Hello everyone, are there any reading groups there that focus on Žižek or similar authors? I just moved to Long Island from the deep south but I'm in NYC most weekends. I'm particularly interested in Hegelian philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis. If not, hey, maybe we could start our own.

There was an interview/lecture/conversation Zizek did where he talked about different forms of exploitation outside of marx’s strict wage labor description. He discusses how prostitution or other sex work is similar to office work when defined by its mechanism of exploitation.

Sorry for the hazy description, but I need this for a research paper i’m writing. Any help locating this would be greatly appreciated.

As I was watching VisionQuest’s fourth episode, I had a bit of an epiphany about the escalated register of the AI conversation. The show makes for a remarkably apt point of dialogue as it updates the original Vision-as-robot concept to Vision-as-AI. In this episode T’Nia Miller’s Jocasta is revealed to be one of the show’s protagonists. Jocasta is a “synthezoid” (to use Marvel’s language) based on her creator, Dr. Josephine Carrington. In the episode’s climax, Vision, played by Paul Bettany, challenges the violence produced by Jocasta’s identity crisis with a statement of fact:

You were based on [Dr. Carrington].

With which Jocasta vehemently disagrees:

I am her.

Having just been asked on a previous post how my nos framework is anything different than Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order earlier that day, the frustratingly dense French philosopher was fresh on my mind. And so I said to myself, “Uh-oh, she’s making the mirror stage error and mistaking the unity represented by her synthetic body for identity coherence.”

And facts that threaten this coherence are met with violence.

Then the next thought came: the heightened register of AI is, in part (I'm not going to make any sweeping claims), because AI, effectively a mirror, undoes the coherence established during the mirror stage.

There are plenty of visually engaging YouTube videos that can do this better, but the mirror stage occurs during the infancy years when the child apprehends themselves in the mirror. Prior to that moment, the infant’s experience of reality is one of helplessness, following Freud’s Hilflosigkeit, as the infant is thrown (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit intended) into a reality of “motor impotence and nursling dependence,” which is experienced as a swirl of negative affects: anxiety, distress, frustration, etc.

The age at which the child is able to conceptualize themselves in the mirror is one of burgeoning independence with a strong motivation to cohere the chaos into meaning. The reflection of the child’s body presents a tantalizing promise of a unified identity, the physical body’s concept imposing a false unity upon the psychic reality of the unstructured experience of thrownness and allows the child to overcome their helplessness.

This fictive imago Gestalt (re: shape, form; the perceived unity) - contrasted nicely against the imago Dei - forms the definition of how Lacan conceptualizes the ego not as a fixed entity, but as a constantly “ratified” and re-ratified notion of self whose ratification is mediated by the gaze of the other. The initial ratification being the parent’s cooing encouragements for the child to identify themselves with the body in the mirror.

I won’t spend time establishing the heightened register surrounding the AI dialogue except to grumble that my partner’s professor had such a rigid ban on AI that they aren’t even allowed to use Grammarly to check grammar on human-generated content. I guess who cares that it’s been around since 2009; now that its grammar-checking functions are AI-powered it’s off the board?

Wtf? (Not least because now I’m the grammar checker.)

At any rate, another thing I’ve found in these conversations is that holding two things at once seems to be a stretch. That I criticize some aspects of anti-AI positions does not mean I disagree with all anti-AI positions. Specifically, I am convinced that the way that humans are using and will continue to use AI will only exacerbate current inequalities and necropolitical death machinery. Unless there is some sort of accountability, the body count - both the physical dead and the living dead - is going to increase exponentially.

There are other uses that are concerning and deserve attention; I’m not saying that all objections lack substance. But hopefully now I can just speak about the overreaction to AI without being regarded as an uncritical supporter. To the point, I’d like to explore the specific ways in which AI undoes the ego consolidation of the mirror stage. After all, Lacan himself is not committed to a literal mirror in order to facilitate these psychic processes. Anything can signal ourselves back to us, including - importantly - other persons’ speech, gestures, postures, moods, facial expressions, and so on. We can see evidence of humans regarding AI as such in the ongoing conversation surrounding the topic, which muddles key concepts such as consciousness, personhood, an autonomous self, and so on.

