Status Updates From Quantum History: A New Mate...

I take the Piccadilly tube line in London, I notice that one of the end stations is “Cockfosters,” a name which give rise to obvious dirty association (fostering my cock). A Jungian approach would decipher in this name a deeper urge to strengthen my potency (if I am a man), as if sexuality is a substantial psychic passion that seeks to express itself in all possible everyday situations.

Does this “astonishing thing” not come close to what Saussure called differentiality? If the identity of an entity resides only in its differences from other entities, then the fact that something doesn’t happen (at a place in the structure where it was expected to happen) counts as a positive fact.

Is exactly the same distinction not at work in how we consider Stalinism? For many, the rise of Stalinism was necessary...

We can already guess what awaits us at the end of this road: Nagarjuna’s Mahayana Buddhist ontology. If all reality is perspectival, if all properties of an entity arise out of its interaction with other entities, and if all this holds for the entirety of reality which is not composed of things that interact but of ephemeral events that momentarily pop up and disappear...

The mystery of the role of observation in a quantum collapse is homologous to the mystery of human communication: why is communication—a dialogue—never just between two agents, why is a third agency, an impassive observer (Lacan’s “big Other”), always necessary?

Does this parallel not rely on an all too simple notion of progress? Do we not now live precisely in an era of big regress, of a total disorientation? Plus is it not the case that, in the course of (historical) time, the very standards of progress are changing?

Žižek is on absolute top (borderline problematic) form here. Perfect balance between complex explorations of relational quantum mechanics and how it applies to reality/subjectivity, and extremely out of pocket analyses of the current political and socioeconomic climate. His arguments tickle my brain 🧠