San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

For this session, we’ll be reading Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, chapters “How Marx Invented the Symptom” and “Che Vuoi?”. These texts outline Žižek’s Lacanian rereading of ideology.

• In “How Marx Invented the Symptom,” Žižek argues that Marx’s notion of ideology parallels the Freudian symptom. A symptom is not just a distortion hiding truth; it is the very site where truth is inscribed in distorted form. Likewise, ideology is not simply an illusion covering reality but a structure through which social reality itself is organized. This reframes ideology as constitutive, not merely deceptive.
• In “Che Vuoi?” (“What do you want?”), Žižek examines the role of the Big Other and the opacity of the Other’s desire in sustaining ideological structures. The subject confronts the enigma of what the Other wants, and this uncertainty anchors fantasy and power. Ideology operates through this enigmatic address, structuring desire and identification.

Together, these chapters show how ideology functions less as a set of false beliefs than as a network of fantasies and symptoms that structure social reality itself.

For this session, we’ll read Nietzsche’s “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”

Nietzsche attacks historicism and the “consumption” of the past that enfeebles action. He distinguishes three uses of history—monumental (models for greatness), antiquarian (piety for origins), critical (judging and breaking with the past)—and shows how each turns poisonous when unmoored from present vitality. Life needs forgetting and the unhistorical as much as memory; the criterion is whether history serves life by strengthening the “plastic power” to interpret, incorporate, and transform the past. He condemns scholarly pedantry, museum-culture, and moralized objectivity that produce weak, reactive subjects. The task: curb historical excess, deploy history as an instrument of creation, and restore the conditions for future-making.