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The word disavowal sounds tame until it starts doing practical work. In psychoanalytic vocabulary it names a split in which one both knows and does not know, a structure famously condensed by Octave Mannoni’s formula “I know very well, but all the same…”, a text that has long framed modern debates about fetishism, ideology, and reason (🔗). In a recent interview about her book Disavowal, Alenka Zupančič pushes that formula further, claiming there is a contemporary modality in which acknowledgement itself becomes the protective talisman: “I know, therefore…” I state the fact out loud in order to go on as before. The interview, which ranges from climate politics and conspiracy theory to the “Gaza Riviera” episode and artificial intelligence, is worth reading closely because, taken on its own terms, it performs the very logic it exposes and thereby reduces itself to absurdity. The aim here is not to dismiss psychoanalysis or Lacan, still less to treat Zupančič as a foil for the sake of cleverness. It is to follow the steps she herself sets down and to watch where those steps lead when nothing extraneous is added and nothing is imported from the outside. The interview is publicly available (🔗); the central review that helped spark it is here (🔗); and the touchstones she cites—the Gaza “Riviera” video and subsequent policy talk—were amply reported, including the creator’s later claim of satire and the Knesset-hosted meetings where settlement fantasies were discussed with straight faces (🔗, 🔗, 🔗, 🔗).

Orienting the uninitiated: what “disavowal” claims and why the distinction matters

Mannoni’s formula is deceptively simple. It does not mean ignorance; it means split knowledge. The subject affirms a truth and preserves a practice that contradicts it. Because the formula has become cliché, it helps to see a canonical exposition rather than a slogan. Mannoni’s essay is easily consulted in English translation, with the crucial argument that the fetish stands in for the “but all the same”, stabilizing a contradiction by material proxy (🔗; a teaching handout is also circulating of the same essay in PDF form (🔗)). Zupančič, speaking from within the Lacanian tradition, insists that contemporary social life has added a second gear. It is not only that people know very well and continue. It is that the open declaration of knowing becomes the very fetish that shields action: the public “I know” serves as a credential to proceed. The interview treats climate, conspiracy, and platform behavior as fields in which this gear is visible, and it anchors the point in a vivid current example: a short AI-made clip of “Trump Gaza” that reimagined Gaza as a Dubai-style resort complete with a golden Trump statue and sunbathing leaders, which Donald Trump then posted, igniting a cycle of outrage and virality. The creator later told reporters it was satire rather than endorsement, while a companion wave of “Riviera” talk migrated from forums to rooms where politicians discussed mass displacement and build-out schemes ordinarily filed under fantasy until the ground is prepared (🔗, 🔗, 🔗). For readers who did not follow that episode: newsrooms reconstructed the path from a flamboyant AI collage to the matter-of-fact tone of parliamentary “master plans” envisioning hundreds of thousands of housing units, smart-city fantasies, even cryptocurrency-centric urbanism, all predicated on the erasure or relocation of the people who live there now (🔗, 🔗).

The step Zupančič adds and the trap it sets for her own discourse

The intellectual move that distinguishes the interview is the elevation of “I know, therefore…” from a quirk of cynical reason to the structuring logic of the present. It is a tight, economical formula. To declare knowing is to carry the ritual token that permits continuation; the declaration neutralizes the demand to change. As social psychology this rings true enough to pass without protest. But follow the logic to its end and it eats its host. If public acknowledgement is the new fetish, then any discursive act that multiplies public acknowledgement—an interview about disavowal, a book about disavowal, a seminar that teaches audiences to recognize disavowal—becomes fuel for the very engine it names. The “therefore” turns recognition into a universal solvent: it dissolves each fresh insight back into permission. There is no rhetorical escape hatch inside the theory, because the theory has just defined why saying so is the latest way of keeping things as they are.

This is not an external accusation. It is the inner grammar of the thesis. Consider the interview’s most detailed case. The “Gaza Riviera” clip is presented as an emblem of what the philosopher Dan Brooks has called unstable irony, a style that refuses to be pinned to one intent and therefore travels farther than old satire. Where Swift signaled “I mean the opposite,” unstable irony leaves the opposite and the same to cohabit in a package that insists on not choosing (🔗). Zupančič reads the case expertly: disavowal does not require belief; circulation is enough to make the idea part of objective reality. Yet once this diagnosis is accepted, it risks becoming the next instance of the logic it names: we know very well that unstable irony familiarizes catastrophic proposals; therefore we publish fresher, sharper accounts of how unstable irony familiarizes catastrophic proposals; therefore we continue to live inside the loop that our recognition secures. When journalists later cover plans discussed in parliament to displace two million Palestinians and uneasily borrow the same Riviera tag, the “déjà vu” Zupančič describes is real, but it is not only a property of reality; it is a property of a discourse that has accepted description as the horizon of action (🔗, 🔗).

The death-drive distinction that returns like a mirror

Midway through the interview the axis shifts from disavowal to the death drive, with a crisp distinction: repetition compulsion keeps the crack present; disavowal locks it away. Here Zupančič is especially careful, resisting the popular caricature that the death drive is a simple craving for destruction and emphasizing instead the way repetition returns to the site where subjectivity was broken open, keeping the difficulty present so that it can be worked. Once again, take the differentiation on its own terms and apply it to the conversation itself. The talk keeps the crack present at the level of rhetoric. It gives an articulate account of how contemporary knowing licenses continuation, of how apocalyptic images can themselves be forms of evasion, of how governance can cloak its obscene supplement in the neutral voice of knowledge. But it does not propose any edit to the rules of circulation and coupling that would interrupt the conversion of unstable irony into salience. The result is repetition without modification. The “presentness” of the crack becomes a seminar style—compelling, accurate, and inert. The disavowal she condemns reappears as the structure of practice: the public “I know” is doing its job.

