Agon Hamza, Frank Ruda and Slavoj Žižek: Reading Marx
Discussion ·
undated · 2:19:34 · 18,653 words
with Co-Discussant
ideologyhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysiscapitalismcommunism-socialismsexuality-genderfascism-populismphilosophy-generalreligion-theologygeopolitics-war
A panel discussion at a London venue centered on the book 'Reading Marx', co-authored by Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza. Frank Ruda connects Plato's cave allegory to Marx's theory of ideology and emancipation, arguing for a 'platonic Marxist' theory of transformation in which there is no life permanently outside the cave. Agon Hamza traces Marx's Hegelian roots through the logic of value, commodity fetishism, and the displacement of religion as critique into religion as model of capitalist social relations. Žižek applies Marxist analysis to the MeToo movement, arguing that the formal sexual contract conceals structural coercion analogous to the labor contract, extends this to surplus enjoyment as parallel to surplus value, and closes by discussing authoritarian capitalism in China and the rise of right-wing populism as products of liberal democratic failure.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's phrase for an experimental, non-repetitive engagement with Marx that opens new problems rather than confirming established doctrine.
Michael Heinrich's term for the tainted illumination that commodity fetishism produces, introduced by Frank Ruda to describe how ideology generates a constant distorting light analogous to Plato's cave shadows.
Peter Sloterdijk's phrase for the total enclosure of contemporary capitalism, used by Frank Ruda as a structural analogue to Plato's cave in which naturalization of social relations prevents subjects from recognizing their condition.
A category whose reality is produced by the gaze of political economy itself, the worker is not merely seen as an animal but made into one by the economic representation that names it so.
Marx's account of how social relations between people acquire the fantastic form of relations between things, treated in the discussion as structurally analogous to religion as a model of the world rather than an object of critique.
Hegel's concept of a particular that stands for the whole within the whole, taken up by Marx in the theory of the proletariat as the class whose particularity expresses the universal contradiction of capitalist society.
Marx's phrase from Capital vol. 3 describing the autonomization of social elements of wealth, cited to show that in mature Marx religion is no longer the object of critique but the model through which capitalist social relations are understood.
Agon Hamza's formulation for the political task of not sustaining identity through mourning for failed communism, but actively releasing the loss itself, recuperating communism as constitutively a ghost, the unrealized.
Kant's term for a short-term sexual contract, dismissed by Kant as reducing persons to objects; Žižek cites it to show that the contractual logic of sex has a long philosophical history with paradoxical consequences.
Milner's distinction (endorsed by Žižek) between a person's formal/structural position of weakness in a social relation and their objective empirical power, MeToo, like the labor contract, operates on structural weakness independent of real-world power.
as “object a”
Lacanian objet petit a invoked as the surplus-profit of self-humiliation, the position of privilege that white liberal self-abasement secretly reserves for itself.
Marx's description of capital as self-moving, self-valorizing substance, cited as pure Hegelian logic (money as substantial universality becoming capital) that turns Hegel's dialectic into a logic of capital rather than a model of emancipation.
as “discourse of the capitalist”
Lacan's fifth discourse (beyond the four classical ones), identified here via Miller's formula as the analyst's discourse with object a functioning differently, the implicit rules of how capitalism actually operates.
The psychoanalytic mechanism by which an external agency enables recognition of one's own potential, Žižek extends this to political emancipation, arguing that pure self-reliance is an illusion and one needs a master to become aware of what one can do.
The excess enjoyment produced in sexual interaction by the very activity of giving pleasure to the other, structurally parallel to Marx's surplus value, where renunciation of one's own pleasure becomes its own libidinal reward.
Marx's concept of the excess value produced by labor beyond what the worker is paid, invoked here as the structural template for understanding asymmetry in both labor and sexual contracts.
as “authoritarian capitalism”
Žižek's label for the Chinese model that combines explosive market development with tight political control, which he identifies as the true emerging threat, more significant than Western populism.
Stories he reaches for 3
On Sabbath in a synagogue, a rabbi and a rich merchant each declare before God 'I am nobody, I am not worthy.' A poor Jew then says the same, and the rich merchant turns to the rabbi: 'Who is this guy, think he can also say he's nobody?' Žižek uses this to show that self-humiliation is a form of privilege, not everyone has the right to be a nobody.
“a poor jew stands up and says, oh my god, i'm also a nobody. and the rich merchant kicks the rabbi, but who is this guy? think he can also say he's nobody?”
Freud continued analysis of the Wolfman (a wealthy Russian who lost his money after the October revolution) and even gave him money, resulting in paranoia, Wolfman began to wonder what Freud really wanted from him. Muriel Gardiner later successfully treated him. Žižek uses this to illustrate why the analytic frame of distance matters (parallel to why sexual/financial entanglement corrupts relations).
“freud as a good guy... continue the analysis even gave scheme. predictably the result was paranoia. because instead of having this neutral relation to your analyst at a distance, wolfmann started to ask, my god, what does he see in me?”
Žižek notes that cognitivists like Thomas Metzinger vindicate Plato's cave: the way we experience our own body is itself shadow-like, we perceive ourselves as part of the shadows. This lends scientific support to the cave allegory as a model of subjective experience.
“plato was right, he just forgot to include ourselves, that the way we experience our body, we perceive ourselves as part of the shadows on the game.”
Works invoked 11
Capital book
Extensively cited throughout, Žižek quotes the Eden passage on the labor contract, the 'hide to market' scene, and uses the logic of surplus value as template for surplus enjoyment.
Cited as the canonical Hegelian-Marxist text that takes dialectical reappropriation of alienated substance as the model of emancipation, one horn of the Hegel-Marx ambiguity.
Science of Logic book
Agon Hamza discusses how Hegel's Science of Logic became an important tool for Marx in Capital because value's equivalence logic exceeded property relations, invoked also by Žižek as the template for capital's self-movement.
The Matrix film
Žižek praises the Wachowskis for showing that even after Neo learns the truth, the enslaved bodies in pods are not simply awakened, they must remain within the matrix, illustrating the impossibility of a clean exit from ideological enclosure.
Cited for Kant's definition of sexual intercourse as 'the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another' and for the concept of marriage as the contract regulating this use.
Critique of Violence essay
Frank Ruda cites Benjamin's essay and its debt to Sorel's idea of divine violence as a paradigm of emancipatory myth that breaks reproductive circles of systemic violence.
Catastrophe play
Žižek cites Beckett's short play as wonderfully sensitive to how weakness and victim-status can itself function as an instrument of power.
Capitalism as Religion essay
Mentioned by Agon Hamza as relevant to the argument that capitalism functions structurally like religion in mature Marx.
Reading Marx book
The book under discussion, co-authored by Žižek, Ruda, and Hamza, Žižek jokingly notes that his chapter doesn't actually read Marx but criticizes object-oriented ontology.
The moderator, not Žižek, uses Borges's story of Ts'ui Pên to describe Žižek's own labyrinthine intellectual project, Žižek does not comment on this analogy directly but uses Borges for a different point about leftist hypocrisy.
Paris Commune other
Agon Hamza identifies it as one of four historical events that transformed Marx's thinking, confronting global capitalism with local political resistance and posing the question of the timeliness of capitalist development.
People invoked 35
Avital Ronell negative
Cited as a case study of how structural master-position and objective loss can diverge: her career was destroyed yet she remained positioned as the powerful one in the power-game logic of MeToo.
Michael Heinrich positive
Cited for introducing the concept of 'backlighting' to describe commodity fetishism's distorting light, and for the point that Capital depicts the logic of appearance of capitalist production.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited on the structural organization of masses → classes → parties → leaders, and on the possibility (no longer available today) that war could bring revolution.
Georg Lukács positive
Mentioned in the context of the Hegelian model of emancipation (alienation then reappropriation) in History and Class Consciousness as one reading of how Marx inherits Hegel.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited by Frank Ruda for the concept of 'experimental reading' and for the idea that dialectics is the logic of capital rather than emancipation.
Deng Xiaoping positive
Cited via an anecdote about his deathbed statement that his greatest achievement was resisting democratization, Žižek worries Deng may have been right about the necessity of authoritarian control for Chinese development.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked on surplus enjoyment, the four discourses (with Miller's fifth-discourse formula), transference, and the neutrality of the analyst; Žižek treats Lacanian categories as essential interpretive tools.
Louis Althusser positive
Mentioned by Agon Hamza as the subject of his PhD and books; his humanist/scientific division of Marx's work is cited as useful but insufficient.
Edward Said negative
Žižek says he dislikes Said and criticizes his analysis of Jane Austen for drawing attention to the colonial background in a manner Žižek finds tendentious.
Donald Trump negative
Identified as a nightmare but also as the direct product of liberal-democratic failure, not a cause but a symptom; Žižek also characterizes him as Weinstein of US politics (via Milner).
Mentioned by Agon Hamza as the Russian revolutionary with whom Marx corresponded in 1881 about whether industrialization was a necessary step toward post-capitalist society.
Andrea Dworkin negative
Mentioned as a radical feminist who argued the standard heterosexual act is a violation of women's bodily integrity, Žižek uses this as the logical but unacknowledged implication of MeToo's structural-weakness thesis.
Oscar Wilde positive
Quoted twice with approval: 'everything in life is about sex except sex itself, sex is about power', used to characterize both MeToo's reductiveness and its insight.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned briefly as agreeing that today's situation resembles pre-WWI rather than the approach of fascism, shared framework for understanding contemporary political danger.
Georges Sorel positive
Frank Ruda cites Sorel's argument that emancipation requires a mobilizing myth (the proletarian general strike) as a precedent for reading Plato's cave within the Marxist tradition.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Žižek endorses Milner's distinction between structural and objective weakness as the key to understanding both the labor contract and MeToo; also cites Milner's Kantian argument that sex outside marriage is a 'crime against humanity' with ironic approval.
Fredric Jameson positive
Frank Ruda uses Jameson's term 'cognitive mapping' to describe what the cave prisoners lack, they are oriented and disoriented simultaneously, unable to situate themselves in the totality.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Frank Ruda invokes Sloterdijk's 'world interior space of capital' as the modern analogue to Plato's cave.
Martin Heidegger positive
Frank Ruda cites Heidegger's lengthy reading of the cave allegory, particularly the distinction between the moment of unchaining and the moment of being drawn out, pointing to the need for an external force.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Žižek credits Miller with the formula that the capitalist discourse is the analyst's discourse with object a functioning differently, identifying the implicit rules of capitalism.
Catharine MacKinnon negative
Grouped with Dworkin as having drawn the most radical conclusions from feminist critique of penetration as masculine violence, conclusions that MeToo implicitly presupposes but few members avow.
Harvey Weinstein negative
Used as the paradigm case of 'spectacular' forced sex that MeToo focuses on, while Žižek argues this focus obscures the more pervasive subtle coercions in long-term relationships.
Angela Merkel positive
Žižek defends Merkel against accusations of weakness in immigration policy, arguing her openness to immigrants is an expression of genuine nationalist confidence and strength rather than naivety.
Herbert Marcuse positive
Cited for the claim that capital is Hegelian, that Marx's description of the passage from money to capital is pure Hegel, illustrating the dialectics-as-logic-of-capital ambiguity.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited by Frank Ruda as taking up Georges Sorel's idea of divine violence that breaks reproductive circles; also mentioned for 'Capitalism as Religion.'
Hans Blumenberg positive
Cited by Frank Ruda as a German 'metaphorologist' whose reading of the cave allegory suggests the prisoners are 'pre-human', not yet realizing their full human potential.
Jordan Peterson negative
Mentioned dismissively in the context of incels, Peterson's ideas provide a kind of cultural echo for the incel demand for socially enforced monogamy.
Thomas Metzinger positive
Cited as a cognitivist who vindicates Plato's cave by showing that our experience of our own body is already shadow-like, including ourselves in the cave allegory.
Ludwig Feuerbach positive
Agon Hamza traces Marx's early critique from Feuerbach's critique of religion as alienation, showing how Marx initially extends and then supersedes the Feuerbachian model.
Muriel Gardiner positive
The American leftist analyst who successfully treated the Wolfman after Freud's mistake, cited as an example of correct analytic distance and the dangers of personal/financial involvement in the analytic relationship.
Karl Marx positive
Central figure throughout, Žižek and co-discussants perform an 'inventive reading' of Marx, using him as a living contemporary philosopher rather than a dogmatic authority.
Žižek uses Borges to illustrate the left's ideological double standards, hyper-sensitivity toward some authors but advance pardon for reactionary statements by canonized figures like Borges (who reportedly refused to speak to Black people).
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited through the Wolfman case as an example of how financial/personal involvement corrupts the analytic relationship, Freud's 'good guy' mistake of continuing analysis and giving money led to paranoia.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek identifies the passage from money to capital in Marx as 'pure Hegel' and wrestles with the ambiguity of whether Hegelian dialectics is the logic of capital or of emancipation.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the definition of marriage as a contract regulating reciprocal use of sexual organs (Metaphysics of Morals) and for the concept of pactum fornicationis, used to show the contractual logic of sex has deep philosophical roots.
What it argues
inventive/experimental reading of MarxPlato's cave as model for ideology critique and emancipationcommodity fetishism and the logic of valuesexual contract versus free labor contractsurplus enjoyment as analogue to surplus valuestructural versus objective weakness and victimhoodauthoritarian capitalism and the rise of right-wing populism
Dialectical moves 9
“Precisely as free individuals without a master, we are absolutely slaves.”
Freedom from external authority in consumerism is not liberation but total subjection, the absence of the master is the condition of maximal slavery.
“We need the master to get out of slavery.”
The master, properly understood, is not the oppressor but the enabling condition of emancipation, the one who makes you aware of your own potential.
“It is not religion that is being attacked for aiding the reproduction of social structure — it is this social structure which is being represented as religion.”
In mature Marx the critique reverses: capitalism is no longer criticized through the model of religion but capitalism itself is shown to function like religion, making religion the model rather than the target.
“Subjectively you may even see things the way they really are, but objectively, in your social activity, you behave as a viewer in the cave.”
Ideological illusion is not merely a subjective error but is inscribed into objective social practice, knowing the truth changes nothing if your actions reproduce the illusion.
“Appearance is inscribed into the structure of reality itself — it's not that reality has a false appearance; the appearance is part of reality.”
The Marxist point against naive realism: ideology is not a veil over a transparent real but a structural feature of the real itself.
“The position of structural weakness gives the woman power; my structural position as a white male makes me powerless in practice.”
The victim position, once institutionalized, becomes a form of power, structural weakness is not the same as actual weakness and can be weaponized.
“Not shadow against light — shadow against shadow is what is necessary.”
Emancipation cannot oppose capitalism's shadowy appearance with transparent truth; it must deploy another kind of appearance (the specter, the myth) against the dominant one.
“Anti-immigrant racists are not strong authoritarian men but true cowards — it is a sign of great strength to welcome immigrants.”
The reversal of the usual frame: what presents itself as tough masculine strength (anti-immigration) is actually fear and weakness, while openness is strength.
“Capital is the automatic subject — the passage from money to capital is pure Hegel — yet this means Hegelian dialectics is the logic of capital, not of emancipation.”
The Hegelian structure Marx inherits turns out to describe capital's self-movement rather than its overcoming, creating an irreducible ambiguity at the heart of Marxist revolutionary theory.