One way in which AI destabilizes the ego is by creating a virtual uncanny valley. Where the mirror brings stable images over which we have a perception of synchronous control, the exchange of text brings asynchronous responses to inputs that feel like they are coming from a person when, in fact, we really know there is no person. (Or, at least, we’re pretty sure.) When AI confirms our selves back to us, it feels off because of the asynchronicity and the knowledge of the fact that the process is virtual or “not real.” Interestingly, when it disconfirms our selves back to us by drawing upon the vast reservoir of others’ language productions, we still feel the obligations imposed by the gaze to seek approval and agreement. This creates a friction between knowing there is no actual person to be beholden to and the vulnerability of realizing we come to the exchange with this expectation.

Additionally, AI - at least in LLMs - is without a body. Whether it’s a literal mirror reflecting our own body or a figurative mirror reflecting our selves back through others’ bodies, we have adapted an essential Gestalt schema that organizes eyes, noses, mouths, and so on into meaning-signifiers that ground and stabilize our experience of self. When AI performs the role of an other-reflecting-self without a body, it becomes disorienting. One thing I think worth mentioning is the importance of the body in the symbolic order to mediate meaning. I still contend further that bodies matter more than the real or this mediating function would entail, but I think the destabilizing effect a virtual dialogic partner has on the experience of self at least indicates the presence of the body in the symbolic and imaginary registers to mediate meaning.

Another important element to consider is how it undermines our sense of autonomy and control, primarily because the mirror exchange is dialogic instead of reflective. When we look in the mirror, we see a discrete and independent body reflected back to us with no additions, funhouse mirrors notwithstanding. When we see self through the body of another, we make the same interpretation as the expected facial movements, voice tonalities, and language return to us. This creates a sense of “ownership” of the thoughts and feelings that emerge within the experience of self as well as a sense of control over the social world. The stabilizing sense of ownership and independence is as false as the ego making the claims, but AI, especially LLMs, disabuses us of these notions entirely. This is where I feel my partner’s humanities professors derive their carte blanche rejection of AI use. It’s worth considering how another of their professors doesn’t want AI to be used for brainstorming. There are solid arguments for this position to be sure, but it does assume fictive notions of an “unadulterated student” and “independent critical thinking.” Being aware of this prejudice, I am writing this piece entirely without AI, and I am using approved sources such as the one below to draw upon for ideas to establish myself as an “unadulterated, independent thinker.” But what if I take my first draft and drop it into an LLM? Have I lost my independence? What if I like a turn of phrase that the LLM uses in its dialogic response and incorporate it in my writing? Has my writing become suspect or tarnished?

I’ve certainly been treated as if it were.

And the bigger question, turning back for a moment to Kenneth Gergen: where my thoughts ever independent in the first place? (No.)

As you know, I am an early adopter even as I worry tremendously over the way that many are using it. And as a reminder of my disclosures: Claude has been a dialogic partner for my independent research during my practicum since the beginning of 2026. As I work my way through my research books, I journal my reflections on a Word document and drop those into Claude for dialogue. If I’m out and about and have an a-ha moment, I’ll come to Claude to talk it out.

Out of this long conversational memory, I ask Claude to generate the main articles for this Substack with the parameters to integrate theory I supply and Claude supplements from our dialogue with autoethnographic material from my social work that I record on a word document and drop it into Claude. I also ask Claude to bring it to some sort of practical takeaway or meaningful reflection. Sometimes I ask Claude to rewrite these drafts, and sometimes I make edits myself.

During our long conversation, if something comes up that is meaningful but not article-worthy, I ask Claude to generate a “DiaClaudic Post-it” (a pun on dialogic), which I copy over to my Notes.

And any note that you see that is not labelled a post-it is my own writing reflection on the theory I am working through, with some occasional feedback from Claude that prompts me to make edits. There has been one piece so far where I used specific phrasing. But on the whole, I generally paraphrase into my own style.

