A Critique of Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-04-01 · 2:06:44 · 15,885 words
philosophy-generalhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologyfascism-populismrace-antisemitismcinema-art-culturesexuality-gendercapitalismconsciousness-mindscience-physicstechnology-ai-cyberspaceliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theologysubjectivity
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture that opens with speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant), arguing they remain unwittingly transcendental despite claiming to overcome Kant. He defends a Hegelian path beyond transcendentalism, that the epistemological obstacle (the gap between subject and reality) is itself constitutive of reality, and illustrates this via fantasy, fetishism, rape trauma, and Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho. The second major movement is a detailed reckoning with Heidegger's Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), exposing the internal logic of Heidegger's anti-Semitism as 'transcendental racism' and arguing the catastrophic outcome is immanent to his philosophical greatness, not separable from it. A concluding section addresses sexuality, biogenetics, political correctness, capitalism, Stalinism, and charity, drawing on Lacan, Benjamin Libet, Sloterdijk, and various cultural examples.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Meillassoux's label for the transcendental thesis that objects are always already correlated to our act of thinking and cannot be thought independently of the subject.
Lacanian term invoked here as the traumatic kernel inscribed not in reality-out-there but in the very distortion of perception, exemplified by the inconsistency of a rape victim's testimony as proof of genuine trauma.
Lacan's object-cause of desire, distinguished here between the object of conscious fantasy and the utterly estranged object imposed from outside, with the imposition of one's own fantasy-object being the most humiliating.
as “fantasy as objective-subjective formation”
Fantasy is not what you consciously dream about but the unconscious network of how things appear to you, too intense libidinally to be consciously assumed or integrated; exemplified by Dennett's distinction between how things appear and how they objectively effectively appear.
as “objective appearance”
Distinguished from both 'reality' and 'subjective illusion': things appear, but not subjectively to a conscious subject, the way the fantasmatic shot of Madeleine in Vertigo appears beyond what Scottie can consciously assume.
Marx's concept, read by Žižek as an illusion inscribed in objective social reality itself: subjects don't consciously believe in commodity magic but enact it in practice ('they know not what they do, but they are doing it').
Implied in the discussion of commodity fetishism: the illusion has material existence and is constitutive of the social order, remove the fiction and reality itself disintegrates.
Žižek's coinage for the premodern/animist conception of nature where all spirituality is immanent and material, magic, ghosts, spirits all belong to this world with no transcendent beyond, illustrated by the world of The Hobbit films.
as “transcendental dimension”
The Kantian idea that reality is always mediated through a structured network of subjectivity, not idealism, but the recognition that subjects are themselves part of reality and never observe it from a neutral nowhere.
Foucault's term for different transcendental horizons of meaning within which phenomena (like madness) appear as what they are, invoked to show that the very distinction between reality and illusion is historically variable.
Lacan's term for the traumatic, painful process by which a human animal is incorporated into language and culture, not a privilege of men; phallus is the signifier of castration itself.
Heidegger's term for the event of disclosure, a change not in things themselves but in the horizonal pre-understanding through which reality always already appears.
as “the obstacle is its own solution”
Žižek's formulation of the basic Hegelian trick: the epistemological obstacle (the gap between individual and collective, or subject and reality) is itself what is most real, not something to overcome but the very structure of reality.
as “power of absolute negativity”
Hegel's term for the mind's capacity to tear apart what belongs together in nature, Žižek invokes it as the heart of the problem of how spirit can emerge from flat material reality.
Heidegger's term for the spirit of technological machination and nihilistic calculation, used by Heidegger to condemn both Western modernity and, catastrophically, 'world Jewry' as its embodiment.
Žižek's diagnosis of Heidegger's anti-Semitism: not biological racism but a spiritual-metaphysical condemnation of Jews as the embodiment of the nihilistic technological attitude (Machenschaft), which paradoxically preserves and deepens racism.
as “Selbstvernichtung (Jewish self-annihilation)”
Heidegger's obscene pseudo-Hegelian reading of the Holocaust as Jewish self-annihilation, the Nazis merely turned the essentially Jewish spirit of technological destruction back against empirical Jews, which Žižek exposes as the most horrifying implication of the Black Notebooks.
as “Zionism as the last form of anti-Semitism”
Žižek's provocation (for which pages were cut from his German book) that Zionist defenders of Israeli state politics reproduce the structure of anti-Semitism when they attack Jewish dissenters as not 'really one of us' and motivated only by money and fame.
Žižek's critique of Marx: Marx's communist vision is capitalist dynamics without the form of capital, capitalism without its antagonisms, rather than a genuinely immanent critique that would discover what is wrong from within the logic of capital itself.
Hollywood industry verb (which Žižek elevates to a concept) for adding pseudo-deep Jungian spiritual meaning to an action script, 'to Campbellize' a film means adding quasi-mythological depth per Joseph Campbell's hero-journey schema.
as “freedom as negativity (Libet)”
Drawing on Libet's free-will experiments, Žižek locates free will not in positive decisions (which are neurologically pre-empted) but in the capacity to block or veto an already-initiated action, a Hegelian displacement of freedom into pure negativity.
as “charity as bribery”
Žižek's thesis that liberal charity functions as a strategy of paying the poor to remain invisible, 'give five dollars a month and you can not only forget about the problem, you can feel good about it.'
Stories he reaches for 12
A scientist visitor asks Bohr why he has a horseshoe above his door, surely he doesn't believe in such superstitions. Bohr replies he was told it works even if you don't believe in it. Žižek uses this to illustrate ideological fetishism: we practice the ritual without believing in it.
“I know I know it's not true, I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if I don't believe in it. That's what we do on the market.”
Libet measured brain readiness potentials and showed that before a subject makes a conscious decision to move, the brain has already initiated the action, but Libet himself, in a Hegelian move, located free will not in positive decisions but in the capacity to veto an already-initiated action.
“Libet believes in the freedom of the will and in a wonderfully Hegelian way he locates it at a different point — what you can do is to block it. Negativity is freedom.”
Žižek recounts going to Cuba as a tourist, turning on the TV for a nap break to find Castro giving what he announced as 'five minutes of remarks'; five hours later Castro was still going. Žižek uses this to apologize in advance for talking too much and to invite interruptions.
“I just wanted to see what they have on TV, and Fidel dropped by, said something like just five minutes, comrades. Five hours later I opened up the TV, he was still going on.”
Adorno shows you cannot deduce society from individuals nor individuals from social totality, but rather than concluding we are trapped in antinomy, he performs the Hegelian trick: this very gap between levels IS what characterizes contemporary society.
“What is the very thing that appears to us as an epistemological obstacle — the gap between individual and collective — is something historically mediated that defines our society itself.”
Heidegger replaced biological racism with a spiritual-metaphysical one: Jews are not biologically inferior but embody the nihilistic technological spirit (Machenschaft) of Western modernity. His defenders note he rejected biological racism, but Žižek shows this substitution makes his anti-Semitism more systematic and more philosophical.
“Jews are of course not biologically inferior but they are condemned because they embody a certain spiritual stance which is the stance of technological manipulation exploitation.”
In the restaurant scene, almost all critics describe Scottie's view of Madeleine as a subjective point-of-view shot; but it is too intense to be that, it is an 'objective subjective formation,' a fantasmatic image he cannot consciously assume or integrate.
“It is a subjective shot. It's not she in reality, it's clearly a fantasmatic shot. But it's too intense, too strong. He cannot...”
Bentham distinguishes real entities from symbolic fictions, then admits you cannot erase the fictions and retain reality, reality depends on fictions. This supports Žižek's point that ideological illusion is constitutive of material social reality.
“We can make this distinction, but you cannot then drop fictions and keep only reality. If you erase fictions, you lose reality also.”
Žižek enjoys the scenario that if CERN successfully reproduces Big Bang conditions and triggers a new Big Bang, all reality disintegrates, they would be proven right, but in a very short time there would be no one left to whom they could prove it.
“They will be proven right but there will be no one in a very short time to whom you can prove that you were right.”
The producers who later made King Kong visited the USSR and saw the constructivist model for the Palace of Soviets, a gigantic skyscraper with a colossal statue of Lenin on top. They said: replace Lenin with an ape and you have King Kong. The iconic image of capitalist cinema originates in Soviet constructivist ambition.
“They saw this famous constructivist model it was never built for the Palace of Soviets, a skyscraper and on the top gigantic statue of Lenin. They said: replace Lenin with ape and you have the ultimate.”
Sloterdijk argues in his globalization book that global capitalism is also a literal globe: the privileged live under an invisible dome where they cannot see the misery outside, even if they know it rationally, like the film Elysium or Logan's Run.
“The privileged live under a globe even if it's an invisible globe and we don't really see what is outside even if we think it's the logic of Elysium.”
Two or three years before the Titanic sank, a novel was published about a giant transatlantic ship called 'Titan' that drowns on its first voyage, the catastrophe was already present in the collective imaginary, which is why the real event was so shocking: not because it was unexpected but because it was expected.
“It was such a shock not because it was unexpected but precisely because it was expected.”
When Scottie discovers Madeleine was always already Judy in disguise, he doesn't merely lose Madeleine, he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before. A paradoxical, more radical loss.
“He doesn't just lose Madeleine but he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before.”
Works invoked 22
Capital book
Specifically the supplement to the first edition on commodity fetishism, praised as 'still actual today'; the formula 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' is central to Žižek's account of ideology.
Vertigo film
Described as 'officially the latest opinion poll of Sight and Sound the greatest film of all time'; the restaurant scene and Madeleine's fantasmatic appearance are central examples of objective appearance and fantasy as objective-subjective formation.
Psycho film
Used for the comparison between the shock of Marion's shower murder (pure shock) and the more disturbing Arbogast murder (anticipated yet more shocking) to illustrate expectation, suspense, and the logic of trauma.
Elysium film
Used alongside Logan's Run to illustrate Sloterdijk's 'invisible globe' thesis, the privileged living in a sealed world, unable to see the misery outside.
Star Wars film
Mentioned as the primary example of Joseph Campbell's hero-journey influence on Hollywood, the template for 'Campbellization.'
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own recent large book; chapters two and three address the question of how to move beyond the transcendental dimension, he directs students there for follow-up.
After Finitude book
Meillassoux's founding text of speculative realism; Žižek uses it to define the target (correlationism) before arguing speculative realists fail to escape the transcendental horizon they attack.
Écrits book
Lacan's collected essays, specifically a text on [unintelligible subject] cited for Lacan's point that what is provocative in Freud is not the irrationality but the discursive rationality of drives.
Zardoz film
Mentioned alongside Logan's Run and Elysium as an illustration of the sealed-globe logic of privileged separation from global poverty.
Dennett uses the distinction between how things appear to you and how things objectively effectively appear to you 'in a mocking critical way'; Žižek takes it seriously as the key to the concept of fantasy.
Mentioned as the site where Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe locate the Mitsein concept as a potential leftist corrective to Heidegger's political failure.
Event book
Žižek's own small book on Heidegger's Ereignis; described as discussing the problem of how to move beyond the ultimate horizon of the event of meaning.
Gulliver's Travels book
Swift's satirical account of the circular origin of language (the bag-of-models story), called a 'wonderful joke' that illustrates the Lacanian point that language is always already presupposed.
Theory of Fictions book
Bentham's work (a Verso selection, now long sold out) distinguishing real entities from symbolic fictions, then admitting fictions cannot be removed without losing reality, a key support for the constitutive role of ideology.
Foucault's work describing the epistemic shift in the perception of madness from demonic/sacred to medical, used as a paradigmatic example of how transcendental horizons structure what counts as real.
King Kong film
Used in the anecdote about the Palace of Soviets model, the producers saw the Soviet constructivist design (Lenin on a skyscraper) and said 'replace Lenin with an ape'; the iconic image thus has Soviet origins.
Jameson's book on structuralism, described as 'not his best book'; used ironically, for Lacan the symbolic is not a prison-house but a torture-house.
Heidegger's private notebooks published in Germany; Žižek analyzes them at length to show the internal logic of Heidegger's anti-Semitism, the concept of Selbstvernichtung applied to the Holocaust, and the incoherence of redemptive readings.
Democracy of Objects book
Levi Bryant's freely downloadable book, part of the speculative realist movement Žižek subjects to immanent critique.
Žižek didn't like the film much but cites a dialogue between Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons quoting statistics about Victorian prostitution, used to refute the idea that Freud's era was defined by sexual repression.
Marx's text describing the logic of history where forces of production create crises resolved by revolutionary changes in relations of production, Žižek argues this mechanical logic does not apply to capitalism, which is in crisis from the very beginning.
Logan's Run film
Paired with Elysium and Zardoz as examples of films illustrating the separation of a privileged class from the misery they cannot see.
People invoked 47
Invoked as the representative of the holist/organicist sociological approach, society as primordial fact, individuals as derivative, contrasted with individualist phenomenology in Adorno's antinomy.
Jonathan Swift positive
Cited for the Gulliver's Travels account of language's circular/impossible origin, a 'wonderful joke' that illustrates Lacan's point that language is always already here.
Naomi Wolf positive
Quoted for the insight that politically correct sexuality with full respect and no harassment would look like a contract, used to support Žižek's claim that seduction is constitutively politically incorrect.
Paul Feyerabend negative
Invoked to mark a position Žižek explicitly rejects: the 'anything goes' relativism that claims scientific results are simply historical constructs.
Described as a kind of mystical left Heideggerian who has since been somewhat forgotten.
Žižek's friend in Israel who was attacked by Zionist defenders in the exact same terms that 19th-century anti-Semites used against Jews, used to illustrate Žižek's thesis that Zionism reproduces anti-Semitism's structure.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for defining his structuralism as 'transcendentalism without subject', supporting Žižek's claim that structuralism is a form of transcendentalism.
Blaise Pascal positive
Invoked for the distinction between the 'gray silent infinite world of mathematical objects' and the human values we project onto it, illustrating the modern split between nature and meaning.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited approvingly for pointing out that direct criminalization of Heidegger is too easy and avoids the true traumatic problem of thinking through his greatness and his catastrophe together.
Lee Kuan Yew positive
Recently deceased (at time of talk); described as the inventor of authoritarian capitalism and the first to show the global direction we are all moving toward, not an Asian exception but a universal model.
Paired with Nancy in the attempt to locate a leftist-compatible element in Heidegger's Mitsein against his political catastrophe.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for the Hegelian trick applied to social theory: the antinomy between individualist and holist approaches to society is not an epistemological obstacle but constitutive of society itself.
Žižek is traveling to meet Brown (then California governor) at Stanford but Brown is not certain he will come.
Listed among left Heideggerians; Žižek argues they are not simply misreading Heidegger nor closet fascists, there is no single essential stable core in Heidegger's thinking.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the Real as trauma inscribed in distortion, symbolic castration, early Lacan's transcendentalism of the symbolic order, late Lacan's complication via the Real, and the insight that the unconscious is rational and structured like language.
Mentioned alongside Lacan as a strong structuralist whose position can be characterized as transcendentalist.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Despite violently opposing structuralism, Deleuze defined his position as 'transcendental empiricism', further evidence that the transcendental cannot be simply bypassed.
Met the previous day at New York Public Library; despite political disagreement (Žižek jokes 'when my people take power you go to gulag') they are now good friends. Invoked in context of understanding Stalinism.
Daniel Dennett positive
Invoked for his distinction in Consciousness Explained between how things appear to you and how things objectively effectively appear to you, used only in a mocking critical way by Dennett, but Žižek takes it seriously as the key to understanding fantasy.
Judith Butler positive
Described as Žižek's 'eternal friend enemy' who agreed at least up to a point with his claims about masochist fantasy and rape; Žižek notes Lacan anticipates Butler's historicization of Oedipus but more rigorously.
Heidegger allegedly wrote an enthusiastic letter to his wife upon Brandt's election as German chancellor ('finally we got rid of those Schwarze, the Christian democrats').
Joseph Campbell negative
Jungian whose hero-journey schema was key influence on George Lucas; 'Campbellizing' became a Hollywood verb for adding pseudo-deep spiritual content, Žižek treats this as ideology of false depth.
Graham Harman negative
Harman 'attacked Žižek ferociously' for claiming philosophy is transcendental; Žižek argues Harman's own object-oriented distinctions just describe another transcendental image of the universe.
John D. Caputo negative
Left Heideggerian who attacked Žižek for focusing too much on capitalism; Žižek's friend coined 'caputolism' as a joke for Caputo's watered-down reformist vision.
Fredric Jameson positive
His Prison-House of Language invoked ironically: for Lacan, language is not so much a prison-house as a torture-house.
Described as 'my friend Julian Assange', used as an example of inverted police logic where the victim's own testimony (denying rape) was overridden by police insistence.
Mentioned as the filmmaker primarily influenced by Joseph Campbell's hero-journey schema for Star Wars.
Michel Foucault positive
Invoked as a Heideggerian who uses 'episteme' for different transcendental horizons, exemplified by the history of madness, the shift from demonic/sacred interpretation to medical pathology.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as a friend and as 'more crazy than me provoking with words'; praised for the critique of biogenetics and for the invisible globe argument about global inequality; criticized by Habermasians as a defender of Nazi eugenics (Žižek defends him).
Martin Heidegger positive
Treated as a mega-great philosopher whose work on Ereignis, historicity of transcendental horizons, and critique of technology is genuinely important, but whose anti-Semitism is not separable from his philosophy; Žižek refuses both simple criminalization and redemption.
Together with Lacoue-Labarthe, tried to rehabilitate Heidegger by isolating a leftist element in the notion of Mitsein, a move Žižek takes seriously without endorsing.
Emmanuel Faye negative
French critic who proposes to directly criminalize Heidegger and strip him of academic status; Žižek rejects this as avoiding the true traumatic problem.
Cited as a war criminal who nonetheless (per private writings) possessed authentic appreciation of late Beethoven quartets, used to illustrate the traumatic problem that great culture and monstrous evil can coexist.
Jeremy Bentham positive
Usually dismissed as a vulgar utilitarian but cited here as a 'great philosopher' for his Theory of Fictions: the insight that fictions cannot be erased while keeping reality, constitutive role of fiction.
Mentioned as Michael Sorkin's wife in the context of the King Kong/Palace of Soviets anecdote.
Quentin Meillassoux negative
Žižek targets Meillassoux's concept of correlationism and argues speculative realism attacks a straw man while remaining unwittingly transcendental.
Levi Bryant negative
Author of Democracy of Objects, freely downloadable; Žižek discusses him as part of the speculative realist movement he critiques.
Michael Sorkin positive
Husband of Joan Copjec; explained to Žižek the origin of the Stalinist Baroque's setback skyscraper style in New York zoning law, used in the King Kong/Palace of Soviets anecdote.
Richard Wolin negative
Habermasian who previously accused Žižek of implying that America 'got what it deserved' on 9/11; also one of those who propose simply criminalizing Heidegger, which Žižek rejects as too easy.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo (now officially the greatest film of all time per Sight and Sound) and Psycho are central examples throughout, used to illustrate fantasy, objective appearance, paradoxical loss, and shock.
Paul Veyne positive
Invoked for the argument that ancient Greeks did not believe literally in their gods, supporting the transcendentalist point that the reality/illusion distinction is itself historically variable.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Given 'great respect' but criticized for having a theoretical framework too weak to think what went wrong in the 20th century; the Habermasian trick of accusing analysts of fascism of being fascinated by it blocks genuine thought.
Benjamin Libet positive
Berkeley neuroscientist whose readiness potential experiments showing brain pre-empts conscious decision are invoked; Žižek praises Libet's own Hegelian displacement of free will into the capacity to block/veto.
