively posit its own presuppositions and transforms into symbolic law?
Make sure to check out Russ Sbriglia’s new album Critique of Pure Desire here!
Up next we move from the tragic act to Žižek’s Quantum History with Adrian Johnston.
See you in Paris,
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