🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(Poly-tickle = political; Jew-essence = jouissance — a wordplay used here to attack racist essentialism, not to endorse it)

🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

🎵 Links Délicatesse 🎵

(previous: Nailing the Concept by Correct Favoritism: How Uncle Slavoj’s Golden Boy Gabriel Got Too Arrogant Too Quickly, While Treasonous Nicol Played the Politeness Hooker to Become Uncle Slavoj’s Cred-Pet)

The trick is simple. First you center enjoyment and announce that you will follow causal chains. Then you re-encode each conflict as a sensual exhibit, as if the very act of enjoying the diagnosis were already the lever. Then you reassemble the circle under two gazes: Uncle’s signature cadence certifying that the room still thinks, and Cred-Pet’s careful curation proving the room is still righteous. The audience leaves high on surplus-information—names, proper nouns, spicy motifs, a tour of modalities—while their institutions leave as they entered. The more exquisitely you speak of surplus-enjoyment, the more you produce it. The more you warn against weirdness, the more you perform weirdness porn. The more you confess the nursery, the more it pays to stay in it.

The crack about “Nazi” and “simple Jew” is not a scandal to be denounced and forgotten; it is the imp of the perverse tossing off the house’s secret in an unguarded moment. The “prefer not to” is not cowardice; it is the deadpan ejection of someone who knows that, in this scene, analysis has become the pole-dance of poly-tickle correctness, each contributor winking to Uncle with a flourish while tickling Cred-Pet with a posture of exacting restraint. You don’t have to hate anyone to see it. You just have to admit what the book actually does on the page: not move a single lever while delivering a full program of Jew-essence—again, our polemical pun on jouissance—designed to make the Hypocritique bubble feel like courage.

2021: Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo Committed Treason: Beware of the superego virus! Don’t excuse your erasure! / A private reason is no reason at all / 2024: Slavoj Hooked By Nicol in: Political Jouissance

🎵 Hammering the nail home 🎵

“Fortunately Slavoj knows that I am a Nazi and he is a simple Jew. So he just went quietly. At what point will Žižek’s open letter against me appear trying to destroy my life? JAJAJAJA!” — Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, 4 July 2021

“I still am not sure exactly what the book is about, and I do not know if Nicol herself knows (or whether Slavoj knows), but as for being involved this, I am now sure that I would prefer not to.” — Ian Parker, 7 July 2021

Those two sentences distributed to 76 Žižekian inboxes are the fuse and the flash. In the first, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo detonates a grotesque “Nazi/Jew” gag in a mass email thread; in the second, Ian Parker—the “handsome and correct” scholar whom some in this circle routinely cite as ballast—announces his exit from her project after watching the chaos unfold. If you’re just arriving: this is the backstage of a house that then publishes a book on ‘political jouissance’—our title’s Jew-essence—coedited by Nicol and Slavoj Žižek. The emails matter because they show the libidinal wiring the book itself refuses to name with the specificity that would cost anyone a prestige chip. The gag is not a slip; it’s a tell. The skedaddle is not prudery; it’s the tipping point at which the polite theater can’t keep the lid on its own enjoyment.

The book’s promise is grand: it will stop the pious verdicts and trace the enjoyment—surplus-charge, sticky pleasures, morbid thrills—that actually glue people to ideologies. Good; analysis beats slogan. But watch the hands. The collection turns out to be a theme-park for weirdness porn: every metaphor, example, and case study is trimmed to deliver the mood of rigorous transgression without ever touching a lever of practice. This is Hypocritique, the house doctrine: curate the feeling of analysis; don’t risk the loss that comes when a rule, a bylaw, a calendar, a budget line, or a credit protocol actually moves. The editors announce materiality, then keep it dematerialized. The contributors promise the gritty ‘how’, then funnel everything back into a sexy, spooky, smarty-pants ambiance. And all of it—every last tickle and wink—happens under the two gazes the scene cannot give up: Uncle Slavoj’s Name-of-the-Father gaze that blesses the shtick, and Cred-Pet Nicol’s beneficent glare that judges who may purr in the nursery.

