Summary of Slavoj Žižek's Surplus-Enjoyment

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The world is sick, says the poet Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 3 -> The world is sick, according to the poet Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is sustained by the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment, which sustain the topsy-turviness of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350040111

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The book is about how the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment sustain the topsy-turviness of our time. Hegel is ever-present in it, but the topic of the book is exactly what its title says: it’s about how the topsy-turviness of our time is sustained by the paradoxes of surplus-enjoyment.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The term apocalypse is used today to describe any larger-scale catastrophic event or series of events that impacts humanity or nature. When we confront some higher and hitherto hidden truth, this truth will shatter our world.

#2

The Butterfly Effect is a theory that states a small change in one event can lead to a large change in another event. It is often used to describe the effects of nuclear war. In an era of multiple catastrophes, what if truth is something that is constructed afterwards, as an attempt to make sense of the catastrophe.

#3

The focus of this book is not different crises, but how we fight them or reproduce them. What I try to achieve is not just to analyze the mess we’re in, but to simultaneously deploy how most of the critiques and protests against global capitalism do not really question its basic premises.

Insights from Chapter 3

#1

Surplus-enjoyment is the perverted pleasure we get in exchange for our obedience and renunciations. It is a gain in loss itself. Objet a, the object of our desire, is the surplus-enjoyment. It is nothing in its normal state, but it is an excess with regard to itself.

#2

The book begins with global capitalism as the social form and ultimate source of the madness of our world. It then deals with the deeply embedded forms of psychic life that sustain social relations of domination and exploitation. It finally proposes a way out of this predicament: the radical gesture of subjective destitution.

#3

Each chapter is also a reader’s report, instigated by an outstanding text. Hegel helps me see the flaws in our contemporary response to global emergencies, and he provides a solution.

Insights from Chapter 4

#1

The book’s formula is 2 + a. The first two chapters deal with Marx and Freud, the two founders of modern hermeneutics of suspicion which denounces the visible order as a theatre of shadows regulated by hidden mechanisms.

#2

The trap of historicism is that although universal, it becomes part of our daily experience only in our epoch, the epoch after the end of history in 1990 when new post-historical antagonisms exploded.

#3

The book will argue that there is more in Hegel than in his contemporary critical readings. His notion of nature is more open to contingencies than the Marxist focus on the productive process, and he saw the role of surplus-enjoyment in religious collective rituals.

#4

The first words spoken by Neil Armstrong after stepping on the moon in 1969 were not the officially reported That’s one small step for man, but the enigmatic remark Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.

#5

When a system that deserves to disappear disintegrates, and almost everyone is enthusiastic about its fall, the task of thought is to envision the dangerous potentials of the emerging new order.

#6

My book is a gradual drift into madness, as I jump from one example to another and from one quotation to another. I consider this a positive feature, as it allows me to unravel the antagonisms of a text.

#7

Materialist quotation is internal to the quoted original through its very externality to it: its violent disfiguration of the original is in some sense more faithful to the original than the original itself since it echoes social struggles that traverse both.

#8

This book is not meant to provide a safe space for those