Had near-divine status in 1920s Soviet Union; the assembly line seen as the ideal of efficient production, used to illustrate Stalinist fascination with American capitalism.
Karl Marx positive
Praised for the notion of commodity fetishism as illusion inscribed in material practice; criticized for having a communist vision that is essentially capitalism without its antagonisms (immanent normativity failure).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's central philosophical resource throughout; specifically the Hegelian trick (the obstacle is its own solution), anti-Platonism of examples, and the logic of Christianity as self-separation of the divine.
Immanuel Kant positive
Kant's introduction of the transcendental dimension is described as one of the greatest breaks in the history of philosophy; Žižek defends the transcendental before moving beyond it.
What it argues
transcendentalism vs. naive realism — Kant, Heidegger, and the subject-object gapHeidegger's Black Notebooks and the internal logic of philosophical anti-Semitismfantasy as objective-subjective formation beyond conscious assumptioncommodity fetishism as illusion inscribed in material practicethe Hegelian trick: the obstacle is its own solutionsexuality as constitutively twisted and politically incorrectbiogenetics, free will, and the Libet experiment
Dialectical moves 12
“The very distortion of the rape victim's testimony is the proof that she was really subjected to a traumatic experience — what looks like an epistemological failure is the mark of the Real.”
Apparent unreliability of the traumatized witness is inverted: coherence would be suspicious; incoherence proves the encounter with the Real.
“If you secretly fantasize about something and it is brutally imposed on you from outside, it is much worse than if something is imposed on you that you didn't dream about.”
The common assumption that having one's wish fulfilled should ease the trauma is reversed: the coincidence of fantasy and external imposition is the maximum humiliation.
“The shot of Madeleine in Vertigo is described by almost all readers as a subjective point-of-view shot, but it is not — it is too intense for Scottie to consciously assume; it is an objective subjective formation.”
What appears to be the most subjective (fantasy, point-of-view) turns out to be an objective structure that exceeds the subject's ability to own it.
“At the end of Vertigo, Scottie doesn't just lose Madeleine — he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before.”
Loss is redoubled: the beloved was always-already not there, making the loss a loss of something that was never possessed, a more paradoxical, more traumatic movement.
“Marx's formula: 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' — they know not what they are doing but they are doing it. The illusion is not in how they perceive reality but in what they do.”
Commodity fetishism is not a cognitive error superimposed on practice but inscribed into the practice itself; ideology is in the deed, not in the belief.
“The true problem is not how to reach the thing-in-itself beyond illusion, but the opposite: how can something like illusion appear at all in the midst of meaningless reality?”
The epistemological question is inverted from 'how do we escape illusion?' to 'how does illusion arise?', illusion becomes the positive problem, reality the negative backdrop.
“The obstacle — the gap between individual and collective approaches to society — is not something to overcome; it is what characterizes our society as such.”
Adorno/Hegel move: the epistemological antinomy is itself an ontological fact about capitalist society; the impasse is the answer.
“For Christianity, you overcome the gap from God not by bridging it but by locating the gap itself into the divine: our separation from God is God's separation from himself.”
The Hegelian Christian move: the finite subject's experience of abandonment (Christ on the cross) is itself the highest expression of the infinite, the gap is the point of unity.
“Heidegger's critique of Nazism is a critique of actually existing Nazism on behalf of its own inner metaphysical greatness — 'National Socialism is a barbaric principle, wherein lies its essence and its capacity for greatness.'”
Heidegger's disillusionment is not a move away from Nazism but a radicalization of it, he condemned the Nazis for not being Nazi enough.
“The highest act of politics (per Heidegger's obscene pseudo-Hegelian gloss on the Holocaust) consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation.”
Žižek exposes the logic: Heidegger reads the Holocaust as Jewish self-destruction, because Jews embodied the technological spirit that ultimately destroyed them, a diabolical inversion that makes the victims the agents of their own murder.
“For Libet, freedom is not in positive decisions (already neurologically pre-empted) but in the capacity to block them — negativity is freedom.”
Free will is relocated from spontaneous action to the veto: the zero-level free act is saying no, stopping, sabotaging, a Hegelian displacement of freedom into pure negation.
“The masochist-spiritualist who wants to erase all traces of self talks only about himself — the very practice of self-annihilation reproduces and inflates the self.”
The attempt to negate the ego exemplifies the Hegelian principle that an idea undermines itself through its actualization.
Claims 22
rejects
Speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists remain unwittingly transcendental — they merely describe a certain image of the universe without being able to claim it is how things are independently of any horizon of disclosure.object-oriented ontology / speculative realism (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Meillassoux)
asserts
The very distortion of a rape victim's testimony is proof of genuine trauma — precisely because trauma (the Real) is inscribed into the distortion of perception, not in what can be reported neutrally.Lacanian Real / trauma and testimony
asserts
Having one's own unconscious fantasy brutally imposed from outside is far worse than having something imposed that one never desired — the humiliation lies precisely in the confrontation with one's innermost secret.fantasy, desire, and the ethics of rape
asserts
A rapist who claims the victim 'secretly wanted it' should be punished even more severely, because there is nothing more humiliating than having one's secret fantasy realized by external force.fantasy and legal-ethical consequences
asserts
Human sexuality is constitutively twisted and politically incorrect — there is no authentic 'politically correct' sexuality free of distortion, because distortion is original to sexuality itself.sexuality and politics
asserts
Every act of seduction necessarily contains a moment that can retroactively be proclaimed harassment — there is no pure consensual initiation that was never an imposition.sexuality, consent, and political correctness
asserts
Fantasy is not subjective in the sense of conscious daydreaming; it is an objective-subjective formation — the unconscious network of how things appear to you that you cannot consciously assume.fantasy / psychoanalytic theory
asserts
Commodity fetishism is not a subjective misperception layered onto objective reality; rather, the illusion is inscribed into the objective network of commodity exchange itself — remove the fiction and reality disintegrates.Marxist commodity fetishism
asserts
The Hegelian path beyond transcendentalism does not try to reach the thing-in-itself directly but shows that the very gap between subject and reality is what is most real.Hegel vs. Kant / moving beyond transcendentalism
asserts
For Hegel, every idea is undermined not by a better idea but by its own exemplification — actualizing an idea shows how it refutes itself.Hegelian dialectics / the role of examples
asserts
Heidegger's anti-Semitism is not an external blemish separable from his philosophy; something must already be wrong in his ideas if Jews can function as the exemplary instance of modern technological nihilism.Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his philosophy
rejects
Simply excommunicating or criminalizing Heidegger is an all-too-easy way out that avoids the truly traumatic problem: he was a great philosopher and the catastrophic outcome is immanent to that greatness.how to respond to Heidegger's Black Notebooks
asserts
Heidegger's disappointment with Nazism was not a rejection of Nazism's barbarism but a critique of actually existing Nazism on behalf of its own metaphysical 'inner greatness' — he blamed the Nazis for succumbing to the same technological nihilism as the West.Heidegger's relationship to Nazism
asserts
Heidegger's reading of the Holocaust as Jewish self-annihilation (Selbstvernichtung) — the idea that Jews who embodied technological destruction were finally destroyed by their own logic — is the most horrifying implication of the Black Notebooks.Heidegger's Black Notebooks / Holocaust
rejects
Habermas's theoretical framework is not strong enough to think what went wrong in the 20th century — the Habermasian trick of accusing those who analyze fascism too closely of being fascinated by it blocks genuine analysis.Habermas and the analysis of fascism
asserts
Marx's vision of communism is essentially capitalism without the form of capital — he fails to develop an immanent normativity, and Stalinism is a manifestation of this failure.Marx's communism and its limits
asserts
Capitalism is in crisis from the very beginning and that is precisely why it works — crisis is not an obstacle but the engine of capitalist self-renewal.capitalist crisis
asserts
Biogenetic manipulation of ethical attitudes reveals that even 'authentic' ethical dispositions are already just a particular chemical-genetic configuration — undermining the very concept of moral authenticity.biogenetics and ethics
asserts
Free will, per Libet's experiments, is not in positive decisions but in the capacity to say no — to block or veto an action already neurologically initiated; negativity is freedom.free will and the Libet experiment
rejects
Political correctness does not overcome racism or sexism but preserves and eroticizes it through endless introspective self-monitoring — a truly post-racist society would be one where you can 'talk dirty' without it working in a sexist way.political correctness
asserts
Charity is a strategy of bribery — paying the poor to remain invisible and allowing the donor to feel virtuous while changing nothing structural.charity and global inequality
asserts
Lee Kuan Yew invented authoritarian capitalism and is the true harbinger of the global direction — not an Asian exception but the global rule emerging everywhere.authoritarian capitalism / Singapore model
Quotes 19
“The very distortion of her or his report is I think the proof that she or he was really subjected to a traumatic experience.”Slavoj Žižek · trauma inscribed in distortion of testimony
“If you secretly fantasize about something, and if this what you dream about is brutally imposed on you from outside, it's much worse than if something is imposed on you that you didn't dream about.”Slavoj Žižek · realization of fantasy as maximum humiliation
“This is the best definition of nightmare: to realize your dreams.”unknown · the horror of wish-fulfillment
“Fantasy is not subjective in the sense of what you are dreaming about. Fantasy is the unconscious network of how things appear to you, but in your conscious you cannot assume it.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy as objective-subjective formation
“Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es — they know not what they are doing but they are doing it. The illusion is not in how they perceive reality but in what they do.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism as practical ideology
“We can make this distinction, but you cannot then drop fictions and keep only reality. If you erase fictions, you lose reality also.”Slavoj Žižek · constitutive role of fiction in social reality
“Human sexuality is effectively in itself twisted, politically incorrect. You cannot isolate some pure authentic full mutual recognition sexuality and then put the blame on society for its distortion.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as constitutively perverse
“The true danger of technology is not that we will all kill ourselves through some experiment which will take the wrong turn. For Heidegger the true danger is in the technological attitude as such. The catastrophe already happened.”Slavoj Žižek · Heidegger on technology — ontological catastrophe already occurred
“National Socialism is a barbaric principle, wherein lies its essence and its capacity for greatness.”Slavoj Žižek · Heidegger's praise of Nazi barbarism as metaphysical greatness
“The obstacle — the problem — becomes its own solution. What is most real is the very gap that separates me from reality.”Slavoj Žižek · basic Hegelian trick — the impasse is the answer
“Our separation from God is a separation of God from himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian Christianity — the gap is within the divine
“For Hegel, every example every actual situation that exemplifies an idea secretly already undermines it. There is always more in an example of the idea than this idea itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's anti-Platonism — examples exceed and undermine ideas
“What Heidegger reproached Hitler for was not the Nazi stance as such but the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to the technological nihilist Machenschaft — becoming like America.”Slavoj Žižek · Heidegger's disillusionment as radicalization, not rejection
“There is no worse antisemite than a Jewish person — but wait, in what precise sense do you mean this?”Slavoj Žižek · Zionism reproducing anti-Semitic structure
“Capitalism is in crisis from the very beginning and that's why it works so well. The more discord, the more the system is pushed to invent something new.”Slavoj Žižek · crisis as engine of capitalism
“Negativity is freedom — you can block it. The zero level free act is not 'I do this' but to say no, to stop it, sabotage.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom located in veto/negation not positive choice
“Charity is a strategy of bribery — you give five dollars a month and you can not only forget about the problems, you can even feel good about it.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological bribery
“Lee Kuan Yew invented authoritarian capitalism — he was the first to show the direction where we are all moving.”Slavoj Žižek · Singapore model as global future
“What is so provocative in Freud is not the irrationality of drives or sexuality but how discursive rational they are — the unconscious is structured like language.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on Freud — rationality of the unconscious
Transcript 39 turns
unknown
Maybe it is because to the monitor the vibration is maybe just between the monitors. Slavoj, apparently you need to move between the monitors. Oh, okay, that's not a problem for me. No worries. The monitors are fine. Yes, here we go. How about here? Yeah, there you
Maybe it is because to the monitor the vibration is maybe just between the monitors. Slavoj, apparently you need to move between the monitors. Oh, okay, that's not a problem for me. No worries. The monitors are fine. Yes, here we go. How about here? Yeah, there you
Slavoj Žižek
go. Is there any improvise here? It's an
go. Is there any improvise here? It's an
unknown
improvement. Okay, rock and roll. All right, so thank you all for coming. Thank you so much for coming. Of course, you're here to listen to Slavoj
improvement. Okay, rock and roll. All right, so thank you all for coming. Thank you so much for coming. Of course, you're here to listen to Slavoj
Slavoj Žižek
Žižek, and
Žižek, and
unknown
here is a man who needs no introduction whatsoever.
here is a man who needs no introduction whatsoever.
Slavoj Žižek
In fact, you've been hearing him now for minutes, so of course not. No, hardly. I'll just read his Wikipedia page. No, so here he is, the man himself. Thank you very much. I will do this. I will do what I promised two days ago, that is to say today is ecology and object-oriented ontology. Incidentally, if any of you checked it, the guy's name is it Levi or Levi, L-E-V-I. How do you pronounce it, by the way? Levi. Levi. Okay, yeah, but Jews usually pronounce Levi as Levi, no? Okay, doesn't matter. Levi Bryant is the name of the guy that Democracy of Objects, the book that you can freely download. So, but I propose a wider approach. What I want to do is to put this object-oriented ontology into a context, for me a critical context in the sense that I think they are at least up to a point attacking a straw man. As you know, if you had the chance to read the founding text of this new so-called speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux, the French guy, Après la finitude, After Finitude, the big enemy is what he, Meillassoux, calls correlationism, or to put it in more philosophical terms, transcendental approach, which means simply whatever we can think, all objects of our thinking are already in some way correlated to our act of thinking. And in this sense, we cannot even imagine, you can, we cannot think objects the way they are independently of us. Now, of course, incidentally, just one thing before I get into it: as you know, I talk too much. That's why my friends call me Fidel, not because of politics but because and it's true, once I was in Cuba, purely private as a tourist, and I wanted to take an afternoon nap, and around PM, I just wanted to see what they have on TV, and Fidel dropped by, said something like just five minutes, comrades, some remarks. Then I went, took a long nap. Five hours later I opened up the TV, he was still going on, no? So, in other words, the only way to do it for you, if you have some inquiries, whatever, please, and I don't mean this as that formal offer of politeness that I expect you not to do it, I really mean it, simply interrupt me, cut me short. If anything is not clear, if something appears to you not my usual stupidity but excessively stupid or whatever, please just crack me. Okay, I think this could be of some interest to you because it's, or at least it appears to be, one almost the predominant trends in contemporary philosophy. Namely, the one of the greatest breaks in maybe the entire history of philosophy is the Kantian break. You know, Immanuel Kant introduced the notion of transcendental dimension, which means what? It means that again, we don't have direct access to reality, if there this reality exists at all, the way it is in itself. Our access to reality is always mediated, structured through, let's say, the lenses, the network of our subjectivity. And this is not necessarily an, here transcendentalists are pretty intelligent, giving even a materialist version of it. This doesn't necessarily mean idealism like you know, there is no reality, it's subjectively constructed. No, it means that precisely we subjects are not some pure mind, immaterial mirror which reflects reality, but we are part of reality. We don't observe reality from nowhere, as it were. So the reason why our perception of reality is always distorted, fractured, biased is precisely because we are part of reality. I mean, Marxists always, and they are justified, make this point that precise in criticizing what they call so-called contemplative materialism, we are not pure tabula rasa, empty mirror somewhere up there mirroring reality. As Marx liked to emphasize, we are always practically engaged with reality. Even science, for example, and that's the classical motive taken over later by other philosophers up to Heidegger. Take science and technology. The transcendental approach would have been not to deny that science provides true knowledge, but to claim that when you approach scientifically reality, already the way you approached it is not neutral in the sense that you in advance implicitly define or conceive reality in a certain way as something subjected to natural laws or as, like as Heidegger tries to demonstrate, as an object of potential technological manipulation and so on and so on. So again, the point is not this, or let me give you another twist to this transcendental approach and it, it may surprise you. Let's say someone, a girl, a woman or a man whatever, is brutally raped. And you know, one of the ways for police to annoy you is to demand a precise witnessing report from you. And then if they catch you, by you I mean the victim, in some slight inconsistencies, they always say, "ah, didn't you imagine it?" and so on and so on. But my answer to this would have been the opposite one: if somebody is brutally raped, what would have made me suspicious is precisely if he or she can give a totally neutral consistent account of it. It is that the very distortion of her or his report is I think the proof that she or he was really subjected to a traumatic experience. You see, this is the point, and it's a very nice deeply Hegelian point. The point being that since trauma is what in Lacanian terminology we call the real, that impenetrable traumatic point that we cannot integrate, the real is not the reality out there on which we speak. The real is inscribed into as it were the very distortion of our perception of reality. You know, again, imagine a woman reporting to policemen on a rape. What proves that we have been dealing here with a real trauma is precisely her distortion of reality. So here I, maybe you can provoke me here, if you would agree or not here. Ah, let me just finish this rape line though she's not a great one to rape like whatever. I once years ago developed a line which it was interesting how some feminists attacked me, but many including my eternal friend enemy Judith Butler agreed with me at least up to a point, you never know with her does she really agree or not. No, sorry, what I want to say is that the point is this one along this line. I I claimed, and I thought I'm giving an extremely pro-feminist argument, and I was shocked that some people misunderstood me. I okay, that's why my experiment, if you read my earlier work this was fifteen twenty years ago, maybe you know it: imagine a woman being raped and then imagine two types of women as possible victims. One is an autonomous woman relying on herself, blah blah. The other is, let's call it naively, you know, an passive, weak woman, maybe even daydreaming about being maybe not raped but brutally mistreated and so on. So my argument was, and it's confirmed from what I learned in my own country Slovenia where there were many refugees from civil war that we had twenty years ago there, refugees I mean poor women victims, that paradoxically in contrast to what you would have expected, although it may appear falsely that the first woman, the autonomous one, would be more hurt because you know she perceived herself as autonomous free agent blah blah and it should humiliate her more than the poor woman who maybe had some masochistic dreams and so on. My argument was, and I can tell you it's confirmed with what I learned from psychiatrists who were dealing with it, is that paradoxically the second one, although formally she got in some vulgar sense she got in reality at least up to a point what she was dreaming about, she would be much more brutally hurt. If you look for who can maybe make kill herself later, suicide, it will not be the autonomous one. The autonomous one, it will be horrible for her, but she will as they say take a good shower, wash herself and fight back or whatever. Now I come to my crucial point. You see, you know this disgusting male justification of rape, you know like even if women protest, fuck them, they secretly want it, you know, all that bullshit. Now you can say, but what am I saying here? Am I not saying that she secretly dreamt about it? And here I hope you will agree, but I'm ready to be interrupted, here comes my, I claim, radical feminism. I claim that and that's the fine point of psychoanalysis. If you secretly fantasize about something, and if this what you dream about is brutally imposed on you from outside, it's much worse than if something is imposed on you that you didn't dream about. You know, if you get in brutal form from out you know because why? It's the utter humiliation. Why? Because you know the problem is that desire is a very ambiguous thing. What we secretly desire, dream about, we don't really want it to happen. If we get it in reality is experienced as... sorry... no, I didn't say... oh, I thought... ah, you see this is called semantic ambiguity. Are you just scratching your nose or... Okay, strike back, yes. It sounds like you're talking about two different kinds of object a, one which is object a of fantasy, and the other one which is completely estranged object a, kind of like just if somebody just out of blue rapes us without us even dreaming about it. So it's like kind of... But you even go too much into theory here. I prefer although if you want we can talk two hours on object a, you never all I wanted to say just is that a very naive, almost commonsensical point I was making, no? And for this reason, that is my if you want feminist point, I think that I think that again if a rapist claims but fuck it, she was provoking me to do it, I know she wanted secretly to do it, he should be punished even more I claim. You know what I mean? You it's too easy to justify rape with the idea that you had clearly signs that she somehow wanted it. There is nothing more humiliating than having it brutally imposed on you what you secretly dream about because our fantasies, our innermost fantasies, what Freud called primordial fantasy and so on, are something extremely you know where you get a touch of it, much more modest touch of it. Did it happen to you this embarrassing moment like you meet someone with whom you were close to decades ago when you were a small kid and usually with your close friends or uncle, parents whatever you have some half private language, nicknames how they called you and so on. But imagine then you are at some reception officially and that guy ah ah and calls you by that name and so on. I almost cannot imagine anything more embarrassing and so on. You know, or as