Start with the closer, because endnotes tell the truth better than prefaces. Žižek’s little morsel about ‘AOC and her boyfriend’s leg’ is a perfect specimen. The policy field is noisy, angered, concrete; instead of pushing a hinge in any institution, the piece dilates a meme—feet, desire, the fetish tic—into a polished riff that caresses the house’s favorite erogenous zone: “look how our theory can eroticize the trivial while appearing to demystify the obscene.” The surplus-information—names, quotes, a neat Lacanian toggle—is a bait-gloss for the same basic function: sell a flirty clinic vignette in place of a procedural intervention. It’s pornography of weirdness: highbrow peep-show, audience flattered, nothing changed. Uncle winks; the room giggles; the credits roll.

Now pull back to the introduction, where Uncle solemnly intones that ideology is material, that belief “functions socially” even when no one believes. Perfect line. The problem is not the line; it’s the next step the line never takes. If materiality is the point, show me the moderator scripts and escalation trees for the stages where ‘analysis is forbidden’; show me how the bylines, deadlines, and budgets are wired; show me the tender that paid for the masthead’s virtue. The book can’t, won’t, doesn’t. Instead, it replaces the lever with a libidinal diagram and calls it a day. That is the nursery pact: gesture at the machine, keep it off-limits, and harvest the prestige.

The “Modalities of enjoying symptoms in current capitalism” chapter is a showroom of the same habit. Neoliberalism, liber-fascism, cyber-liberalism—the triptych feels scientific, seductively so. The stress/depression-fear/anger-attention/burnout glosses slide like satin. The text promises strategy, later, elsewhere; for now, it offers a tasting flight of disorders outfitted as geopolitics, perfectly calibrated to let the reader recognize a bit of themselves (ooh, that’s me doomscrolling) while never naming a single institutional screw that must be turned. Abstraction as cardio: the reader’s heart races; the room’s rules rest.

Andrea Perunović’s ‘mistrust’ trip from “tickle” to “blaze of petrol” is libidinal designer-lighting. The metaphor starts on the skin and ends in flames. You can feel it. That’s the point. It is fuel without engine, drama without drive train: the happiness of caressing a riot with words, with the safe mutual understanding that no one will disaggregate the chain of command that makes riot a response in the first place. The tickle is the hook. The blaze is the fog machine. Uncle likes the showmanship; Cred-Pet nods at the tone.

Ignacio López-Calvo’s environmental crisis chapter flirts with escape velocity. Extractivism in Latin America is an institutional network of permits, pipelines, concessions, militias, banks, insurers. The argument names the sadistic enjoyment behind the despoiling. It is the nearest thing to a lever in the book. And yet the anthology’s format absorbs it back into edifying outrage: case-study as pilgrimage, absolution by citation. The showroom applause is a compost heap that never touches a procurement trail.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun’s ‘hyper-royalism’ is museum-grade dissent, curated exile. The book places it like a reliquary: look, a distant modality of sovereign enjoyment. You learn, you ache, you nod. Then you close the covers and nothing in your own venue’s rules changes. That is how the house preserves the burn without torching the carpets.

Jens Schröter’s ‘joy circuit’ plays the artisanal DJ of systems talk. Circuits, loops, platforms—the lexicon hums. But the board is unplugged. If there is a switch to throw, it remains a metaphor. Again the house gets what it came for: the tingle of ‘system’, the absolution of action-deferred.

Natalia Romé’s ‘uncanny politics’ offers boutique eeriness. It upgrades the room’s taste profile by making unease itself the object. You leave more refined in your dread—not one rule more constrained.

Obed Frausto’s necro-society triptych—acrobat, Lilith, machine—gives the nursery a baroque mortuary. It is splendid, operatic, high-gloss. It is also, at the level that matters here, a mausoleum for levers. Death drive becomes décor. The drive survives; the driver keeps the keys.

Francesca Recchia Luciani’s Nancy-inflected ‘sexistence’ bathes the scene in sacrament. Desire, touch, bodies: all necessary, all real, none joined to any rule you could amend. Sublimation is turned into a mercy that preempts grime.