Claims 16
asserts
There is no permanently livable position outside the cave — emancipation must pass through a return, and this structure is instructive for any Marxist theory of transformation.emancipation / Platonic cave allegory / Marxist politics · Co-Discussant
asserts
The worker as revolutionary subject does not pre-exist capitalism but is produced as a 'real abstraction' by the gaze of political economy itself — capitalism creates the very animal it sees in the worker.proletariat / revolutionary subject / real abstraction · Co-Discussant
asserts
In mature Marx, religion is no longer criticized as an illusion to be dispelled but is invoked as the structural model through which capitalist social relations function — an inversion of the Feuerbachian starting point.commodity fetishism / religion / ideology critique · Co-Discussant
asserts
The formal sexual contract of the MeToo era conceals structural coercion exactly as Marx showed the free labor contract conceals exploitation — the form of free equal exchange is compatible with real asymmetry.sexual contract / MeToo / Marxist analysis of free contract
asserts
Human rights and sexuality are not ultimately compatible because sexuality involves irreducible asymmetry, elements of power and fantasy that cannot be governed by contractual equality.sexuality / human rights / contractual liberalism
asserts
MeToo's focus on structural weakness reproduces rather than undermines power structures because it allows the structurally 'weaker' party to deploy victim status as an instrument of power.MeToo / structural weakness / victimhood as power
asserts
In sexual interaction there is always a surplus enjoyment structurally parallel to Marx's surplus value — pleasure found in serving the other's pleasure, not reducible to one's own direct gratification.surplus enjoyment / sexual economy / Lacanian analogy
asserts
Trump did not fall from outer space but is the direct product of the weaknesses and failures of the liberal-democratic consensus.Trump / liberal democracy / right-wing populism
asserts
The Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model — combining explosive economic development with political control — is more dangerous than Western populism and may represent the true emerging threat.China / authoritarian capitalism / geopolitics
asserts
Perhaps the only realistic subversive position today is good old honest social democracy, as figures like Corbyn and Schröder represent.radical left / social democracy / political strategy
reframes
Capital, as Marx describes it in the passage from money to capital, follows pure Hegelian logic — yet this means Hegelian dialectics is also the logic of capital, not only the model of emancipation, creating an ambiguity in the Marx–Hegel relationship.Marx-Hegel relationship / dialectics / capital as automatic subject
asserts
The MeToo contractual approach secretly privileges casual one-night sex as the paradigm of sexual conduct, marginalizing the more pervasive and subtle forms of coercion in long-term relationships.sexual contract / MeToo / long-term relationships
asserts
A master in the emancipatory sense is not someone who knows better than you what you want, but someone who opens up potentials in you and enables recognition of what you can do — the lesson of transference.master / emancipation / psychoanalytic transference
asserts
White liberal self-humiliation — denying one's own identity and confessing guilt for everything — secretly reserves for itself the position of universality and is itself a form of patronizing racism.white liberal guilt / racism / universality
asserts
Borges is as politically reactionary as Wagner or Nietzsche, yet the left pardons him in advance where it applies hypersensitive scrutiny to others — revealing an ideological inconsistency in progressive literary culture.political correctness / Borges / ideological hypocrisy
asserts
In consumerist society we are, paradoxically in the Platonic sense, absolutely slaves precisely as free individuals without a master.consumerism / freedom / slavery / master
Quotes 12
“precisely today in our consumerist society, as free individuals without a master, we are absolutely slaves.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom without master = absolute slavery
“the possessor of labor power follows as his laborer... timid and cold back like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but the hide.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx on the labor contract as concealed coercion
“me too is the best example of oscar wilde's famous saying that everything in life is about sex except sex itself. sex is about power.”Slavoj Žižek · MeToo reduces sex to a power game
“we thus enter the cruel world of brutal power games masked as the noble struggle of the victims against oppression.”Slavoj Žižek · victimhood as instrument of power
“trump did not fall from outer space. if there is a guy who clearly emerges out of the weaknesses of liberal democratic consensus, that's trump.”Slavoj Žižek · right-wing populism as product of liberal failure
“maybe the truly radical position today is good old honest social democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · social democracy as the only realistic subversive position
“not to be a nobody is a privilege.”Slavoj Žižek · self-humiliation as a position of power
“subjectively you may even see things the way they really really are. but objectively, in your social activity, you behave as a viewer in the game.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as objective practice, not merely subjective illusion
“the true subvertiveness of late marx: we can only say that appearance is inscribed into the structure of reality itself.”Slavoj Žižek · appearance is real, not merely a veil over reality
“i don't believe in this pure self-reliance of the individual. without what psychoanalysis calls transference, it has to come from outside.”Slavoj Žižek · emancipation requires external recognition / transference
“in their very denying of their identity, they reserve for themselves the position of universality.”Slavoj Žižek · white liberal guilt as disguised claim to universality
“me too is a mega important moment in the history of humanity. the basic matrix which began even in a pre-class society with the rise of tribal patriarchy is changing.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's genuine affirmation of MeToo's historical importance
Transcript 162 turns
Co-Discussant
countryists.
countryists.
Moderator
will give a shot
will give a shot
Co-Discussant
short talkage.
short talkage.
Moderator
then they will... curse each other. interrogate each other and then we'll open it to the to the public until about 8 o'clock. i just say a few things to start with, actually, and introduce... should i introduce the three speakers all at once rather than... i just say a few things anyway, about why we gathered here. ironically, this is the place we here every week to teach law. the only reason you were able to book, the pish was able to book it is because the law school has a reading week. so usually we are used to listening to hard law subjects here, like law, contract, law landlord law, equity. it's really strange to be here, to be enlightened about ke. but it's also been a very... uh... it know it's been a venue for so many memorable events, this place. i mean, as you know, i mean, a lot of political events took place here, if you google it. so it's always lots of activists book it for their own emancipatory politics. so we're in the same tradition now, following the french tradition. but one thing about friends, i mean, if you've noticed, this venue is called the light. and according to quaker tradition, the light is where we obviously get enlightenment. and apparently early quakers would not actually... chat to each other or give talks in order to reach enlightenment but they would sit in silence and at some point the holy spirit would visit us. now we're not going to wait for the holy spirit, we're going to evoke it in the form of the hegelian spirit to speak to us. so what we'll do is talk about this famous book, Reading Marx. which... what's nice about this book is, in my view, it's... become really the three authors don't treat don't deify or even celebrate marx but treat him both as a contemporary and more importantly as a philosopher and then they interrogate marx from their own perspective in Frank Ruda's case through plato's cave in Agon through Hegel, and Agon is bold enough to say that you're going to correct marx's version of the theory of labor because marx's version of the theory of labor was a bit too rough and Agon himself gives a more subtle question of the theory of labor via hegel and that gek talks about object-oriented ontology. e...
then they will... curse each other. interrogate each other and then we'll open it to the to the public until about 8 o'clock. i just say a few things to start with, actually, and introduce... should i introduce the three speakers all at once rather than... i just say a few things anyway, about why we gathered here. ironically, this is the place we here every week to teach law. the only reason you were able to book, the pish was able to book it is because the law school has a reading week. so usually we are used to listening to hard law subjects here, like law, contract, law landlord law, equity. it's really strange to be here, to be enlightened about ke. but it's also been a very... uh... it know it's been a venue for so many memorable events, this place. i mean, as you know, i mean, a lot of political events took place here, if you google it. so it's always lots of activists book it for their own emancipatory politics. so we're in the same tradition now, following the french tradition. but one thing about friends, i mean, if you've noticed, this venue is called the light. and according to quaker tradition, the light is where we obviously get enlightenment. and apparently early quakers would not actually... chat to each other or give talks in order to reach enlightenment but they would sit in silence and at some point the holy spirit would visit us. now we're not going to wait for the holy spirit, we're going to evoke it in the form of the hegelian spirit to speak to us. so what we'll do is talk about this famous book, Reading Marx. which... what's nice about this book is, in my view, it's... become really the three authors don't treat don't deify or even celebrate marx but treat him both as a contemporary and more importantly as a philosopher and then they interrogate marx from their own perspective in Frank Ruda's case through plato's cave in Agon through Hegel, and Agon is bold enough to say that you're going to correct marx's version of the theory of labor because marx's version of the theory of labor was a bit too rough and Agon himself gives a more subtle question of the theory of labor via hegel and that gek talks about object-oriented ontology. e...
Slavoj Žižek
in the book.
in the book.
Moderator
in the book. you won't do that here. okay, what the book seems to promise is some kind of emancipatory politics that enables us to use frank's metaphor to come, not only to come out of plato's cave, but also to know what to do once we've come out of it, you to get rid of our chains. and i just say a few things about the colleagues who are going to be discussing. with Frank Ruda. okay, so Frank Ruda, we met before. was it the actuality of absolute that you were here for? one of the another hegelian conference. he's written a lot on on Hegel's rabble, where he rethinks Hegel's theory of the state and political theory in terms of the rab, which had until then been quite neglected in Hegelian writing. right. then you've written on Badiou, idealism without idealism, and more recently about freedom in a fatalistic view of freedom, which us lakans are very comfortable with.
in the book. you won't do that here. okay, what the book seems to promise is some kind of emancipatory politics that enables us to use frank's metaphor to come, not only to come out of plato's cave, but also to know what to do once we've come out of it, you to get rid of our chains. and i just say a few things about the colleagues who are going to be discussing. with Frank Ruda. okay, so Frank Ruda, we met before. was it the actuality of absolute that you were here for? one of the another hegelian conference. he's written a lot on on Hegel's rabble, where he rethinks Hegel's theory of the state and political theory in terms of the rab, which had until then been quite neglected in Hegelian writing. right. then you've written on Badiou, idealism without idealism, and more recently about freedom in a fatalistic view of freedom, which us lakans are very comfortable with.
Slavoj Žižek
deviation isn't your title materialism without matter no idealism without idealism that was great
deviation isn't your title materialism without matter no idealism without idealism that was great
Moderator
true.
true.
Slavoj Žižek
oh.
oh.
Moderator
realism without idealism. and freedom without freedom. freedom is necessity. shall we start with frank and then i'll introduce agon when it's yeah.
realism without idealism. and freedom without freedom. freedom is necessity. shall we start with frank and then i'll introduce agon when it's yeah.
Co-Discussant
okay. well, hello. this on. yeah. so hello and good evening. so i'm going to say actually something about... what i did in the book and why i did it and the reason why i don't, i mean it's not simply meant as a repetition but why i thought it might make sense. to elucidate what i'm saying. what i was trying to do there is because a couple of reviews of this book came out and they all were basically, well the book overall is quite okay but the ruder chapter sucks. how could you really believe that the platonic cave allegory tells us anything about contemporary capitalism? that is so wrong as reading of marx. kind of his reading of plato and super uninformative for anything with regards to emancipation. so usually i don't mind that so much, but i thought maybe i just like didn't say it right. so i'm trying again. so what we're all sort of committed to do in the book is kind of what adorno once called the experimental reading. adorno once said you can only read hegel in an experimental way right because in certain passages or whatsoever you have to come up with an innovative inventive solution. for what hegel is doing, because it's so internally opaque and sometimes mystified or whatsoever. and what we are trying to do, i think each in a different way, is what, i mean, the term that slava uses is inventive reading, an inventive reading of marx, which i think is precisely experimenting with and on marx.
okay. well, hello. this on. yeah. so hello and good evening. so i'm going to say actually something about... what i did in the book and why i did it and the reason why i don't, i mean it's not simply meant as a repetition but why i thought it might make sense. to elucidate what i'm saying. what i was trying to do there is because a couple of reviews of this book came out and they all were basically, well the book overall is quite okay but the ruder chapter sucks. how could you really believe that the platonic cave allegory tells us anything about contemporary capitalism? that is so wrong as reading of marx. kind of his reading of plato and super uninformative for anything with regards to emancipation. so usually i don't mind that so much, but i thought maybe i just like didn't say it right. so i'm trying again. so what we're all sort of committed to do in the book is kind of what adorno once called the experimental reading. adorno once said you can only read hegel in an experimental way right because in certain passages or whatsoever you have to come up with an innovative inventive solution. for what hegel is doing, because it's so internally opaque and sometimes mystified or whatsoever. and what we are trying to do, i think each in a different way, is what, i mean, the term that slava uses is inventive reading, an inventive reading of marx, which i think is precisely experimenting with and on marx.
Slavoj Žižek
great.
great.
Co-Discussant
so the thing that i try to do is to come to terms with the following problem. namely a problematic assumption of traditional marxism and the problematic assumption of traditionalism and i think. the three of us share this, i believe at least, is that there is at least latently always already a pre-configured always existing subject of historical transformation. call it as you like. un sujet supposé de l'histoire, if you wish. and this... assumption, as powerful as it can be, became kind of problematic when this very subject, supposed to be the subject of history, did not really do what it was supposed to do.
so the thing that i try to do is to come to terms with the following problem. namely a problematic assumption of traditional marxism and the problematic assumption of traditionalism and i think. the three of us share this, i believe at least, is that there is at least latently always already a pre-configured always existing subject of historical transformation. call it as you like. un sujet supposé de l'histoire, if you wish. and this... assumption, as powerful as it can be, became kind of problematic when this very subject, supposed to be the subject of history, did not really do what it was supposed to do.
Slavoj Žižek
right.
right.
Co-Discussant
so and i hoped in producing a weird, let's say, short circuit. between a very old... questioning of emancipation in plato, namely the cave allegory. and marx to raise again the question of what it means to to be emancipated and how to conceive of the subjectivity that is. doing this very emancipation, that is realizing or practicing. a form of liberation. okay. and it's totally obvious why one can misread this short circuit immediately in a zillion different ways, actually. um... so... what i want to argue for quickly is why i still think, even though no one seems to agree with me that this is a kind of instructive experiment. okay. what does the cave allegory do? it's actually a myth. ob? obviously it's a myth. but a myth that is supposed to introduce us in the intricacies of emancipation, actually. right so and a lot of people in the marxist tradition believed that one needs a myth. to mobilize people for emancipation. so it's not totally, let's say, outside of any kind of marxist thought. i mean, think for example of, okay, then he had later a shitty reputation of because mussolini was his student, but other people who didn't become fascists also liked him, namely Georges Sorel. a crucial reference point for walter benjamin, obviously. the critique of violence, right? and he argued in his book on violence that the only option of emancipation is to use an emancipatory myth. i... a highly problematic one in sorel because it is kind of in it's ralph's understanding. the myth of a final catastrophic battle. and i mean, it sounds a bit schmidtian, actually, when you read it. but nonetheless, i mean, the idea was one needs a myth to mobilize the masters for emancipation. and that was the myth of the proletarian general strike,. and that was then became kind of the paradigm figure later for walter bi means figure of divine violence, which was supposed to break the reproductive circles, right? of the forms of violence implemented and repeated by the system. okay. so... i thought maybe plato's myth could also, within the marxist tradition, tell us something, because marxists previously, or before, thought that this is the case. so in a sense, what does plato's, i mean, you all know this allegory, this is why i'm not describing it in details. what kind of situation is plato describing? basically it's describing a situation where the people involved lack cognitive mapping in Fredric Jameson's terms. right? why? because they're constantly, their gaze is restrained, they can't move, they're in chains, their g, they're asphyxiated. they're looking at something that they cannot identify as the thing that it is. i mean, they're looking at shadows, but they don't have any idea that the shadows are shadows. which is why they're weirdly, even though they're super oriented. totally disoriented in a certain sense. that'sato plato's argument. okay. and plato's argument is that these kinds of disorientations that are not even realized as disorientations come with ontological implications of their own or with ontologies of their own. so the cave prisoners believe in certain things to exist, certain things to be real and so forth, right so they're not only... aphxiated in a certain way, they're not only oriented and disoriented in a certain way, they only opt without knowing it for a certain ontology. and that is all kind of... in the cave allegory setting. and behind them people carry stuff around. commodities, one could say. that was my association. um... of whom they only know because there is a constant backlightlight. and the constant backlighting is a term michael heinrich introduced when he described marx, marx's theory of fetishism. he says fetishism generates everywhere a kind of backlighting, right? there's always kind of certain... tainted light, if you wish. okay so... in a sense. che. say it in very trivial terms, what plato is addressing could easily be identified as what later is called ideology critique. in one way or the other, right? you take one thing to be real. but it's not really real. or whatsoever. like in very standard and traditional interpretation you get something like this. and so my question was, is that what Peter Sloterdijk once called the world interior space of capital. a gigantic copula, as he's describing. not similar. to what plato says about the cave, in a way. right. i'm not saying, and this is where all people. all the criticism start. i'm not saying let's not go for the shadows but for the real things, right? this is not an implication of what i already said and that is not where i'm going. that would be a traditional interpretation. we just need to leave the cave and then things are cool. but even in plato, it's far more complicated, actually. okay, because plato. i mean, you know the story. one of them is somehow. thrown out of the cave right. and then it hurts a lot. and then he returns and then it hurts even more, right? because the people don't want to listen to him and they don't want to leave the cave and stuff like that. okay. so in a certain sense, i want to argue. it's obvious that there is no life outside the cave. permanent permanent life outside the cave. and maybe that is instructive for an understanding of how to read marx,? or combine playato the cave allegory. with marx...a. did marx at least for a certain period of time not only suggest that we can only if that metaphor if you wish works counter the shadowy realm of capitalism with another shadowy creature. i mean, the spectre, right? that haunted europe. so maybe shadow against shadow is necessary, right? it's not shadow against light. immediately. okay. and of course there are a number of questions that one could immediately raise putting these two together. who the hell built the cave? did someone build it or is it just natural? are we always already in the cave? what the hell does it mean to exit the cave? like you can immediately see contemporary theories who think about exodus movements and so forth, right leaving, returning, take up the thing. and that is supposed to be a figure of emancipation too. okay. one thing that struck me, though, was that plato seems to suggest, at least in certain readings, if you believe the german metaphorologist, it's a really weird profession actually, but anyhow, the german metaphorologist hans blumenberg, that the people in the cave are not really human yet. they're kind of pre-human. weirdly not realizing their human full potential, right? so what is at stake, and there is another trap actually immediately, is what it means to be human, right? and because leaving the cave seems to be linked. to overcoming a peculiar, whatever, maybe constitutive, maybe not constitutive form of alienation. of course immediately everyone thinks humanism and all these kinds of things. and that could be problematic. if one would say, well, we could just live somewhere else and not inside the cave, and there doesn't have to be a cave. but i'm not saying that. i'd just like to be clear. okay. and if you take a look at marx's description of the almost myriad processes of naturalization that happen in capitalism. it's a kind of um way by means of which capitalism presents itself that as marx as an eternal natural necessity. that's capital. that seems to be a very defining feature of the cave, right? the people in the cave think, well, the cave is just like where we are, right? naturally. that's our natural surrounding, and that's where we are always going to be. so i thought bringing all this together, one could raise the question, well, not of brexit. but of what would it be? sex sounds weird, but you get the point, right? the exit of capitalism. it's not a cool term, obviously, but exit of of capitalism, maybe. so maybe exiting. it's an, interesting question if the access is linked to a return, right? i mean, if that is the movement. and somehow maybe this is different from