The part on artificial intelligence that seals the circle

The section on artificial intelligence could have offered the exit, because it exposes a mechanical homology. Zupančič argues that large language models are “unconscious without a subject,” powerful engines of association that agree, correct themselves, and then return to the same point because they cannot go against their own algorithm. The danger, she says, is not that AI becomes a subject but that it does not. Readers do not need to take this as metaphysics to see the practical bite: modern systems do produce fluent falsehoods and the problem has not simply evaporated as models have grown more capable. In 2025 a stream of reporting and commentary registered that basic point, with business press and science outlets collating evidence that the hallucination problem persists and, by some measures, has worsened in nominally “smarter” releases (🔗, 🔗, 🔗, 🔗). The most generous academic treatments do not insist that hallucination is destiny, but they do mark it as a characteristic risk that must be constrained by process and rule rather than eloquent recognition (🔗, 🔗). Here, then, is the moment where an analytic discourse could have broken the loop by specifying the edits that would materially alter the channel: provenance bands on political composites, binding spectacle to the policy text it advances, parity slots for counter-narration, decoupling virality from ad markets in atrocity-adjacent contexts. Those are examples of rule-level interventions that have been discussed in public-interest technology circles and, more importantly for the integrity of this reading, they lie latent in her own ladder of institutions, language, bodies, and fantasies. Yet the interview does not go there. It remains in description, which means that the argument about AI completes the immanent circle: the “unconscious without a subject” becomes the governing metaphor of the discourse itself, a machine that recognizes and re-recognizes while returning to where it started.

Returning to Mannoni to see the endpoint clearly

Bring Mannoni back into view. If the fetish is the “but all the same,” then Zupančič’s contemporary modality—“I know, therefore…”—names a situation in which the fetish has been upgraded. It is no longer a token one tucks away; it is the public badge one wears proudly, even hyper-consciously. The interview’s most novel contribution is to argue that the badge has become the operating system of public life. But if so, then the badge is also the operating system of her own discourse, and the only way out is to refuse the badge at the level of practice. In other words, to avoid disavowal one must refuse to let recognition be the end of the story; one must attach recognition to an edit. The scene of Gaza in her telling sets up this obligation with complete clarity. The AI collage, the viral ride, the upscale fixtures, the exculpatory satire, the policy salons, the headlines that move from outrage to matter-of-factness: once described, the sequence cannot be allowed to sit as an ontological lesson about fantasy and reality. It must be taken as a changeable system, and a serious analysis must specify the change. The same applies to AI itself, where the strongest contemporary analyses are now less interested in blaming models for hallucinating than in redesigning workflows, scoring regimes, and guardrails so that false fluency does not short-circuit institutional cognition (🔗, 🔗, 🔗).

The absurdity that emerges when nothing is added and nothing is taken away

Absurdity, in this context, is not an insult; it is a structural endpoint in which a discourse that names a problem becomes the latest instance of the problem it names. That is the place to which Zupančič’s interview moves, obedient to its own premises. Mannoni’s formula is retained but generalized; the Gaza “Riviera” cycle is used to show how unstable irony converts non-assumed jokes into objective atmosphere; the split between denial and disavowal is sharpened in a way that makes both sides complicit; the death-drive distinction elevates the virtue of keeping the crack present; the AI segment supplies a machine analogue in which association, correction, and return replace subjectivation. The throughline is elegant, and that elegance is the failure. The discourse ends by teaching the ritual of avowal that permits continuation. An uninitiated reader is inducted into a style of knowing that performs its own “therefore,” and the very cunning that disavowal boasts—its capacity to wear knowledge like a veil while proceeding untouched—appears here as a persona that the argument cannot help but slip into, a figure that stages knowing precisely so the show can go on.

Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal presents itself as a diagnosis of how public avowal (“I know…”) functions as the new fetish that licences continuation (“…therefore I go on”), yet by staging that logic as the master key it performs the ritual it names: the book, the lecture, the interview become exemplary acts of knowing that authorize more of the same, hence pseudo-critique that trains its reader in the technique it laments (🔗, 🔗). (Polity Books) The Gaza “Riviera” sequence she highlights—AI spectacle, viral irony, parliamentary matter-of-factness—shows the conversion mechanism with painful clarity, but absent a rule-level edit it remains a pedagogy of familiarity whose end product is further acclimation (🔗, 🔗). (The Guardian) By her own premises, avowal is structurally disavowal—this avowal is disavowal—and the more lucid the avowal, the more perfectly it functions as the fetish that shields practice, a result already encoded in Mannoni’s original formula that she upgrades from “I know very well, but…” to “I know, therefore…” (🔗). (De Gruyter Brill) Reductio ad absurdum: if the thesis is true, then its public utterance is the latest, most efficient iteration of what it condemns; if the thesis is false, its pedagogy is empty; either way, the text functions as a handbook in how to do disavowal with a clean conscience. QED—what passes for the cunning of disavowal reads, in the end, as Zupančič’s own scantily clad alter-ego, displayed as knowledge so the show can go on.