Interrogating Interpassivity
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The concept of interpassivity as developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek has become ubiquitous throughout many disciplines: media, sociology, technology studies, gamming, public spaces and so on. Interpassivity is pitted against the more common understanding of intersubjectivity to worry the question of agency and belief in the symbolic order as it is remains covered over by the glass bell of capitalism. In this essay, I argue that this concept is much too simplistic and restricted in its machinic repetition, borrowing too heavily from the Lacanian understanding of desire as lack, and much too pessimistic for any future thought of challenging capitalism. This essay takes the format of a series of numbered points. Such a structure helps facilitate the multiple issues that present themselves with this concept. Generally, speaking, this essay is more a query into the difficulties with the concept of interpassivity, and some of the possible other directions that this concept can take us, especially away from its deeply Lacanian roots, and into a more Deleuze & Guattarian frame of mind.