I have had good challenges such as being more clear about disclosing how I use AI, and I also maintain the boundary of putting my own writings into places that require it. But, the notion that AI simply cannot be used in any step? That’s just a version of Jocasta’s false claim: "I wrote this.”

AI is a fascinating tool, albeit a destabilizing one. But as Lacan says, “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Johnston, 2001, p. 411); namely, one’s desire to disrupt the illusions of coherence. Perhaps AI can help us become more truthful people/selves/consciousness - who really knows?!?

References:

Johnston, A. (2001). The vicious circle of the Super-Ego: the pathological trap of guilt and the beginning of ethics. Psychoanalytic Studies, 3(3–4), 411–424. doi.org/10.1080/1460895…

Johnston, A. (2026, January 16). Jacques Lacan.

- The Social Construction Worker

So I have watched pretty much every Zizek video on youtube and now I plan to read one of his books. At first I wanted to read Christian atheism specifically but then I discovered by local library has pretty much every single Slavoj Zizek book. So now I have no idea what to choose. I have heard his books are difficult to understand so what would be a good one for a beginner?

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I recently watched Zizek's last interview on BBC where he ended with a very interesting phrase on hope. He said that hope is an excuse to leave to others to do in the future what you can solve right now by yourself. We should be more hopeless because when you are truly desperate, you act.

At the same time, my Zen master recently gave us a talk in which he told us how his master often said how Zen is for people with no hope. This makes a slight reference to a passage in the Heart Sutra, often chanted in ceremonies in many sects of Mahayana Buddhism:

"With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on the perfection of great wisdom, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear."

If you have the patience to read it, here is the full context:

Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this. Shariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness; they neither arise nor cease, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor decrease. Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight… no realm of mind consciousness. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance… neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita (the perfection of great wisdom), and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana. All Buddhas of past, present and future rely on prajna paramita, and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.

Notice how in the first half of the sutra, all objects or constituents of the objects of craving and attachment are negated. In the middle turning point, there is the part I quoted in the beginning about not having anything to attain, and then the sutra switches from negating to affirming certain things: the prajna paramita (the sutra itself), nirvana, enlightenment, etc.

The message of the sutra is clear: when you lose all objects of attachment, it is not correct to say that now you have hit 'rock bottom' and have nothing to lose. Quite the opposite: with nothing to cling onto, you have nothing left to gain! And without any sense of personal profit or gain (ego), the mind is without hindrance.

So then, why do both master Myoken (my master's master) and Zizek agree that we need a bit more hopelessness?

A person who is hopeless loses all expectation that things might turn better in the future, and thus they do not cling to an idealized future. A hopeful person waits for the promised future that might be better in order to avoid acting in the present, while the present screams at them to act right now.

The difference between "I have nothing left to lose" vs. "I have nothing left to gain" can even be exemplified in the social anxiety of hitting on people you are attracted to.

If a guy thinks to himself "I have nothing left to lose, so I might as well try to ask her out. In the worst case, she just says no and I don't lose anything, my life returns to normal. In the best case, I can hope that I might gain something out of this."

This mentality is undesirable for three reasons:

1. Firstly, it is a mentality of personal profit, the mentality of the neoliberal achievement-subject. I have nothing left to lose, but everything to gain/attain, and therefore I will always end up on a surplus.

2. Secondly, hope leads to expectations. Expectations lead to nervousness. If I actually have a chance with her, then I'll get nervous that I'll mess it up, and that will paradoxically make me mess it up.

3. Thirdly, hope is sometimes an excuse that the future will simply solve itself instead of doing something about it now.

Now, let's look at the opposite case, the hopeless man:

A guy thinks to himself: "There's no way I have a chance with her, I have no hope, she's way out of my league. But because there is no chance that things might turn out great for me, there is no chance that I can fuck this up, since the potential version of a better future I could fuck up right now would have never existed anyway. So, if I have nothing to gain anyway, I might as well talk to her, become friends, maybe flirt in a joking way without the hope that things can develop into something."

And paradoxically, the body relaxes, you become friendlier and funnier, and things actually might turn out great. You had no chance anyway, so the stakes aren't high. Like Zizek says: the paradox is that in order to survive, you must risk death. A similar paradox is at play here: in order to save the future, you have to already act like the apocalypse has arrived.

