Interpassivity

Interpassivity inverts the familiar concept of interactivity. Where interactivity means active engagement with a medium, interpassivity means delegating the passive reception to a device while the subject retains credit for the experience. The VCR recording a film you will never watch; the canned laughter laughing at the sitcom on your behalf; the Tibetan prayer wheel spinning prayers while you attend to other matters—in each case, the subject's experience is outsourced to a mechanism, and the outsourcing is felt not as loss but as liberation. AI-generated output is interpassive in Žižek's precise sense: the user has not written the text but has directed it, shaped it, specified parameters. The experience is neither active (she did not write) nor passive (she did not merely receive). It is interpassive—creative labor delegated to the machine while the user occupies the position of creator. She is the author who does not write, the director who does not act. The enjoyment interpassivity provides is the masterly gesture without the risk: commanding powerful