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🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

🎵 Tod MacGowan had a talk 🤠👻

(The Holy Family of Hypocritique: How Crisis & Critique’s Pact of Analyseverbot Neutralizes Žižek, C&C Žižek Volume is a Faux Artifact: Toad Megavan Tailing Žižek’s Oeuvre: Capped Kermit Reruns of the Mike Down Routine, From The Holy Family to Analyseverbot: The Hypocritique of Interlectural Motheration)

‘We have no need for other worlds. We need mirrors.’ Solaris

The paradox of the latest Crisis & Critique Žižek volume is that it reads like a mirror that loves its own reflection. Page after page, the contributors sculpt a flattering, elegantly restless image of themselves—curators of toughness, keepers of paradox, guardians of ethical tone—by projecting a theatrical Slavoj onto the scrim in front of them. They need him loud so they can be beautifully dissatisfied. They need him unruly so they can be measured. In psychoanalytic language, what’s at work is a secondary gain: the maintenance of an ideal ego that stays exquisitely aggrieved while never risking the shift from image to identification. The maternal superego—soothing, moderating, smoothing—governs this theater of dissatisfaction. It’s what we might call motheration: motherly moderation that keeps everyone safe within a pampered ‘comfort zone.’ The missed step is simple and unfashionable. Instead of fixing on Slavoj the personality, they should have taken Slavoj’s discourse as their ego ideal—the paternal function that interrupts, names, and binds. The father does not caress your ideal image; he draws the line that lets you outgrow it.

Watch how the projection surface is prepared. The Introduction lays down the glossy decals: Žižek is “variously called a charlatan of theory, the Elvis of cultural theory, the giant of Ljubljana, or capitalism’s court-jester”, even as the editors flatter the book’s populist conscience: he “produces… new legibilities, new intelligibilities – for potentially everyone” and, yes, he “lives to think”. John Milbank sweetens the aura into a slogan: Žižek the “wild Slovenian populariser of already wild French theory” has become “a… voice of sanity”, “combative” and “anti-woke,” even as “an unrepentant Communist” who somehow steadies the debate. Robert Pfaller turns the scene into ballroom: the thinker as “dance partner,” an “outstanding… wingspan” gliding between world events and concept-work. Clara R. San Miguel canonizes: Žižek now “reads us,” installed in the “asynchronous time of the logos”. Alexander Stagnell sets the spotlights and blocking: Žižek “stages” the impasse and even “acts it out,” the better to reveal limits. Todd McGowan sharpens a house definition: Žižek is “a figure of provocation rather than perversion,” the one who “strives to expose” the big Other’s incoherence rather than titillate it.

This is all affectionate—and it is the exact point at which the maternal superego starts purring. Ideal egos love portraits that glow with dissatisfaction but never command identification. What would paternal identification sound like here? Not another flourish about Žižek the provocateur or the Elvis, but what Žižek himself calls a return to concepts and politics, which is to say, to the law that thought lays down for itself. He couldn’t be plainer in his closing letter: “We thus have to return to both terms… politics and concepts,” and, for him, Crisis & Critique “is… a journal of concepts, providing the space for their free development in all their productive inconsistency”. That is not motheration. That is the paternal function in its sober key: the ego ideal that says, stop polishing your image; submit to a concept you didn’t invent.

Žižek’s tone in that same letter is all wrong for the cuddle of the ideal ego. It begins in fret and ends in a jab. “At my old age, I learned to enjoy peace, but each new issue of C&C… regularly ruins a couple of my days”. He confesses that he dreads learning “unknown things about myself” and then mischievously goes overboard: C&C is “in some sense the ONLY journal in its genre, what in logic they call hapax, a universality with just one particular case”. It’s witty snake-charm. But what follows re-installs the paternal edge: he worries aloud that jokes can become the lubricant of power; that making fun of rulers may “serve the safe reproduction of this same power,” and asks, without consoling himself, “Do I also not often fall into the trap…? I’ll leave this question open”. The paternal ideal does not pamper you for your beautiful doubts; it refuses you the comfort of finishing the thought with a self-exoneration.

By contrast, the maternal superego in Hypocritique offers endless, well-lit dissatisfaction. It lets you be the curator of courage, the director of limits, the master of a negative community, the ethical friend who knows how to hold a dangerous word with care. It is not accidental that Joan Copjec praises those who “delay the closure” like “masters of suspense,” because “to take an author at his word is to fall into the trap of ‘knowing too much’”. It is not wrong. It is also the precise cadence by which a maternal superego tucks the community into bed: postpone closure; love the unsayable; remain capacious. Payam Masarrat’s Plato shows the other side of the same lullaby. Citing Žižek, he notes we should “fully endorse and assume” a certain monologic bluntness, because “dialogues are commonplace, encounters are rare” and “an encounter cannot be reduced to symbolic exchange”. But how quickly that becomes a stylized disavowal of decision, an ode to monologic gravitas that still caresses the ideal image: we are the adults in the room who know that true encounters are rare. The maternal superego lets you keep that pride.