In fact, you've been hearing him now for minutes, so of course not. No, hardly. I'll just read his Wikipedia page. No, so here he is, the man himself. Thank you very much. I will do this. I will do what I promised two days ago, that is to say today is ecology and object-oriented ontology. Incidentally, if any of you checked it, the guy's name is it Levi or Levi, L-E-V-I. How do you pronounce it, by the way? Levi. Levi. Okay, yeah, but Jews usually pronounce Levi as Levi, no? Okay, doesn't matter. Levi Bryant is the name of the guy that Democracy of Objects, the book that you can freely download. So, but I propose a wider approach. What I want to do is to put this object-oriented ontology into a context, for me a critical context in the sense that I think they are at least up to a point attacking a straw man. As you know, if you had the chance to read the founding text of this new so-called speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux, the French guy, Après la finitude, After Finitude, the big enemy is what he, Meillassoux, calls correlationism, or to put it in more philosophical terms, transcendental approach, which means simply whatever we can think, all objects of our thinking are already in some way correlated to our act of thinking. And in this sense, we cannot even imagine, you can, we cannot think objects the way they are independently of us. Now, of course, incidentally, just one thing before I get into it: as you know, I talk too much. That's why my friends call me Fidel, not because of politics but because and it's true, once I was in Cuba, purely private as a tourist, and I wanted to take an afternoon nap, and around PM, I just wanted to see what they have on TV, and Fidel dropped by, said something like just five minutes, comrades, some remarks. Then I went, took a long nap. Five hours later I opened up the TV, he was still going on, no? So, in other words, the only way to do it for you, if you have some inquiries, whatever, please, and I don't mean this as that formal offer of politeness that I expect you not to do it, I really mean it, simply interrupt me, cut me short. If anything is not clear, if something appears to you not my usual stupidity but excessively stupid or whatever, please just crack me. Okay, I think this could be of some interest to you because it's, or at least it appears to be, one almost the predominant trends in contemporary philosophy. Namely, the one of the greatest breaks in maybe the entire history of philosophy is the Kantian break. You know, Immanuel Kant introduced the notion of transcendental dimension, which means what? It means that again, we don't have direct access to reality, if there this reality exists at all, the way it is in itself. Our access to reality is always mediated, structured through, let's say, the lenses, the network of our subjectivity. And this is not necessarily an, here transcendentalists are pretty intelligent, giving even a materialist version of it. This doesn't necessarily mean idealism like you know, there is no reality, it's subjectively constructed. No, it means that precisely we subjects are not some pure mind, immaterial mirror which reflects reality, but we are part of reality. We don't observe reality from nowhere, as it were. So the reason why our perception of reality is always distorted, fractured, biased is precisely because we are part of reality. I mean, Marxists always, and they are justified, make this point that precise in criticizing what they call so-called contemplative materialism, we are not pure tabula rasa, empty mirror somewhere up there mirroring reality. As Marx liked to emphasize, we are always practically engaged with reality. Even science, for example, and that's the classical motive taken over later by other philosophers up to Heidegger. Take science and technology. The transcendental approach would have been not to deny that science provides true knowledge, but to claim that when you approach scientifically reality, already the way you approached it is not neutral in the sense that you in advance implicitly define or conceive reality in a certain way as something subjected to natural laws or as, like as Heidegger tries to demonstrate, as an object of potential technological manipulation and so on and so on. So again, the point is not this, or let me give you another twist to this transcendental approach and it, it may surprise you. Let's say someone, a girl, a woman or a man whatever, is brutally raped. And you know, one of the ways for police to annoy you is to demand a precise witnessing report from you. And then if they catch you, by you I mean the victim, in some slight inconsistencies, they always say, "ah, didn't you imagine it?" and so on and so on. But my answer to this would have been the opposite one: if somebody is brutally raped, what would have made me suspicious is precisely if he or she can give a totally neutral consistent account of it. It is that the very distortion of her or his report is I think the proof that she or he was really subjected to a traumatic experience. You see, this is the point, and it's a very nice deeply Hegelian point. The point being that since trauma is what in Lacanian terminology we call the real, that impenetrable traumatic point that we cannot integrate, the real is not the reality out there on which we speak. The real is inscribed into as it were the very distortion of our perception of reality. You know, again, imagine a woman reporting to policemen on a rape. What proves that we have been dealing here with a real trauma is precisely her distortion of reality. So here I, maybe you can provoke me here, if you would agree or not here. Ah, let me just finish this rape line though she's not a great one to rape like whatever. I once years ago developed a line which it was interesting how some feminists attacked me, but many including my eternal friend enemy Judith Butler agreed with me at least up to a point, you never know with her does she really agree or not. No, sorry, what I want to say is that the point is this one along this line. I I claimed, and I thought I'm giving an extremely pro-feminist argument, and I was shocked that some people misunderstood me. I okay, that's why my experiment, if you read my earlier work this was fifteen twenty years ago, maybe you know it: imagine a woman being raped and then imagine two types of women as possible victims. One is an autonomous woman relying on herself, blah blah. The other is, let's call it naively, you know, an passive, weak woman, maybe even daydreaming about being maybe not raped but brutally mistreated and so on. So my argument was, and it's confirmed from what I learned in my own country Slovenia where there were many refugees from civil war that we had twenty years ago there, refugees I mean poor women victims, that paradoxically in contrast to what you would have expected, although it may appear falsely that the first woman, the autonomous one, would be more hurt because you know she perceived herself as autonomous free agent blah blah and it should humiliate her more than the poor woman who maybe had some masochistic dreams and so on. My argument was, and I can tell you it's confirmed with what I learned from psychiatrists who were dealing with it, is that paradoxically the second one, although formally she got in some vulgar sense she got in reality at least up to a point what she was dreaming about, she would be much more brutally hurt. If you look for who can maybe make kill herself later, suicide, it will not be the autonomous one. The autonomous one, it will be horrible for her, but she will as they say take a good shower, wash herself and fight back or whatever. Now I come to my crucial point. You see, you know this disgusting male justification of rape, you know like even if women protest, fuck them, they secretly want it, you know, all that bullshit. Now you can say, but what am I saying here? Am I not saying that she secretly dreamt about it? And here I hope you will agree, but I'm ready to be interrupted, here comes my, I claim, radical feminism. I claim that and that's the fine point of psychoanalysis. If you secretly fantasize about something, and if this what you dream about is brutally imposed on you from outside, it's much worse than if something is imposed on you that you didn't dream about. You know, if you get in brutal form from out you know because why? It's the utter humiliation. Why? Because you know the problem is that desire is a very ambiguous thing. What we secretly desire, dream about, we don't really want it to happen. If we get it in reality is experienced as... sorry... no, I didn't say... oh, I thought... ah, you see this is called semantic ambiguity. Are you just scratching your nose or... Okay, strike back, yes. It sounds like you're talking about two different kinds of object a, one which is object a of fantasy, and the other one which is completely estranged object a, kind of like just if somebody just out of blue rapes us without us even dreaming about it. So it's like kind of... But you even go too much into theory here. I prefer although if you want we can talk two hours on object a, you never all I wanted to say just is that a very naive, almost commonsensical point I was making, no? And for this reason, that is my if you want feminist point, I think that I think that again if a rapist claims but fuck it, she was provoking me to do it, I know she wanted secretly to do it, he should be punished even more I claim. You know what I mean? You it's too easy to justify rape with the idea that you had clearly signs that she somehow wanted it. There is nothing more humiliating than having it brutally imposed on you what you secretly dream about because our fantasies, our innermost fantasies, what Freud called primordial fantasy and so on, are something extremely you know where you get a touch of it, much more modest touch of it. Did it happen to you this embarrassing moment like you meet someone with whom you were close to decades ago when you were a small kid and usually with your close friends or uncle, parents whatever you have some half private language, nicknames how they called you and so on. But imagine then you are at some reception officially and that guy ah ah and calls you by that name and so on. I almost cannot imagine anything more embarrassing and so on. You know, or as
unknown
they say, to realize your dreams, no? This is the best definition of nightmare, no? So, incidentally about rape although I know of one example where things were opposite. My friend, I'm glad to say this, Julian Assange, told me that the woman who accused him allegedly of rape now came open in Sweden and said, "listen, this was some condom
they say, to realize your dreams, no? This is the best definition of nightmare, no? So, incidentally about rape although I know of one example where things were opposite. My friend, I'm glad to say this, Julian Assange, told me that the woman who accused him allegedly of rape now came open in Sweden and said, "listen, this was some condom
Slavoj Žižek
misunderstanding, I dragged him to bed, it absolutely was not in any meaningful sense a rape." You know what I like? You know what was the reaction of police? The opposite of the usual reaction which is you know, poor woman claims I was raped, the obscene policeman says, "are you sure? didn't you
misunderstanding, I dragged him to bed, it absolutely was not in any meaningful sense a rape." You know what I like? You know what was the reaction of police? The opposite of the usual reaction which is you know, poor woman claims I was raped, the obscene policeman says, "are you sure? didn't you
unknown
enjoy it?" Here it was that the victim claims there was no rape, and the police claims, "no, you don't know, stupid woman, you were raped," and so
enjoy it?" Here it was that the victim claims there was no rape, and the police claims, "no, you don't know, stupid woman, you were raped," and so
Slavoj Žižek
on and so on. It's a totally crazy situation. But let me go on. So this is also let me put it in another term. I'm so sad that we don't have the video clips, but I don't blame you, I'm just too lazy to prepare all of you. I've written about it in, I forgot which of my books, namely I hope you saw Hitchcock's, my god, it's now officially the latest opinion poll of Sight and Sound the greatest film of all time, Vertigo. There are even two shots there, especially one at the beginning which has a wonderfully ambiguous status. No, you don't have even to know the story. Scottie, James Stewart, is hired to follow Madeleine. He goes into that restaurant, Ernie's, and this is an element of your American barbarism, it's now a shitty pizza place whatever. And it was a nice place, you know, I was there just at the end when it still existed, Ernie's. So okay, and then you have the crucial scene. He, Scottie, observes her, Madeleine. He is she is approaching him because he is at the bar, sits close to the exit from the restaurant. And then you have him like cannot decide should he look at her or not because she is standing waiting for her husband behind his back, his back, he says. And then you see that famous hypnotic shot in profile, Kim Novak, Madeleine, and artificial, almost golden, kind of fantasmatic image light behind her. What's so interesting here? It's some [unintelligible], some French guy brought attention to this, how almost all big interpreters from from Robin Wood onwards read this shot of her as a subjective point of view shot. But look at it closely and you will see that it's not. That the point is that he is too fascinated by her, it's impossible for him to sustain her pre-, so it's more than and that's the mystery, it is a subjective shot. It's not she in reality, it's clearly a fantasmatic shot. But it's too intense, too strong. He cannot, you know, it's and again why this mistake is made by almost all readers, they automatically describe this as a point of view shot and they avoid the basic paradox of the notion of fantasy. That it is a subjective formation, but a kind of objective subjective formation, something that's too intense libidinally, too strong and you cannot integrate it, confront it face to face, subjectively assume it. In other words, I developed this in many of my books, to understand the functioning of fantasy and other similar phenomena you have to introduce a wonderful concept that Daniel Dennett uses it in his Consciousness Explained, but unfortunately just in a mocking critical way. Namely the difference between how things appear to you and how things objectively effectively appear to you. You see the elegance of this argument. It's not simply: this is how things really are and this is how things appear to you. No, you are not even aware how things really appear to you. And this is the whole point of the notion of fantasy. Fantasy is not subjective in the sense of what you are dreaming about. Fantasy is the unconscious if you want network of how things appear to you, but again in your conscious you cannot assume it. And again, you get a couple of times we don't have time now to go into Vertigo, this nice example of an let's call it objective appearance. Things appear but not subjectively to you. And it's a wonderful notion and I claim, I developed this many times in my books, that this is also the key to Marx's notion of commodity fetishism. Marx is saying that there something so wonderful that is still actual today and I have no problems criticizing Marx. But there he is wonderful. Namely, Marx is not simply claiming, just read the small supplement to the first edition of Capital on the secret of commodity fetishism or whatever. Marx is not saying we have the reality of the universe of commodities, market, and then fetishism is the way we misperceive it. No, fetishism is in the as it were reality of how we act on the market. So when Marx says this short formula of fetishist ideology, 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' subjects caught in fetishism know not what they are doing it but they are doing it. It's not simply they are doing something but they think they are doing something else. No, the catch is that what they don't know is the illusion they are following in their activity. For Marx, it's not simply that commodity is a social phenomenon but to us fetishists it appears as something magic and so on. As Marx put it nicely, no, to an ordinary bourgeois subject commodity doesn't appear as a magic object but simply as some object out there you can buy for money blah blah blah. But it's the illusion is inscribed into the objective network of commodities. That's why we are coming back to, you remember two days ago I quoted for hundredth time that Nils Bohr horseshoe, no? "I know I know it's not true, I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if I don't believe in it." That's what we do on the market. We don't believe in commodity fetishism but we practice it. We act. So this is I think again a wonderful idea, this idea of an illusion which as it were has material existence and is in this sense constitutive of the material social order. If you take the illusion away, reality disintegrates. You know who knew this? If you want to amuse yourself, he is a great philosopher usually dismissed as vulgar utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, in his famous, a friend of mine published a selection is now long sold out by Verso, Theory of Fictions. How he first begins, Bentham, by distinguishing between what is in reality and symbolic fictions we built out of it. But then he adds something very mysterious: he said we can make this distinction, but you cannot then drop fictions and keep only reality. If you erase fictions, you lose reality also. So now, of course, so that I don't lose my thread, let's go back to Kant, transcendental dimension and so on. So transcendental what Kant calls transcendental dimension is this type of an unconscious notional network. You are not even aware of it but it's always here structuring your approach to reality. Of course I agree with new materialists that we should move beyond this transcendental horizon. But we should nonetheless first give to it what is due to it. You know, the deepest point of transcendental approach is not the point about subjective constitution of reality. How there is no reality in itself, what we perceive as reality is always constituted, mediated through our subjective, even if it is collectively subjective perspective. And for example this would have been a nice example of transcendental approach. I'm sorry if it is sexist, but let's take a beautiful woman. You can approach her as... all your examples are sexist. Yeah, why not? What's wrong about it? Because it's disrespectful. Towards whom? Women. Why? And anyone who is not an anti-feminist chauvinist. Why? Why why why? If you are not insulted by these examples then you are. I'm not insulted by these examples. Yeah, why no no let's talk about it. I sincerely don't get it why. You think then if you say this. many examples you can choose that are not gendered and that are not sexist and that are not insulting. Why? I agree with gendered and sexed and this should be immediately clear why I use this one, but why insulting? Who is insulted and why? First of all you broke women into two broad categories and you seem to think that was a sufficient characterization of all women. No, I just took two extremes I made it clear. Yeah. You know where I see in what I said a deep feminist tendency, I will tell you. Because I claim that what shocked me with many feminists is that they tried to dismiss the very idea to which I relied, that there may be women who secretly dream about masochism blah blah. They claim this is male projection and so on. But I claim that the way this de facto works is putting women under pressure to make women feel guilty if they have masochist dreams. I claim why not? They should have full right to have the nastiest masochist dreams and so on, of being raped and so on. Here we have to draw the line. But this gives no one the right to realize these dreams I claim. And not just from theory but from experience, not mine, of what some psychiatrist told me and so on. That how such a procedure of... they they okay... Those who claim, who want to dismiss these so-called masochist rape dreams claim either they are male fantasies, and to a large extent they are I claim, or they claim women who do this just internalize male values, they are subordinated to male ideology and so on. I reject this. I think that sexuality is in itself in this way perverted, it's original. You cannot, if again as I already said two two days ago, this is the trauma of Freudian discovery which is alive more than ever today, that human sexuality is effectively in itself twisted, politically incorrect and so on and so on. You cannot isolate some pure authentic how do you call it full mutual recognition sexuality and then put the blame on society for its distortion. Sexuality without distortion doesn't exist for necessary reasons, which is why again I think I did quote two days ago, I did mention, although I don't otherwise like her too much but here she had an insight, Naomi Wolf, who said that if you try to imagine politically correct totally sexuality with full respect no harassment and so on, you get the model of a contract. Everything else, there is no politically correct I emphatically claim this process of seduction. Always
on and so on. It's a totally crazy situation. But let me go on. So this is also let me put it in another term. I'm so sad that we don't have the video clips, but I don't blame you, I'm just too lazy to prepare all of you. I've written about it in, I forgot which of my books, namely I hope you saw Hitchcock's, my god, it's now officially the latest opinion poll of Sight and Sound the greatest film of all time, Vertigo. There are even two shots there, especially one at the beginning which has a wonderfully ambiguous status. No, you don't have even to know the story. Scottie, James Stewart, is hired to follow Madeleine. He goes into that restaurant, Ernie's, and this is an element of your American barbarism, it's now a shitty pizza place whatever. And it was a nice place, you know, I was there just at the end when it still existed, Ernie's. So okay, and then you have the crucial scene. He, Scottie, observes her, Madeleine. He is she is approaching him because he is at the bar, sits close to the exit from the restaurant. And then you have him like cannot decide should he look at her or not because she is standing waiting for her husband behind his back, his back, he says. And then you see that famous hypnotic shot in profile, Kim Novak, Madeleine, and artificial, almost golden, kind of fantasmatic image light behind her. What's so interesting here? It's some [unintelligible], some French guy brought attention to this, how almost all big interpreters from from Robin Wood onwards read this shot of her as a subjective point of view shot. But look at it closely and you will see that it's not. That the point is that he is too fascinated by her, it's impossible for him to sustain her pre-, so it's more than and that's the mystery, it is a subjective shot. It's not she in reality, it's clearly a fantasmatic shot. But it's too intense, too strong. He cannot, you know, it's and again why this mistake is made by almost all readers, they automatically describe this as a point of view shot and they avoid the basic paradox of the notion of fantasy. That it is a subjective formation, but a kind of objective subjective formation, something that's too intense libidinally, too strong and you cannot integrate it, confront it face to face, subjectively assume it. In other words, I developed this in many of my books, to understand the functioning of fantasy and other similar phenomena you have to introduce a wonderful concept that Daniel Dennett uses it in his Consciousness Explained, but unfortunately just in a mocking critical way. Namely the difference between how things appear to you and how things objectively effectively appear to you. You see the elegance of this argument. It's not simply: this is how things really are and this is how things appear to you. No, you are not even aware how things really appear to you. And this is the whole point of the notion of fantasy. Fantasy is not subjective in the sense of what you are dreaming about. Fantasy is the unconscious if you want network of how things appear to you, but again in your conscious you cannot assume it. And again, you get a couple of times we don't have time now to go into Vertigo, this nice example of an let's call it objective appearance. Things appear but not subjectively to you. And it's a wonderful notion and I claim, I developed this many times in my books, that this is also the key to Marx's notion of commodity fetishism. Marx is saying that there something so wonderful that is still actual today and I have no problems criticizing Marx. But there he is wonderful. Namely, Marx is not simply claiming, just read the small supplement to the first edition of Capital on the secret of commodity fetishism or whatever. Marx is not saying we have the reality of the universe of commodities, market, and then fetishism is the way we misperceive it. No, fetishism is in the as it were reality of how we act on the market. So when Marx says this short formula of fetishist ideology, 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' subjects caught in fetishism know not what they are doing it but they are doing it. It's not simply they are doing something but they think they are doing something else. No, the catch is that what they don't know is the illusion they are following in their activity. For Marx, it's not simply that commodity is a social phenomenon but to us fetishists it appears as something magic and so on. As Marx put it nicely, no, to an ordinary bourgeois subject commodity doesn't appear as a magic object but simply as some object out there you can buy for money blah blah blah. But it's the illusion is inscribed into the objective network of commodities. That's why we are coming back to, you remember two days ago I quoted for hundredth time that Nils Bohr horseshoe, no? "I know I know it's not true, I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if I don't believe in it." That's what we do on the market. We don't believe in commodity fetishism but we practice it. We act. So this is I think again a wonderful idea, this idea of an illusion which as it were has material existence and is in this sense constitutive of the material social order. If you take the illusion away, reality disintegrates. You know who knew this? If you want to amuse yourself, he is a great philosopher usually dismissed as vulgar utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, in his famous, a friend of mine published a selection is now long sold out by Verso, Theory of Fictions. How he first begins, Bentham, by distinguishing between what is in reality and symbolic fictions we built out of it. But then he adds something very mysterious: he said we can make this distinction, but you cannot then drop fictions and keep only reality. If you erase fictions, you lose reality also. So now, of course, so that I don't lose my thread, let's go back to Kant, transcendental dimension and so on. So transcendental what Kant calls transcendental dimension is this type of an unconscious notional network. You are not even aware of it but it's always here structuring your approach to reality. Of course I agree with new materialists that we should move beyond this transcendental horizon. But we should nonetheless first give to it what is due to it. You know, the deepest point of transcendental approach is not the point about subjective constitution of reality. How there is no reality in itself, what we perceive as reality is always constituted, mediated through our subjective, even if it is collectively subjective perspective. And for example this would have been a nice example of transcendental approach. I'm sorry if it is sexist, but let's take a beautiful woman. You can approach her as... all your examples are sexist. Yeah, why not? What's wrong about it? Because it's disrespectful. Towards whom? Women. Why? And anyone who is not an anti-feminist chauvinist. Why? Why why why? If you are not insulted by these examples then you are. I'm not insulted by these examples. Yeah, why no no let's talk about it. I sincerely don't get it why. You think then if you say this. many examples you can choose that are not gendered and that are not sexist and that are not insulting. Why? I agree with gendered and sexed and this should be immediately clear why I use this one, but why insulting? Who is insulted and why? First of all you broke women into two broad categories and you seem to think that was a sufficient characterization of all women. No, I just took two extremes I made it clear. Yeah. You know where I see in what I said a deep feminist tendency, I will tell you. Because I claim that what shocked me with many feminists is that they tried to dismiss the very idea to which I relied, that there may be women who secretly dream about masochism blah blah. They claim this is male projection and so on. But I claim that the way this de facto works is putting women under pressure to make women feel guilty if they have masochist dreams. I claim why not? They should have full right to have the nastiest masochist dreams and so on, of being raped and so on. Here we have to draw the line. But this gives no one the right to realize these dreams I claim. And not just from theory but from experience, not mine, of what some psychiatrist told me and so on. That how such a procedure of... they they okay... Those who claim, who want to dismiss these so-called masochist rape dreams claim either they are male fantasies, and to a large extent they are I claim, or they claim women who do this just internalize male values, they are subordinated to male ideology and so on. I reject this. I think that sexuality is in itself in this way perverted, it's original. You cannot, if again as I already said two two days ago, this is the trauma of Freudian discovery which is alive more than ever today, that human sexuality is effectively in itself twisted, politically incorrect and so on and so on. You cannot isolate some pure authentic how do you call it full mutual recognition sexuality and then put the blame on society for its distortion. Sexuality without distortion doesn't exist for necessary reasons, which is why again I think I did quote two days ago, I did mention, although I don't otherwise like her too much but here she had an insight, Naomi Wolf, who said that if you try to imagine politically correct totally sexuality with full respect no harassment and so on, you get the model of a contract. Everything else, there is no politically correct I emphatically claim this process of seduction. Always