what people talked about. when they talked about exodus. but then one could have, would have maybe a potential figure. schema, whatever you want to call it. of emancipation, liberation, transformation. thanks. and once you not forget that, for example, marx and capital describes with the very first sentence, the logic of appearance of a society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. he literally says that. just... wealth in that society appears in the form of a gigantic collection of commodities. so what it's all about in the german marx marxologist or whatever you want to call him, michael heinrich that i esteem highly. made that point repeatedly that this means that what marx depicts is the logic of appearance of a certain regime of production. so it is about appearance, right? i mean, you see another, not only analogy. you. but then the question is, and i'm... there is a clock and i didn't take a look when i started actually teach you. do we have10 more minutes?10? i think that's wonderful, really? yeah, i think so.. huh. okay. that's good. so what i gave you thus far is a list of, let's say, more or less motifs or short-circuit concepts that... basically... culminate for me and what i'm doing there in three points that i think resonate with certain things that the other two talk about. let me first, how can one, in what way would one describe and in what way could one make sense of the idea that capitalism, the world interior space of capital, is a cave, eh? be. what would exiting mean? and c. in what sense? are complications linked to the exit and to the return right because then one would have a. something that for the marxist tradition obviously sounds totally obscene, right, but a platonic marxist theory of transformation. and my cue i didn't take from for the description of the world interior space of capital as a k, i didn't take from capital, but from marx's 43, 44 manuscripts, which are obviously immensely dangerous. to touch even because everyone thinks human is immediately, right? everyone. but anyhow, marx says there is something quite interesting which i thought mirrors nicely the platonic description of the cave prisoners not being. that sounds weird, but not fully realizing their potential, but also not being fully human. because marx talks... about the following fact that political economy that is the economic science that works as representation and for the reproduction of a capitalist system, and that is right now almost literally marks identifies or sees the worker nothing. but an animal reduced to its minimum bodily needs, in auf die striktesten leibbensbedürfnisse, reduziertes vieh. right. so there is something going on like an animalization. of the worker from the perspective of the economic representation of the economic system. and something really weird happens, i think, here, and marx, in my reading at least, is aware of that. so i'm pushing him to be less humanist. um... namely that. the political economy that identifies this animal in the worker. yeah, but it doesn't talk about something totally abstract or whatsoever. or. marxist terms. reduced right it's an act of reduction but also in the very same act produces the very reality of this reaction reduction sorry. so not only does political economy see in the worker just an animal, it creates. a reality in which the worker is actually the very animal political economy sees in the worker. rightso it's to defeat. backlo. building in. which is very interesting. because the animal that political economy sees in the worker, is a very unnatural animal. it's not like a dark or whatever, but it's... an animal created through the gaze. through what political economy sees. in the entity that it calls the worker. so very briefly, and right now i'm trying to tie in what i said, to tie back to what i said in the very beginning, the problem of, let's say, political subjectivity. because the worker, if i understand well marksx this point correctly, is. a kind of real abstraction, what people in the marxist tradition call a real abstraction. it's something whose reality is produced by the very gaze of political economy on the economic reality it thereby transforms. and that means the worker per se is not revolutionary. it's just a weird representation of political economy. that, weirdly, generates the reality of itself. like a shadow starting to live, if you wish. okay. i can. three and a half minutes maybe and then that okay. so... that's quite interesting because then in the worker per se there does not lie. emancipation, right? or if one translates this marxian point back into plato. that would weirdly radicalize plato into a setting where even the prisoners are weirdly shadow. okay. and engels said in the anti-during, and i take, i mean, he meant something different, but i think that it plays it to my cards, he says, from the very moment the bourgeoisie emerged, it was always accompanied by its shadow, the proletariat. i think that's kind of true, right? i mean, if you take the perspective of key. props. okay. and of course, why that is can be very trivially understood because well, not the worker, but that which makes the the worker a labor force, at least from the perspective of political economy. the worker must sell, and what you sell is a commodity, and of course the commodity is full of... theological niceties, right? i mean, that's mark's whole point. when he talks about commodity fetishism though the commodity fetishism pertains even to the to the to he or see who the marxist tradition. identified as revolutionary age. okay, what to do with all this, right? i mean, what i'm trying to say that there is not yet an always already constituted good, purified, supervolution revolutionary, always already with emancipatory potential. subject so the whole question is, about the constitution of that kind of, i mean, that must follow from this, right? if that makes any sense what i'm trying to say. it must mean that one is right now talking about the constitution of liberated or liberating and emancipated, emancipating. subject. okay. and here an interesting problem begins, i think. and martin heidegger has pointed that out nicely in his reading of the kfalagri. very long reading, like 100 pages. and he just distinguishes different stages in the cave allegory. but the difference between two stages is particularly interesting for me. and this difference works in the following way that someone takes the chains off from the prisoners. but they don't want to leave. they just want to look at the shadows because it's entertaining and fun and they're used to it. and turn gaze hurt, right, the guy who just came back who's complaining all the time and talking nonsense and so forth. um... so what does one do in such a situation? and the first, i mean, so plato answers that in the myth, that the first one is drawn out, right? i mean, he or she doesn't go out freely. but so you need someone, that seems to be the suggestion. who draws you out of your natural embeddedness and all the natural beliefs and petty fetishisms and all the kinds of things. um... so you need someone like... uh slavoy pointed that out in a series of publications before this book and after this book, like a master. i mean, that is precisely the function of someone like a master, structurally, conceptually. but and that's really, really my last two and a half very long sentences. but i thought because sloy elaborated. a contemporary function of the master and its emancipatory potential. um... resonating in also in claims that but you made that in a certain sense one needs a political master and therefore it's instructive to talk about the situation of the analyst and the analyst in psychoanalysis and so forth. and then he made it just like like interesting nice comment in the lacamp book you just still had on the table, where he basically says, well, the analyst, it makes only only sense and analysis only works if the analyst is a volunteer. if he or she is voluntarily in analysis, because otherwise it won't work. and so i had the idea if one wants to map this analytical situation on the playag situation, which is supposed to say something about exiting capitalism, right? that is right now the... whatever conundrum, let's call it like that. one would have to say something. about a dialectics not of... master and slave lord and bondsman but of master and volunteer in one way or the other right which immediately becomes insanely complicated. just think. and that's a contemporary resonance, how much capitalism relies on voluntary and volunteering labor. a lot of unpaid labor is voluntary. in one way. so one has to distinguish between volunteering and volunteering. and with that, i stop.
so and i hoped in producing a weird, let's say, short circuit. between a very old... questioning of emancipation in plato, namely the cave allegory. and marx to raise again the question of what it means to to be emancipated and how to conceive of the subjectivity that is. doing this very emancipation, that is realizing or practicing. a form of liberation. okay. and it's totally obvious why one can misread this short circuit immediately in a zillion different ways, actually. um... so... what i want to argue for quickly is why i still think, even though no one seems to agree with me that this is a kind of instructive experiment. okay. what does the cave allegory do? it's actually a myth. ob? obviously it's a myth. but a myth that is supposed to introduce us in the intricacies of emancipation, actually. right so and a lot of people in the marxist tradition believed that one needs a myth. to mobilize people for emancipation. so it's not totally, let's say, outside of any kind of marxist thought. i mean, think for example of, okay, then he had later a shitty reputation of because mussolini was his student, but other people who didn't become fascists also liked him, namely Georges Sorel. a crucial reference point for walter benjamin, obviously. the critique of violence, right? and he argued in his book on violence that the only option of emancipation is to use an emancipatory myth. i... a highly problematic one in sorel because it is kind of in it's ralph's understanding. the myth of a final catastrophic battle. and i mean, it sounds a bit schmidtian, actually, when you read it. but nonetheless, i mean, the idea was one needs a myth to mobilize the masters for emancipation. and that was the myth of the proletarian general strike,. and that was then became kind of the paradigm figure later for walter bi means figure of divine violence, which was supposed to break the reproductive circles, right? of the forms of violence implemented and repeated by the system. okay. so... i thought maybe plato's myth could also, within the marxist tradition, tell us something, because marxists previously, or before, thought that this is the case. so in a sense, what does plato's, i mean, you all know this allegory, this is why i'm not describing it in details. what kind of situation is plato describing? basically it's describing a situation where the people involved lack cognitive mapping in Fredric Jameson's terms. right? why? because they're constantly, their gaze is restrained, they can't move, they're in chains, their g, they're asphyxiated. they're looking at something that they cannot identify as the thing that it is. i mean, they're looking at shadows, but they don't have any idea that the shadows are shadows. which is why they're weirdly, even though they're super oriented. totally disoriented in a certain sense. that'sato plato's argument. okay. and plato's argument is that these kinds of disorientations that are not even realized as disorientations come with ontological implications of their own or with ontologies of their own. so the cave prisoners believe in certain things to exist, certain things to be real and so forth, right so they're not only... aphxiated in a certain way, they're not only oriented and disoriented in a certain way, they only opt without knowing it for a certain ontology. and that is all kind of... in the cave allegory setting. and behind them people carry stuff around. commodities, one could say. that was my association. um... of whom they only know because there is a constant backlightlight. and the constant backlighting is a term michael heinrich introduced when he described marx, marx's theory of fetishism. he says fetishism generates everywhere a kind of backlighting, right? there's always kind of certain... tainted light, if you wish. okay so... in a sense. che. say it in very trivial terms, what plato is addressing could easily be identified as what later is called ideology critique. in one way or the other, right? you take one thing to be real. but it's not really real. or whatsoever. like in very standard and traditional interpretation you get something like this. and so my question was, is that what Peter Sloterdijk once called the world interior space of capital. a gigantic copula, as he's describing. not similar. to what plato says about the cave, in a way. right. i'm not saying, and this is where all people. all the criticism start. i'm not saying let's not go for the shadows but for the real things, right? this is not an implication of what i already said and that is not where i'm going. that would be a traditional interpretation. we just need to leave the cave and then things are cool. but even in plato, it's far more complicated, actually. okay, because plato. i mean, you know the story. one of them is somehow. thrown out of the cave right. and then it hurts a lot. and then he returns and then it hurts even more, right? because the people don't want to listen to him and they don't want to leave the cave and stuff like that. okay. so in a certain sense, i want to argue. it's obvious that there is no life outside the cave. permanent permanent life outside the cave. and maybe that is instructive for an understanding of how to read marx,? or combine playato the cave allegory. with marx...a. did marx at least for a certain period of time not only suggest that we can only if that metaphor if you wish works counter the shadowy realm of capitalism with another shadowy creature. i mean, the spectre, right? that haunted europe. so maybe shadow against shadow is necessary, right? it's not shadow against light. immediately. okay. and of course there are a number of questions that one could immediately raise putting these two together. who the hell built the cave? did someone build it or is it just natural? are we always already in the cave? what the hell does it mean to exit the cave? like you can immediately see contemporary theories who think about exodus movements and so forth, right leaving, returning, take up the thing. and that is supposed to be a figure of emancipation too. okay. one thing that struck me, though, was that plato seems to suggest, at least in certain readings, if you believe the german metaphorologist, it's a really weird profession actually, but anyhow, the german metaphorologist hans blumenberg, that the people in the cave are not really human yet. they're kind of pre-human. weirdly not realizing their human full potential, right? so what is at stake, and there is another trap actually immediately, is what it means to be human, right? and because leaving the cave seems to be linked. to overcoming a peculiar, whatever, maybe constitutive, maybe not constitutive form of alienation. of course immediately everyone thinks humanism and all these kinds of things. and that could be problematic. if one would say, well, we could just live somewhere else and not inside the cave, and there doesn't have to be a cave. but i'm not saying that. i'd just like to be clear. okay. and if you take a look at marx's description of the almost myriad processes of naturalization that happen in capitalism. it's a kind of um way by means of which capitalism presents itself that as marx as an eternal natural necessity. that's capital. that seems to be a very defining feature of the cave, right? the people in the cave think, well, the cave is just like where we are, right? naturally. that's our natural surrounding, and that's where we are always going to be. so i thought bringing all this together, one could raise the question, well, not of brexit. but of what would it be? sex sounds weird, but you get the point, right? the exit of capitalism. it's not a cool term, obviously, but exit of of capitalism, maybe. so maybe exiting. it's an, interesting question if the access is linked to a return, right? i mean, if that is the movement. and somehow maybe this is different from what people talked about. when they talked about exodus. but then one could have, would have maybe a potential figure. schema, whatever you want to call it. of emancipation, liberation, transformation. thanks. and once you not forget that, for example, marx and capital describes with the very first sentence, the logic of appearance of a society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. he literally says that. just... wealth in that society appears in the form of a gigantic collection of commodities. so what it's all about in the german marx marxologist or whatever you want to call him, michael heinrich that i esteem highly. made that point repeatedly that this means that what marx depicts is the logic of appearance of a certain regime of production. so it is about appearance, right? i mean, you see another, not only analogy. you. but then the question is, and i'm... there is a clock and i didn't take a look when i started actually teach you. do we have10 more minutes?10? i think that's wonderful, really? yeah, i think so.. huh. okay. that's good. so what i gave you thus far is a list of, let's say, more or less motifs or short-circuit concepts that... basically... culminate for me and what i'm doing there in three points that i think resonate with certain things that the other two talk about. let me first, how can one, in what way would one describe and in what way could one make sense of the idea that capitalism, the world interior space of capital, is a cave, eh? be. what would exiting mean? and c. in what sense? are complications linked to the exit and to the return right because then one would have a. something that for the marxist tradition obviously sounds totally obscene, right, but a platonic marxist theory of transformation. and my cue i didn't take from for the description of the world interior space of capital as a k, i didn't take from capital, but from marx's 43, 44 manuscripts, which are obviously immensely dangerous. to touch even because everyone thinks human is immediately, right? everyone. but anyhow, marx says there is something quite interesting which i thought mirrors nicely the platonic description of the cave prisoners not being. that sounds weird, but not fully realizing their potential, but also not being fully human. because marx talks... about the following fact that political economy that is the economic science that works as representation and for the reproduction of a capitalist system, and that is right now almost literally marks identifies or sees the worker nothing. but an animal reduced to its minimum bodily needs, in auf die striktesten leibbensbedürfnisse, reduziertes vieh. right. so there is something going on like an animalization. of the worker from the perspective of the economic representation of the economic system. and something really weird happens, i think, here, and marx, in my reading at least, is aware of that. so i'm pushing him to be less humanist. um... namely that. the political economy that identifies this animal in the worker. yeah, but it doesn't talk about something totally abstract or whatsoever. or. marxist terms. reduced right it's an act of reduction but also in the very same act produces the very reality of this reaction reduction sorry. so not only does political economy see in the worker just an animal, it creates. a reality in which the worker is actually the very animal political economy sees in the worker. rightso it's to defeat. backlo. building in. which is very interesting. because the animal that political economy sees in the worker, is a very unnatural animal. it's not like a dark or whatever, but it's... an animal created through the gaze. through what political economy sees. in the entity that it calls the worker. so very briefly, and right now i'm trying to tie in what i said, to tie back to what i said in the very beginning, the problem of, let's say, political subjectivity. because the worker, if i understand well marksx this point correctly, is. a kind of real abstraction, what people in the marxist tradition call a real abstraction. it's something whose reality is produced by the very gaze of political economy on the economic reality it thereby transforms. and that means the worker per se is not revolutionary. it's just a weird representation of political economy. that, weirdly, generates the reality of itself. like a shadow starting to live, if you wish. okay. i can. three and a half minutes maybe and then that okay. so... that's quite interesting because then in the worker per se there does not lie. emancipation, right? or if one translates this marxian point back into plato. that would weirdly radicalize plato into a setting where even the prisoners are weirdly shadow. okay. and engels said in the anti-during, and i take, i mean, he meant something different, but i think that it plays it to my cards, he says, from the very moment the bourgeoisie emerged, it was always accompanied by its shadow, the proletariat. i think that's kind of true, right? i mean, if you take the perspective of key. props. okay. and of course, why that is can be very trivially understood because well, not the worker, but that which makes the the worker a labor force, at least from the perspective of political economy. the worker must sell, and what you sell is a commodity, and of course the commodity is full of... theological niceties, right? i mean, that's mark's whole point. when he talks about commodity fetishism though the commodity fetishism pertains even to the to the to he or see who the marxist tradition. identified as revolutionary age. okay, what to do with all this, right? i mean, what i'm trying to say that there is not yet an always already constituted good, purified, supervolution revolutionary, always already with emancipatory potential. subject so the whole question is, about the constitution of that kind of, i mean, that must follow from this, right? if that makes any sense what i'm trying to say. it must mean that one is right now talking about the constitution of liberated or liberating and emancipated, emancipating. subject. okay. and here an interesting problem begins, i think. and martin heidegger has pointed that out nicely in his reading of the kfalagri. very long reading, like 100 pages. and he just distinguishes different stages in the cave allegory. but the difference between two stages is particularly interesting for me. and this difference works in the following way that someone takes the chains off from the prisoners. but they don't want to leave. they just want to look at the shadows because it's entertaining and fun and they're used to it. and turn gaze hurt, right, the guy who just came back who's complaining all the time and talking nonsense and so forth. um... so what does one do in such a situation? and the first, i mean, so plato answers that in the myth, that the first one is drawn out, right? i mean, he or she doesn't go out freely. but so you need someone, that seems to be the suggestion. who draws you out of your natural embeddedness and all the natural beliefs and petty fetishisms and all the kinds of things. um... so you need someone like... uh slavoy pointed that out in a series of publications before this book and after this book, like a master. i mean, that is precisely the function of someone like a master, structurally, conceptually. but and that's really, really my last two and a half very long sentences. but i thought because sloy elaborated. a contemporary function of the master and its emancipatory potential. um... resonating in also in claims that but you made that in a certain sense one needs a political master and therefore it's instructive to talk about the situation of the analyst and the analyst in psychoanalysis and so forth. and then he made it just like like interesting nice comment in the lacamp book you just still had on the table, where he basically says, well, the analyst, it makes only only sense and analysis only works if the analyst is a volunteer. if he or she is voluntarily in analysis, because otherwise it won't work. and so i had the idea if one wants to map this analytical situation on the playag situation, which is supposed to say something about exiting capitalism, right? that is right now the... whatever conundrum, let's call it like that. one would have to say something. about a dialectics not of... master and slave lord and bondsman but of master and volunteer in one way or the other right which immediately becomes insanely complicated. just think. and that's a contemporary resonance, how much capitalism relies on voluntary and volunteering labor. a lot of unpaid labor is voluntary. in one way. so one has to distinguish between volunteering and volunteering. and with that, i stop.