A hard paternal voice breaks that spell by reintroducing castration—not as punishment, but as the symbolic cut that allows desire to grow up. Žižek, at his most scandalous, states it with unnerving clarity: “sometimes, the ethical injunction not to kill is the very refuge providing the excuse to act as we should. Sometimes, one has to kill IN ORDER TO keep one’s hands clean”. You don’t have to like the example to grasp the function. The point is that there are moments when the maternal ethic of care disguises evasion; there are thresholds you don’t cross without a law you didn’t write. Even Yuval Kremnitzer, in a very different register, hears the echo when he laments the “continuous violation of norms and boundaries… Where and when do we set boundaries with full force and at any cost?”. That is not the language of the ideal ego luxuriating in its dissatisfaction. That is the paternal question.

Return, then, to the way the volume casts Slavoj to give themselves contour. Milbank calls him a “voice of sanity” precisely so he can be the cleric of steadiness. Pfaller calls him a joyous “dance partner” so that he can be the pedagogue who dances with difficulty without being discomposed by it. San Miguel vaults him into the Logos so that she can occupy the calm mezzanine from which the classics are surveyed and arranged—“Žižek reads us”. Stagnell scripts him as the auteur of contradiction so that he, Stagnell, can direct the performance of limits from the clean balcony of rhetoric—Žižek “stages” and “acts it out”. McGowan is the candid exception; he explicitly names the trap: “Perversion has a semblance of radicality that belies its underlying conservative function, while provocation… hides its authentic challenge to the ruling ideology”. But even here the maternal comfort steals back in: we have expertly named the distinction; our dissatisfaction has been beautifully phrased.

Taking Žižek’s discourse as ego ideal would look homelier. It would mean, first of all, treating concepts as the adult authority. Slavoj’s own summary is almost childlike in its directness: “Lacan… is… a creator of new concepts… The Real, the big Other, non-All, surplus-enjoyment, fantasy… yes, these concepts are multivalent” and Crisis & Critique is where “their free development” should happen. To identify with that is to accept the paternal function of the signifier: the word that cuts through your self-satisfaction. It would also mean admitting that the jokey persona you project onto him is less instructive than the conceptual demand he lays on you. When he asks whether his own humor is complicit, he does not let you translate that into a flattering ethic of care: “making fun of those in power” may “serve the safe reproduction of this same power” and he leaves the wound open. The paternal ideal does not console you for asking the question; it withholds the cuddle of an answer.

There is a further twist that those who enjoy maternal comfort will hate. Identification with the paternal ideal is not stern for sternness’s sake. It clears a path out of the suffocating exhibition of negative glamour. That is why Žižek can be corny and resolute in the same sentence. He will overpraise a journal as “the ONLY” one of its kind—“what in logic they call hapax” —and then switch registers into the uncompromising tone that forbids poetic evasions in the clinic and in politics alike. “There is no meta-language… politics has no neutral outside, every apolitical stance is immanently political”. The father’s law here is almost embarrassingly basic: stop mistaking your posture for a place to stand.

If the diagnosis needs one last control test, take Copjec’s elegant hymn to the slow fade and compare it to Masarrat’s blunt citation of Žižek’s monologic imperative, where “dialogues are commonplace, encounters are rare” . The maternal superego tells a bedtime story in which we all become “masters of suspense” and “delay the closure” so that everyone feels gathered in capaciousness. The paternal superego says—sometimes rudely—that your capacity to delay is just your incapacity to decide. It is a relief to remain beautifully dissatisfied. It is developmental to endure a cut in your image by identifying with a discourse that doesn’t need you to sparkle.

There is a reason Žižek writes that every time Crisis & Critique appears, it “ruins” his days: the paternal ideal ruins. It deprives you of the right to be prettily upset. The maternal superego, by contrast, polishes your disturbance until it gleams. And that is the secret pact animating Hypocritique. The authors’ secondary gain is a radiant self-image held at just the right level of ache. The corrective is not to toss out care, tone, or even theater; it is to learn to prefer concepts to charisma, discourse to persona, ego ideal to ideal ego. Do that, and the famous Slovenian stops being your projection screen and becomes what, in psychoanalysis, he always was: a bearer of the law of thought, the one who interrupts your mothered comfort so a world can be faced.