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someone must make a move
someone must make a move
Slavoj Žižek
which retroactively can be proclaimed harassment or, and
which retroactively can be proclaimed harassment or, and
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that's
that's
Slavoj Žižek
the
the
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beauty, Du
beauty, Du
Slavoj Žižek
Puy whom I mentioned the last time said this, that's why you know here you see the
Puy whom I mentioned the last time said this, that's why you know here you see the
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paradox. Let's
paradox. Let's
Slavoj Žižek
say somebody makes a pass of seduction. Then he can be even accepted or rejected. He can be rejected claiming no, you violated harassment and so on. But there is an obstacle, but if his advances are accepted, we shouldn't say that he
say somebody makes a pass of seduction. Then he can be even accepted or rejected. He can be rejected claiming no, you violated harassment and so on. But there is an obstacle, but if his advances are accepted, we shouldn't say that he
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successfully he did successfully overcome
successfully he did successfully overcome
Slavoj Žižek
the obstacle. No, he establishes that there was no obstacle at all. It's a you know it is the same thing that again think about Vertigo, Hitchcock's Vertigo. I hope you know the story. At the end of the film when Scottie discovers that Madeleine didn't exist, that the first even original Madeleine was already Judy masked as Madeleine. This is a weird kind of a loss because he doesn't just lose Madeleine but he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before. It's a much more it's a much more paradoxical movement. So again, that would have been first,
the obstacle. No, he establishes that there was no obstacle at all. It's a you know it is the same thing that again think about Vertigo, Hitchcock's Vertigo. I hope you know the story. At the end of the film when Scottie discovers that Madeleine didn't exist, that the first even original Madeleine was already Judy masked as Madeleine. This is a weird kind of a loss because he doesn't just lose Madeleine but he retroactively establishes that what he lost never existed even before. It's a much more it's a much more paradoxical movement. So again, that would have been first,
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that would have been my thesis and again, I'm again
that would have been my thesis and again, I'm again
Slavoj Žižek
after I accept everything but again if it's what word was used,
after I accept everything but again if it's what word was used,
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insulting? Who is insulted and why? I still don't get it.
insulting? Who is insulted and why? I still don't get it.
Slavoj Žižek
I get it that it's in this formal sense sexist, that I don't know, I may have chosen another example or what, but why who is insulted? I just asking who is insulted here? Ah, one way would be ugly women, like I implicitly so-called ugly women. Okay, that I imply that you don't know that I privilege beautiful women and so on and so on. Okay, but okay, let's drop this and let me go on on okay, I will try to take another example. A rabbit. No, I know I will again be accused. A square. Sorry. No, it doesn't work because that's the reason why I wanted to use the example of beautiful woman. That we can, men but also women, how can you approach beautiful woman as an object? You can approach it as an object of biology, of a body. You can approach it as an erotic object. You can approach it as an... and again, many other ways. But that's the catch for naive realist approach: they would have said that okay, there is something like the reality of the woman out there, and then there is and then there is the different ways we perceive it. For transcendentalists, no, they would have said every approach constitutes its object. If you approach a woman, a man, I'm sorry I'm not cynical here, a rabbit or whatever as a scientist, it will appear you as a in a certain way. If you approach it as you are hungry, you are trying to catch a rabbit, it's an but you see my point, a radical transcendentalist will not allow you to simply distinguish between reality in itself accessible probably only to science and all these let's call them subjectively interested approaches. And I'm here in some sense more on the transcendental side, in the sense that I claim that it's all too easy. I mean, if nothing else, my god, I learned this from feminist critics of science, how the usual at least biological apparatus, it can be shown, the conceptual network that it uses already secretly privileges men. You know, science I don't think that science can be simply subjectified, I am not a new Paul Feyerabend etc. anything goes, we can do whatever we want. I'm not saying that scientific results are simply historical constructs, but what I am saying is that nonetheless science is part of society, which means that its conceptual apparatus is not simply neutral, and the the inquiry into is there a secret either sexist bias or social bias whatever, you know, is there. So okay, this is what I hope you got the gist of the point of what I'm trying. Yes? Can you talk about this in terms of collective unconscious on collective unconscious level? I'm so afraid of this term, you know, it's a Jungian term. I know I know yeah I'm saying let's if we take for example could we say there that if we say the fantasy became true through all these movies and you know before that could we say that I mean I'm sorry but could we say that US is then becoming raped in a in some way and then that it become raped in a way that it happened. No, it's a good example in this sense that I claim that the reason it was such a trauma and again if I reapply to it that parallel with rape that the reason precisely that in this let's call it rather collective imaginary this topic of a mega terrorist attack catastrophe was all the time here already. You see that's my point that this made the shock worse not easier to sustain no but not what Richard Wollin a Habermasian accused me that I somehow imply that you got what you deserved or not even more what you wanted what you were dreaming about absolutely not again if anything it's even worse what you got there I'm only saying and where I deal with it I mentioned also this is the most beautiful example we all know it I'm ashamed to mention it Titanic do you know that the extent to which not just the general idea of a catastrophe but precisely this catastrophe
I get it that it's in this formal sense sexist, that I don't know, I may have chosen another example or what, but why who is insulted? I just asking who is insulted here? Ah, one way would be ugly women, like I implicitly so-called ugly women. Okay, that I imply that you don't know that I privilege beautiful women and so on and so on. Okay, but okay, let's drop this and let me go on on okay, I will try to take another example. A rabbit. No, I know I will again be accused. A square. Sorry. No, it doesn't work because that's the reason why I wanted to use the example of beautiful woman. That we can, men but also women, how can you approach beautiful woman as an object? You can approach it as an object of biology, of a body. You can approach it as an erotic object. You can approach it as an... and again, many other ways. But that's the catch for naive realist approach: they would have said that okay, there is something like the reality of the woman out there, and then there is and then there is the different ways we perceive it. For transcendentalists, no, they would have said every approach constitutes its object. If you approach a woman, a man, I'm sorry I'm not cynical here, a rabbit or whatever as a scientist, it will appear you as a in a certain way. If you approach it as you are hungry, you are trying to catch a rabbit, it's an but you see my point, a radical transcendentalist will not allow you to simply distinguish between reality in itself accessible probably only to science and all these let's call them subjectively interested approaches. And I'm here in some sense more on the transcendental side, in the sense that I claim that it's all too easy. I mean, if nothing else, my god, I learned this from feminist critics of science, how the usual at least biological apparatus, it can be shown, the conceptual network that it uses already secretly privileges men. You know, science I don't think that science can be simply subjectified, I am not a new Paul Feyerabend etc. anything goes, we can do whatever we want. I'm not saying that scientific results are simply historical constructs, but what I am saying is that nonetheless science is part of society, which means that its conceptual apparatus is not simply neutral, and the the inquiry into is there a secret either sexist bias or social bias whatever, you know, is there. So okay, this is what I hope you got the gist of the point of what I'm trying. Yes? Can you talk about this in terms of collective unconscious on collective unconscious level? I'm so afraid of this term, you know, it's a Jungian term. I know I know yeah I'm saying let's if we take for example could we say there that if we say the fantasy became true through all these movies and you know before that could we say that I mean I'm sorry but could we say that US is then becoming raped in a in some way and then that it become raped in a way that it happened. No, it's a good example in this sense that I claim that the reason it was such a trauma and again if I reapply to it that parallel with rape that the reason precisely that in this let's call it rather collective imaginary this topic of a mega terrorist attack catastrophe was all the time here already. You see that's my point that this made the shock worse not easier to sustain no but not what Richard Wollin a Habermasian accused me that I somehow imply that you got what you deserved or not even more what you wanted what you were dreaming about absolutely not again if anything it's even worse what you got there I'm only saying and where I deal with it I mentioned also this is the most beautiful example we all know it I'm ashamed to mention it Titanic do you know that the extent to which not just the general idea of a catastrophe but precisely this catastrophe
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was part
was part
Slavoj Žižek
of imaginary do you know that two or three years I write about this I forgot in which one of my books a novel was published which dealt with a ultra transatlantic ship which on its first trip drowns and you know what was in the novel the name of the ship not Titanic but Titan I mean it's incredible and again so you see my point it was such a shock not because it was unexpected but precisely because it was expected and to make you feel this logic let me turn to another Hitchcock movie Psycho I hope I don't have to lose time you both know it there are two great great okay classical murder scenes there the murder of Marion the famous shower murder and the second murder of Arbogast the detective I always preferred the second murder the first murder is pure shock but the paradox of the second murder you remember Arbogast goes up the stairs in the mother's house is that all points towards the murder that something will happen murder is not a shock and that's why when Norman figure enters it's even more of a shock you see okay I could go deeply into this stuff but not now let's return to let's return to the topic of the of the transcendental so for me and I was attacked ferociously by Graham Harman the big speculative realist for this philosophy as such is in a way transcendental not in the sense of Kantian transcendental subjectivity but in a more basic sense in what sense for example when and that's Heidegger's thesis when philosophy deals with for example asks what is truth the authentic true philosophical interest or for example what is life is not the realist question of biological definition of life but it's a to use Heidegger's term a transcendental hermeneutic question it's a question look in our daily world we all the time use words like life soul and so on the question is how do we in our daily life how do we always already understand life what is the implicit understanding of it and this is where Heidegger then introduces the notion of historicity into transcendental dimension for Heidegger big for for example I don't know for example truth the way we privilege truth today we privilege scientific truth truth as what can be experimentally confirmed as objectively existing and so on and so on it is clear that this is the modern scientific notion of truth we cannot apply the same notion of truth for example to
of imaginary do you know that two or three years I write about this I forgot in which one of my books a novel was published which dealt with a ultra transatlantic ship which on its first trip drowns and you know what was in the novel the name of the ship not Titanic but Titan I mean it's incredible and again so you see my point it was such a shock not because it was unexpected but precisely because it was expected and to make you feel this logic let me turn to another Hitchcock movie Psycho I hope I don't have to lose time you both know it there are two great great okay classical murder scenes there the murder of Marion the famous shower murder and the second murder of Arbogast the detective I always preferred the second murder the first murder is pure shock but the paradox of the second murder you remember Arbogast goes up the stairs in the mother's house is that all points towards the murder that something will happen murder is not a shock and that's why when Norman figure enters it's even more of a shock you see okay I could go deeply into this stuff but not now let's return to let's return to the topic of the of the transcendental so for me and I was attacked ferociously by Graham Harman the big speculative realist for this philosophy as such is in a way transcendental not in the sense of Kantian transcendental subjectivity but in a more basic sense in what sense for example when and that's Heidegger's thesis when philosophy deals with for example asks what is truth the authentic true philosophical interest or for example what is life is not the realist question of biological definition of life but it's a to use Heidegger's term a transcendental hermeneutic question it's a question look in our daily world we all the time use words like life soul and so on the question is how do we in our daily life how do we always already understand life what is the implicit understanding of it and this is where Heidegger then introduces the notion of historicity into transcendental dimension for Heidegger big for for example I don't know for example truth the way we privilege truth today we privilege scientific truth truth as what can be experimentally confirmed as objectively existing and so on and so on it is clear that this is the modern scientific notion of truth we cannot apply the same notion of truth for example to
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Plato to Plato truth is not the accordance how do you call it between between our statement and
Plato to Plato truth is not the accordance how do you call it between between our statement and
Slavoj Žižek
reality like I look at an object and I say it's a chair there now if there really is
reality like I look at an object and I say it's a chair there now if there really is
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I simplify to the utmost a chair out there my statement is true
I simplify to the utmost a chair out there my statement is true
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for Plato it's almost the opposite truth is not the adequatio in Latin the correspondence between truth does not mean my statement fits the object truth is a property of the object itself truth a true for Plato the question is not am I saying is it true what I'm saying about
for Plato it's almost the opposite truth is not the adequatio in Latin the correspondence between truth does not mean my statement fits the object truth is a property of the object itself truth a true for Plato the question is not am I saying is it true what I'm saying about
Slavoj Žižek
a chair but is it is this chair a true chair and it is a true chair if it fits the idea of the chair and so on you know truth is constitutive of empirical reality itself which can be more true and less true so okay or another obvious example nature I mean what is nature one thing is the premodern but even there things are of course much more complex we shouldn't throw all them together notion of nature even material nature which can be spiritualized but still in a way materialist I call this the Hobbit notion of nature Hobbit material because did you notice something interesting in Hobbit movies that although of course you have supernatural phenomena there ghosts magic objects but there are no spirits in the pure religious sense of transcendence all spirituality magic is material magic it's only this world here which is full of ghosts there is no beyond that's why there are only evil spirits good spirits whatever you want but no divinities nothing nothing above so this would have been premodern nature which this is crucial is immanent meaning is immanent to it what we beginning
a chair but is it is this chair a true chair and it is a true chair if it fits the idea of the chair and so on you know truth is constitutive of empirical reality itself which can be more true and less true so okay or another obvious example nature I mean what is nature one thing is the premodern but even there things are of course much more complex we shouldn't throw all them together notion of nature even material nature which can be spiritualized but still in a way materialist I call this the Hobbit notion of nature Hobbit material because did you notice something interesting in Hobbit movies that although of course you have supernatural phenomena there ghosts magic objects but there are no spirits in the pure religious sense of transcendence all spirituality magic is material magic it's only this world here which is full of ghosts there is no beyond that's why there are only evil spirits good spirits whatever you want but no divinities nothing nothing above so this would have been premodern nature which this is crucial is immanent meaning is immanent to it what we beginning
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by modernity claim is that we should distinguish
by modernity claim is that we should distinguish
Slavoj Žižek
between reality in itself and the meanings and so on we project onto it now for a philosopher the first question is not so which notion of truth is really true it's just to describe these different horizons in medieval horizon you don't have this distinction between what Pascal calls this gray silent infinite world of soulless world of mathematical I mean of objects which can only be dressed in mathematical formulas
between reality in itself and the meanings and so on we project onto it now for a philosopher the first question is not so which notion of truth is really true it's just to describe these different horizons in medieval horizon you don't have this distinction between what Pascal calls this gray silent infinite world of soulless world of mathematical I mean of objects which can only be dressed in mathematical formulas
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and then our subjective values that we
and then our subjective values that we
Slavoj Žižek