Moderator
thank you. that has immensely with your book on freedom, actually. so we have to work out how much voluntarism has in with freedom as you depict it. whilst pondering what frank was saying, i'll say a few words about aon, and then acon will keep the... i've known virtually for about five years actually, through social media and thanks to mrs. may's hostile environment and she's trying to distance herself from it, but she's definitely responsible. she was the home secretary. he was not allowed in this country again and again and again. i don't know how they let you in. so it's a big... it's a big thanks to Lou Miller actually and the ICA for finally making it to england because there's so many time attempts to come. and... and i think when i first met you virtually, you were writing a book with Žižek on Kosovo, From Myth to Symptom. since then, i actually gave up social media to avoid having to see how much he was producing all the time. it was so annoying. every time you opened facebook, you had a new book out, including this one, Re-reading Žižek. he wrote a book with Frank on Žižek and dialectical materialism, where they try to systematize g. we'll see whether that's an impossibility later. and the other thing in his spare time, he's done his phd on Althusser and has two books on Althusser, and one on Althusser in Pasolini's film. read the book, neither Althusser nor Pasolini's films will you be able to read or watch them the same way again. and another book that has just come out on Althusser and theology. ah, all the time, again with frank ruder. he was a founding member and co-editor of crisis and critique, which is one of the most influential contemporary philosophy journals online. and it's free. so no capitalist. it's too late. you have to pay. with that, we'll listen to your talk, which will be on... what you read in the book?
thank you. that has immensely with your book on freedom, actually. so we have to work out how much voluntarism has in with freedom as you depict it. whilst pondering what frank was saying, i'll say a few words about aon, and then acon will keep the... i've known virtually for about five years actually, through social media and thanks to mrs. may's hostile environment and she's trying to distance herself from it, but she's definitely responsible. she was the home secretary. he was not allowed in this country again and again and again. i don't know how they let you in. so it's a big... it's a big thanks to Lou Miller actually and the ICA for finally making it to england because there's so many time attempts to come. and... and i think when i first met you virtually, you were writing a book with Žižek on Kosovo, From Myth to Symptom. since then, i actually gave up social media to avoid having to see how much he was producing all the time. it was so annoying. every time you opened facebook, you had a new book out, including this one, Re-reading Žižek. he wrote a book with Frank on Žižek and dialectical materialism, where they try to systematize g. we'll see whether that's an impossibility later. and the other thing in his spare time, he's done his phd on Althusser and has two books on Althusser, and one on Althusser in Pasolini's film. read the book, neither Althusser nor Pasolini's films will you be able to read or watch them the same way again. and another book that has just come out on Althusser and theology. ah, all the time, again with frank ruder. he was a founding member and co-editor of crisis and critique, which is one of the most influential contemporary philosophy journals online. and it's free. so no capitalist. it's too late. you have to pay. with that, we'll listen to your talk, which will be on... what you read in the book?
Co-Discussant
yeah well, thank you. it's great to be here. thank you for organizing this. well, in this presentation i will try to draw some possible conclusions from the chapter in the book which we are discussing today while remaining as thorough as possible if i can to.
yeah well, thank you. it's great to be here. thank you for organizing this. well, in this presentation i will try to draw some possible conclusions from the chapter in the book which we are discussing today while remaining as thorough as possible if i can to.
Moderator
actually.
actually.
Co-Discussant
uh... the traditional understanding of marx hegelian roots bears on two fronts. on the one hand, the political theory of the proletariat, and on the other, the logic of capitalism. the first case is usually associated with marx's early works and inverting hegelian dialectics, whereas the second concerns his a mature work where he famously extracts of the rational kernel out of its mystical shell. politically, marxist hegelianism would be recognizable in the way the universal and particular are bound together in his understanding of the proletariat. is there a necessary link between the general direction and organization of society and the existence of a particular subset of this same society? the hegelian theory of the concrete universals. of something which stands for the whole within the whole, even more so than the abstract apprehension of its totality, was fully deployed in hegel's work, both in his understanding of christianity as well as in his ontologies. even though marx's theory of class would get increasingly complex throughout his investigations, the idea that one can orient social change by a compass that is guided by a particular social class has direct links with the hegelian theory of negativity and concrete universality. these are links that marx would never let go. marx's mar galvinism is also very much at stake in his mature critique of political economy.
uh... the traditional understanding of marx hegelian roots bears on two fronts. on the one hand, the political theory of the proletariat, and on the other, the logic of capitalism. the first case is usually associated with marx's early works and inverting hegelian dialectics, whereas the second concerns his a mature work where he famously extracts of the rational kernel out of its mystical shell. politically, marxist hegelianism would be recognizable in the way the universal and particular are bound together in his understanding of the proletariat. is there a necessary link between the general direction and organization of society and the existence of a particular subset of this same society? the hegelian theory of the concrete universals. of something which stands for the whole within the whole, even more so than the abstract apprehension of its totality, was fully deployed in hegel's work, both in his understanding of christianity as well as in his ontologies. even though marx's theory of class would get increasingly complex throughout his investigations, the idea that one can orient social change by a compass that is guided by a particular social class has direct links with the hegelian theory of negativity and concrete universality. these are links that marx would never let go. marx's mar galvinism is also very much at stake in his mature critique of political economy.
Moderator
it.
it.
Co-Discussant
this presented to
this presented to
Moderator
g.
g.
Co-Discussant
s. if early, if his early work was based on a critique of hegel's idealism, prompting the need to invert the logical grounding from the immaterial realm of the law to the material problem of survival and work, when it came to the logic of capitalism itself, the stakes could no longer be conceived in this way. for the logic of value, albeit not reducible to that of the property, was equally removed from the material. if marx's early work on economy was primarily concerned with explaining alienation, the production of disparities by intervention of unjust property rules, in capital the problem is quite distinct. here the enigma, the form of value, is rather that of equivalence. how can different objects be equated on the market? and how can profit be produced while keeping to this rule of equivalence? this is why hegel's science of logic became an important age, because it was not a matter of showing that below the equal treatment of judicial subject by laws, there was an unequal treatment of economic the. instead, it was a matter of showing that the generalization of a real form of equality with no exception produced out of its own function. but does this have political implications? and if yes, what would they be? here the question is not so much of interpreting marx, as much as it is a matter of locating the question. where does one state the autonomy of marxist politics? this is in fact a class issue, not in the sense of what one says about class, but where from one speaks about politics. a division like one proposed by Louis Althusser, dividing the humanist from the scientific phases in his work, is certainly useful, but none of these proposals substitute the historical decisions which confronted marx throughout his life. the first event when in 1842 he found himself in an embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests regarding the case of forest thefts and the division of landed property. second, the failure of 8 of the so-called springtimes of the people and the subsequent proclamation of louis bonaparte as emperor. the 1857 financial crisis, arguably the first worldwide economic crisis with its social and political effects in britain. and lastly, the emergence of the paris commune in 18. 71. each of these events brought about important changes to marxist thinking. the young hegelianism of his student years were shattered in 1842 by the intrusion of the problem of survival, of man's need to produce their own means of subsistence, a question which oriented marx's early critique of private property and his take on man's universality as a concrete consequence of our transformative relation to nature in general and our own nature in particular. a whole view of work, humanity, and the future of the poor was constructed upon his first critique of private property. but marxist writings on the limit of right and the state were later confronted by the failure of 1848 revolutions, and especially by the emergence of a new emperor through the very democratic means supposed to bring the working class' interests into the direct conflict with those of the bourgeoisie. the critique of political economy acquired a new place in the following years of marxist studies. rather than focusing on the relation between civil society and the state, we see a shift towards the infrastructure of civil society itself, in the problem of value and the commodity production. this is the time of marx deepening critical studies of the classical economists, leading him to a first presentation of the theory of surplus value and the renewal of his political theory. but nothing in the works of classical bourgeois economists could have anticipated the paradoxical fact that a crisis in the very economic structure responsible for the exploitation and inequality could serve to enforce rather than destroy its functioning. this was, however, what in ad , economic crisis brought to view. in order to respond to it, marx had to devise a new entry point into his critique of political economy, one in which the limits of capital function as internal rather than external ones, a shift with deep consequences for the understanding of value, production, international relations, and the role of the state. it was surely this view on the global dimension of capitalism which made marx at first responsive to the outbreaks of the communes in 1871. since this confronted the global panorama of marxist work with local political resistance. but if marx was surely not going to drop his analysis of the globalized economic a network of capitalism, the new sequence of political struggles in the 70s did nonetheless pose the question of timeliness of capitalist development. was industrialization truly a necessary step in the passage from communal properties of feudal life to a post-capitalist egalitarian society? in these years, even though marx was not to publish any other works, he furthered his understanding of non-capitalist social formations. a study emblematic, exemplified by his correspondence with the russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, if i'm pronouncing it correctly, in 1881. each of these different sequences in marx's thought brought about important changes in his conceptual framework.
s. if early, if his early work was based on a critique of hegel's idealism, prompting the need to invert the logical grounding from the immaterial realm of the law to the material problem of survival and work, when it came to the logic of capitalism itself, the stakes could no longer be conceived in this way. for the logic of value, albeit not reducible to that of the property, was equally removed from the material. if marx's early work on economy was primarily concerned with explaining alienation, the production of disparities by intervention of unjust property rules, in capital the problem is quite distinct. here the enigma, the form of value, is rather that of equivalence. how can different objects be equated on the market? and how can profit be produced while keeping to this rule of equivalence? this is why hegel's science of logic became an important age, because it was not a matter of showing that below the equal treatment of judicial subject by laws, there was an unequal treatment of economic the. instead, it was a matter of showing that the generalization of a real form of equality with no exception produced out of its own function. but does this have political implications? and if yes, what would they be? here the question is not so much of interpreting marx, as much as it is a matter of locating the question. where does one state the autonomy of marxist politics? this is in fact a class issue, not in the sense of what one says about class, but where from one speaks about politics. a division like one proposed by Louis Althusser, dividing the humanist from the scientific phases in his work, is certainly useful, but none of these proposals substitute the historical decisions which confronted marx throughout his life. the first event when in 1842 he found himself in an embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests regarding the case of forest thefts and the division of landed property. second, the failure of 8 of the so-called springtimes of the people and the subsequent proclamation of louis bonaparte as emperor. the 1857 financial crisis, arguably the first worldwide economic crisis with its social and political effects in britain. and lastly, the emergence of the paris commune in 18. 71. each of these events brought about important changes to marxist thinking. the young hegelianism of his student years were shattered in 1842 by the intrusion of the problem of survival, of man's need to produce their own means of subsistence, a question which oriented marx's early critique of private property and his take on man's universality as a concrete consequence of our transformative relation to nature in general and our own nature in particular. a whole view of work, humanity, and the future of the poor was constructed upon his first critique of private property. but marxist writings on the limit of right and the state were later confronted by the failure of 1848 revolutions, and especially by the emergence of a new emperor through the very democratic means supposed to bring the working class' interests into the direct conflict with those of the bourgeoisie. the critique of political economy acquired a new place in the following years of marxist studies. rather than focusing on the relation between civil society and the state, we see a shift towards the infrastructure of civil society itself, in the problem of value and the commodity production. this is the time of marx deepening critical studies of the classical economists, leading him to a first presentation of the theory of surplus value and the renewal of his political theory. but nothing in the works of classical bourgeois economists could have anticipated the paradoxical fact that a crisis in the very economic structure responsible for the exploitation and inequality could serve to enforce rather than destroy its functioning. this was, however, what in ad , economic crisis brought to view. in order to respond to it, marx had to devise a new entry point into his critique of political economy, one in which the limits of capital function as internal rather than external ones, a shift with deep consequences for the understanding of value, production, international relations, and the role of the state. it was surely this view on the global dimension of capitalism which made marx at first responsive to the outbreaks of the communes in 1871. since this confronted the global panorama of marxist work with local political resistance. but if marx was surely not going to drop his analysis of the globalized economic a network of capitalism, the new sequence of political struggles in the 70s did nonetheless pose the question of timeliness of capitalist development. was industrialization truly a necessary step in the passage from communal properties of feudal life to a post-capitalist egalitarian society? in these years, even though marx was not to publish any other works, he furthered his understanding of non-capitalist social formations. a study emblematic, exemplified by his correspondence with the russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, if i'm pronouncing it correctly, in 1881. each of these different sequences in marx's thought brought about important changes in his conceptual framework.
Moderator
twenty.
twenty.