You interlecturals appear extraordinarily peaceful for a crowd who are continuously and frantically failing to adequately process what is truly going on. One would almost believe that you actually know stuff, you know?

Let’s open the portmanteau. An interlectural is not quite an intellectual. The interlectural lives in the inter-lecture: in the little corridor between the keynote and the Q&A, between the citation and the sigh, between “as Hegel reminds us” and “let me complicate that.” It is a style of appearing beautifully dissatisfied in the gaps. The interlectural speaks most eloquently in everything that is not quite a claim — the tasteful aside, the knowing shrug toward paradox, the shared chuckle at the impossibility of closure. It is criticism as liminal décor. It is criticism that takes place in the passageway, which is why it rarely arrives.

This is why the interlectural so often needs a borrowed lectern. The moment a real lecture must be given — when one must risk a stand under one’s own authority — the voice falters and reaches for a surrogate father: a conference series, a founding name, a properly italicized canon, the charisma of a friendly monster from Ljubljana. Under borrowed authority, the inter-lecture imagines itself a lecture: the lectern becomes a rental costume, and the voice, now amplified, continues to speak in the corridor. One hears the same cadences of exquisite unrest, the same mint-fresh reverence for negativity, only louder. The authority is not taken; it is worn.

This is why your favorite panel can feel like a séance of elegant unease. The interlectural keeps the mood deliciously unresolved: neither the breezy “perversion” that merely pokes the Big Other, nor the crude decision that would break the spell, but a cultivated “provocation” that admires the point where authority fails and leaves it gleaming. The persona projected on Slavoj is perfect for this. Make him the court-jester, the Elvis, the provocateur, and the interlectural becomes the tasteful custodian of his unruliness. The mothering superego is thrilled: the children have been so stimulatingly upset and so safely contained.

But the psychoanalytic compass points elsewhere. The way out of motheration — that plush maternal moderation that converts principle into tone — is not a louder inter-lecture. It is identification with a discourse that can cut. The ego ideal, here, is not the charismatic Slavoj you can name-drop, but the discourse that refuses the cuddle of a finale. Take him at his least romantic: when he says, without melodrama, that we must “return to both terms… politics and concepts,” he is calling you to prefer the word that binds over the image that glows. Prefer the law of a concept to the warmth of your reflected self.

The interlectural cannot bear this, because it carries a pact with its own mirror. It is happiest when it can admire its frustration, happiest when its dissatisfaction is beautifully phrased, happiest when it can tarry with the miss as if suspense were a method rather than a mood. It thrives on being almost ready to mean it. The paternal function is the ruin of this pleasure. It does not ask you to be harsher; it asks you to grow up. It asks you to step out of the inter-lecture and either lecture under your own name or stop speaking. In other words, to accept a discourse that disciplines your style.

There is a comic test for interlecturality. Watch what happens when the borrowed lectern is gently removed. The interlectural, deprived of the father’s microphone, does not fall silent; it panics back into motheration. The tone becomes “care,” the claims become “holding space,” the decision becomes “tarrying with the miss.” The room sways with gratitude. Everyone feels exquisitely seen. Nothing is faced.

An intellectual may be wrong. An interlectural may be brilliant. But only one of them can be contradicted without collapsing into wounded elegance. The former has taken a position that a counterexample can bruise. The latter has perfected a style that a counterexample only adorns. That is why the interlectural loves Slavoj as image — he is the perfect cloak for their corridor eloquence — and fears Slavoj as discourse, because the discourse is the father in the room, the unglamorous voice that says: this way is out, and that way is fantasy.

So let’s keep the coinage honest. Interlectural, from inter-lecture: the one who appears in the passages, beautiful in dissatisfaction, except when the lecture must be owned and the lectern can no longer be borrowed. At that threshold the interlectural’s glamour dissolves. Either the voice identifies with a law that it did not write, and enters the adult risks of speech; or it retreats, tenderly, back into the corridor, where the echoes of profundity are always kinder than the sound of the real.

So-called intellectual moderation is actually Interlectural Motheration, a soft-focus cuddle of the self that mistakes stroked plumage for stance; and to the house that christened itself a hapax, I can only say: careful with that hapax, C&C—yes, like Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful with that axe, Eugene’—1. as if your hapax could cut like an axe, when in fact it wobbles like foam and never bites; 2. and yet it’s even more dangerous for the opposite reason, because the lullaby of uniqueness sedates judgment; good handling here is not hugging and squeezing and patting, but learning how not to sheath a blade in a plush toy and then call it philosophy.

Addendum: The Interlectural Denegation Playbook (with plush edges)

Every time Hypocritique announces that it does not do X, it does X in italics and asks to be thanked for the restraint. This addendum supplies a pocket field guide to the genre where the cut is performed as choreography, the law is posed as a question, and the bruise is applied as blush.