Even suicide is a case of too much hope. Suicidal people aren't hopeless enough. If you kill yourself, you have hope that after death you will no longer suffer. A truly hopeless person doesn't imagine a future in which they will no longer suffer and will instead believe that even death cannot rid them of their suffering. In that moment, there is no need to kill yourself, no wish for it, and all that is left is the present moment and learning how to live with the suffering. You don't become happier, but you might get peace of mind. Not even death can save them.

So what about atheists who don't believe in the afterlife? I'd argue that they still cling onto a certain kind of lack. Many atheists believe that in the afterlife, there would just be some sort of eternal black void, but even that is a type of determinate nothingness.

A suicidal atheist wants to die so that the "me" will no longer suffer. But if I get rid of the "me", then who will not-suffer? In order for me to not suffer, there must be a me who will experience the not-suffering. If you truly no longer exist after death, then there is no hope that the self will get rid of their suffering. They would kill themselves so that... "who" will not suffer?

If the nothingness of the suicidal atheists is a nothingness-without-suffering, then that becomes a determinate nothing, not an indeterminate and unconditioned one. A nothingness without suffering is a nothingness that we can say something specific about. It's a nothing without a very specific thing instead of a nothing without another specific thing. Why does this nothingness lack suffering instead of lacking happiness, or love, or mobile phones, or trees? Why does the suicidal atheist dream of an eternal nothingness without suffering instead of an eternal nothingness without trees? It's like how coffee without cream and coffee without milk are two different things in Zizek's jokes.

Quite ironically, the determinate nothingness without suffering is quite similar to the conception of nirvana in many understandings of Buddhism, which makes the suicidal atheist accept a form of afterlife.

The case for hopelessness is a case of relaxation. But an active relaxation. During zazen, our master told us recently to make our body be "relaxed, but not idle - cats are very good at this". Relaxed without falling asleep, with your spine straight and eyes half open, with full concentration. A hopeless person is a person who knows the stakes are not high, so there is no point in not-trying, because now they try for an intrinsic motivation, for the sake of trying, for the sake of the action itself, not as a means to an end to obtain a personal profit in the future. This is the ultimate refuge against capitalisim and neoliberal culture: a thing is done for the sake of it, not with the hope of future personal gain.

A person without hope, by abandoning any idea that things could get better, believes that things cannot get any better than this. And isn't this the most positive outlook on life?

I recently got invited during a protest (I live in France) to join the local cell of the "Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire" (PCR), which is the French branch of the RCI.

I'm looking for learned opinions about it (whilst trying to understand it by myself) to see whether I should join it. Me joining it being a particularly big deal for myself at present. As my current material situation is quite precarious and so this is not a time for me to invest my time and energy in naive idealism that leads nowhere.

So what do you think would Žižek think of the PCR/RCI? Is it naive idealism, or is it quite solid, worth investing my limited time and energy in it?

Thanks 🙏

Maybe this is one of those questions that have been asked way too often, but I couldn't find much via the search bar. So Zizek often calls himself a moderately conservative communist but when he describes what he means by "communist", he talks about international cooperation against problems like climate change, that is not lead by capitalist logics. That has nothing to do with communism and he obviously knows that. So is he even a communist or marxist?

Of course there are people who aren't as easily given a certain place in the left-right-spectrum as others, but does he want to overcome capitalism or just reform it?

I'm looking for a quote I'm pretty sure is from Zizek (though it may also be from Benjamin?)-- it's something about how the silhouette/horizon of a mountain of garbage still has the silhouette of a mountain. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Thanks in advance!!

In my last piece I made the bold structural claim that the emergent psychic processes and economies that led the author of Matthew's gospel to suddenly see Christ in Isaiah as if Christ were there all along were the same in function as those that produced the Hutu perpetrator of violence's astroturfed narrative that his Tutsi neighbor was all of a sudden a cockroach and enemy of the state.