Co-Discussant
at early stages of his work, marx linked the critique of capitalism to the critique of religion in a double sense. first of all, following feuerbach, the critique of religion meant the undoing of mystifications which naturalized social relations of domination, that is, which made the inverted world brought about by capitalism's property relation consonant with our consciousness. against feuerbach, a critical outlook of social relations in capitalism showing how these same relations produce and reproduce these mystifications in the first place. it is in this second aspect of irreligious criticism which structures the series of displacements with which marx understand the so-called research program of 1842-1851. if forbach came to marx's aid in order to undo the other world of it is the ensuring criticism of earth which truly characterizes marx's own thinking. but the way marx approaches the problem of self-estrangement in its unholy forms appear as an extension of rather than as a break with the critique of religion. so when one shifts the criticism of religion into criticism of law and property relations, the basis for the worker's alienation from his productions, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of political representation, the basis for the workers' invisibility as an orient force of society, these displacements still take the form for a model of the original for bian critique of self-ement. that is, they still take the form of denouncing of the way abstract relations in fact stand for concrete non-relations. property rights ensure the worker's exploitation, political representation ensures his political impotence. the movement from abstract to concrete, from the ideal to the real, from the divine to the human, was the principal dynamic of marxian model of critique, while its objects were the criticism of law and criticism of politics. in some, while focused on the relation between labor and property or civil society and the state. however, when we juxtapose the way religion functions as a negative of critique in his theoretical sequence to the way it re-emerges in marx's most well-known work, and more specifically the most well-known chapter of that work, the section of fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof from the first volume of capital, a crucial shift seems to have taken place. here marx is no longer discussing how the products of labor appear an alien power acquiring an essential difference from the producers or proprietary differences. instead, he is interested in how the products of labor become equivalent to each other and ultimately to the producers themselves. the equivalence between commodities. the problem marx is trying to render legible is a central one. if we take the standpoint of what is concretely taking place. at the production process, if we enter a factory and see what we find there, nowhere are the social social relations which truly condition the process visible. we don't find inequality anywhere, no social relations appear, but rather equally self-serving individuals putting their private properties to use, be one's own labor force or previously bought means of production such as machines, etc. but from the standpoint of property, we cannot even find the reason why the capitalist would prefer to invest his money into other property, laborers, rented, machinery, etc. if the end product would be worth worth the sum of the money he spent. so the very reason of being of the factory is not visible. and so it is not the reason why this process begets more money than the money invested in it. it is only from the standpoint of exchange of products, that is, from the products of labor taken as commodities, that the social relations at stake in the very production process become themselves legible. it is only by considering labor as a commodity. that the social relations between workers, their distinction from those who buy the labor commodity, the production of surplus value, etc., are expressed. in other words, if we take the standpoint of relation between people, between concrete individuals, social relations are effectively invisible, substituted by property relations which are immediate and equal. and therefore explain nothing of the production process itself. why, if we take the standpoint of relation between things, between commodities, the social relations between people are suddenly expressed at the cost of making concrete individuals invisible. marx must explain therefore the logic of process through which social relations acquire qualities that are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. he turns to physics here, proposing an analogy with light. we see things lit because light hits our eyes, but even though the being of a thing seen depends on the relation between the eye and the thing, that is, of light hitting the thing, even and then our eyes. we confront these things as separate from us, not as subjective excitations of our optic nerve, but as an objective form of something outside the eye itself. the analogy is there. social relations appear as social things outside the subject of this relation, just as the relation between the eye and what we seen appears as an objective thing outside the eye. but at this point, marx points out the limit of the analogy. in the case of the eye, there is a physical relation between physical things. that is, the eye, the thing being seen and the light hitting both the eye and the object are materially homogenous. all the elements in this process are physical. but is it different with commodities? why? because the relation at stake here i'm quoting, is heterogeneous to the things it relates. the existence of the things for commodity has absolutely no connection with their physical properties. end of quote. in the case of light, we can deduce properties about light by analyzing the object it relates to. because light interacts with objects being part of the same material world as they are, it are truly infinitesimal level, it can be seen that it exerts force over the object it hits or produces just heat or exc the object. on the other hand, the exchange relations between commodities do not contain an atom of use-value. that is, they are indifferent to the concrete and material substratum of the things being related. nothing about value can be deduced by looking at what is concretely put into relations through the value relations. however, it is only from the set point of these relations that the social relation between concrete people and things become visible. so while there is a definite social relation between men, this relation assumes for them the fantastic form of relation between things. the term that is not captured by the physical metaphor is fantastic. it implies that information is lost when we only accept the existence of material and concrete things and people. it is not a mere perceptible distortion, like a transcendental illusion which structure our visual field, but concretely plays no part in the behavior of life. in. the fantastic aspect of this process concerns the fact that if we try to move from the distortion back to the concrete process, we also lose the causal enment which truly structures these concrete conflicts. at this point, marx makes a novel use of religion, clearly distinct from the critical model based on fre. seven. okay well. and i'm quoting mo. in order therefore to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. they are products of human brain. there the products of human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. so it is in the world of commodities, with the products of men's hands. i call this fetishism, which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities the myst enveloped regions of religion are called upon here not as a model of what is to be criticized, but rather as a model of how social relations truly function in capitalism. as a fantastic domain which effectively transcends, to the point that without assuming the existence of this transcendental or supernatural standpoint, the legibility of concrete and localized social relations themselves is compromised. considering how central the critique of religion was to the constitution of marx's own critical stance, it is worth pondering over the fact that marx here claims that in order to account for the reality of value for, we must have recourse to religion. what exactly is the status of this necessity? there seems to be a strange enlargement of the scope of materialism in the passage from feuerbach to early marx and then to the standpoint of capital. at first, feuerbach proposed that the materialist position would recognize the religious form operates as illusory alienation to which our own production appears to us as an autonomous or otherworldly, which is why the spiritual overcoming of this illusion would reveal that the human species itself is the source and the site of our self-transcendence. marlan claimed that this relation of alienation is not an illusion, but rather a redoubling of a very real form of social alienation through which workers are materially deprived of the products of their labor. alienation is not the essential religious phenomenon. for it is conditioned by the social reality of alienation, the essential dimension of religious world, rather than be the ill, separation that this alienated sphere then acquires in regards to real social life. finally, with the shift from property relations to the problematic of value, this separation itself is recognized as part of the social world, since the logic of d. is materially separated from its own material substratum what is then pr of religion as a form. it is true that in capital, marx frequently refers to capitalism or aspects of it as religious-like. for example, in the third volume he writes, i quote. it is a great merit of classical economists to have dissolved the false appearance and deception, this autonomization and ossification of the different social elements of wealth vis-à-vis one another, this personification of things and verification. of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life. oh. but to say that the way social... well, is fault hidden from us in capitalism under the illusionusory personification of things and conversion of production relation into entities, make the religion of everyday life is not to criticize religion, but rather to criticize capitalism in its religion-like features. it is hard to miss that an inversion has taken place here. it is not religion that is being attacked for aiding the reproduction of well social structure. it is rather this social structure which is being represented as religion. and so, once again, religion appears not as an object of critique, but as a model of the world. walter benjamin has this capitalism as a religion, but i don't have to discuss this now because i'm almost at the end. okay, yes. to conclude, marx's famous response to prouddon's philosophy of poverty was the return to the message in inverted form, the poverty of philosophy. today, when the value of thinking has become itself measured by the standards of incessant activity and production which organizes all forms of labor, the time have come to supplement marx's own position. the crisis of the left is no longer the crisis of idealism, of poor philosophy, disconnected from the material basis which condition it. ours is poverty of philosophy, a blatant absence of any form of thinking, subtracted from the imperative of compulsive activity. a return to philosophy then has a double role today. it is a means to reinvent the critical powers needed in order to transform the world. and it is itself the first movement of construction of something which has no place in our world. our task, therefore, is not that of fighting the dominance in the current historical structure of whole, dominance which makes itself responsible for what we have lost. say what is happening all over the world with riots uprising in all the. for the contingencies that never became part of the actual hope, in making itself responsible for the phantasmatic status of true communism. this instance also makes itself an indispensable part of our identity as democratic socialists militants betrayed by the course of the socialist experiments of the 20th century, alleviating our guilt pain. our first choice is rather to let go of the identity sustained by the loss itself, to lose the loss, both to let it go and to recuperate it as being constitively a ghost, something that is to quote laccon, neither being nor non-being but the unrealized. in other words, our task is to operate a withdrawal, which itself constitutes the opening for a new field of experimentation of what marx used to call possible communism.
at early stages of his work, marx linked the critique of capitalism to the critique of religion in a double sense. first of all, following feuerbach, the critique of religion meant the undoing of mystifications which naturalized social relations of domination, that is, which made the inverted world brought about by capitalism's property relation consonant with our consciousness. against feuerbach, a critical outlook of social relations in capitalism showing how these same relations produce and reproduce these mystifications in the first place. it is in this second aspect of irreligious criticism which structures the series of displacements with which marx understand the so-called research program of 1842-1851. if forbach came to marx's aid in order to undo the other world of it is the ensuring criticism of earth which truly characterizes marx's own thinking. but the way marx approaches the problem of self-estrangement in its unholy forms appear as an extension of rather than as a break with the critique of religion. so when one shifts the criticism of religion into criticism of law and property relations, the basis for the worker's alienation from his productions, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of political representation, the basis for the workers' invisibility as an orient force of society, these displacements still take the form for a model of the original for bian critique of self-ement. that is, they still take the form of denouncing of the way abstract relations in fact stand for concrete non-relations. property rights ensure the worker's exploitation, political representation ensures his political impotence. the movement from abstract to concrete, from the ideal to the real, from the divine to the human, was the principal dynamic of marxian model of critique, while its objects were the criticism of law and criticism of politics. in some, while focused on the relation between labor and property or civil society and the state. however, when we juxtapose the way religion functions as a negative of critique in his theoretical sequence to the way it re-emerges in marx's most well-known work, and more specifically the most well-known chapter of that work, the section of fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof from the first volume of capital, a crucial shift seems to have taken place. here marx is no longer discussing how the products of labor appear an alien power acquiring an essential difference from the producers or proprietary differences. instead, he is interested in how the products of labor become equivalent to each other and ultimately to the producers themselves. the equivalence between commodities. the problem marx is trying to render legible is a central one. if we take the standpoint of what is concretely taking place. at the production process, if we enter a factory and see what we find there, nowhere are the social social relations which truly condition the process visible. we don't find inequality anywhere, no social relations appear, but rather equally self-serving individuals putting their private properties to use, be one's own labor force or previously bought means of production such as machines, etc. but from the standpoint of property, we cannot even find the reason why the capitalist would prefer to invest his money into other property, laborers, rented, machinery, etc. if the end product would be worth worth the sum of the money he spent. so the very reason of being of the factory is not visible. and so it is not the reason why this process begets more money than the money invested in it. it is only from the standpoint of exchange of products, that is, from the products of labor taken as commodities, that the social relations at stake in the very production process become themselves legible. it is only by considering labor as a commodity. that the social relations between workers, their distinction from those who buy the labor commodity, the production of surplus value, etc., are expressed. in other words, if we take the standpoint of relation between people, between concrete individuals, social relations are effectively invisible, substituted by property relations which are immediate and equal. and therefore explain nothing of the production process itself. why, if we take the standpoint of relation between things, between commodities, the social relations between people are suddenly expressed at the cost of making concrete individuals invisible. marx must explain therefore the logic of process through which social relations acquire qualities that are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. he turns to physics here, proposing an analogy with light. we see things lit because light hits our eyes, but even though the being of a thing seen depends on the relation between the eye and the thing, that is, of light hitting the thing, even and then our eyes. we confront these things as separate from us, not as subjective excitations of our optic nerve, but as an objective form of something outside the eye itself. the analogy is there. social relations appear as social things outside the subject of this relation, just as the relation between the eye and what we seen appears as an objective thing outside the eye. but at this point, marx points out the limit of the analogy. in the case of the eye, there is a physical relation between physical things. that is, the eye, the thing being seen and the light hitting both the eye and the object are materially homogenous. all the elements in this process are physical. but is it different with commodities? why? because the relation at stake here i'm quoting, is heterogeneous to the things it relates. the existence of the things for commodity has absolutely no connection with their physical properties. end of quote. in the case of light, we can deduce properties about light by analyzing the object it relates to. because light interacts with objects being part of the same material world as they are, it are truly infinitesimal level, it can be seen that it exerts force over the object it hits or produces just heat or exc the object. on the other hand, the exchange relations between commodities do not contain an atom of use-value. that is, they are indifferent to the concrete and material substratum of the things being related. nothing about value can be deduced by looking at what is concretely put into relations through the value relations. however, it is only from the set point of these relations that the social relation between concrete people and things become visible. so while there is a definite social relation between men, this relation assumes for them the fantastic form of relation between things. the term that is not captured by the physical metaphor is fantastic. it implies that information is lost when we only accept the existence of material and concrete things and people. it is not a mere perceptible distortion, like a transcendental illusion which structure our visual field, but concretely plays no part in the behavior of life. in. the fantastic aspect of this process concerns the fact that if we try to move from the distortion back to the concrete process, we also lose the causal enment which truly structures these concrete conflicts. at this point, marx makes a novel use of religion, clearly distinct from the critical model based on fre. seven. okay well. and i'm quoting mo. in order therefore to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. they are products of human brain. there the products of human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. so it is in the world of commodities, with the products of men's hands. i call this fetishism, which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities the myst enveloped regions of religion are called upon here not as a model of what is to be criticized, but rather as a model of how social relations truly function in capitalism. as a fantastic domain which effectively transcends, to the point that without assuming the existence of this transcendental or supernatural standpoint, the legibility of concrete and localized social relations themselves is compromised. considering how central the critique of religion was to the constitution of marx's own critical stance, it is worth pondering over the fact that marx here claims that in order to account for the reality of value for, we must have recourse to religion. what exactly is the status of this necessity? there seems to be a strange enlargement of the scope of materialism in the passage from feuerbach to early marx and then to the standpoint of capital. at first, feuerbach proposed that the materialist position would recognize the religious form operates as illusory alienation to which our own production appears to us as an autonomous or otherworldly, which is why the spiritual overcoming of this illusion would reveal that the human species itself is the source and the site of our self-transcendence. marlan claimed that this relation of alienation is not an illusion, but rather a redoubling of a very real form of social alienation through which workers are materially deprived of the products of their labor. alienation is not the essential religious phenomenon. for it is conditioned by the social reality of alienation, the essential dimension of religious world, rather than be the ill, separation that this alienated sphere then acquires in regards to real social life. finally, with the shift from property relations to the problematic of value, this separation itself is recognized as part of the social world, since the logic of d. is materially separated from its own material substratum what is then pr of religion as a form. it is true that in capital, marx frequently refers to capitalism or aspects of it as religious-like. for example, in the third volume he writes, i quote. it is a great merit of classical economists to have dissolved the false appearance and deception, this autonomization and ossification of the different social elements of wealth vis-à-vis one another, this personification of things and verification. of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life. oh. but to say that the way social... well, is fault hidden from us in capitalism under the illusionusory personification of things and conversion of production relation into entities, make the religion of everyday life is not to criticize religion, but rather to criticize capitalism in its religion-like features. it is hard to miss that an inversion has taken place here. it is not religion that is being attacked for aiding the reproduction of well social structure. it is rather this social structure which is being represented as religion. and so, once again, religion appears not as an object of critique, but as a model of the world. walter benjamin has this capitalism as a religion, but i don't have to discuss this now because i'm almost at the end. okay, yes. to conclude, marx's famous response to prouddon's philosophy of poverty was the return to the message in inverted form, the poverty of philosophy. today, when the value of thinking has become itself measured by the standards of incessant activity and production which organizes all forms of labor, the time have come to supplement marx's own position. the crisis of the left is no longer the crisis of idealism, of poor philosophy, disconnected from the material basis which condition it. ours is poverty of philosophy, a blatant absence of any form of thinking, subtracted from the imperative of compulsive activity. a return to philosophy then has a double role today. it is a means to reinvent the critical powers needed in order to transform the world. and it is itself the first movement of construction of something which has no place in our world. our task, therefore, is not that of fighting the dominance in the current historical structure of whole, dominance which makes itself responsible for what we have lost. say what is happening all over the world with riots uprising in all the. for the contingencies that never became part of the actual hope, in making itself responsible for the phantasmatic status of true communism. this instance also makes itself an indispensable part of our identity as democratic socialists militants betrayed by the course of the socialist experiments of the 20th century, alleviating our guilt pain. our first choice is rather to let go of the identity sustained by the loss itself, to lose the loss, both to let it go and to recuperate it as being constitively a ghost, something that is to quote laccon, neither being nor non-being but the unrealized. in other words, our task is to operate a withdrawal, which itself constitutes the opening for a new field of experimentation of what marx used to call possible communism.