The ‘Yes-But’ Balm

Not persona, but concepts—yes, but the concept is worn like cologne. Denegation works as skincare: it absorbs the oil of self-regard and leaves a matte finish of seriousness. The trick is simple. Declare: we are not glamorizing the subject; we are rigorously reconstructing the discourse. Then stand before your own reflection and admire the rigor. The father’s law remains in the next room; in here we are moisturized by Method.

Conceptual Concealer

Ontological antagonism becomes an aesthetic. You don’t avoid the cut; you diffuse it with neutral tones. Determinate negation gets blended until it flatters every cheekbone in sight. It reads fierce; it lands plush. If anyone asks where the incision is, point to the lighting design and say, look how sharp it feels.

Stagecraft of Severity

Every conflict is staged, not suffered. There are spotlights, blocking, wingspans, acts; there is a curtain call for contradiction. You don’t take a position, you premiere one. The audience goes home “ruined” in the way one is ruined by a tasteful ending—softly disturbed, beautifully dissatisfied, ready to subscribe.

The Question-Mark Quilt

Invoke Authority, then tuck it into a question. Where and when do we set boundaries? Exactly here, exactly now—except of course not, because the question must be honored. The mark that should punctuate the sentence is transformed into a blanket under which everyone can keep asking, indefinitely, with excellent tone.

Paternal Cosplay

Speak of the cut in the future anterior: we will have decided. Adorn yourself with the vocabulary of castration, law, encounter, the non-All—then remove all specificity like a safety pin. The blade appears; the blade is discussed; the blade is sheathed with care. You look terrific in the uniform.

Scarcity Sublime

Encounters are rare; decisions are grave; concepts are hapax; journals are unique. Scarcity is the alibi that guarantees postponement: the rarer the Thing, the more ethical it is to keep it offstage. One cannot be vulgar and actually decide in the vicinity of such sublimity. The interlectural learns to curate absence.

Provocation Placebo

Perversion titillates; provocation exposes—so we choose provocation. And yet the provocation is dispensed in child-safe doses, tamper-evident, with a pamphlet on possible side effects: mild discomfort, temporary openness, a pleasant ache of insight. If symptoms resolve into action, consult your superego.

The Hapax Pacifier

Hapax is announced like a lullaby: unique, singular, never to be repeated. Everyone coos. The word that should threaten by naming a limit instead soothes by naming a brand. Uniqueness becomes a white-noise machine: shhh, we are the only ones. Sleep, little concept, sleep.

Choreographed Antagonism

Disagreement is acknowledged as a dance. There are partners, steps, a tempo of negation. The quarrel glides. The audience learns that conflict can be elevated into grace—no sweat, no stumble, no risk of falling off the edge of the stage into the world.

Canonization by Reconstruction

We do not canonize; we reconstruct with rigor. The reconstruction lifts the text to a mezzanine where it can be curated without being obeyed. From that balcony the editors can say, with perfect sincerity, that they have honored the discourse—just not enough to let it bind them.

The Care-Tone Convertor

Remove the lectern and watch the interlectural recoil into care. Not because care is bad, but because here it is a mask for refusal. The decision is renamed “holding space,” the law becomes “making room,” and the cut is translated into “tarrying with the miss.” Everyone feels exquisitely recognized; nothing is faced.

‘Not X, But Y’—The Denegation Template

Not image, but concept.
Not theater, but method.
Not comfort, but rigor.
Not delay, but respect for the unconscious.
Not provocation as show, but as ethics.
Each ‘but’ returns the denied term in formalwear. The house rule is invariant: negate, sublimate, congratulate.

How to Spot It in the Wild

• If severity arrives pre-framed (curated, staged, choreographed), you’re in the denegation zone.
• If a decisive thesis floats at the altitude of a weather report—true, impressive, and addressed to no one—it’s interlectural motheration.
• If the text names the very trap it enacts and then proceeds untroubled, applaud: you are witnessing mature Verneinung.

A Simple Counter-Ritual

Disallow the question mark where a period is due. Name the object. Tie a concept to a consequence. Replace the sentence “Encounters are rare” with an encounter that risks a name. Retire the wingspan and step off the stage. If the cut cannot be located in the text, relocate it in your practice—now, not in the promised future anterior.

Closing Snip

The maternal superego is not defeated by shouting “Law!” louder; it is defeated by letting the law land somewhere other than the page. Until then the volume remains a very well-lit nursery: the knife is polished nightly, the lullabies are learned, and everyone sleeps under the Question-Mark Quilt, beautifully dissatisfied, perfectly safe.