project onto them and of course one consequence of this is that art appears as much less truthful as science like they say science give you gives you the truth art only evokes some emotions feeling of beauty it doesn't really touch the truth no the philosophical problem is just to describe different or as Michel Foucault would have put it here he is Heideggerian different epistemes epistemes is Foucault's name for different transcendental horizons no and for example what Foucault describes you should I was informed that you will leave please do it more demonstratively slam the door like enough of this shit whatever sorry you know for example you must know this the whole point of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie History of Madness I think it had a different title here is precisely to describe a big shift in the perception of madness before modernity specifically French Baroque modernity absolutism madness was either demonic possession or madness had a deeper meaning it was either some kind of a sacred dimension speaking to madmen or simple possession by demons or decadence whatever with modernity madness becomes a matter of medicine biological process of decay of the brain or whatever whatever it's which is why only with modernity you have institutions madhouses madness you see and again for Foucault it's meaningless to ask that's the transcendental catch it's meaningless to ask okay but what is madness really is there a as it were divine message in it or it's simply a mental or brain process simple pathology for Foucault this is an impossible question why because every approach to this question you see my point will already imply a certain transcendental horizon like you cannot step out and approach reality from the zero point we are always already as Heidegger would have put it included into it part of it so so and again for Heidegger this is the history of philosophy the point is not how things really are the point is to describe different ways how people in in Marx's way we would have said in their predominant ideology how people experience what is real what is just illusion and so on and so on again as I already hinted at the very distinction between reality and illusion also is not an ahistorical one it appears in a different way this is what I think I mentioned the last time Paul Veyne did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods like if you were of course ancient Greeks did not believe literally in their gods if you were to ask someone do you really think if you climbed to the top of Mount Olympus will you see there Zeus and Athena and so on he would have said no I'm not crazy but at the same time it would be that's what I want you to get it would have been totally wrong to think that for them religion was just a subjective illusion no we are already importing into it a distinction for which there is no space at least if I follow the predominant readings in ancient Greek universe so again and some okay the extreme of this position transcendental which is why I think although they attack transcendental subjectivity they are fully transcendental would have been what now it's disappearing but years it was very popular usually referred to as so-called how do you call it as so-called discursive materialism you know materiality being here not materiality of objects materiality of socially mediated discursive practices for example yes are you claiming that in a way structuralists of the 60s were transcendentalists of the sort I'm claiming it but I have good reasons to claim it do you know that Claude Lévi-Strauss defined his position as it was a famous statement as transcendentalism without subject so I I although I don't want to I talk too much I don't want to lose time completely here because there are even Deleuze who turns violently against structuralism talks about it's a crucial term about he defines his position as transcendental empiricism how are you saying that Lacan and Althusser were transcendentalists I mean strong structuralism with Lacan ah my god I don't want to get lost here see but these are such wonderful topics that's the problem with Lacan up to a certain point he was it's clear up to what point when he liked to emphasize especially in the 50s early 60s his first ten seminars and so on where for him symbolic order is the ultimate transcendental horizon you know when he says we cannot move outside language language is always already here and all questioning about how did language itself rise up or how or similar are myths myths in the sense that they are pseudo explanations because they already presuppose that language is here you have a wonderful story in one of I forget which one not the main one Lilliputians one of Swift's Gulliver it's four parts I think no he has the craziest theory of the existence of the emergence of language it's a joke but it's a wonderful joke he says that he describes it like this people were developing out of apes blah blah and they needed to communicate so they were doing it how they were carrying on their back a bag with small models of things like if you wanted to say house you pick up a small model of a house and so on then the bag grew larger and larger and then at some point somebody says it's stupid why carry so many models why don't we replace them with words you know and fuck it I mean it's circular you see the point it's already here and so the the horizon of early Lacan is so-called symbolic castration which means fundamental the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis for Lacan is that again we cannot step out of language language is always already here all we know is and I develop this in one of my books forgot which one via an ironic reference to Fredric Jameson you know his book about structuralism which is by the way not his best book The Prison-House of Language no that for Lacan it's not so much a prison-house but he even says this somewhere it's a torture-house of language the basic idea is that the process that Freud is describing as let's say becoming cultural of a human animal it's an extremely painful traumatic process you don't have normal becoming human and the name of this traumatic experience is for Lacan symbolic castration which I don't have time to go into it I think in no way under privileges women it's not that we men are not castrated women are castrated for Lacan we don't have time to go into it the signifier phallus is precisely the signifier of castration in the sense that in the sense that the more you are phallic the more you are castrated but that's another story let's not go into it so my answer to you would have been yes but then things get complicated with late Lacan with the real the real is precisely a dimension which cannot be accounted for in the terms of castration but okay I will give you but please that's why no I didn't did I give you something to read if you want to know more if you are interested look at my last big fat book Absolute Recoil the chapters two and three there I approach precisely this question how can we move beyond the transcendental because again back to Heidegger I described this in other of my small book Event for Heidegger this event of meaning in the sense of a disclosure of a certain understanding of reality is the ultimate horizon Heidegger calls it Ereignis event it's not a change in things themselves it's a change in how things appear to us in the horizon of pre-understanding how we always already understand reality it's basically simple you know Heidegger's point would have been for example that in modernity the predominant mode of approaching reality is through technology and scientific exploration we only touch the real true science all other approaches aesthetic and so on are just more secondary imaginary and so on and so on so again for Heidegger the ultimate horizon is this but as I develop in my book things get complicated here because the consequence of this for Heidegger is that catastrophe is primarily an ontological transcendental catastrophe as Heidegger likes to say and he is consequent here the true danger of of of technology is not that we will all kill ourselves through some experiment which will turn out take the wrong turn or atomic war or whatsoever for Heidegger the true danger is in the technological attitude as such the catastrophe already happened incidentally I love some of these scenarios of possible catastrophes you know where now that they are trying to reproduce the conditions of Big Bang at CERN South in Southern Switzerland you know that one of the fears was that if they succeed they will trigger a new Big Bang and all our reality will disintegrate I like this scenario that they will be proven right but there will be no one in a very short time to whom you can prove that you were right no okay what I want to say is and here Heidegger you know like Heidegger is not an idealist he is not claiming that this event of being creates things but that things always already appear to us within a certain let's call it eventual horizon we have our modern horizon we have medieval horizon classical Greek oriental horizon although there is not one here things go complex confused with Heidegger but then Heidegger very mysteriously a couple of times tries to move a step further for example he asks somewhere what is then the status of things before ontological horizon he admits
project onto them and of course one consequence of this is that art appears as much less truthful as science like they say science give you gives you the truth art only evokes some emotions feeling of beauty it doesn't really touch the truth no the philosophical problem is just to describe different or as Michel Foucault would have put it here he is Heideggerian different epistemes epistemes is Foucault's name for different transcendental horizons no and for example what Foucault describes you should I was informed that you will leave please do it more demonstratively slam the door like enough of this shit whatever sorry you know for example you must know this the whole point of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie History of Madness I think it had a different title here is precisely to describe a big shift in the perception of madness before modernity specifically French Baroque modernity absolutism madness was either demonic possession or madness had a deeper meaning it was either some kind of a sacred dimension speaking to madmen or simple possession by demons or decadence whatever with modernity madness becomes a matter of medicine biological process of decay of the brain or whatever whatever it's which is why only with modernity you have institutions madhouses madness you see and again for Foucault it's meaningless to ask that's the transcendental catch it's meaningless to ask okay but what is madness really is there a as it were divine message in it or it's simply a mental or brain process simple pathology for Foucault this is an impossible question why because every approach to this question you see my point will already imply a certain transcendental horizon like you cannot step out and approach reality from the zero point we are always already as Heidegger would have put it included into it part of it so so and again for Heidegger this is the history of philosophy the point is not how things really are the point is to describe different ways how people in in Marx's way we would have said in their predominant ideology how people experience what is real what is just illusion and so on and so on again as I already hinted at the very distinction between reality and illusion also is not an ahistorical one it appears in a different way this is what I think I mentioned the last time Paul Veyne did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods like if you were of course ancient Greeks did not believe literally in their gods if you were to ask someone do you really think if you climbed to the top of Mount Olympus will you see there Zeus and Athena and so on he would have said no I'm not crazy but at the same time it would be that's what I want you to get it would have been totally wrong to think that for them religion was just a subjective illusion no we are already importing into it a distinction for which there is no space at least if I follow the predominant readings in ancient Greek universe so again and some okay the extreme of this position transcendental which is why I think although they attack transcendental subjectivity they are fully transcendental would have been what now it's disappearing but years it was very popular usually referred to as so-called how do you call it as so-called discursive materialism you know materiality being here not materiality of objects materiality of socially mediated discursive practices for example yes are you claiming that in a way structuralists of the 60s were transcendentalists of the sort I'm claiming it but I have good reasons to claim it do you know that Claude Lévi-Strauss defined his position as it was a famous statement as transcendentalism without subject so I I although I don't want to I talk too much I don't want to lose time completely here because there are even Deleuze who turns violently against structuralism talks about it's a crucial term about he defines his position as transcendental empiricism how are you saying that Lacan and Althusser were transcendentalists I mean strong structuralism with Lacan ah my god I don't want to get lost here see but these are such wonderful topics that's the problem with Lacan up to a certain point he was it's clear up to what point when he liked to emphasize especially in the 50s early 60s his first ten seminars and so on where for him symbolic order is the ultimate transcendental horizon you know when he says we cannot move outside language language is always already here and all questioning about how did language itself rise up or how or similar are myths myths in the sense that they are pseudo explanations because they already presuppose that language is here you have a wonderful story in one of I forget which one not the main one Lilliputians one of Swift's Gulliver it's four parts I think no he has the craziest theory of the existence of the emergence of language it's a joke but it's a wonderful joke he says that he describes it like this people were developing out of apes blah blah and they needed to communicate so they were doing it how they were carrying on their back a bag with small models of things like if you wanted to say house you pick up a small model of a house and so on then the bag grew larger and larger and then at some point somebody says it's stupid why carry so many models why don't we replace them with words you know and fuck it I mean it's circular you see the point it's already here and so the the horizon of early Lacan is so-called symbolic castration which means fundamental the fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis for Lacan is that again we cannot step out of language language is always already here all we know is and I develop this in one of my books forgot which one via an ironic reference to Fredric Jameson you know his book about structuralism which is by the way not his best book The Prison-House of Language no that for Lacan it's not so much a prison-house but he even says this somewhere it's a torture-house of language the basic idea is that the process that Freud is describing as let's say becoming cultural of a human animal it's an extremely painful traumatic process you don't have normal becoming human and the name of this traumatic experience is for Lacan symbolic castration which I don't have time to go into it I think in no way under privileges women it's not that we men are not castrated women are castrated for Lacan we don't have time to go into it the signifier phallus is precisely the signifier of castration in the sense that in the sense that the more you are phallic the more you are castrated but that's another story let's not go into it so my answer to you would have been yes but then things get complicated with late Lacan with the real the real is precisely a dimension which cannot be accounted for in the terms of castration but okay I will give you but please that's why no I didn't did I give you something to read if you want to know more if you are interested look at my last big fat book Absolute Recoil the chapters two and three there I approach precisely this question how can we move beyond the transcendental because again back to Heidegger I described this in other of my small book Event for Heidegger this event of meaning in the sense of a disclosure of a certain understanding of reality is the ultimate horizon Heidegger calls it Ereignis event it's not a change in things themselves it's a change in how things appear to us in the horizon of pre-understanding how we always already understand reality it's basically simple you know Heidegger's point would have been for example that in modernity the predominant mode of approaching reality is through technology and scientific exploration we only touch the real true science all other approaches aesthetic and so on are just more secondary imaginary and so on and so on so again for Heidegger the ultimate horizon is this but as I develop in my book things get complicated here because the consequence of this for Heidegger is that catastrophe is primarily an ontological transcendental catastrophe as Heidegger likes to say and he is consequent here the true danger of of of technology is not that we will all kill ourselves through some experiment which will turn out take the wrong turn or atomic war or whatsoever for Heidegger the true danger is in the technological attitude as such the catastrophe already happened incidentally I love some of these scenarios of possible catastrophes you know where now that they are trying to reproduce the conditions of Big Bang at CERN South in Southern Switzerland you know that one of the fears was that if they succeed they will trigger a new Big Bang and all our reality will disintegrate I like this scenario that they will be proven right but there will be no one in a very short time to whom you can prove that you were right no okay what I want to say is and here Heidegger you know like Heidegger is not an idealist he is not claiming that this event of being creates things but that things always already appear to us within a certain let's call it eventual horizon we have our modern horizon we have medieval horizon classical Greek oriental horizon although there is not one here things go complex confused with Heidegger but then Heidegger very mysteriously a couple of times tries to move a step further for example he asks somewhere what is then the status of things before ontological horizon he admits
unknown
something is out there
something is out there
Slavoj Žižek
but it doesn't yet ontologically exist because to ontologically exist means to appear within a certain horizon of meaning and he just speculates about this he doesn't find his way out and what I try to prove is that there is a Hegelian way because you know what's the problem yes transcendental approach is radical and you cannot bypass it that's my reproach to this object ontology object-oriented ontology I think they are unaware of the extent to which they remain within the transcendental they describe a certain image of
but it doesn't yet ontologically exist because to ontologically exist means to appear within a certain horizon of meaning and he just speculates about this he doesn't find his way out and what I try to prove is that there is a Hegelian way because you know what's the problem yes transcendental approach is radical and you cannot bypass it that's my reproach to this object ontology object-oriented ontology I think they are unaware of the extent to which they remain within the transcendental they describe a certain image of
unknown
universe for example Graham Harman his distinction between external side of things how they relate to other object and always this excess of how they are in themselves and so
universe for example Graham Harman his distinction between external side of things how they relate to other object and always this excess of how they are in themselves and so
Slavoj Žižek
on and so on but it's clear that this is just a certain disclosure of reality and you cannot simply claim this is how things are independently of us but the big problem is this one how can then we overcome the transcendental horizon without falling back into some kind of naive realism we have direct access to things the way they are in themselves and so on and so on and I think that I try to find an answer following Hegel it's a speculative trick which consists in this that it's a wrong approach if in a naive realist way you try to distinguish between how things appear to us and how they are in themselves you know like let's erase all illusions and all our misperceptions and then we will reach the thing in itself the true problem is the opposite one how can in the midst of reality which is meaningless in itself it's just things in cosmos how can something like illusion appear let me give you just to be clear to you an example that I used already in my first book and then some twenty times whatever Theodor Adorno in a couple of times he uses this trick for example when he Adorno deals with the relationship between two types of approach to society either this individualist phenomenological type where your starting point are individuals and then you try to explain society as the result of the reaction of individuals for example we interact and then through repeated interaction slowly institutions emerge and so on and so on so again the key is interaction of individuals and larger social structure arises out of it then we have the opposite approach to simplify it usually identified in sociology which Émile Durkheim who was how do you call it collective organism he claimed society is the primordial fact it's always already here and individual is something which emerges out of social development individualism is secondary we begin with society which is always already here and then we have different forms of individuality which emerge depending on social structure then Adorno asks a question which is which of the two then is true and here he pulls his big Hegelian trick he says it's a wrong question we shouldn't say ask we have one approach individualist another approach organism society comes first and then ask but what is the truth he claims this what is the very yeah he admits first that these two options cannot be synthesized brought together there is a gap that said you cannot ever really deduce society from interaction of individuals and you also cannot ever deduce individuals fully from some anonymous social field so he admits the gap is here antinomy to put it in Kantian terms but the conclusion he draws from this is not so we are always caught in antinomy and we simply cannot know what society is in itself he performs a wonderfully simple trick he says but what if this very gap between individual and collective level is what characterizes today's society as such you see the point what is the very thing that appears to us as an epistemological obstacle the gap between individual approach and collective approach is something historically mediated part is something that defines our society itself and that's the basic for me at least Hegelian trick that the obstacle the problem becomes its own solution what is in itself real is the very gap between individual and social which characterizes at least our society and so on and so on and I claim I don't if you want to read my books on religion I try to develop it there that in this sense Hegel was a Christian you find this unique same move only in Christianity because you know the usual religious problem is we are separated from God abandoned by God so how to rejoin God and then through prayer through good works whatever you want but for Hegel Christian solution is a different one Christian solution is this one okay you are screwed up like Job you experience yourself totally separated from God at that point you are in the same position as Christ on the cross who you know that terrifying moment on the cross Christ says 'Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani' father why gave you abandoned me and so on and so on you see the beauty that's how you overcome the gap not by overcoming it but by locating the gap itself into the object so it's through the very this experience of the very gap that separates you from God that you are part of divinity you are part of divinity you are part of God which is why as Hegel points out for Christianity is totally totally against all this topic of you know how can we rejoin divinity no we don't rejoin divinity divinity descends to us but again not in the simple sense of of you know God sending a messenger to us no our separation from God is a separation of God from himself and Hegel draws from this maybe he is not right a radical historicist conclusion which is that our history the way humanity historically experiences God is the history of God himself you know self so for Hegel different religions are not just first of course for Hegel you cannot simply separate one religion is right others are bullshit you also cannot say they are all just human imaginations blah blah no what Hegel claims is that as he puts it the process of human understanding of God is the process of divine self-understanding okay but let's not so I hope you I gave you a vague idea of how this would be my path of moving beyond the transcendental dimension of how you know not this naive approach oh my god we are caught in illusions can I jump beyond and approach the thing itself but the opposite the opposite what is what is most real is the very gap that separates me from reality and this is also what this is again I love Hegel because of this I'm so obsessed with Hegel Hegel's problem is not this usual one the in you know like are we infinitely caught in our subjective illusions or how can we reach the way things really are no for Hegel the big problem is the opposite one how is within the stupid flat reality this gray world out there like how is something so traumatic like separation lie illusion possible for Hegel illusion is something incredible the greatest power he calls this power of absolute negativity that we with our mind we can tear apart what in nature it belongs together so again this is why incidentally I am so obsessed I try to understand it with quantum physics because to really answer this question that's my pretense I'm not sure I succeed to really answer the question of how can something like spirit emerge out of nature of course and not to give a circular account that there is always already spirit in nature I think that only the image of or the structure of reality described by quantum physics renders is strong enough to account for it but again I got a little bit lost in this improvisations so again based on this before I go to object-oriented ontology and ecology I want to give you a short theater of horrors so that you will not think that I'm just praising Heidegger maybe this will interest you I want to describe to you the contours of a maybe some of you have already read it the problem of the the big scandal let's call it like this a year ago when finally they were published in Germany it's not yet finished but the first volume was published of so-called Schwarze Hefte black book notes of Heidegger some volumes no just small book notes in which from late 20s till I think late 50s early 60s Heidegger was writing putting down his intimate thoughts and of course it caused such a scandal you can see there how to the end Heidegger persisted in his anti-Semitism and his ambiguous fascination with Nazism and so on and I will not try to save in any way Heidegger the shock was so strong that the president of one of the Heidegger associations in Germany stepped down said here I no longer can do it and so on so again what happens here what these volumes show is that after Heidegger effectively cultivated more and more doubts about Hitler and the Nazi regime he was not laughing here when he stepped down as the dean of Freiburg University he was disappointed but a more horrible thing is the precise shape of this disappointment basically he was blaming the enemy what Heidegger reproach Hitler with reproach Hitler for was not the Nazi stance as such but the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to the technological nihilist what he calls Machenschaft this manipulative attitude technologically and so on manipulating reality becoming like America Great Britain I mean United States Great Britain France Soviet Union and so on who are always more guilty a quote from this black book notes all well-meaning and even archaeological excavation of earlier folklore all conventional cultivation of custom all extolling of landscape and soil all glorification of the blood is just foreground and smoke screen and necessary in order to obscure what truly and solely is the unconditional domination dominion of the Machenschaft of destruction so as it is clear from many similar passages Heidegger's critique of Nazism is thus a critique of actually existing Nazism on behalf of its own metaphysical what he calls inner greatness furthermore Heidegger's reserves towards the Nazi regime had nothing to do with his eventual rejection of its murderous brutality far from denying the Nazi barbarism Heidegger locates into it precisely the greatness of Nazism here is a quote it's crazy quote National Socialism is a barbaric principle wherein lies its essence and its capacity for greatness the danger is not Nazism itself like Nazi brutality as threat to Western civilization but instead that it will be rendered innocuous via homilies about the true the good and the beautiful and so on and so on so you see Heidegger this is what those who try to redeem Heidegger like but he grew doubtful about Nazism yes but not in the sense of my god it's horrible but in the sense of beneath this all brutality blood and soil they don't really mean it they are really manipulators like like whom like British like blah blah and like the Jews of course no because let's go on while anti-Semitism persists and survives Heidegger's disenchantment with Nazism okay one has to admit that it doesn't play a central role in Heidegger's edifice he has just but they're terrifying a couple of passages in this black book notes on anti- on the Jews he uses Jews just as the embodiment of as it were what is wrong with the West of Western nihilism Heidegger's point is that and he calls the term