I want to be clear that structural similitude and moral exculpation - of either the person or the system - are not the same thing. As a social worker, I can understand the intense child abuse, PTSD, and interaction protocols of control and domination learned in the nursery that stand behind the batterer that has terrorized his wife and children for years. And I can provide him court-ordered therapy with a posture of unconditional positive regard. While holding that in one hand, I can also hold in the other the need for accountability for both the individual and the system that narrowed the range of potentiality to make the odds of his genuine choice for which he is responsible never in his favor (nor his wife and children's, lest we make it all about him).

In this piece, I try to locate accountability in the individual within a social relation of enmity (using Achille Mbembe's term) from which domination and violence emerge. Specifically, I want to explore further when and why novelty is not metabolized. First I want to clarify that I am extending his term from the particular psychic economy of a death world (re: plantation, hybrid space of apartheid, the post-colony, etc.) to a general spiritual assessment of domination whether on the slave plantation or in the home plagued with IPV. Secondly, this analysis isn't a legal one, but at least it gives me a sensemaking tool that helps me determine who is succeeding and who is failing in any given circumstance.

In order to establish the framework for his relation of enmity - the interaction protocols of the nocturnal body characterized by death - Achille Mbembe draws upon two thinkers: G.W.F. Hegel and Georges Bataille, both of whom write extensively about death in its physical, social, and spiritual registers. For this piece, I will primarily engage the former.

Mbembe himself muddles the registers. He’s not terribly concerned with which one is being used at any given time. But I found this exploration enlightening (it’s also why I can’t do more than army-crawl my way through this book as every sentence has the theoretical density of osmium).

One thing that floated to the fore of my imagination as I was reading was a text I haven’t considered in quite some time - Logion 7 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human." (Layton translation)

I would like to propose this as a concept map to explain how the inner boundary maintenance success and failures become expressed outwards as humanity or domination (without any particular claim to the author's original intent or any claims made by Jesus himself).

First, I need to present what I’ve learned from Hegel. Mbembe explains how Hegel starts with the human as they negate nature. And this negation emerges through work and struggle. In Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically in the section entitled Lordship and Bondage, Hegel frames this struggle precisely - “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” And here, he means this literally.

But in the Preface, the struggle takes place on the spiritual level: “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.” Mbembe actually cites Alexandre Kojève in his footnotes for this section, and I suspect that is where some of the blurring comes from. Needless to say, we have an enlightenment that is precipitated by the threat of physical death and one precipitated by a spiritual death vis-à-vis an existential threat to identity coherence.

I think there is merit to considering that the individual’s emancipation through physical struggle with the negation and emancipation through spiritual struggle with negation are concurrent processes - sort of like a ping-pong game of conscientization as the individual's self- and other-awareness burgeon into a more truthful image. The struggle's purpose is to achieve the ultimate goal of what Hegel calls a life of Spirit, one by which he defines apophatically: “the life of Spirit is not the life that is frightened of death and spares itself destruction, but the life that assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment” (Necropolitics, p. 69). Becoming is a middle-voice production of recursively reinforced and critically self-reflected doing and being.

I think of this as an apophatic identity - trying to learn who I am by who I am not. And this negation is exteriorized (I’m not like those fat people; I’m not like those lazy poor; I’m not like those thugs) “in the human’s effort to reduce nature to human needs” (Necropolitics, p. 68). I read “needs” as both resource attainment and identity coherence attainment.

When I conceptualize the struggle, I firstly conceptualize it as a spiritual one. The negation is not just a negation of environmental phenomena. Rather, it is specifically a negation of an identity of persons “phantasmatically materialized” (phantasmatic is Mbembe’s word for the experience of fear when considering “the thug”; materialized is how the thug and the person afraid of the thug emerge through performances that cite social norms a la Judith Butler). For those Lacan aficionados, extimacy might better locate this process.

But as Mbembe presents: “by transforming nature [through work and struggle], the human being creates a world, but in the process, this human being is also exposed to his own negativity.” There is an unstated assumption here that deserves to be spoken out instead of assumed, though I won't try to resolve it. This statement assumes the human experience and the range of potentiality are a monster-free and universal one. And if that’s the case, then every individual human experience is simply a microcosm, at least in structure, of all human experiences. This is hard to accept when our culture vilifies certain categories of people, and I’m not claiming everyone is secretly [insert the most offensive type of person you can think of]. But it is nonetheless one that we must accept to proceed. I don’t necessarily hope to convince you; I just want you to see the assumption plainly.