Then the house prayer: the collective ‘Daydream and emancipation: Against surplus-enjoyment, repression…’ in which six signatures—including Uncle and Cred-Pet—recite the catechism against the very loop they animate. It’s the most Zizekian trick in the repertoire: admit the sin so well that absolution is automatic. If you can name the parallax, you have already done your penance. The choir’s sound is gorgeous; the collection plate overflows; the parish bylaws remain unedited.

Tim Themi’s Lacan-Bataille ‘perverted erotics’ pumps a clean hit of transgression. It’s the club night the house needs to feel alive: crackle, moan, phrase, hush. The shock lands; the calendar stays.

Daniel Bristow’s ‘absence of politics’ is tragic clarity with a limp. He’s right: the drive can swamp the field. The house trembles before the void. Then it poses prettily with it.

Alfredo Eidelsztein’s braid of discourse, saber, jouissance—politibiology/biopolitics—satisfies the graphophiles, those of us who need a handsome tangle before bed. The more exquisite the weave, the safer the switch panel. Mastery, meet nursery.

David Pavón-Cuéllar on capital’s jouissance is the closest thing to a Marxian upholstery job the book allows itself. Surplus-value and plus-de-jouir are cinched tight with pleasing rigor. The critique is flawless; the payroll hums as it did.

Mia Neuhaus paces aggression against the future: a pediatrician for the superego. Necessary realism about pain, clean prognoses; the IV drip of responsibility with just enough bitter to feel medicinal. Prognosis replaces plan; the ward is calm.

Graham Harman’s ‘Levinas way’ of jouissance delivers visiting-prof sheen. Credit glints on the dust jacket. The house purrs as the big names pass like comets. The crib rails stay polished.

And back we come to ‘boyfriend’s leg’, the petit four that proves the point. The book begins with serious ex cathedra talk about material supports; it ends with a quasi-sexy meme autopsied by the high priest. That is the formal truth of the project, and the emails were its primal scene. The “Nazi/Jew” line is not a mere faux pas; it is the obscene kernel of the house’s enjoyment surfacing for a moment in daylight, a gleeful proof that the power to include, exclude, and rename is owned privately even as the public face preaches universality. Parker’s weary line—“I am now sure that I would prefer not to”—is not merely prudish moralism; it is the point at which even a sympathetic insider can no longer pretend the nursery is a workshop.

To say all this is not to deny that the book is often brilliant, moving, inventive. That brilliance is exactly how Hypocritique shelters itself. The trick is simple. First you center enjoyment and announce that you will follow causal chains. Then you re-encode each conflict as a sensual exhibit, as if the very act of enjoying the diagnosis were already the lever. Then you reassemble the circle under two gazes: Uncle’s signature cadence certifying that the room still thinks, and Cred-Pet’s careful curation proving the room is still righteous. The audience leaves high on surplus-information—names, proper nouns, spicy motifs, a tour of modalities—while their institutions leave as they entered. The more exquisitely you speak of surplus-enjoyment, the more you produce it. The more you warn against weirdness, the more you perform weirdness porn. The more you confess the nursery, the more it pays to stay in it.

That is why those two quotes at the top matter. The crack about “Nazi” and “simple Jew” is not a scandal to be denounced and forgotten; it is the imp of the perverse tossing off the house’s secret in an unguarded moment. The “prefer not to” is not cowardice; it is the deadpan ejection of someone who knows that, in this scene, analysis has become the pole-dance of poly-tickle correctness, each contributor winking to Uncle with a flourish while tickling Cred-Pet with a posture of exacting restraint. You don’t have to hate anyone to see it. You just have to admit what the book actually does on the page: not move a single lever while delivering a full program of Jew-essence—again, our polemical pun on jouissance—designed to make the Hypocritique bubble feel like courage.

No institutions will be reformed here. No procedures will be drafted. There will be, instead, the performance of analysis as an art of arousal: a leg, a tickle, a royal cult, a necro-scene, a graph, a Levinas caress. The reader is invited to feel both smarter and braver for consuming the collection, and to leave with clean hands. That is the idiotic baseness of the whole: a house that confesses its sin beautifully as a way to keep it.