Weltjudentum world Jewry is what embodies at its purest this Machenschaft calculating nihilistic attitude of manipulation and so on and so on now of course some defenders try to save Heidegger but you see Jews are just one example we can erase the Jews and still claim that Heidegger's mistake was not in his critique of technology and so on modern nihilism but simply he took the wrong example as modern nihilism at its purest well as a good Hegelian my answer is here examples are never just you know the and because if you try to save Heidegger in this way you can also save Hitler himself because as nice Marxist reading demonstrated it's absolutely clear that when Hitler hates Jews Jews embody class struggle Jews are simply those who are supposed to bring antagonism class struggle into society so you can then only say oh Hitler was right we need organic order he was just wrong to project the the antagonistic element onto onto the Jews again the truly horrible thing I think in this black book notes is double we can nonetheless reconstruct a whole theory of Jews from Heidegger first Heidegger performs the well-known operation of rejecting primitive biological racism and his defenders always quote this Heidegger always emphasizes Nazi biological racism is vulgar and so on and so on yes but what Heidegger does is replace biological racism with let's call it transcendental spiritual racism Jews are of course not biologically inferior but they are condemned because they embody a certain spiritual stance which is again the stance of technological manipulation exploitation blah blah which makes them what they are so European nihilism or what Heidegger calls forgetting of being culminates in modern Machenschaft spirit of machinations manipulations which quote from Heidegger leads to total deracination resulting in the self-alienation of peoples end of quote and contemporary Jewry Jewry Weltjudentum Jewishness quotes I quote from Heidegger that's the horror the increase in power of the Jews finds its basis in the fact that Western metaphysics above all in its modern incarnation offers fertile ground for the dissemination of an empty rationality and calculability which in this way gains a foothold in spirit without ever being able to grasp from within the hidden realms of decision and so on and so on so again a clear correlation between Jews and what Heidegger calls the modern technological nihilism the world Jewry Weltjudentum thus embodies the technological degradation of our lives which is why as Heidegger observes in a related text quote it would be important to inquire about the basis of the of the Jewish unique predisposition towards planetary criminality here we are so how about the Holocaust here even I was shocked Heidegger goes to the end here things get really dark as Heidegger observed he writes in his notebook in with regard to Jews I quote the highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation it's crazy wait a minute the best or the most horrible is coming end of quote so in an obscenely pseudo-Hegelian way the elimination annihilation of European Jews must be understood as an act of Jewish self-annihilation Selbstvernichtung his word the Holocaust was ultimately an act of Jewish self-annihilation insofar as at Auschwitz and other death camps the Jews who were the prime movers behind Machenschaft technological devastation and so on they themselves succumb to industrial mass murder you see the terrifying logic Jews embodied the spirit of technological exploitation destruction of nature so it's only logical that at the end this fate was also their own so Europe's Jews only fell prey to forces that they themselves unleashed or as Heidegger states quote when the essentially Jewish in the metaphysical sense struggles against what is empirically Jewish the high point of self-annihilation in history is attained end of quote in short the Nazis in organizing the technological annihilation of Jews merely turned the essentially Jewish stance of technological manipulation against the empirical Jews themselves I mean this is a pretty terrifying idea you have to admit it so and I don't want in any way to redeem Heidegger here okay we don't have time now to go into this topic of what pushed Heidegger in this direction it's a very complex topic I would like just to say this that the obvious solution or outcome of these discoveries would have been what some radical critics of Heidegger from Richard Wollin to Emmanuel Faye and so on in France would have been they propose simply to directly criminalize Heidegger in the sense of he shouldn't be even considered as a serious philosopher one should simply deprive him of his academic status he is out I think that this all too this direct criminalization of Heidegger is an all too easy way out and even Derrida pointed this out one should be you know you avoid the true traumatic problem which is unfortunately Heidegger was a mega great philosopher and the true trauma is it's the same problem that I think I already mentioned two days ago like how could but in a more less terrifying way like how could someone like Reinhard Heydrich probably effectively enjoy late Beethoven's late Beethoven's quartets and so on or in many other examples you find of war criminals to whom in their private writings you cannot deny an authentic spiritual greatness and I recently spoke with a Jewish friend of mine who is a Heideggerian and I asked him how can you after all this how can you remain Heideggerian and he told me he gave me quite a shocking answer he referred to some ancient Jewish wisdom according to which there are some deep traumatic insights that can only be formulated by a diabolically evil person you know that to see something you some some deep hidden traumatic truth you have to be evil we can only get it from I think this is also maybe a too poetic way out but I think that there is no worse antisemite than Jewish person yeah but wait a minute they are in what precise sense do you mean this I develop this as a paradox and which is why my book in German was censored you know pages out when I claimed that today Zionism is the last form of anti-Semitism but I meant something quite empirical I experienced this with when I was in Israel with my friend Udi Aloni and at some round table Zionist defenders of Israeli state politics attacked him for what that he is not really one of them he is only interested in money and fame he just pretends to be one of them and I was shocked I told them you know you are describing him in exactly the same way in the late 19th century national antisemites in France were describing Jews you pretend to be one of us but you are only interested in money or whatever you are not really one of us that's I'm claiming that today you know also you have even this moment of self-alienation this attributing to the Jews the tendency to self-annihilation Zionists call this self Jewish self-hating Jew you know like that they want to destroy and no we are but again back to it what I want to say is that of course I will try to put it like this of course that would have been my conclusion of course we cannot accept this just something I'm totally opposed to this simple defense of Heidegger in the sense of he was just misled blah blah we can reformulate his entire edifice without the man no here I'm a Hegelian the basic Hegelian insight is about examples is that I've written about it maybe you know it I'm sorry if I repeat myself you know the German word for example is Beispiel Beispiel which means it comes by it plays like it emerges by something that comes on the top of it but and in this sense as Hegel deploys very well Hegel is anti-Platonic why in the Platonic universe you have the pure idea and then you have examples which are lower and lower no example can fully fit the idea Hegel accepts this just with an addendum so much worse for the idea that is to say for Hegel every example every actual situation that exemplifies an idea secretly already undermines it there is always more in an example of the idea than this idea itself and this is how I give you the very elementary matrix this is how Hegel's progress dialectical progress functions it's not it's not that when you have a certain attitude notion Hegel does not undermine it through a reference to a better idea no his criticism is always self-criticism he says let's just exemplify this idea let's realize it imagine realizing it and in this way we will discover how this idea by way of actualizing itself refutes itself to give you an extremely simple example this masochist mystical self-torturing you should erase the traces of yourself to get rid of your false self and become a pure spirit or whatever Hegel says but the very form the practice of this masochist spiritualist who want to erase their self is that and this is often my impression at least with some false mystics they talk all the time about themselves you know is there still some trace of they how to erase it they are just occupied you know the practice of their annihilation annihilation of the self this is always what bothered me a little bit maybe I'm wrong with so-called Eastern spirituality they talk about how we in the West are egocentric blah blah we are just nothing part of cosmos fuck it and then they talk all the time about our spirit how to overcome this that they talk only about their inner life okay so again back to it my point would have been this one so again yes back to Hegel the fact that Heidegger takes as the example of modern technological manipulation the Jewish spirituality of course has very heavy consequences we cannot say let's erase the example let's keep his idea no we should definitely claim that something must be wrong with his idea the problem here is that nonetheless fuck it his ideas are great ideas but we have to confront this we have to fight through it and I know this okay I put it in another way there are many Heideggerians who are even radical leftists like for example years ago he died of I don't know what Reiner Schürmann you know a kind of a mystical Heideggerian today is half forgotten then today John Caputo Gianni Vattimo John Caputo is interesting because he in a polemic against me he tries to claim that I'm focus too much on capitalism that can't we imagine a more like why isn't it that if we were to get capitalism with health care more equality blah blah why not you know and a nice friend of mine attacked him that he wants to replace capitalism with caputolism like Caputo this is a nice dirty joke okay but now I will say something in defense of them I think that all those leftist Heideggerians again today Vattimo John Caputo it would be wrong to say that they are simply misreading Heidegger or on the other hand that they are without knowing it closet fascists you know that they only think they are leftist but really their structure is closet fascist I think a more radical conclusion had to be drawn there is not one essential stable core of Heidegger's thinking it's open for example even empirically it's not as simple as that after let me tell you a funny story which I mention in one of my books I think one of the big participants of leftist movement student revolt in the late 60s in Germany all around told me that he with his friends visited Heidegger in to inquire how does he stand towards movement and Heidegger was enthusiastic about them okay but then he has explained his enthusiasm and this somehow ruined the pleasure because he said you're trying to do now what I tried to do in as a rector you didn't work but nonetheless do you know that Heidegger consistently it's clear now after World War II voted for social democrats when web- that was the big event of my youth when Willy Brandt was first elected as chancellor and so on Heidegger wrote an enthusiastic letter to his wife you know like finally we got rid of those Schwarze the blacks the Christian demo- Christian democrats fine and so on so what I'm saying is that what I'm saying is that there is no way we can there is no shortcut you know Heidegger is a mega great thinker but I described you here in a very simplified way this idea of transcendental event history as a succession of events pure eventuality and then there are of course immediately problems how do you move from early Heidegger Sein und Zeit being and time to this it's a pro- but what I want to say is that the only path of thinking is to think through Heidegger in the sense of he did something great but the result was catastrophic and this result is immanent to his greatness and to think this contradiction what do you have is the same as you remember I was telling you two days ago is the same for me with communism with Christianity and so on I never like these games of oh Marx was pure and so on just and then it doesn't matter where you set the limit for some it's already late Engels his companion for others it's Lenin for yet others is is is Stalin and so on but I think that you cannot play this game so easily there has to be something already in Marx himself it's not so much what he said maybe even more what he didn't say where he didn't see the problem and so I am here very much a pessimist not a pessimist in the sense that they invite this vision in the rest I fully accept Marx's critique of capitalism I still think that his critique of political economy is an unheard of achievement the problem is that he uses a certain notion of communism to measure let's call it naively as a standard to measure the capitalist alienation antagonisms or whatever no this is best explained best discernible in his formulas of instead of you know always Marx likes to use already the young Marx this rhetorics of instead of work making us richer and more free work the more we work the more we are slaves and so on and so on where Marx fails is that what I call immanent normativity Marx's idea of communism is simply to simplify it for me the idea of capitalism without capital Marx is well aware that there is an incredible dynamics of capitalism capitalism is crazy the most dynamic system but Marx thinks that at a certain point the form of capital becomes an obstacle to it and then you can erase this form and get an even stronger dynamics I think this doesn't go because you know where now this will be philosophical reading of what I don't like Marx's text introduction to critique of political economy blah blah where he describes his it's horrible logic of history when he says you know at a certain point when productive forces develop then relations of production are in harmony with them but then when forces of production develop more there is a gap and you need a social revolution so that new relations of production emerge which and so on but I think that precisely for capitalism this doesn't work there was no epoch of hard capitalism is in crisis from the very beginning and that's why it works so well the crisis you know that's why Marx's always have this problem it's a crisis it's a deeper crisis horrible yes but the more capitalism is in crisis the more you know the more discord you have crisis the more it is pushed the system to invent something new to pull itself out and so on and so on so you see my point for Marx I think should be criticized in this sense to what extent his vision of communism was still too much indebted to the capitalist universe he just wanted basically capitalism without its antagonisms yes do you think that Stalinism is a manifestation of that and do you would you say in a way yes you can say this yes because you know what people don't take into account and I know this first hand because yesterday I was at New York Public Library with that guy who well I told him afterwards we are good friends now Steve Kotkin know that we can be friends but when my people take power you go to gulag no and he says then it's same the same no but but I learned that that you know to understand properly Stalinism you have to take into account already in the 1920s in Soviet Union their absolute obsession with America America you know that Henry Ford had an almost half divine status in 1920s for such a nice irony while for us enlightened Western Marxists Henry Ford is you know how do you call it that work on track conveyor assembly line yeah assembly line the worst alienation for them it was the idea you know so now comes what did I think already mention this even to you that when Stalin was asked in can he define the figure of ideal Bolshevik maybe I already used this here I'm sorry you know what his answer was the combination of Russian passionate dedication and of American pragmatic spirit you can even explain in this way you know we all mock didn't I already mention this to you did I use two days ago I didn't the example of this Stalinist Baroque you know this kitschy this is New York in what sense an architect explained to me when Stalinist architecture emerged in early 30s they were fascinated by this type of buildings in New York and you know what's their origin Michael Sorkin the husband of Joan Copjec explained to me did you know that you know Manhattan was full so they raised they the only way to expand was to build up and then some of the buildings collapsed so then city authority decided that if you want to go up you must go in a little bit no and this then was overtaken by there is even mutual influence did I use the last time I didn't the use of I think I did King Kong you know the story of King Kong iconic image you know Empire State Building the gigantic ape on the top you know the origin of it Soviet Union in the late 20s the producers which later produced King Kong visited Soviet Union and met they were still there some of those architects and they saw this is a famous constructivist model it was never built for the Palace of Soviets kind of a skyscraper and on the top gigantic statue of Lenin they said replace Lenin with ape and you have the ultimate it's empirically taken from from Soviets on the other hand Soviets were so fascinated maybe they were right by Hollywood they the the boss of Soviet cinema visited Hollywood and was ah they say you know Hollywood was strictly organized everything was planned you had a group of scenario with whom job was just to select to read world literature to select jokes others for this for that and up to a point it works even now I met a guy through friends in Hollywood I asked him what is he doing he told me I'm Campbellizing scripts you know what he was referring to you know who is Joseph Campbell that Jungian blah who was the key influence on George Lucas for Star Wars and to Campbellize it became a verb in Hollywood means to add some pseudo-deep spiritual thoughts you know let's say we have an action movie and the producer says we need to Campbellize it a little bit get somebody who reads somebody and says but what meaning does it have where do we you know you can follow this process nicely I claim in some Clint Eastwood movies you know Dirty Harry is just this but you see Campbellization here and there so Soviets were so fascinated by this you know that there was a plan it was interrupted because of World War II they had a plan to build on which is now again Russia Crimea peninsula or whatever another a Soviet Hollywood they were so fascinated and also for example McDonalds they loved it hard-line communists you know what fascinated them they wanted people to work and then to have quick efficient food no they they saw maybe they were right McDonalds as like where America is almost communist I loved it no so again but again back to it you simplify the problem my problem is not to avoid the tragedy of history the tragedy if you claim Heidegger is a criminal it's all too easy the problem is precisely this one a great philosopher and he did pass how come that it was possible for him still to be a really great philosopher can he be redeemed for example another half-Heideggerian French guy Jean-Luc Nancy and the other guy Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe their entire effort is to isolate the aspect they try to locate it in Sein und Zeit in the notion of Mitsein Mitsein at the sense of Dasein to say it in stupid terms human beings are not alone we are always thrown together but that Heidegger didn't pursue that line enough so that you must add different form of collective analysis and then to fill in this gap then fascist community comes and so on and so on so again I think that what some Habermas pupils like Richard Wollin and so on want to do again it's a too easy job you can excommunicate Heidegger but then no wonder you cannot really think neither fascism nor communism and so on that's why although I have a certain great as I already said today's ago great respect for Habermas but for me Habermas is so clearly his theoretical framework is not strong enough to think what went wrong to put it simply in the 20th century and the moment you try to think that the moment you try to think it you are accused of yourself being like the standard Habermasian trick is to accuse those who want to analyze too closely fascist irrationalism as themselves fascinated by it irrationalists and so on and so on that's why you know for example Habermas warns against ethnic blah blah but he doesn't really provide a convincing a convincing analysis of it and I think the trick is to be here I am Lacanian you know what's Lacan's point it's not oh the lesson of psychoanalysis is the darkness of human passions is just no Lacan puts very nicely in his text on [unintelligible] I'm sorry one of the Écrits that what is so provocative in Freud is not the irrationality of drives or sexuality but how discursive rational they are this is what Lacan means with his unconscious is structured like language and so on and so on that even drives if you take the chapter in Seminar XI he speaks about machine montage of drives it's an artificial something artificial drives have nothing through with some instinctive authenticity and so on and so on and I think Lacan is right there is nothing in the Jungian sense archetypal about drives and so on they are contingent symbolic constructs and so on Lacan even here you can see where Judith Butler goes a little bit too quickly Lacan not only is aware that Oedipus complex is historical he even locates the very discovery of Oedipus complex Freudian at a certain moment and it's more correct than the usual idiots who claim yeah Oedipus complex this was in value for Freud's time when it was Victorian oppression my God I read recently a history of sexuality where I saw this what Victorian oppression if you try to imagine very vulgar how much people were fucking per capita per week probably they were never fucking as much as in as in Victorian times you know where the the idea came to me you know that shitty movie I didn't like it too much French Lieutenant's Woman there is a dialogue between Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons which quote some statistics which I then looked upon it's true that if you take in a- if you take into account the number of prostitutes in London in 1880s and if you take into account all the male who were their potential customers you get at a and if you accept a modest estimate that each prostitute had like only four five customers per week you get a totally incredible number that an average London guy was going to a prostitute like two three times a week or something like that it's totally crazy so what I'm saying is that Lacan shows nicely that not only Freud was able to formulate Oedipus complex precisely because in social reality Oedipus complex was already in crisis you know it's this confirms Hegel's view of how theory always comes afterwards too late it's only when some phenomenon is in crisis already begins to to disintegrate that you can form that you can form its theory in other words I don't understand this fear of Habermasians you know where you find this fear even more are you were you aware of it now this may surprise you I am still friendly although he is not so much a right winger but definitely not a left winger Peter Sloterdijk you don't remember a couple of times he provoked incredible backlash for example some fifteen years ago when was that debate on on human park or whatever and he was accused by Habermasians Peter Sloterdijk of defending Nazi eugenics no I am here on Sloterdijk's side I knew him I debated this with him his point is just this one deeply true with the prospect of biogenetic and so on manipulations things radically change we need new rules why because the standard ethical rules that we have simply rely on the notion of a free personality free will education and so on but the the prospect of biogenetic and so on manipulations changes this the moment your very just think about education okay let's say you are more intelligent than me which is quite possible I guess in an IQ test so then let's say we work for an exam you work hard but I take some pill or whatever not just the ones that you already have today and almost with no work I learn it but you know what this means this means that the whole pedagogy which is based on the idea that you know education hard work what if we even will be able to manipulate basic ethical psychic attitudes fear courage and so on you know what's the horror they will lose their authentic ethical status if I am a coward and I take a pill and I'm no longer coward where is the ethical greatness of overcoming your fear through courage and so on and what what Sloterdijk is just saying is that high you know this is a big problem we will have to rethink it the Habermasian answer was simply basically a prohibition we shouldn't do it we have to set limits to biogenetic and so on manipulations but for me as I already said this I did two days ago the problem are not these manipulations as such the problem is their how because look this is the problem that's the trick if I am a coward and very simple example I know it's not simple as that and if through some biogenetic or even simple chemical manipulation you can change my ethical attitudes you know what this means it's not only you cannot then even distinguish my authentic ethical attitude and the one then manipulated through chem because if you can change it with chemistry it simply means that already my previous innocent attitude just reflected a different chemical composition if you can manipulate ethical attitudes through this biochemical or biogenetic manipulations it simply means that you know even the authentic one lose their authenticity it means I may appear courageous whatever but it's just I was lucky to get that chemical or genetic so where is our freedom and so on I do not I am not saying as already emphasized two days ago I am not saying that it's a lost case you know I'm not saying that but it's a ah the guy who you should read yes I mentioned it now I cannot miss Benjamin Libet L-I-B-E-T I think he's now retired he taught at Berkeley he made I think I mentioned it I'm