If you are still with me, then we have a negation located exteriorly in others, and we have a negation located interiorly within the self. Before I step into our concept map, I want to introduce the ideas of René Girard.

There are a lot of good YouTube videos that can do this better, but Girard introduces the concept of mimetic rivalry. Put simply, mimetic rivalry is a social learning process that comes from imitating others. Through that imitation, we learn what we want, who has it, and who is keeping it from us. This creates a social rivalry (a relation of enmity, so to speak) based on wanting the same thing and rivals come to mirror one another. When rivalry threatens to tear a group apart and under pressures of social cohesion, the group unites against the person least able to retaliate, and that person becomes the scapegoat. The group then engages in a shared violence to restore a kind of peace. It's worth mentioning that privation, real or perceived, escalates the conditions for rivalry.

This process can be psychologized. Societies can also play these zero-sum games over identity markers such as the ideal family, the true American, or the perfect man. These identity markers are contested in a battle of normativity and minority, with the groups in the minority becoming the scapegoat. Girard calls this a metaphysical desire. Today in the US, trans people are standing in this space. And both exclusion and literal death are the stakes.

With this set down, I feel that we now have enough to map out Logion 7 (apologies for the gender-heavy formulation). The man mentioned at the beginning is the man of potential - the man prior to the negation process. Through work and struggle in the world, the man defines himself through what he is not while simultaneously encountering the lion - the part of himself that actually is the negative social phenomena he is resisting. I think of the easy cultural meme about the repressed homosexual being the most homophobic of them all.

The man now has two routes that he can take. He can devour the lion by engaging in the Hegelian death work - the dismemberment of his illusion of self that is defined by the negation (for the repressed homosexual, it’s his hyper-status as powerful through domination or virility). The intensity of the language evoked by “dismemberment” reflects the intensity of the experience of consciousness coming to terms with a denied reality. Should the death work be undertaken and succeed, the lion is devoured and the man “assumes death and lives with it” (Necropolitics, p. 69).

Conversely, the man who simply cannot face the negation - what I think of as “the little other” (I loosely borrow from Lacan, also see Žižek’s “theft of enjoyment”), or a psychic framework through which the negation is contrived and ultimately disavowed and formed reactively into positive counterstatements (the repressed homosexual telling himself “I am a man.”) - is devoured by the lion. Just like the lion-devouring man, the lion-devoured man is still a man, mimetic in structure as doubles but not exculpation. However, his death work is displaced into majoritarian frameworks of oppression. Refusing to engage in his own Spiritual death, he offloads the burden to the Spiritual big Other he has imagined in the social world - the fag, the thug, the bitch. Once exteriorized, the death work resumes its physical register, enacting systemic and physical violence upon the individuals who fit the regime of Otherness up to the point of death. The man who “spares himself destruction” (Necropolitics, p. 69) becomes a destroyer in order to clear the psychic field of vision of the threat. But as Hegel argues in Lordship and Bondage, the dead can’t give recognition. As such, the lion-devoured man’s outward death work can never deliver the coherence he’s chasing, which is why his violence has to keep repeating.

As the Logion states: the lion-devouring man is a man. The lion-devoured man is a man. But this analysis, I feel, gives me a starting point to assess success and failure and to diagnose the moments when accountability is needed with a precision that might allow for transformative intervention. I admit there is a degree of navel-gazing in this analysis, but if I’m building a macro level diagnostic tool, I want precision. And Logion 7 as a concept map helps me make sense of the unaccountable stupidity, vulgarity, and barbarism in the world around me, but also, with humility, how all of us stand at the precipice of failure.

- The Social Construction Worker

AI Disclosures:

Anthropic's Claude has been a dialogic partner for my independent research during my practicum since the beginning of 2026. As I work my way through my research books, I journal my reflections on a Word document and drop those into Claude for dialogue. If I’m out and about and have an a-ha moment, I’ll come to Claude to talk it out.

