What follows is less of an academic essay and more of a personal tribute to the work of Slavoj Žižek. His concepts, theories and insights have had a profound impact on my own thinking, but this influence goes far beyond abstract philosophizing and speculation. I argue that Žižek’s work is…

Hi, I’m writing this to let you know that I had a great discussion last night with my fellow Young Žižekians (Andrew, Nick and Dave). This is the first time that the four of us have actually been able to film a conversation together. We discuss Jonah Hill’s new film…

What follows is my commentary on one of the most famous passages in all of Karl Marx’s work. This particular passage is found at the very beginning of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, which contains Marx’s most well-known discussion of religion (Christianity). This contains…

As most of you know, I never got to get a formal education. I didn’t graduate from high school (I do have my GED, though) and I never went to university. However, when I was 27 and 28, I did take some classes at Longview Community College. The story goes…

The Game recently released a diss track, a song called ‘The Black Slim Shady’, aimed at his former Aftermath labelmate who goes by the name Eminem. The track is based on two beats. The first is a vintage Dr. Dre/G-Unit sounding beat (circa 2003) and the second one is very…

What follows is a short introduction to the Heideggerian concept of the ontological difference, which is absolutely essential to all of Heidegger’s philosophizing. In fact, I’d argue that one cannot begin to make sense of Heidegger’s lifelong questioning of Being without grasping this fundamental distinction. Understanding the ontological difference presupposes…

A couple of months ago, I received some “criticism” of one of my blog posts on Lacan because I “conflated” the terms objet petit a and objet a. My “critic” informed me that I was “straight-up retarded” for making this mistake. now, the problem, of course, is that the objet…

Hello, it’s Michael Downs here. I am the author of The Dangerous Maybe. I just want to let all of my readers know about something very cool that just happened last Saturday night. Recently, Chris Cutrone (the founder of the Platypus Affiliated Society) went on my friend Theory Pleeb’s YouTube…

Hi, everyone! I just want to let all of you know that I currently have a new series of videos in the works devoted to Žižek’s theory of ideology over on Theory Pleeb’s YouTube channel. I decided to do this as a way of celebrating Slavoj’s birthday (March 21). The…