sorry if I repeat myself he made that legendary experiment of you know proving that when you do the most contingent gesture that like a split of a second before you make conscious decision like he asked people okay sit and at any moment quickly decide to grab this paper measuring your brain he demonstrated that before you make the decision split of a second orders are already on the way in other words your brain already makes a decision and the conclusion for me would have been that when you think you are making a free contingent decision you are just becoming aware about something blah blah but now comes the interesting point Libet believes in the freedom of the will and in a wonderfully Hegelian way he locates it at a different point he claims we are looking at the wrong place which is positive decisions he claims that what you can do is to when decision is on the way to block it that negativity is freedom you can block it it's a wonderful Hegelian that you know the zero level free act is not I do this I want to do this but to say no to stop it sabotage and so on so back to Sloterdijk he did this he did another great thing I claim like he was attacked like crazy but I like him for his he's more crazy than me provoking with words he said this is nice provocation that the great illusion of 20th century was that the poor can save the world proletarians and so on he said now we know only the ultra rich can save the world what does he mean by this he wants to save social democracy his idea is this one communism doesn't work rich are inventors productive and his idea is this one how to that we simply have to show greater give greater social recognition to the rich and this will it's a naive idea I don't agree with it this will justify us then taking even more money from them and so on and so on he's trying to save social democratic welfare state basically and so on and so on so again what I'm saying is that you see this is the impotence of simply Habermasians attacking him neo-Nazi and so on and so on okay he is often naive and so on although deeply right now I remembered I've written this in my books you know who died now a week ago or two Lee Kuan Yew the founder of Singapore this is an ingenious idea as Sloterdijk he said that if ever people will be building a monument in years from now in future to someone from our age it will be Lee Kuan Yew why he invented authoritarian capitalism he was the first to show the direction where we are all moving and very intelligently Sloterdijk shows that this is not just Asian primitives they are not good enough for democracy no it's a global it has nothing to do with Asian values you see he can be also his book on globalization is a wonderful idea where he demonstrates how global capitalism is not just global everyone is in it it also it is also globe in the sense of the privileged live under a globe even if it's an invisible globe and we don't really see what is outside even if we think it's the logic of Elysium if you saw the movie or there is an old one did you see it Logan’s Run or Zardoz and so on you know the privileged and he gives wonderful descriptions of this of course rationally we know there are people living misery but you know one thing is to rationally know it the other thing is to be really aware of it like I will fly next week also for two days to LA I already mentioned this to you no you land to LAX then you take a cab to Beverly Hills or whatever but you know nobody sees the area around LAX which is slum why so this is why LAX airport was built there because screw the poor who cares all the all the planes landing there and so on so this was the shock for us in Europe it's a wonderful horrible thing in Florence suburbs Firenze Italy there was a fire a year and a half two years ago and what happened there is that twenty Chinese died or whatever and they discovered that it's not only Chinese gulags third world sweatshops there in the suburb of of Firenze noble European culture there was a whole ghetto to Chinese working like slaves illegally and so on and so on in terrible conditions you see my point even if we are rationally aware in some sense we don't see it and this is I think how our news manipulate us you see more or less but you see it on screen it's not part of your reality all the poverty and so on and so on that's why we like charity I always have a theory that charity is a strategy of basically bribery we pay you to stay there you know it's always it's something I'm I'm so disgusted by all these appeals you know like you have a photo of some black guy boy for example with a distorted lip and then for five dollars a month you can make a change you can and so on you know what is beneath this is basically what they are telling you is give five dollars a month and you can not only forget about problems you can even feel good that you are sorry I got a little bit lost into it so but we go on next Monday no thanks very much for your patience and fuck you only two of you ah the lady has gone there okay I really I really sincerely wanted to rep because I know my god it always happens to me why she was hurt and so on and so on where she felt but I what I really didn't get is like you know what I mean for me non-sexist society is not a society where you have to be careful all the time it's a society where you can talk dirty but it doesn't work in sexist way again as I told you a society which overcomes racism for me is not a society where you follow all the rules oh my god I said black no I should say African-American and so on but when and you know I have a couple I've told you this I think of black friends who really like me and told me call me nigger I allow you to do it you know what I mean that's the problem this is what makes me so afraid that political correctness just it just it keeps the thing you know there is always a certain obscene pleasure in political correctness this endless self my god I used that expression was I still maybe racist or whatever you know this great pleasure of again looking deeper and deeper into you and discovering new strata of I'm saying just forget about it this is how let me conclude with this story then I go I'm looking for there ah here I was in India I met Naxalites there my god I could have been arrested one million of Maoist guerrillas I met one of them who was a taxi driver but really very intelligent and I was with my publisher there the taxi driver understood some political names and asked my publisher with whom I talked 'how is this guy is he one of us Naxalite guerrilla' and the guy gave him yes and then the taxi driver threw the guy asked me a question and it was pure obscene offer of solidarity he asked me it's terrible I warn you if you thought that was insulting wait for this he asked me there is a well known image of old Gandhi like this on a stick in a white tunic walking from one village to another he asked me what is for you the message of this old fox oh I knew it must be something extremely turned and yes I guessed it what he wants I told him it's a call to the next village the stick I want the boy to bug me to fuck me if not I will have to do it myself with the stick the guy stopped a taxi embraced me and said you are one of us and now comes the ethical part then we spoke for two hours and no it wasn't that we were telling each other even more dirty stories it was pure politics and so on but in order you know that obscene gesture was like yes you are not a snob you are one of us again that was the miracle we did not then talk oh did you hear about the guy who fucked three goats or whatever no it was pure cold political analysis what they can do but that was my that's how I claim how you really overcome racism there okay sorry talk too much see you next Monday now this luggage I told you I'm going there to meet Jerry Brown tomorrow I hope this will work he promised but he's not sure that he will come to to Stanford just hold it just stay here sorry now the limousine is waiting we could be here just for today or also next week yes tell it to me okay if you want Western business signal oh it's I never get it why no please like like you see your uncle the one then Armstrong I have no idea [unintelligible]
on and so on but it's clear that this is just a certain disclosure of reality and you cannot simply claim this is how things are independently of us but the big problem is this one how can then we overcome the transcendental horizon without falling back into some kind of naive realism we have direct access to things the way they are in themselves and so on and so on and I think that I try to find an answer following Hegel it's a speculative trick which consists in this that it's a wrong approach if in a naive realist way you try to distinguish between how things appear to us and how they are in themselves you know like let's erase all illusions and all our misperceptions and then we will reach the thing in itself the true problem is the opposite one how can in the midst of reality which is meaningless in itself it's just things in cosmos how can something like illusion appear let me give you just to be clear to you an example that I used already in my first book and then some twenty times whatever Theodor Adorno in a couple of times he uses this trick for example when he Adorno deals with the relationship between two types of approach to society either this individualist phenomenological type where your starting point are individuals and then you try to explain society as the result of the reaction of individuals for example we interact and then through repeated interaction slowly institutions emerge and so on and so on so again the key is interaction of individuals and larger social structure arises out of it then we have the opposite approach to simplify it usually identified in sociology which Émile Durkheim who was how do you call it collective organism he claimed society is the primordial fact it's always already here and individual is something which emerges out of social development individualism is secondary we begin with society which is always already here and then we have different forms of individuality which emerge depending on social structure then Adorno asks a question which is which of the two then is true and here he pulls his big Hegelian trick he says it's a wrong question we shouldn't say ask we have one approach individualist another approach organism society comes first and then ask but what is the truth he claims this what is the very yeah he admits first that these two options cannot be synthesized brought together there is a gap that said you cannot ever really deduce society from interaction of individuals and you also cannot ever deduce individuals fully from some anonymous social field so he admits the gap is here antinomy to put it in Kantian terms but the conclusion he draws from this is not so we are always caught in antinomy and we simply cannot know what society is in itself he performs a wonderfully simple trick he says but what if this very gap between individual and collective level is what characterizes today's society as such you see the point what is the very thing that appears to us as an epistemological obstacle the gap between individual approach and collective approach is something historically mediated part is something that defines our society itself and that's the basic for me at least Hegelian trick that the obstacle the problem becomes its own solution what is in itself real is the very gap between individual and social which characterizes at least our society and so on and so on and I claim I don't if you want to read my books on religion I try to develop it there that in this sense Hegel was a Christian you find this unique same move only in Christianity because you know the usual religious problem is we are separated from God abandoned by God so how to rejoin God and then through prayer through good works whatever you want but for Hegel Christian solution is a different one Christian solution is this one okay you are screwed up like Job you experience yourself totally separated from God at that point you are in the same position as Christ on the cross who you know that terrifying moment on the cross Christ says 'Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani' father why gave you abandoned me and so on and so on you see the beauty that's how you overcome the gap not by overcoming it but by locating the gap itself into the object so it's through the very this experience of the very gap that separates you from God that you are part of divinity you are part of divinity you are part of God which is why as Hegel points out for Christianity is totally totally against all this topic of you know how can we rejoin divinity no we don't rejoin divinity divinity descends to us but again not in the simple sense of of you know God sending a messenger to us no our separation from God is a separation of God from himself and Hegel draws from this maybe he is not right a radical historicist conclusion which is that our history the way humanity historically experiences God is the history of God himself you know self so for Hegel different religions are not just first of course for Hegel you cannot simply separate one religion is right others are bullshit you also cannot say they are all just human imaginations blah blah no what Hegel claims is that as he puts it the process of human understanding of God is the process of divine self-understanding okay but let's not so I hope you I gave you a vague idea of how this would be my path of moving beyond the transcendental dimension of how you know not this naive approach oh my god we are caught in illusions can I jump beyond and approach the thing itself but the opposite the opposite what is what is most real is the very gap that separates me from reality and this is also what this is again I love Hegel because of this I'm so obsessed with Hegel Hegel's problem is not this usual one the in you know like are we infinitely caught in our subjective illusions or how can we reach the way things really are no for Hegel the big problem is the opposite one how is within the stupid flat reality this gray world out there like how is something so traumatic like separation lie illusion possible for Hegel illusion is something incredible the greatest power he calls this power of absolute negativity that we with our mind we can tear apart what in nature it belongs together so again this is why incidentally I am so obsessed I try to understand it with quantum physics because to really answer this question that's my pretense I'm not sure I succeed to really answer the question of how can something like spirit emerge out of nature of course and not to give a circular account that there is always already spirit in nature I think that only the image of or the structure of reality described by quantum physics renders is strong enough to account for it but again I got a little bit lost in this improvisations so again based on this before I go to object-oriented ontology and ecology I want to give you a short theater of horrors so that you will not think that I'm just praising Heidegger maybe this will interest you I want to describe to you the contours of a maybe some of you have already read it the problem of the the big scandal let's call it like this a year ago when finally they were published in Germany it's not yet finished but the first volume was published of so-called Schwarze Hefte black book notes of Heidegger some volumes no just small book notes in which from late 20s till I think late 50s early 60s Heidegger was writing putting down his intimate thoughts and of course it caused such a scandal you can see there how to the end Heidegger persisted in his anti-Semitism and his ambiguous fascination with Nazism and so on and I will not try to save in any way Heidegger the shock was so strong that the president of one of the Heidegger associations in Germany stepped down said here I no longer can do it and so on so again what happens here what these volumes show is that after Heidegger effectively cultivated more and more doubts about Hitler and the Nazi regime he was not laughing here when he stepped down as the dean of Freiburg University he was disappointed but a more horrible thing is the precise shape of this disappointment basically he was blaming the enemy what Heidegger reproach Hitler with reproach Hitler for was not the Nazi stance as such but the fact that the Nazis also succumbed to the technological nihilist what he calls Machenschaft this manipulative attitude technologically and so on manipulating reality becoming like America Great Britain I mean United States Great Britain France Soviet Union and so on who are always more guilty a quote from this black book notes all well-meaning and even archaeological excavation of earlier folklore all conventional cultivation of custom all extolling of landscape and soil all glorification of the blood is just foreground and smoke screen and necessary in order to obscure what truly and solely is the unconditional domination dominion of the Machenschaft of destruction so as it is clear from many similar passages Heidegger's critique of Nazism is thus a critique of actually existing Nazism on behalf of its own metaphysical what he calls inner greatness furthermore Heidegger's reserves towards the Nazi regime had nothing to do with his eventual rejection of its murderous brutality far from denying the Nazi barbarism Heidegger locates into it precisely the greatness of Nazism here is a quote it's crazy quote National Socialism is a barbaric principle wherein lies its essence and its capacity for greatness the danger is not Nazism itself like Nazi brutality as threat to Western civilization but instead that it will be rendered innocuous via homilies about the true the good and the beautiful and so on and so on so you see Heidegger this is what those who try to redeem Heidegger like but he grew doubtful about Nazism yes but not in the sense of my god it's horrible but in the sense of beneath this all brutality blood and soil they don't really mean it they are really manipulators like like whom like British like blah blah and like the Jews of course no because let's go on while anti-Semitism persists and survives Heidegger's disenchantment with Nazism okay one has to admit that it doesn't play a central role in Heidegger's edifice he has just but they're terrifying a couple of passages in this black book notes on anti- on the Jews he uses Jews just as the embodiment of as it were what is wrong with the West of Western nihilism Heidegger's point is that and he calls the term Weltjudentum world Jewry is what embodies at its purest this Machenschaft calculating nihilistic attitude of manipulation and so on and so on now of course some defenders try to save Heidegger but you see Jews are just one example we can erase the Jews and still claim that Heidegger's mistake was not in his critique of technology and so on modern nihilism but simply he took the wrong example as modern nihilism at its purest well as a good Hegelian my answer is here examples are never just you know the and because if you try to save Heidegger in this way you can also save Hitler himself because as nice Marxist reading demonstrated it's absolutely clear that when Hitler hates Jews Jews embody class struggle Jews are simply those who are supposed to bring antagonism class struggle into society so you can then only say oh Hitler was right we need organic order he was just wrong to project the the antagonistic element onto onto the Jews again the truly horrible thing I think in this black book notes is double we can nonetheless reconstruct a whole theory of Jews from Heidegger first Heidegger performs the well-known operation of rejecting primitive biological racism and his defenders always quote this Heidegger always emphasizes Nazi biological racism is vulgar and so on and so on yes but what Heidegger does is replace biological racism with let's call it transcendental spiritual racism Jews are of course not biologically inferior but they are condemned because they embody a certain spiritual stance which is again the stance of technological manipulation exploitation blah blah which makes them what they are so European nihilism or what Heidegger calls forgetting of being culminates in modern Machenschaft spirit of machinations manipulations which quote from Heidegger leads to total deracination resulting in the self-alienation of peoples end of quote and contemporary Jewry Jewry Weltjudentum Jewishness quotes I quote from Heidegger that's the horror the increase in power of the Jews finds its basis in the fact that Western metaphysics above all in its modern incarnation offers fertile ground for the dissemination of an empty rationality and calculability which in this way gains a foothold in spirit without ever being able to grasp from within the hidden realms of decision and so on and so on so again a clear correlation between Jews and what Heidegger calls the modern technological nihilism the world Jewry Weltjudentum thus embodies the technological degradation of our lives which is why as Heidegger observes in a related text quote it would be important to inquire about the basis of the of the Jewish unique predisposition towards planetary criminality here we are so how about the Holocaust here even I was shocked Heidegger goes to the end here things get really dark as Heidegger observed he writes in his notebook in with regard to Jews I quote the highest type and the highest act of politics consists in placing your opponent in a position where he is compelled to participate in his own self-annihilation it's crazy wait a minute the best or the most horrible is coming end of quote so in an obscenely pseudo-Hegelian way the elimination annihilation of European Jews must be understood as an act of Jewish self-annihilation Selbstvernichtung his word the Holocaust was ultimately an act of Jewish self-annihilation insofar as at Auschwitz and other death camps the Jews who were the prime movers behind Machenschaft technological devastation and so on they themselves succumb to industrial mass murder you see the terrifying logic Jews embodied the spirit of technological exploitation destruction of nature so it's only logical that at the end this fate was also their own so Europe's Jews only fell prey to forces that they themselves unleashed or as Heidegger states quote when the essentially Jewish in the metaphysical sense struggles against what is empirically Jewish the high point of self-annihilation in history is attained end of quote in short the Nazis in organizing the technological annihilation of Jews merely turned the essentially Jewish stance of technological manipulation against the empirical Jews themselves I mean this is a pretty terrifying idea you have to admit it so and I don't want in any way to redeem Heidegger here okay we don't have time now to go into this topic of what pushed Heidegger in this direction it's a very complex topic I would like just to say this that the obvious solution or outcome of these discoveries would have been what some radical critics of Heidegger from Richard Wollin to Emmanuel Faye and so on in France would have been they propose simply to directly criminalize Heidegger in the sense of he shouldn't be even considered as a serious philosopher one should simply deprive him of his academic status he is out I think that this all too this direct criminalization of Heidegger is an all too easy way out and even Derrida pointed this out one should be you know you avoid the true traumatic problem which is unfortunately Heidegger was a mega great philosopher and the true trauma is it's the same problem that I think I already mentioned two days ago like how could but in a more less terrifying way like how could someone like Reinhard Heydrich probably effectively enjoy late Beethoven's late Beethoven's quartets and so on or in many other examples you find of war criminals to whom in their private writings you cannot deny an authentic spiritual greatness and I recently spoke with a Jewish friend of mine who is a Heideggerian and I asked him how can you after all this how can you remain Heideggerian and he told me he gave me quite a shocking answer he referred to some ancient Jewish wisdom according to which there are some deep traumatic insights that can only be formulated by a diabolically evil person you know that to see something you some some deep hidden traumatic truth you have to be evil we can only get it from I think this is also maybe a too poetic way out but I think that there is no worse antisemite than Jewish person yeah but wait a minute they are in what precise sense do you mean this I develop this as a paradox and which is why my book in German was censored you know pages out when I claimed that today Zionism is the last form of anti-Semitism but I meant something quite empirical I experienced this with when I was in Israel with my friend Udi Aloni and at some round table Zionist defenders of Israeli state politics attacked him for what that he is not really one of them he is only interested in money and fame he just pretends to be one of them and I was shocked I told them you know you are describing him in exactly the same way in the late 19th century national antisemites in France were describing Jews you pretend to be one of us but you are only interested in money or whatever you are not really one of us that's I'm claiming that today you know also you have even this moment of self-alienation this attributing to the Jews the tendency to self-annihilation Zionists call this self Jewish self-hating Jew you know like that they want to destroy and no we are but again back to it what I want to say is that of course I will try to put it like this of course that would have been my conclusion of course we cannot accept this just something I'm totally opposed to this simple defense of Heidegger in the sense of he was just misled blah blah we can reformulate his entire edifice without the man no here I'm a Hegelian the basic Hegelian insight is about examples is that I've written about it maybe you know it I'm sorry if I repeat myself you know the German word for example is Beispiel Beispiel which means it comes by it plays like it emerges by something that comes on the top of it but and in this sense as Hegel deploys very well Hegel is anti-Platonic why in the Platonic universe you have the pure idea and then you have examples which are lower and lower no example can fully fit the idea Hegel accepts this just with an addendum so much worse for the idea that is to say for Hegel every example every actual situation that exemplifies an idea secretly already undermines it there is always more in an example of the idea than this idea itself and this is how I give you the very elementary matrix this is how Hegel's progress dialectical progress functions it's not it's not that when you