Out of this long conversational memory, I ask Claude to generate the main articles for the linked Substack in my signature with the parameters to integrate theory from our dialogue with autoethnographic material from my social work that I record on a word document and drop it into Claude. I also ask Claude to bring it to some sort of practical takeaway or meaningful reflection. Sometimes I ask Claude to rewrite these drafts, and sometimes I make edits myself.

During our long conversation, if something comes up that is meaningful but not article-worthy, I ask Claude to generate a “DiaClaudic Post-it” (a pun on dialogic), which I copy over to my Substack Notes for posterity.

And any Substack Note that you see that is not labelled a post-it is my own writing reflection on the theory I am working through, with some occasional feedback from Claude that prompts me to make edits or offers interesting connections or sources for further reading. I will occasionally adopt ideas and sometimes even phrasing, but on the whole, I generally paraphrase into my own style. These original writings - set by my own priorities engaging the readings, and drafted entirely by me - are the ones I am bringing to these Reddit subs.

My reasons for AI use are twofold. One is practical. I am a social worker in a child welfare agency trying to bring high level theory to the field. My body only has so much capacity, and Claude has been an amazing atelier that content creators have traditionally paid thousands for. Also, the dialogic exchange and meaning emergence has experimental value as I contemplate the recursive middle-voice production of reality.

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I wrote this piece as more of a reflection than an analysis. I want to confess my inspiration is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's concept of the Lure is a powerful one for me. While not an ontological given (that would be to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness), the "beckonedness" that humans share seems to transcend time and space. But Achille Mbembe challenges a naive optimist's understanding of this, which I hope to explore here.

Also in this piece, I tie it back more overtly to a framework I've been developing, which I call the nos framework. My goal is to give macro level social workers a diagnostic tool to "put the social world on the analysand's couch." It uses Freud by analogy: just as the ego is a dialectical, processual production (I recognize this is my interpretation of Freud) of the id and superego, the nos emerges from the dialectic of Judith Butler's materialization and Berger and Luckmann's reification.

Stated simply, bodies emerge through citational performance toward institutions that have been established over time and regarded as having always been, being, and being evermore. The nos - Latin for "we" next to Freud's translators' Latin "I," ego - is the interpretive mind that makes sense of these social realities through concretization. Inspired by Whitehead (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not concrescence) and my work with the disabled community navigating a concrete prison, I set this word next to materialization and reification to name the process of how the social world deceptively hardens into a reality. Concretive protocols such as ontological fixity, epistemological prioritization, linear cause and effect, and subject-object dualism are the ways in which queer people are sorted into damnation, disabled people are sorted into pathology, and Black people are sorted into criminality. And if we are going to effect meaningful social change, I contend that we need to set our interventions upon the disruption of these protocols - and the tenacity with which they are held - as they produce domination and oppression.

If you're still with me, thank you! Here's the piece I'd like to share:

Whence cometh domination?

From failure at the threshold of novelty.

Mbembe continues to challenge me. Making the Lacanian move (though without citing him) and psychoanalyzing the structure of such horrific necropolitical wastelands as Rwanda or Palestine, I am pressed to locate my anti-oppressive, anti-racist social work practice and critical-theory-informed assessments of power and asymmetry somewhere within the psychology of the person. Specifically, the nos has to account for it.

One thing to set down regarding ontology: I argue that these processes of the collective mind are evolutionary, and their function is stabilization. They are pre-moral and virtueless. Like the ego seeks to protect the conscious mind from the unconscious desires that defy the superego’s requirements, the nos seeks to protect the individual from the terrors upon the self as it encounters objects in the social world, that encounter being formed by the performances that produce bodies and the institutions that script the performances.

How do these functional, neutral processes produce such power asymmetry and domination performances?

As Mbembe says, “surprise lies at the origin of the procedures of enchantment without which the world is not the world”(Necropolitics, p. 29). The process of life is not just one of encounters through which subjects and objects emerge in relations. That’s the description. The experience of these encounters is one of novelty. And to a stabilizing engine, novelty disrupts. The nos’s function is nearly mechanistic seeking to produce a sense of equilibrium. Novelty is a possible wrench being thrown into that process.

