ABSTRACT
The four discourses are four social links that Lacan discusses in his Seminar XVII, Seminar XX and Radiophonie. For Zizek, the four discourses illustrates ideological power relations and the university discourse is the one he revisits the most often, as its diagram helps explain the underlying structure of several different hegemonic discourses such as stalinism, capitalism, biopolitics and cynicism. Following Lacan's theory of sexual difference, Zizek divides the four discourses into two sets: the shift from the master's to the university discourse is masculinity, the tension between the hysteric discourse and the analyst's discourse is femininity. Zizek may not always distinguish the sexual pervert from the political pervert but the analyst's discourse surely is to differ from both. There Zizek argues that drive as the agent of the discourse is what propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.