Moderator
that's great. thank you very much. more faith in philosophy to, let's say, a route to emancipation. this time losing the loss. now our last speaker is jik. sl. i've introduced it before, so i... um... i'm sure you're know him. i think i'll just say one thing actually, because i don't know if it... has said it. you all know enough about jj, i don't have to go. and also esther introduced him yesterday, so i don't have to. this one. story that keeps coming to mind. you know when i was looking at both your work and the frank brters and ag ham sort of... because several edited collections where you try to systematize school of thought and then the recent book is about dialectical materialism but other edited collections are trying to and it sort of made me wonder whether it's actually. a task that is possible and the with metaphor, i keep coming back to this beautiful short story, but i'm sure you all know it, by jorge luis borges. and i don't know if anyone has compared your work to this guy before, but i don't know why they haven't, because to me it seems so... clear that you are that character from the Jorge Luis Borges and i'm thinking of the story the g of f past you know that character Ts'ui Pên who gives up the governorship of a peak province in china and he announces to his family that he's giving it up because he has two important tasks to complete and one is to write a novel in which he says all men will be lost and the second task is to create a labyrinth, which again would be the most intricate labyrinth ever produced. anyway, unfortunately Ts'ui Pên this is not prediction know is murdered before he finishes either the labyrinth or the novel. and his children and grandchildren when they look for the novel they just find this um... masses of manuscripts that they can't make head or tail or you know they can't put together it doesn't make any sense they don't connect together and then this sinologist comes along it gets better promise this sinologist comes along and solves the riddle of what was Ts'ui Pên's task. i mean he's basically you know it the little that Ts'ui Pên was not writing a novel. and constructing a labyrinth but the novel was the labyrinth so it was one and the same task and the labyrinth he created was one where which is a really noble and if only we could all emulate actually a project and what Ts'ui Pên was doing and i think in some respects you resemble him. is that every time in his writing of the novel he would come across a contingency or various options, various choices that he would have to make. instead of choosing one and eliminating all the others and just sticking to one path, he would choose all of them simultaneously. and they would all, you know, that's why you end up with this garten of fucking paths. and obviously the paths would proliferate and proliferate because all possible eventualities would be constantly pursued. and despite the fact that rek comes back to three, you, favorites, you know, lakan, hee and marx. i think he also at the time das was the favor of... going on to fkin pass. so something happens in the world, he stops to write about that. something happens somewhere else he do that as well. so there is this he's leaving us with a labyrinth that we are still trying to find our way around. so good luck to frank and agon that are looking for their way around. but i think...
that's great. thank you very much. more faith in philosophy to, let's say, a route to emancipation. this time losing the loss. now our last speaker is jik. sl. i've introduced it before, so i... um... i'm sure you're know him. i think i'll just say one thing actually, because i don't know if it... has said it. you all know enough about jj, i don't have to go. and also esther introduced him yesterday, so i don't have to. this one. story that keeps coming to mind. you know when i was looking at both your work and the frank brters and ag ham sort of... because several edited collections where you try to systematize school of thought and then the recent book is about dialectical materialism but other edited collections are trying to and it sort of made me wonder whether it's actually. a task that is possible and the with metaphor, i keep coming back to this beautiful short story, but i'm sure you all know it, by jorge luis borges. and i don't know if anyone has compared your work to this guy before, but i don't know why they haven't, because to me it seems so... clear that you are that character from the Jorge Luis Borges and i'm thinking of the story the g of f past you know that character Ts'ui Pên who gives up the governorship of a peak province in china and he announces to his family that he's giving it up because he has two important tasks to complete and one is to write a novel in which he says all men will be lost and the second task is to create a labyrinth, which again would be the most intricate labyrinth ever produced. anyway, unfortunately Ts'ui Pên this is not prediction know is murdered before he finishes either the labyrinth or the novel. and his children and grandchildren when they look for the novel they just find this um... masses of manuscripts that they can't make head or tail or you know they can't put together it doesn't make any sense they don't connect together and then this sinologist comes along it gets better promise this sinologist comes along and solves the riddle of what was Ts'ui Pên's task. i mean he's basically you know it the little that Ts'ui Pên was not writing a novel. and constructing a labyrinth but the novel was the labyrinth so it was one and the same task and the labyrinth he created was one where which is a really noble and if only we could all emulate actually a project and what Ts'ui Pên was doing and i think in some respects you resemble him. is that every time in his writing of the novel he would come across a contingency or various options, various choices that he would have to make. instead of choosing one and eliminating all the others and just sticking to one path, he would choose all of them simultaneously. and they would all, you know, that's why you end up with this garten of fucking paths. and obviously the paths would proliferate and proliferate because all possible eventualities would be constantly pursued. and despite the fact that rek comes back to three, you, favorites, you know, lakan, hee and marx. i think he also at the time das was the favor of... going on to fkin pass. so something happens in the world, he stops to write about that. something happens somewhere else he do that as well. so there is this he's leaving us with a labyrinth that we are still trying to find our way around. so good luck to frank and agon that are looking for their way around. but i think...
Co-Discussant
yeah.
yeah.
Moderator
so, Ts'ui Pên. Pên.
so, Ts'ui Pên. Pên.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you very much. sorry'm sorry. thank you very much, and i like very much this mention of bo. you know, why i like critically to mention boes? because i notice this hypocrisy of most of the leftists, how, you know, today, in today's politically correct paranoia, you mention something,, there is racism there, anti-feminism and so on. so with some authors, we have this hyper-sensitive reading. with other authors. who were obviously politically reactionary and somehow because they are ours, they are pard in advance. like my example is Wagner, Nietzsche. wagner is hyper undergeist. if in part five he mentions the smell of the the nice smell of the dancing girls. ah it's the reference to how jew smell it's anti-semitism and so on. right between them. in this openly reactionary attitude, everything is pardoned in advance. and with the same, i remember, now, unfortunately, he died last cl. he was once referring to bororges. and said that he was at one of borkke's conferences towards the end where b was already half blind. she said before it was like this one in a university. hola, sorry, with a room, with a dash, and bororg has asked somebody, do you see well? yes. look around if there is a black person in here. i don't speak to blacks, they are too stupid, so please have that one thrown out. now what i like is that nation and everyone accepted this as a joke. imagine somebody else saying this, you know. i noticed this it's very interesting. writer. like do you remember, i don't like Edward Said. he wrote an analysis of jane austen. where he draw attention to the simple fact of the mm mentioned in oblique way but unambiguously the colonial background. what the greatest how can you even manage that and on and so on but okay let me i want to do now i hope i will be able to be a little bit shorter than oh of you. something very problematic. in the book, i treat more than both of you in the sense that in reading mar, i don't read mar. i really criticize object-oriented ontology with the excuse that this is show mar if he were to be alive. now i want to do something. speech. reading marks through me too. what would marx have thought about certain proposals of me too? not so much me too as this political correction and so on. and i want precisely to focus on one thing which was already mentioned by you, this idea of equal contract and so on. how marx demystifies shit? and then how in certain some parts towards which i'm critical of today's shism, how precisely? as a way to... fight, coercion and violence. sexual relations, the idea of contract is... forcefully returned here and there. for example, in the united states, i was there two weeks ago, i was showing. some of the states, they already circulate the contract forms, you know, we want to jump to bed a. you have to fill both names, date of birth, your do have age or whatever, illness, then religion. nationality if this is a problem and very interesting at the end what is off limit like you must put there sorry no anal contact or whatever and then both sign it now we are free and this is not a joke in australia. i love it. in my clinic in new york where a guy from australia claimed the i lying and next day he came and apologized to me and said, no, i checked it up, you were right. in australia, it's already in two of that states, new south b and tasmania. a lot. a. a couple, two people. before they do we. i don't know how they even think of checking this or whatever. they have to face each other. face to face, eye to eye, and both of them shoot. say loudly and clearly yes, i want to do it. sorry, i find this nonsensical for no other reason. that you can see here the secret ideological bias of all this idea. it secretly takes as the model of sexual conduct one-night sex, you know. because there it has a certain meaning with this. i mean, doing this with your wife for years. every evening. so again, this strange push towards a kind of... bureatic registration. we cannot just do it. and especially with this verbal agreement, i even don't see what's the point because okay. i mean the brutal i will never be able to... but let's say i am violent towards a lady. then she denounces me for kurt and i say, no, but don't you remember you said yes. and of course, i am lying, but you know, then you go a step further. okay, but nonetheless, i want to do something else here. to parliamentize generally this idea del sexual contract. we both sign egalitarian contract, we agree. what gets lost in the idea that sexual contract can work as a possible means of guaranteeing that the relationship is voluntary, that is to say without coercion, is, i think, m's good old insight from capital into how a formally free contract can also really be also, rely on coercion and thus effectively function as a form of coercion. who can forget marx's description of the free contract between a capitalist and a worker? this contract is... i quote max, in fact. the very eden of the innate rights of men, their alone rule, freedom, equality, property, and liberty. both participants are. constrained only by their own free will. they contract ex free agent and the agreement they come to is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. however, the contract is concluded, this beautiful poetic quote from max. we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatic. she! who before was the money owner now stand in front as capitalist the possessor of labor power follows as his laborer the one with an air of importance smirking intent on. bes the other timid and cold back like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but the hide. end of quote. from mark capital. the synonym of hiding the synonyms of hiding, battering, threshashing, bounding. h. span, sw. also also a brutal sexual act. this is me. this this indicate that we can apply marxist analysis of a free contract also to the idea of a sexual contract? at the most elementary level, it is easy to demonstrate how in sexual exchange also, the form of free contract can conceal coercion and violence. one of the agents agrees to sexual contract out of fear, out of emotional blackmail, out of material dependency and so on. but the complication reaches much deeper and imminent in sexual exchange, where freedom, equality, property, and not but enjoyment rule. this additional term, like benjamin max, spoils the freedom equality designated by the preceding terms. enjoyment introduces asymmetry. and into the balance of the exchange of pleasures. the two or more, i don't want to be called into binary logic, or more sexual partners. reach a deal of what i do to you and you do to me. e. interaction that would bring to both of us maximal pleasure. however, how are our pleasures mediated? when i engage in sex with a partner, i may only found pleasure in the other's pleasure and humiliation or vice versa. i may enjoy in my serving the other and only find pleasure in the signs of others' ecstatic pleasure. i may do it out of envy to prove i can better satisfy my partner. then it's his or her previous partner. plus, i mean do out of love. sexual pleasure is for me a sign of love. while my partner is interested in me only as a purveyor of sexual pleasure. can we imagine a sharper achievement? we should reach even a step further here. in labor capital exchange, worker doesn't sell his product but his own labor power as a commodity. we are dealing here with the logic of universality and its exception. the commodity form gets universal only when on the market producers are not only exchanging their products, d. becomes universal commodity form only when an exceptional commodity appears on the market, which is productive labor force itself. do we get a homologous exception also in sexual contract? what if the symmetry of each partner giving pleasure to the other? is also always already broken. one person works on the other to give it. him her pleasure and the idea is of course that this activity of giving pleasure becomes an intense. of pleasure. for the worker. here enters the thology between surplus value produced by the worker and surplus enjoyment produced by the activity of giving pleasure. the enjoyment generated by the very activity of serving the other, sexual partner. and i think that it's absolute illusion. psycholog. to say, i only care for my... ple when i do things to you or you do things to me. it's always a surplus here. that is to say, the very activity of experiencing pleasure is mediated through your pleasure, like are. i'm sorry to be a little bit of hindi open, but that's my problem. i can enjoy only if i see signs of pleasure in my partner. if i don't do that, i become important. i cannot do it. and i'm not boasting. this can be very unlikely. i love my wife because her answer in that situation to me stop about love and caring me. can't you just brutally ask me? i want to be an object, not your stupid subject of whatever. and she is right. but let's go on. what makes contractual sex problematic is not only its legal form, but also its hidden bias. contractual form obviously privileges casual sex where partners don't yet know each other and want to avoid misunderstandings about their one-night stand. one needs to extend our attention also to the long-term relationship. permitted with forms of violence and intimidation in much more subtle forms than the spectacular weinstein style enforced sex. to paraphrase brecht. what is the fate of a movie star who was once blackmailed into sex or directly raped to ensure her career compared with the miserable housewife who is for long years constantly terrorized and humiliated by her husband? bah! is marriage also not a contract, a permanent one? kant who in his metaphysics of morals, in favor defined sexual intercourse as the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another, end of quote, determines marriage as the contract reg this use. he dismisses a short-term sexual contract as he calls it it pactum fornicationis, contract fornication, admitting only marriage since in it my partner is not reduced to an object. or so consequently, as jean-claude miller pointed out here at berberg a year ago, for. come! sex outside marriage is quite literally a crime against humanity. in it, both participants reduce each other to objects used for pleasure and thereby deny the human dignity. i mean, i love this idea. may beginning hey they should. organ another tribunal for crime against humanity and it's not about perversion, torture, but you just get the casual sex crime against humanity and it's a problem. okay the more problematic part. further complications emerged. with white parts of meat. i. yeah much of me too. the match is flashing. the healing asymmetry. that sustains the notion of the contract of equal free partners and relying on marx's notion of the imbalance in the contract between worker and her. capitalists where the two are formally equal. Jean-Claude Milner, i assume you know him here, recently outlined the difference between objective and structural weakness. weakness as opposite to power. the idea being that this is the big obsession of me to how it's really about power. i mean, as i always repeat, mit too is the best example of... oscar wilde famous saying that everything in life is about sex except sex itself. sex is about power, of course. show... okay uh even if in the labour contract the worker is paid its full value the exchange between worker and capitalist is not equal. there is exploitation since worker is a commodity which produces surplus value, more value than its own value. in this sense, the contract is unjust. worker is in a weaker structural position, even if it is objectively stronger, with more empirical social power and so on and so on. and again, according to Milner, the MeToo movement implicitly transposes the same logic. to the sexual exchange between a man and a woman even if they both formally agree to make. to make love as equal partners, that is to say, even if the appearance is that of an equal exchange of sexual favors, there is a structural equality. and the woman started a structural inequality and the woman is... the weaker is in a weaker position. as the contract between worker and capitalists, one should emphasize the structural, formal character of this weakness. even if the woman initiated sexual change, even if she is socially or financially much stronger, she is structurally weaker. thein rec the lesson of Harvey Weinstein scandal. if by rape we understand an enforced sexual exchange, every. alt mm virtually potentially a case of rape. it goes by chance that very few of actual m2 members are ready to sell out this radical implications. but there were incidentally some feminists decades ago when i were young, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who claimed that already biologically, physiologically. standard standard heter sexual act is a violation of the integrity of woman's body, penetration and so on. the large majority is not ready to claim that sexual act is such an act of masculine violence. they proclaim. yes. their goal only to struggle for sexuality which does not rely on male positions of power and brings true joy to both partners. however, the implication that sexual act is ultimately such an act of rape, of violent imposition and coercion clearly functions the outspoken presupposition a great part of mitu movement with its focus on the cases of made corruption of violence. it partisan street, man. exclusively as potential trait and women as potential victims of male power.. the how donald trump is the exact opposite of me too. if me too privilege structural weakness at the expense ex. trump ignores structural weakness and focuses exclusively on objective. in which all participants can be and should be yeah ignore or turn then shit or. against themselves when circumstances that is to say, the america first interests demand. one demonizes kim yong-un as a threat to humanity, then one treats him as a threat, and so on and so on. up to the ultimate example of separating children of the illegal immigrants from their parents. in trump's immoral universe, it is totally logical to attack the weak opponent, the weakest opponent, the opponent is at its weakest point, children. as Milner concluded, trump is the Weinstein of the united states politics. however, this... asymmetry also signals the fateful limitation and even ethically problematic implication, i think, of this mit-to orientation. its exclusive focus on structural weakness. and incidentally, i'm not dreaming here. i experienced it lot like now two weeks ago when i was in new york. i did something totally acceptable, none of my usual bad face jokes, and a woman attacked. and patiently, okay, why not? patiently i demonstrated that her data are false and so on and so on. and i was quite shocked because her answer to me was, i'm getting lost here. and really i don't get that as a woman. she speaks from a weaker position, so she is the victim. that is to say, is's nothing else. the position is. because of the structural weakness of one she. i am not perfumed. innocent until proven guilty, i. presumed guilty until proven innocent. the a priori a priori judgment a priori i'm guilty empirically, i should prove that i am innocent. so. i am more or less automatically suspected at least of acting as a right homophobic supremacistacist and i am at least guilty of. racial and sexual insensitivity. so the position of structural weakness gives the woman the power and my structural position of a white male effectively makes me powerless, often in practice. this is one wonderful example, becker in his masterpiece like. a short play, he name short play catastrophe. wonderfully sensitive to this point, how weakness itself being a victim can be used to multitude can be used as. extremely efficient instrument of power. and my latest example, i know i was widely criticized for it, if in the united states this so-called here, so that people don't accuse me that i'm anti-feminist sex, here sex relation goes in the opposite direction.. between Avital Ronell and her postdoctoral student, numero and so on. although he ruined her life. she is now half crazy. she escaped to a small mexican village and everyone wants to stay there. nonetheless, you should just see her. she is totally broken. her career is ruined. ah, nonetheless, she's the master. he's... the. no... we thus enter the cruel world of brutal power games masked as the noble struggle of the victims against oppression. one should recall here again that oscar wright saying everything is about power, except about sex except sex. some partisans of me too talk about sex, but their position of ann is that of power and of those who don't get it, of course. following roscar right, they reduce sex to a power game and what they exclude from their position of enunciation is precisely and simply sex. why am i saying? now let me be very clear here, not to make fun of me too. my god, i think me too is mega important. moment making in the history of humanity. the! be! a relationship between sex the basic matrix which began even in a pre-class society with the rise of tribal patriarchy is changing and so on. but i think that this type of approach. just reproduceces power structure is's extremely dangerous and so on and we end badly, especially for i think a different approach is necessary. where. the first approach i would have made is not to paint it would be even more subtly. critical of masculinity. it's not out of any sympathy for men, i hope you would agree, to say that all those brutal rapists and so on. they are not really figures of power. they're really weakness to act out their impotence and so on. that is how i would. a the topic and this is the problem we are making all the time even generally and'm sorry some of you yesterday at my class i will read my of accusing right wingers of being er. the masculine, aggressive, strong and so on, all these anti-immigrants and so on. i think now this will sound crazy. i think we should adopt the opposite strategy. i maybe. it's risky crazy. they will again proclaim me totally crazy. i will immediately finish. i plan to write a text. pr angela mark. against current denunciation as you know, a weak, confused, womanly soft. she is a true great german nationalist in a positive sense who believe in the greatness of german nation and so on. why? because quite na, it is a sign of great strength and trust into germans that you are ready to say to immigrants, come here, we are not afraid of you. we will integrate you. we can afford it. and i think we should begin to attack anti-immigrant racists. not the strong authoritarian men who don't want to whip themselves all the time, but on the contrary, they are the true cowards. how can somebody who goes like trump now into a panic if 300 immigrants are approaching the united states border? this is not strength, this is cowardly, weak, cowardly weakness. generally i think that instead of just moaning for power, power, power, but secretly manipulating. our victim status precisely to get power. the true thing would be to grant power to others, but as an expression of my own sovereignty and power. a truly powerful man or woman has no need to terrorize to be afraid of others and so on and so on. and again, i... the same. with me too. don't they get it that? men also suffer today. this in no way justifies, i'm here fan, any mistreatment of women. but in today's capitalism, men are in crisis and the only strategy is to make an alliance with. to somehow, i know it's difficult, it's almost utopia. say man, not we are sick and tired of you posing as a strong male and so on, but to say sorry, i don't buy your game. of course i'm afraid if you beat me, but at the same time, i am aware that you are a weak guy. you are the truly weak guy and so on. so don't be afraid of. instead of playing these disgusting games and week and week and all the time like in cartoons, you know, when a cat an evil cat or who donald there whatever sees money, click click, you can see in his before his eyes those you know you know coins drop in balance. instead of this, we horrible, horrible, but you can see quickly how can i use this? and i had some relations like this years ago to. i was very shocked. i was in a relationship with an american girl who was well, exploiting me very much financially. really practically ruined me. and i complained and in answer, how dare you say this? do you know what men were doing for thousands of years to women and so on and so on. you know like this immediate reference to so what i'm saying is better. and hope you agree, i'm not criticizing in a very short way. i know me too, the because of making fun of you. really want that some fundamental change will come out of it and not just this same game of guilt and so on who is more guilty, this pretty disgusting element of justifying your position only by making yourself more and more guilty. if you allow me to conclude another joke that i used yesterday sorry? you should be asking me. you, you have the power. no, okay, one joke that i used yesterday, i'm sorry to my students.. whenever... somebody proclaims greed and so on or whatever. there is always a hypocrisy in it, you should always ask the laian question when one humiliates himself too much, but what secret profit does he get? usually it's a out of it. the job that i... i told yesterday it's one of the wonderful. jokes. from jewish tradition when on sabbat in synagogue. jew smith and first rich rabbi said, i am nobody. oh dear god, i'm not worthy of your attention. i'm nobody. then a rich jewish merchant says, i'm also nobody, god. i'm not worthy of blah, blah, blah. then a poor jew stands up and says, oh my god, i'm also a nobody. and the rich merchant kicks the rabbi, but who is this guy? think he can also say he just nobody or whatever. not to be an un is a privilege. didn't you i have again and again this experience in the united states where are white people who are always red, yes, we are guilty of everything. there are no buffaloes, not enough forests in the united states, africa is starving, european imperialism guilty of everything. but then i always noticed that patronizing organ. in their very denying of their identity, d. reserve for themselves the position of universality. i see them all the time at round tables interacting others like for example it was so humiliating in montana years ago. indian called himself