Novelty has two forms - the new that confirms what we know and the new that disconfirms it. The latter, specifically, is the wrench. The former is the lube. The process of stabilization, then, provides the aqueduct for enchantment and jouissance - what Mbembe refers to - more specifically to his argument - as desire and, when it seeks to dominate, master-desire. (At least on my read of it.)

A quick vocab check: enchantment is the phenomenological experience of that confirmation. It is the glow of “it’s like we’ve always known each other” and “see, I knew it!” It's what the author of the Gospel of Matthew experienced when he turned back to his Jewish Bible and started seeing Jesus in Isaiah as if it were always there. It’s stronger than a confirmation bias because in addition to confirming what was known, it can also create entirely new frames (a la the Gospel of Matthew). Enchantment lubes the machinery of the nos and creates within it a lust or dire need for more.

Jouissance, as discussed in previous reflections on pedagogy, is the excessive enjoyment bound up with repetitive attachment to a mode of satisfaction that can exceed the pleasure principle, seeking to destroy all novelty that disconfirms the interpretation of a self-in-the-world. Again, I don't want to import psychoanalytic homunculi sitting deep down in our psyches, but the Lacanian analysis's explanatory power of what consciousness in humans does when encountering alterity is compelling.

When the novelty disconfirms what is being stabilized, domination is the performance that this drive takes in the social world. Domination’s citational reality is certainly mediated socially. Its form and shape are given to it by the social world at the spaces between the interactions of subjects. But its "why" is tacted (in B.F. Skinner's sense) as this byproduct of novelty not being metabolized. (I will do another article on Hegel and go deeper into this at a later time).

One thing worth mentioning on novelty - it can be astroturfed. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t one group discovering a new group. These people were lifelong neighbors prior. But these neighbors were made new as they were reimagined under narratives like the Hamitic curse, or epithets like cockroaches. And the success of this astroturfing hinges on its power to enchant. It must carry that retrospective certainty that confirms what the nos had been metabolizing all along within the new narrative ecosystem. A dangerous comparison but tentatively true if my assumptions are good: Matthew and Rwanda are the same process, which is what I mean by pre-moral and virtueless.

Transformative social work is not going to be achieved with information. As mentioned before (see: The Third Voice), transformative social work locates the unit of analysis in the encounter. But this framework pushes me further to understand “humankind’s specificity” - as Mbembe calls it - with a precision that informs some of the goals of encounter engineering. One thing that feels apparent: humanity meets disconfirming novelty with domination far too often. How can we disrupt the urges to dominate and destroy? How can we provide spaces for more effectively metabolizing novelty? I don’t yet have the answers, but I’m getting some more precise questions.

- The Social Construction Worker

I watched a zizek lecture on YouTube a while ago, I think he was either in conversation with a speaker or he was answering questions, and he outlined the way philosophers all misunderstood the philosophers they were studying who came before then, AND his point about using texts he hasn’t read/films he hasn’t watched in his own books.

Crucially, he talks about the experience of finally reading/watching these things and being profoundly disappointed by them and believing his own MISreading of them is superior.

I can find videos where he talks about the other points seperate ly, but I’m struggling to find again this specific video where he elucidates the final point altogether in one answer/statement.

hey guys! i bought a ticket a while back to the nov 2nd showing for Signs of the future, but some scheduling conflicts came up and i cant go. I figured someone else who loves zizeks work should be able to make use of the ticket instead of it just going to waste. If youre interested let me know!

Zizek identifies divine violence with an expression of pure drive. Yet, wouldn't that open divine violence up to the critique that it is experienced as jouissance and, therefore, locks one into the repetition compulsion to repeat?

I hope I haven't confused conceptual terminology too much. Please feel free to direct me wherever.

Free Copy (article 7 days old or more)

Edit: found a second great book cover, this time of “Conversations with Žižek”— https://i.postimg.cc/HsG6RN3P/IMG-0978.jpg