have a certain attitude notion Hegel does not undermine it through a reference to a better idea no his criticism is always self-criticism he says let's just exemplify this idea let's realize it imagine realizing it and in this way we will discover how this idea by way of actualizing itself refutes itself to give you an extremely simple example this masochist mystical self-torturing you should erase the traces of yourself to get rid of your false self and become a pure spirit or whatever Hegel says but the very form the practice of this masochist spiritualist who want to erase their self is that and this is often my impression at least with some false mystics they talk all the time about themselves you know is there still some trace of they how to erase it they are just occupied you know the practice of their annihilation annihilation of the self this is always what bothered me a little bit maybe I'm wrong with so-called Eastern spirituality they talk about how we in the West are egocentric blah blah we are just nothing part of cosmos fuck it and then they talk all the time about our spirit how to overcome this that they talk only about their inner life okay so again back to it my point would have been this one so again yes back to Hegel the fact that Heidegger takes as the example of modern technological manipulation the Jewish spirituality of course has very heavy consequences we cannot say let's erase the example let's keep his idea no we should definitely claim that something must be wrong with his idea the problem here is that nonetheless fuck it his ideas are great ideas but we have to confront this we have to fight through it and I know this okay I put it in another way there are many Heideggerians who are even radical leftists like for example years ago he died of I don't know what Reiner Schürmann you know a kind of a mystical Heideggerian today is half forgotten then today John Caputo Gianni Vattimo John Caputo is interesting because he in a polemic against me he tries to claim that I'm focus too much on capitalism that can't we imagine a more like why isn't it that if we were to get capitalism with health care more equality blah blah why not you know and a nice friend of mine attacked him that he wants to replace capitalism with caputolism like Caputo this is a nice dirty joke okay but now I will say something in defense of them I think that all those leftist Heideggerians again today Vattimo John Caputo it would be wrong to say that they are simply misreading Heidegger or on the other hand that they are without knowing it closet fascists you know that they only think they are leftist but really their structure is closet fascist I think a more radical conclusion had to be drawn there is not one essential stable core of Heidegger's thinking it's open for example even empirically it's not as simple as that after let me tell you a funny story which I mention in one of my books I think one of the big participants of leftist movement student revolt in the late 60s in Germany all around told me that he with his friends visited Heidegger in to inquire how does he stand towards movement and Heidegger was enthusiastic about them okay but then he has explained his enthusiasm and this somehow ruined the pleasure because he said you're trying to do now what I tried to do in as a rector you didn't work but nonetheless do you know that Heidegger consistently it's clear now after World War II voted for social democrats when web- that was the big event of my youth when Willy Brandt was first elected as chancellor and so on Heidegger wrote an enthusiastic letter to his wife you know like finally we got rid of those Schwarze the blacks the Christian demo- Christian democrats fine and so on so what I'm saying is that what I'm saying is that there is no way we can there is no shortcut you know Heidegger is a mega great thinker but I described you here in a very simplified way this idea of transcendental event history as a succession of events pure eventuality and then there are of course immediately problems how do you move from early Heidegger Sein und Zeit being and time to this it's a pro- but what I want to say is that the only path of thinking is to think through Heidegger in the sense of he did something great but the result was catastrophic and this result is immanent to his greatness and to think this contradiction what do you have is the same as you remember I was telling you two days ago is the same for me with communism with Christianity and so on I never like these games of oh Marx was pure and so on just and then it doesn't matter where you set the limit for some it's already late Engels his companion for others it's Lenin for yet others is is is Stalin and so on but I think that you cannot play this game so easily there has to be something already in Marx himself it's not so much what he said maybe even more what he didn't say where he didn't see the problem and so I am here very much a pessimist not a pessimist in the sense that they invite this vision in the rest I fully accept Marx's critique of capitalism I still think that his critique of political economy is an unheard of achievement the problem is that he uses a certain notion of communism to measure let's call it naively as a standard to measure the capitalist alienation antagonisms or whatever no this is best explained best discernible in his formulas of instead of you know always Marx likes to use already the young Marx this rhetorics of instead of work making us richer and more free work the more we work the more we are slaves and so on and so on where Marx fails is that what I call immanent normativity Marx's idea of communism is simply to simplify it for me the idea of capitalism without capital Marx is well aware that there is an incredible dynamics of capitalism capitalism is crazy the most dynamic system but Marx thinks that at a certain point the form of capital becomes an obstacle to it and then you can erase this form and get an even stronger dynamics I think this doesn't go because you know where now this will be philosophical reading of what I don't like Marx's text introduction to critique of political economy blah blah where he describes his it's horrible logic of history when he says you know at a certain point when productive forces develop then relations of production are in harmony with them but then when forces of production develop more there is a gap and you need a social revolution so that new relations of production emerge which and so on but I think that precisely for capitalism this doesn't work there was no epoch of hard capitalism is in crisis from the very beginning and that's why it works so well the crisis you know that's why Marx's always have this problem it's a crisis it's a deeper crisis horrible yes but the more capitalism is in crisis the more you know the more discord you have crisis the more it is pushed the system to invent something new to pull itself out and so on and so on so you see my point for Marx I think should be criticized in this sense to what extent his vision of communism was still too much indebted to the capitalist universe he just wanted basically capitalism without its antagonisms yes do you think that Stalinism is a manifestation of that and do you would you say in a way yes you can say this yes because you know what people don't take into account and I know this first hand because yesterday I was at New York Public Library with that guy who well I told him afterwards we are good friends now Steve Kotkin know that we can be friends but when my people take power you go to gulag no and he says then it's same the same no but but I learned that that you know to understand properly Stalinism you have to take into account already in the 1920s in Soviet Union their absolute obsession with America America you know that Henry Ford had an almost half divine status in 1920s for such a nice irony while for us enlightened Western Marxists Henry Ford is you know how do you call it that work on track conveyor assembly line yeah assembly line the worst alienation for them it was the idea you know so now comes what did I think already mention this even to you that when Stalin was asked in can he define the figure of ideal Bolshevik maybe I already used this here I'm sorry you know what his answer was the combination of Russian passionate dedication and of American pragmatic spirit you can even explain in this way you know we all mock didn't I already mention this to you did I use two days ago I didn't the example of this Stalinist Baroque you know this kitschy this is New York in what sense an architect explained to me when Stalinist architecture emerged in early 30s they were fascinated by this type of buildings in New York and you know what's their origin Michael Sorkin the husband of Joan Copjec explained to me did you know that you know Manhattan was full so they raised they the only way to expand was to build up and then some of the buildings collapsed so then city authority decided that if you want to go up you must go in a little bit no and this then was overtaken by there is even mutual influence did I use the last time I didn't the use of I think I did King Kong you know the story of King Kong iconic image you know Empire State Building the gigantic ape on the top you know the origin of it Soviet Union in the late 20s the producers which later produced King Kong visited Soviet Union and met they were still there some of those architects and they saw this is a famous constructivist model it was never built for the Palace of Soviets kind of a skyscraper and on the top gigantic statue of Lenin they said replace Lenin with ape and you have the ultimate it's empirically taken from from Soviets on the other hand Soviets were so fascinated maybe they were right by Hollywood they the the boss of Soviet cinema visited Hollywood and was ah they say you know Hollywood was strictly organized everything was planned you had a group of scenario with whom job was just to select to read world literature to select jokes others for this for that and up to a point it works even now I met a guy through friends in Hollywood I asked him what is he doing he told me I'm Campbellizing scripts you know what he was referring to you know who is Joseph Campbell that Jungian blah who was the key influence on George Lucas for Star Wars and to Campbellize it became a verb in Hollywood means to add some pseudo-deep spiritual thoughts you know let's say we have an action movie and the producer says we need to Campbellize it a little bit get somebody who reads somebody and says but what meaning does it have where do we you know you can follow this process nicely I claim in some Clint Eastwood movies you know Dirty Harry is just this but you see Campbellization here and there so Soviets were so fascinated by this you know that there was a plan it was interrupted because of World War II they had a plan to build on which is now again Russia Crimea peninsula or whatever another a Soviet Hollywood they were so fascinated and also for example McDonalds they loved it hard-line communists you know what fascinated them they wanted people to work and then to have quick efficient food no they they saw maybe they were right McDonalds as like where America is almost communist I loved it no so again but again back to it you simplify the problem my problem is not to avoid the tragedy of history the tragedy if you claim Heidegger is a criminal it's all too easy the problem is precisely this one a great philosopher and he did pass how come that it was possible for him still to be a really great philosopher can he be redeemed for example another half-Heideggerian French guy Jean-Luc Nancy and the other guy Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe their entire effort is to isolate the aspect they try to locate it in Sein und Zeit in the notion of Mitsein Mitsein at the sense of Dasein to say it in stupid terms human beings are not alone we are always thrown together but that Heidegger didn't pursue that line enough so that you must add different form of collective analysis and then to fill in this gap then fascist community comes and so on and so on so again I think that what some Habermas pupils like Richard Wollin and so on want to do again it's a too easy job you can excommunicate Heidegger but then no wonder you cannot really think neither fascism nor communism and so on that's why although I have a certain great as I already said today's ago great respect for Habermas but for me Habermas is so clearly his theoretical framework is not strong enough to think what went wrong to put it simply in the 20th century and the moment you try to think that the moment you try to think it you are accused of yourself being like the standard Habermasian trick is to accuse those who want to analyze too closely fascist irrationalism as themselves fascinated by it irrationalists and so on and so on that's why you know for example Habermas warns against ethnic blah blah but he doesn't really provide a convincing a convincing analysis of it and I think the trick is to be here I am Lacanian you know what's Lacan's point it's not oh the lesson of psychoanalysis is the darkness of human passions is just no Lacan puts very nicely in his text on [unintelligible] I'm sorry one of the Écrits that what is so provocative in Freud is not the irrationality of drives or sexuality but how discursive rational they are this is what Lacan means with his unconscious is structured like language and so on and so on that even drives if you take the chapter in Seminar XI he speaks about machine montage of drives it's an artificial something artificial drives have nothing through with some instinctive authenticity and so on and so on and I think Lacan is right there is nothing in the Jungian sense archetypal about drives and so on they are contingent symbolic constructs and so on Lacan even here you can see where Judith Butler goes a little bit too quickly Lacan not only is aware that Oedipus complex is historical he even locates the very discovery of Oedipus complex Freudian at a certain moment and it's more correct than the usual idiots who claim yeah Oedipus complex this was in value for Freud's time when it was Victorian oppression my God I read recently a history of sexuality where I saw this what Victorian oppression if you try to imagine very vulgar how much people were fucking per capita per week probably they were never fucking as much as in as in Victorian times you know where the the idea came to me you know that shitty movie I didn't like it too much French Lieutenant's Woman there is a dialogue between Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons which quote some statistics which I then looked upon it's true that if you take in a- if you take into account the number of prostitutes in London in 1880s and if you take into account all the male who were their potential customers you get at a and if you accept a modest estimate that each prostitute had like only four five customers per week you get a totally incredible number that an average London guy was going to a prostitute like two three times a week or something like that it's totally crazy so what I'm saying is that Lacan shows nicely that not only Freud was able to formulate Oedipus complex precisely because in social reality Oedipus complex was already in crisis you know it's this confirms Hegel's view of how theory always comes afterwards too late it's only when some phenomenon is in crisis already begins to to disintegrate that you can form that you can form its theory in other words I don't understand this fear of Habermasians you know where you find this fear even more are you were you aware of it now this may surprise you I am still friendly although he is not so much a right winger but definitely not a left winger Peter Sloterdijk you don't remember a couple of times he provoked incredible backlash for example some fifteen years ago when was that debate on on human park or whatever and he was accused by Habermasians Peter Sloterdijk of defending Nazi eugenics no I am here on Sloterdijk's side I knew him I debated this with him his point is just this one deeply true with the prospect of biogenetic and so on manipulations things radically change we need new rules why because the standard ethical rules that we have simply rely on the notion of a free personality free will education and so on but the the prospect of biogenetic and so on manipulations changes this the moment your very just think about education okay let's say you are more intelligent than me which is quite possible I guess in an IQ test so then let's say we work for an exam you work hard but I take some pill or whatever not just the ones that you already have today and almost with no work I learn it but you know what this means this means that the whole pedagogy which is based on the idea that you know education hard work what if we even will be able to manipulate basic ethical psychic attitudes fear courage and so on you know what's the horror they will lose their authentic ethical status if I am a coward and I take a pill and I'm no longer coward where is the ethical greatness of overcoming your fear through courage and so on and what what Sloterdijk is just saying is that high you know this is a big problem we will have to rethink it the Habermasian answer was simply basically a prohibition we shouldn't do it we have to set limits to biogenetic and so on manipulations but for me as I already said this I did two days ago the problem are not these manipulations as such the problem is their how because look this is the problem that's the trick if I am a coward and very simple example I know it's not simple as that and if through some biogenetic or even simple chemical manipulation you can change my ethical attitudes you know what this means it's not only you cannot then even distinguish my authentic ethical attitude and the one then manipulated through chem because if you can change it with chemistry it simply means that already my previous innocent attitude just reflected a different chemical composition if you can manipulate ethical attitudes through this biochemical or biogenetic manipulations it simply means that you know even the authentic one lose their authenticity it means I may appear courageous whatever but it's just I was lucky to get that chemical or genetic so where is our freedom and so on I do not I am not saying as already emphasized two days ago I am not saying that it's a lost case you know I'm not saying that but it's a ah the guy who you should read yes I mentioned it now I cannot miss Benjamin Libet L-I-B-E-T I think he's now retired he taught at Berkeley he made I think I mentioned it I'm sorry if I repeat myself he made that legendary experiment of you know proving that when you do the most contingent gesture that like a split of a second before you make conscious decision like he asked people okay sit and at any moment quickly decide to grab this paper measuring your brain he demonstrated that before you make the decision split of a second orders are already on the way in other words your brain already makes a decision and the conclusion for me would have been that when you think you are making a free contingent decision you are just becoming aware about something blah blah but now comes the interesting point Libet believes in the freedom of the will and in a wonderfully Hegelian way he locates it at a different point he claims we are looking at the wrong place which is positive decisions he claims that what you can do is to when decision is on the way to block it that negativity is freedom you can block it it's a wonderful Hegelian that you know the zero level free act is not I do this I want to do this but to say no to stop it sabotage and so on so back to Sloterdijk he did this he did another great thing I claim like he was attacked like crazy but I like him for his he's more crazy than me provoking with words he said this is nice provocation that the great illusion of 20th century was that the poor can save the world proletarians and so on he said now we know only the ultra rich can save the world what does he mean by this he wants to save social democracy his idea is this one communism doesn't work rich are inventors productive and his idea is this one how to that we simply have to show greater give greater social recognition to the rich and this will it's a naive idea I don't agree with it this will justify us then taking even more money from them and so on and so on he's trying to save social democratic welfare state basically and so on and so on so again what I'm saying is that you see this is the impotence of simply Habermasians attacking him neo-Nazi and so on and so on okay he is often naive and so on although deeply right now I remembered I've written this in my books you know who died now a week ago or two Lee Kuan Yew the founder of Singapore this is an ingenious idea as Sloterdijk he said that if ever people will be building a monument in years from now in future to someone from our age it will be Lee Kuan Yew why he invented authoritarian capitalism he was the first to show the direction where we are all moving and very intelligently Sloterdijk shows that this is not just Asian primitives they are not good enough for democracy no it's a global it has nothing to do with Asian values you see he can be also his book on globalization is a wonderful idea where he demonstrates how global capitalism is not just global everyone is in it it also it is also globe in the sense of the privileged live under a globe even if it's an invisible globe and we don't really see what is outside even if we think it's the logic of Elysium if you saw the movie or there is an old one did you see it Logan’s Run or Zardoz and so on you know the privileged and he gives wonderful descriptions of this of course rationally we know there are people living misery but you know one thing is to rationally know it the other thing is to be really aware of it like I will fly next week also for two days to LA I already mentioned this to you no you land to LAX then you take a cab to Beverly Hills or whatever but you know nobody sees the area around LAX which is slum why so this is why LAX airport was built there because screw the poor who cares all the all the planes landing there and so on so this was the shock for us in Europe it's a wonderful horrible thing in Florence suburbs Firenze Italy there was a fire a year and a half two years ago and what happened there is that twenty Chinese died or whatever and they discovered that it's not only Chinese gulags third world sweatshops there in the suburb of of Firenze noble European culture there was a whole ghetto to Chinese working like slaves illegally and so on and so on in terrible conditions you see my point even if we are rationally aware in some sense we don't see it and this is I think how our news manipulate us you see more or less but you see it on screen it's not part of your reality all the poverty and so on and so on that's why we like charity I always have a theory that charity is a strategy of basically bribery we pay you to stay there you know it's always it's something I'm I'm so disgusted by all these appeals you know like you have a photo of some black guy boy for example with a distorted lip and then for five dollars a month you can make a change you can and so on you know what is beneath this is basically what they are telling you is give five dollars a month and you can not only forget about problems you can even feel good that you are sorry I got a little bit lost into it so but we go on next Monday no thanks very much for your patience and fuck you only two of you ah the lady has gone there okay I really I really sincerely wanted to rep because I know my god it always happens to me why she was hurt and so on and so on where she felt but I what I really didn't get is like you know what I mean for me non-sexist society is not a society where you have to be careful all the time it's a society where you can talk dirty but it doesn't work in sexist way again as I told you a society which overcomes racism for me is not a society where you follow all the rules oh my god I said black no I should say African-American and so on but when and you know I have a couple I've told you this I think of black friends who really like me and told me call me nigger I allow you to do it you know what I mean that's the problem this is what makes me so afraid that political correctness just it just it keeps the thing you know there is always a certain obscene pleasure in political correctness this endless self my god I used that expression was I still maybe racist or whatever you know this great pleasure of again looking deeper and deeper into you and discovering new strata of I'm saying just forget about it this is how let me conclude with this story then I go I'm looking for there ah here I was in India I met Naxalites there my god I could have been arrested one million of Maoist guerrillas I met one of them who was a taxi driver but really very intelligent and I was with my publisher there the taxi driver understood some political names and asked my publisher with whom I talked 'how is this guy is he one of us Naxalite guerrilla' and the guy gave him yes and then the taxi driver threw the guy asked me a question and it was pure obscene offer of solidarity he asked me it's terrible I warn you if you thought that was insulting wait for this he asked me there is a well known image of old Gandhi like this on a stick in a white tunic walking from one village to another he asked me what is for you the message of this old fox oh I knew it must be something extremely turned and yes I guessed it what he wants I told him it's a call to the next village the stick I want the boy to bug me to fuck me if not I will have to do it myself with the stick the guy stopped a taxi embraced me and said you are one of us and now comes the ethical part then we spoke for two hours and no it wasn't that we were telling each other even more dirty stories it was pure politics and so on but in order you know that obscene gesture was like yes you are not a snob you are one of us again that was the miracle we did not then talk oh did you hear about the guy who fucked three goats or whatever no it was pure cold political analysis what they can do but that was my that's how I claim how you really overcome racism there okay sorry talk too much see you next Monday now this luggage I told you I'm going there to meet Jerry Brown tomorrow I hope this will work he promised but he's not sure that he will come to to Stanford just hold it just stay here sorry now the limousine is waiting we could be here just for today or also next week yes tell it to me okay if you want Western business signal oh it's I never get it why no please like like you see your uncle the one then Armstrong I have no idea [unintelligible]