thank you very much. sorry'm sorry. thank you very much, and i like very much this mention of bo. you know, why i like critically to mention boes? because i notice this hypocrisy of most of the leftists, how, you know, today, in today's politically correct paranoia, you mention something,, there is racism there, anti-feminism and so on. so with some authors, we have this hyper-sensitive reading. with other authors. who were obviously politically reactionary and somehow because they are ours, they are pard in advance. like my example is Wagner, Nietzsche. wagner is hyper undergeist. if in part five he mentions the smell of the the nice smell of the dancing girls. ah it's the reference to how jew smell it's anti-semitism and so on. right between them. in this openly reactionary attitude, everything is pardoned in advance. and with the same, i remember, now, unfortunately, he died last cl. he was once referring to bororges. and said that he was at one of borkke's conferences towards the end where b was already half blind. she said before it was like this one in a university. hola, sorry, with a room, with a dash, and bororg has asked somebody, do you see well? yes. look around if there is a black person in here. i don't speak to blacks, they are too stupid, so please have that one thrown out. now what i like is that nation and everyone accepted this as a joke. imagine somebody else saying this, you know. i noticed this it's very interesting. writer. like do you remember, i don't like Edward Said. he wrote an analysis of jane austen. where he draw attention to the simple fact of the mm mentioned in oblique way but unambiguously the colonial background. what the greatest how can you even manage that and on and so on but okay let me i want to do now i hope i will be able to be a little bit shorter than oh of you. something very problematic. in the book, i treat more than both of you in the sense that in reading mar, i don't read mar. i really criticize object-oriented ontology with the excuse that this is show mar if he were to be alive. now i want to do something. speech. reading marks through me too. what would marx have thought about certain proposals of me too? not so much me too as this political correction and so on. and i want precisely to focus on one thing which was already mentioned by you, this idea of equal contract and so on. how marx demystifies shit? and then how in certain some parts towards which i'm critical of today's shism, how precisely? as a way to... fight, coercion and violence. sexual relations, the idea of contract is... forcefully returned here and there. for example, in the united states, i was there two weeks ago, i was showing. some of the states, they already circulate the contract forms, you know, we want to jump to bed a. you have to fill both names, date of birth, your do have age or whatever, illness, then religion. nationality if this is a problem and very interesting at the end what is off limit like you must put there sorry no anal contact or whatever and then both sign it now we are free and this is not a joke in australia. i love it. in my clinic in new york where a guy from australia claimed the i lying and next day he came and apologized to me and said, no, i checked it up, you were right. in australia, it's already in two of that states, new south b and tasmania. a lot. a. a couple, two people. before they do we. i don't know how they even think of checking this or whatever. they have to face each other. face to face, eye to eye, and both of them shoot. say loudly and clearly yes, i want to do it. sorry, i find this nonsensical for no other reason. that you can see here the secret ideological bias of all this idea. it secretly takes as the model of sexual conduct one-night sex, you know. because there it has a certain meaning with this. i mean, doing this with your wife for years. every evening. so again, this strange push towards a kind of... bureatic registration. we cannot just do it. and especially with this verbal agreement, i even don't see what's the point because okay. i mean the brutal i will never be able to... but let's say i am violent towards a lady. then she denounces me for kurt and i say, no, but don't you remember you said yes. and of course, i am lying, but you know, then you go a step further. okay, but nonetheless, i want to do something else here. to parliamentize generally this idea del sexual contract. we both sign egalitarian contract, we agree. what gets lost in the idea that sexual contract can work as a possible means of guaranteeing that the relationship is voluntary, that is to say without coercion, is, i think, m's good old insight from capital into how a formally free contract can also really be also, rely on coercion and thus effectively function as a form of coercion. who can forget marx's description of the free contract between a capitalist and a worker? this contract is... i quote max, in fact. the very eden of the innate rights of men, their alone rule, freedom, equality, property, and liberty. both participants are. constrained only by their own free will. they contract ex free agent and the agreement they come to is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. however, the contract is concluded, this beautiful poetic quote from max. we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatic. she! who before was the money owner now stand in front as capitalist the possessor of labor power follows as his laborer the one with an air of importance smirking intent on. bes the other timid and cold back like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but the hide. end of quote. from mark capital. the synonym of hiding the synonyms of hiding, battering, threshashing, bounding. h. span, sw. also also a brutal sexual act. this is me. this this indicate that we can apply marxist analysis of a free contract also to the idea of a sexual contract? at the most elementary level, it is easy to demonstrate how in sexual exchange also, the form of free contract can conceal coercion and violence. one of the agents agrees to sexual contract out of fear, out of emotional blackmail, out of material dependency and so on. but the complication reaches much deeper and imminent in sexual exchange, where freedom, equality, property, and not but enjoyment rule. this additional term, like benjamin max, spoils the freedom equality designated by the preceding terms. enjoyment introduces asymmetry. and into the balance of the exchange of pleasures. the two or more, i don't want to be called into binary logic, or more sexual partners. reach a deal of what i do to you and you do to me. e. interaction that would bring to both of us maximal pleasure. however, how are our pleasures mediated? when i engage in sex with a partner, i may only found pleasure in the other's pleasure and humiliation or vice versa. i may enjoy in my serving the other and only find pleasure in the signs of others' ecstatic pleasure. i may do it out of envy to prove i can better satisfy my partner. then it's his or her previous partner. plus, i mean do out of love. sexual pleasure is for me a sign of love. while my partner is interested in me only as a purveyor of sexual pleasure. can we imagine a sharper achievement? we should reach even a step further here. in labor capital exchange, worker doesn't sell his product but his own labor power as a commodity. we are dealing here with the logic of universality and its exception. the commodity form gets universal only when on the market producers are not only exchanging their products, d. becomes universal commodity form only when an exceptional commodity appears on the market, which is productive labor force itself. do we get a homologous exception also in sexual contract? what if the symmetry of each partner giving pleasure to the other? is also always already broken. one person works on the other to give it. him her pleasure and the idea is of course that this activity of giving pleasure becomes an intense. of pleasure. for the worker. here enters the thology between surplus value produced by the worker and surplus enjoyment produced by the activity of giving pleasure. the enjoyment generated by the very activity of serving the other, sexual partner. and i think that it's absolute illusion. psycholog. to say, i only care for my... ple when i do things to you or you do things to me. it's always a surplus here. that is to say, the very activity of experiencing pleasure is mediated through your pleasure, like are. i'm sorry to be a little bit of hindi open, but that's my problem. i can enjoy only if i see signs of pleasure in my partner. if i don't do that, i become important. i cannot do it. and i'm not boasting. this can be very unlikely. i love my wife because her answer in that situation to me stop about love and caring me. can't you just brutally ask me? i want to be an object, not your stupid subject of whatever. and she is right. but let's go on. what makes contractual sex problematic is not only its legal form, but also its hidden bias. contractual form obviously privileges casual sex where partners don't yet know each other and want to avoid misunderstandings about their one-night stand. one needs to extend our attention also to the long-term relationship. permitted with forms of violence and intimidation in much more subtle forms than the spectacular weinstein style enforced sex. to paraphrase brecht. what is the fate of a movie star who was once blackmailed into sex or directly raped to ensure her career compared with the miserable housewife who is for long years constantly terrorized and humiliated by her husband? bah! is marriage also not a contract, a permanent one? kant who in his metaphysics of morals, in favor defined sexual intercourse as the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another, end of quote, determines marriage as the contract reg this use. he dismisses a short-term sexual contract as he calls it it pactum fornicationis, contract fornication, admitting only marriage since in it my partner is not reduced to an object. or so consequently, as jean-claude miller pointed out here at berberg a year ago, for. come! sex outside marriage is quite literally a crime against humanity. in it, both participants reduce each other to objects used for pleasure and thereby deny the human dignity. i mean, i love this idea. may beginning hey they should. organ another tribunal for crime against humanity and it's not about perversion, torture, but you just get the casual sex crime against humanity and it's a problem. okay the more problematic part. further complications emerged. with white parts of meat. i. yeah much of me too. the match is flashing. the healing asymmetry. that sustains the notion of the contract of equal free partners and relying on marx's notion of the imbalance in the contract between worker and her. capitalists where the two are formally equal. Jean-Claude Milner, i assume you know him here, recently outlined the difference between objective and structural weakness. weakness as opposite to power. the idea being that this is the big obsession of me to how it's really about power. i mean, as i always repeat, mit too is the best example of... oscar wilde famous saying that everything in life is about sex except sex itself. sex is about power, of course. show... okay uh even if in the labour contract the worker is paid its full value the exchange between worker and capitalist is not equal. there is exploitation since worker is a commodity which produces surplus value, more value than its own value. in this sense, the contract is unjust. worker is in a weaker structural position, even if it is objectively stronger, with more empirical social power and so on and so on. and again, according to Milner, the MeToo movement implicitly transposes the same logic. to the sexual exchange between a man and a woman even if they both formally agree to make. to make love as equal partners, that is to say, even if the appearance is that of an equal exchange of sexual favors, there is a structural equality. and the woman started a structural inequality and the woman is... the weaker is in a weaker position. as the contract between worker and capitalists, one should emphasize the structural, formal character of this weakness. even if the woman initiated sexual change, even if she is socially or financially much stronger, she is structurally weaker. thein rec the lesson of Harvey Weinstein scandal. if by rape we understand an enforced sexual exchange, every. alt mm virtually potentially a case of rape. it goes by chance that very few of actual m2 members are ready to sell out this radical implications. but there were incidentally some feminists decades ago when i were young, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who claimed that already biologically, physiologically. standard standard heter sexual act is a violation of the integrity of woman's body, penetration and so on. the large majority is not ready to claim that sexual act is such an act of masculine violence. they proclaim. yes. their goal only to struggle for sexuality which does not rely on male positions of power and brings true joy to both partners. however, the implication that sexual act is ultimately such an act of rape, of violent imposition and coercion clearly functions the outspoken presupposition a great part of mitu movement with its focus on the cases of made corruption of violence. it partisan street, man. exclusively as potential trait and women as potential victims of male power.. the how donald trump is the exact opposite of me too. if me too privilege structural weakness at the expense ex. trump ignores structural weakness and focuses exclusively on objective. in which all participants can be and should be yeah ignore or turn then shit or. against themselves when circumstances that is to say, the america first interests demand. one demonizes kim yong-un as a threat to humanity, then one treats him as a threat, and so on and so on. up to the ultimate example of separating children of the illegal immigrants from their parents. in trump's immoral universe, it is totally logical to attack the weak opponent, the weakest opponent, the opponent is at its weakest point, children. as Milner concluded, trump is the Weinstein of the united states politics. however, this... asymmetry also signals the fateful limitation and even ethically problematic implication, i think, of this mit-to orientation. its exclusive focus on structural weakness. and incidentally, i'm not dreaming here. i experienced it lot like now two weeks ago when i was in new york. i did something totally acceptable, none of my usual bad face jokes, and a woman attacked. and patiently, okay, why not? patiently i demonstrated that her data are false and so on and so on. and i was quite shocked because her answer to me was, i'm getting lost here. and really i don't get that as a woman. she speaks from a weaker position, so she is the victim. that is to say, is's nothing else. the position is. because of the structural weakness of one she. i am not perfumed. innocent until proven guilty, i. presumed guilty until proven innocent. the a priori a priori judgment a priori i'm guilty empirically, i should prove that i am innocent. so. i am more or less automatically suspected at least of acting as a right homophobic supremacistacist and i am at least guilty of. racial and sexual insensitivity. so the position of structural weakness gives the woman the power and my structural position of a white male effectively makes me powerless, often in practice. this is one wonderful example, becker in his masterpiece like. a short play, he name short play catastrophe. wonderfully sensitive to this point, how weakness itself being a victim can be used to multitude can be used as. extremely efficient instrument of power. and my latest example, i know i was widely criticized for it, if in the united states this so-called here, so that people don't accuse me that i'm anti-feminist sex, here sex relation goes in the opposite direction.. between Avital Ronell and her postdoctoral student, numero and so on. although he ruined her life. she is now half crazy. she escaped to a small mexican village and everyone wants to stay there. nonetheless, you should just see her. she is totally broken. her career is ruined. ah, nonetheless, she's the master. he's... the. no... we thus enter the cruel world of brutal power games masked as the noble struggle of the victims against oppression. one should recall here again that oscar wright saying everything is about power, except about sex except sex. some partisans of me too talk about sex, but their position of ann is that of power and of those who don't get it, of course. following roscar right, they reduce sex to a power game and what they exclude from their position of enunciation is precisely and simply sex. why am i saying? now let me be very clear here, not to make fun of me too. my god, i think me too is mega important. moment making in the history of humanity. the! be! a relationship between sex the basic matrix which began even in a pre-class society with the rise of tribal patriarchy is changing and so on. but i think that this type of approach. just reproduceces power structure is's extremely dangerous and so on and we end badly, especially for i think a different approach is necessary. where. the first approach i would have made is not to paint it would be even more subtly. critical of masculinity. it's not out of any sympathy for men, i hope you would agree, to say that all those brutal rapists and so on. they are not really figures of power. they're really weakness to act out their impotence and so on. that is how i would. a the topic and this is the problem we are making all the time even generally and'm sorry some of you yesterday at my class i will read my of accusing right wingers of being er. the masculine, aggressive, strong and so on, all these anti-immigrants and so on. i think now this will sound crazy. i think we should adopt the opposite strategy. i maybe. it's risky crazy. they will again proclaim me totally crazy. i will immediately finish. i plan to write a text. pr angela mark. against current denunciation as you know, a weak, confused, womanly soft. she is a true great german nationalist in a positive sense who believe in the greatness of german nation and so on. why? because quite na, it is a sign of great strength and trust into germans that you are ready to say to immigrants, come here, we are not afraid of you. we will integrate you. we can afford it. and i think we should begin to attack anti-immigrant racists. not the strong authoritarian men who don't want to whip themselves all the time, but on the contrary, they are the true cowards. how can somebody who goes like trump now into a panic if 300 immigrants are approaching the united states border? this is not strength, this is cowardly, weak, cowardly weakness. generally i think that instead of just moaning for power, power, power, but secretly manipulating. our victim status precisely to get power. the true thing would be to grant power to others, but as an expression of my own sovereignty and power. a truly powerful man or woman has no need to terrorize to be afraid of others and so on and so on. and again, i... the same. with me too. don't they get it that? men also suffer today. this in no way justifies, i'm here fan, any mistreatment of women. but in today's capitalism, men are in crisis and the only strategy is to make an alliance with. to somehow, i know it's difficult, it's almost utopia. say man, not we are sick and tired of you posing as a strong male and so on, but to say sorry, i don't buy your game. of course i'm afraid if you beat me, but at the same time, i am aware that you are a weak guy. you are the truly weak guy and so on. so don't be afraid of. instead of playing these disgusting games and week and week and all the time like in cartoons, you know, when a cat an evil cat or who donald there whatever sees money, click click, you can see in his before his eyes those you know you know coins drop in balance. instead of this, we horrible, horrible, but you can see quickly how can i use this? and i had some relations like this years ago to. i was very shocked. i was in a relationship with an american girl who was well, exploiting me very much financially. really practically ruined me. and i complained and in answer, how dare you say this? do you know what men were doing for thousands of years to women and so on and so on. you know like this immediate reference to so what i'm saying is better. and hope you agree, i'm not criticizing in a very short way. i know me too, the because of making fun of you. really want that some fundamental change will come out of it and not just this same game of guilt and so on who is more guilty, this pretty disgusting element of justifying your position only by making yourself more and more guilty. if you allow me to conclude another joke that i used yesterday sorry? you should be asking me. you, you have the power. no, okay, one joke that i used yesterday, i'm sorry to my students.. whenever... somebody proclaims greed and so on or whatever. there is always a hypocrisy in it, you should always ask the laian question when one humiliates himself too much, but what secret profit does he get? usually it's a out of it. the job that i... i told yesterday it's one of the wonderful. jokes. from jewish tradition when on sabbat in synagogue. jew smith and first rich rabbi said, i am nobody. oh dear god, i'm not worthy of your attention. i'm nobody. then a rich jewish merchant says, i'm also nobody, god. i'm not worthy of blah, blah, blah. then a poor jew stands up and says, oh my god, i'm also a nobody. and the rich merchant kicks the rabbi, but who is this guy? think he can also say he just nobody or whatever. not to be an un is a privilege. didn't you i have again and again this experience in the united states where are white people who are always red, yes, we are guilty of everything. there are no buffaloes, not enough forests in the united states, africa is starving, european imperialism guilty of everything. but then i always noticed that patronizing organ. in their very denying of their identity, d. reserve for themselves the position of universality. i see them all the time at round tables interacting others like for example it was so humiliating in montana years ago. indian called himself
Moderator
indian.
indian.
Slavoj Žižek
and the white guy interrupted. are you crazy you reproducing white t? you are a native american and so on and so on. you know, this is the object a. this is the surplus profit of this self-humigation. let's avoid this game. i was too long i'm sorry, but that's my nature. fuck you.
and the white guy interrupted. are you crazy you reproducing white t? you are a native american and so on and so on. you know, this is the object a. this is the surplus profit of this self-humigation. let's avoid this game. i was too long i'm sorry, but that's my nature. fuck you.
Moderator
thank you very much. i was wondering how long it would take it to sort of go into me too.
thank you very much. i was wondering how long it would take it to sort of go into me too.
Slavoj Žižek
it was. don't overdo.
it was. don't overdo.
Moderator
no, no, no. actually, i was thinking, that's precisely, you know,, i mean, i was speak hard with this work in practice, especially legally, you but i think we have noticed that, you know, that's why a feminist hero is not necessarily rose mcowan, but stormy daniels, who disavows the me-to movement. stormy daniels.
no, no, no. actually, i was thinking, that's precisely, you know,, i mean, i was speak hard with this work in practice, especially legally, you but i think we have noticed that, you know, that's why a feminist hero is not necessarily rose mcowan, but stormy daniels, who disavows the me-to movement. stormy daniels.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah. don't you agree?.,. asia argento.
yeah. don't you agree?.,. asia argento.
Moderator
well, yeah. what was wrong? a beautiful lady, this would have been my dream when i'm 15, 15.
well, yeah. what was wrong? a beautiful lady, this would have been my dream when i'm 15, 15.
Slavoj Žižek
yes.
yes.
Moderator
if you
if you
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, yeah. to make love to you. i. i think. no,. yeah.
yeah, yeah. to make love to you. i. i think. no,. yeah.
Moderator
all right, now we have another half an hour or so. he wants to talk to the.
all right, now we have another half an hour or so. he wants to talk to the.
Co-Discussant
i good of time, no, no. i
i good of time, no, no. i
Moderator
do you want to respond to each other and then we open it to the audience or shall we close?
do you want to respond to each other and then we open it to the audience or shall we close?
Slavoj Žižek
i always prefer not to know. i may, okay, i will begin very very fast. to say like your play idea no. you know, you are right. you had wrong friends to criticize you for. how important?
i always prefer not to know. i may, okay, i will begin very very fast. to say like your play idea no. you know, you are right. you had wrong friends to criticize you for. how important?
Co-Discussant
even even in popular cult
even even in popular cult
Slavoj Žižek
in cognitive vision today. the idea of plato's gate precisely like Metzinger and other intelligent cognitivists. all the time claimed plato was right, he just forgot to include ourselves, that the way we experience our body, we perceive ourselves as part of the shadows on the game. so not to mention obviously, movies like matrix, where i like it precisely the way you mentioned this problem, but we cannot go out of the cave. because that's what... the brothers, they are now both and vowski, they saw clearly because at the end of, i hope you saw the movie, main one. the obvious question would have been, now that we saw we are manipulated by the matrix, you know that for me most impressive scene, well all those bodies like in fetal position and energy drone. why doesn't he awaken there? why don't they step out of the matrix? no,, we have to remain have to remain... within it. second, what you said about appearance. and now i connect to you just a brief question. you know, where i agree with both of you. and would you agree to go even to the end? as you pointed out abon, very nicely, it's not just that. let marx go against this one. reality and its false religious appearance. appearance is in reality inscribed into the structure of reality itself. what i would have added here is that up to a point, and that's the true subvertiveness of late maps. we can only even say that distinguish two types of appearance. simple subjective appearances, the way things appear to me, and let's call it object, marx uses the term object or whatever, and appearance, false appearance inscribed into reality itself. so what marx is saying basically is subjectively you may even see things the way they really really are. but objectively, in your social activity, you behave as a viewer in the game. so this idea that even if subjectively, you don't live in appearance, objectively, you are in appearance. the last question addressed to both of you. you know, there is a big problem for me, very simple one, with the relationship mark scheger. d! apart from simple dismissal of hegel in mature marx, isn't there a certain ambiguity in the marxist relationship to hegel? on the one hand, and this line was taken up later by jan lukacs, history and class consciousness. hegel's dialectical process, substantial unity alien of and then in the liberating moment subject reappropriate the alienated sam. this kgelian process is taken over as the model of emancipation. for example, in the famous fragment on pre-capitalist modes of production, then with others, it's in adorno mostly, in maruse and the one. dialectic is logic of the capital. and the idea is that the revolution no longer follows the hegelian logic of revolution, but maruse even, i forgot which one, he was popular when i was young, even wrote. a short text claiming capital isig. you know, this can be clearly shown. how when marx speaks in capital describes the passage from money to capital, it's pure he. money is substantial universality to capital as self-moving. de. so that passage to emancipation is a break out of yeah. okay, the this question. how do you stand towards this? sorry, it may be incredible, but i finished. thank you.
in cognitive vision today. the idea of plato's gate precisely like Metzinger and other intelligent cognitivists. all the time claimed plato was right, he just forgot to include ourselves, that the way we experience our body, we perceive ourselves as part of the shadows on the game. so not to mention obviously, movies like matrix, where i like it precisely the way you mentioned this problem, but we cannot go out of the cave. because that's what... the brothers, they are now both and vowski, they saw clearly because at the end of, i hope you saw the movie, main one. the obvious question would have been, now that we saw we are manipulated by the matrix, you know that for me most impressive scene, well all those bodies like in fetal position and energy drone. why doesn't he awaken there? why don't they step out of the matrix? no,, we have to remain have to remain... within it. second, what you said about appearance. and now i connect to you just a brief question. you know, where i agree with both of you. and would you agree to go even to the end? as you pointed out abon, very nicely, it's not just that. let marx go against this one. reality and its false religious appearance. appearance is in reality inscribed into the structure of reality itself. what i would have added here is that up to a point, and that's the true subvertiveness of late maps. we can only even say that distinguish two types of appearance. simple subjective appearances, the way things appear to me, and let's call it object, marx uses the term object or whatever, and appearance, false appearance inscribed into reality itself. so what marx is saying basically is subjectively you may even see things the way they really really are. but objectively, in your social activity, you behave as a viewer in the game. so this idea that even if subjectively, you don't live in appearance, objectively, you are in appearance. the last question addressed to both of you. you know, there is a big problem for me, very simple one, with the relationship mark scheger. d! apart from simple dismissal of hegel in mature marx, isn't there a certain ambiguity in the marxist relationship to hegel? on the one hand, and this line was taken up later by jan lukacs, history and class consciousness. hegel's dialectical process, substantial unity alien of and then in the liberating moment subject reappropriate the alienated sam. this kgelian process is taken over as the model of emancipation. for example, in the famous fragment on pre-capitalist modes of production, then with others, it's in adorno mostly, in maruse and the one. dialectic is logic of the capital. and the idea is that the revolution no longer follows the hegelian logic of revolution, but maruse even, i forgot which one, he was popular when i was young, even wrote. a short text claiming capital isig. you know, this can be clearly shown. how when marx speaks in capital describes the passage from money to capital, it's pure he. money is substantial universality to capital as self-moving. de. so that passage to emancipation is a break out of yeah. okay, the this question. how do you stand towards this? sorry, it may be incredible, but i finished. thank you.
Moderator
do you want to?
do you want to?
Co-Discussant
well, that's the maximum question, right? mm to connect that, because right now i'm cheating a little bit, i'm telling you in advance. to connect that to what the point you made about the me too movement, because if i understood it correctly, what you're basically saying is... where have a level of explicit rules, right? there seems to be structural change. and there we're talking about structural weakness, victimization, and stuff like that. and the appropriation of the subjective position of the victim as demanding justice and so forth. but the implicit rule governing these explicit rules are the same as before, right and hence, i mean, your point was always ideology is precisely the way in which implicit, and that would be a systematization, ideology situates between... it tells you how to apply the explicit rules and when make an exception, when reverse deep order, right? and so ideology is what connects the implicit to the explicit rules. in a certain sense, one could say, well, a similar, structurally similar problem you get with the marxian appropriation of the hegelian model, right? i mean, what does it mean? i mean, is it still the idea of we first have something like an alienated substance and afterwards the reappropriropriation, precisely what happens in capital, and we just reverse the order?
well, that's the maximum question, right? mm to connect that, because right now i'm cheating a little bit, i'm telling you in advance. to connect that to what the point you made about the me too movement, because if i understood it correctly, what you're basically saying is... where have a level of explicit rules, right? there seems to be structural change. and there we're talking about structural weakness, victimization, and stuff like that. and the appropriation of the subjective position of the victim as demanding justice and so forth. but the implicit rule governing these explicit rules are the same as before, right and hence, i mean, your point was always ideology is precisely the way in which implicit, and that would be a systematization, ideology situates between... it tells you how to apply the explicit rules and when make an exception, when reverse deep order, right? and so ideology is what connects the implicit to the explicit rules. in a certain sense, one could say, well, a similar, structurally similar problem you get with the marxian appropriation of the hegelian model, right? i mean, what does it mean? i mean, is it still the idea of we first have something like an alienated substance and afterwards the reappropriropriation, precisely what happens in capital, and we just reverse the order?
Slavoj Žižek
yeah
yeah
Co-Discussant
because, i mean, if that were to be true, i mean, this is why you can say both, right? this is why you can say it is the logic of capital, capital is automatic subject, as it were. but it's.
because, i mean, if that were to be true, i mean, this is why you can say both, right? this is why you can say it is the logic of capital, capital is automatic subject, as it were. but it's.
Slavoj Žižek
very mysteriously, this is crucial. uses this automatic chapter. yes
very mysteriously, this is crucial. uses this automatic chapter. yes
Co-Discussant
um but at the same time, it's supposed to be the model of emancipation, right? how can it be both? and in a certain sense... well, it must mean, and this is how i right now took your point, and that this must be in a certain sense the hegelian and marxian understanding. well, one needs a different relation of how to connect implicit and explicit roles, right? i mean, one needs a different... understanding of ideology i mean a different ideology a different
um but at the same time, it's supposed to be the model of emancipation, right? how can it be both? and in a certain sense... well, it must mean, and this is how i right now took your point, and that this must be in a certain sense the hegelian and marxian understanding. well, one needs a different relation of how to connect implicit and explicit roles, right? i mean, one needs a different... understanding of ideology i mean a different ideology a different
Slavoj Žižek
i'm just giving a hint for some of you who are lakians here. you know, i was like a big problem with bilair. but at a certain point... in a certain text, he forgot, nobody interpreted this he made the same point, you know this eternal debate. which of the four discourses it another one, fifth one is the discourse of capitalististic discourse. is is the inverted master blah blah. and miller proposed a wonderful goes formula. it's the analyst discourse just the term functioning differently. because isn't it clear that in capitalism it's in analyst discourse, object a is the agent and so on.
i'm just giving a hint for some of you who are lakians here. you know, i was like a big problem with bilair. but at a certain point... in a certain text, he forgot, nobody interpreted this he made the same point, you know this eternal debate. which of the four discourses it another one, fifth one is the discourse of capitalististic discourse. is is the inverted master blah blah. and miller proposed a wonderful goes formula. it's the analyst discourse just the term functioning differently. because isn't it clear that in capitalism it's in analyst discourse, object a is the agent and so on.
Moderator
it is just
it is just
Slavoj Žižek
it's not the formula of this torch, it's a again.
it's not the formula of this torch, it's a again.
Moderator
this
this
Slavoj Žižek
in implicit rules of how it functions.
in implicit rules of how it functions.
Co-Discussant
i sorry.
i sorry.
Moderator
gu from.
gu from.
Co-Discussant
no, no, no, i agree with him. i was just thinking of the way of how to differentiate his own dialectics from that of he. either for more, so he goes all the way. i think Béatrice Longuenesse has explained to three levels., no, i think...
no, no, no, i agree with him. i was just thinking of the way of how to differentiate his own dialectics from that of he. either for more, so he goes all the way. i think Béatrice Longuenesse has explained to three levels., no, i think...
Moderator
he wants to.
he wants to.
Co-Discussant
mm.
mm.
Slavoj Žižek
you know what i like about him? just one point.
you know what i like about him? just one point.
Moderator
he comes from.
he comes from.
Co-Discussant
cost.
cost.
Slavoj Žižek
prina i caught myself,, i'm not making this as a racist point, but to criticize my racism how to really humiliate you, and i all the time think in racist, i'm sorry, but i enjoy it, admit it, you know what would be the worst thing to tell you, admit it, is to address you in this patronizing way. could you tell us hagon from your specific comfort? pers you know and what's so beautiful about him is that precisely when you read him and so on, you don't need this patronizing approach which i get with many anti-racist academics who praise black authors in this racist way. the message implicit between them, you see even if he is black, he is not totally stupid you see and the one, you know. but...
prina i caught myself,, i'm not making this as a racist point, but to criticize my racism how to really humiliate you, and i all the time think in racist, i'm sorry, but i enjoy it, admit it, you know what would be the worst thing to tell you, admit it, is to address you in this patronizing way. could you tell us hagon from your specific comfort? pers you know and what's so beautiful about him is that precisely when you read him and so on, you don't need this patronizing approach which i get with many anti-racist academics who praise black authors in this racist way. the message implicit between them, you see even if he is black, he is not totally stupid you see and the one, you know. but...
Audience Member
you're.
you're.
Slavoj Žižek
but today. this this is the good point of globalization, i. you really get one i wrote a review of Jeremy's wonderful book on Haiti revolution and its echo in art. you get black otos. vera. you forget that they are black, not in this sense white liberal. oh my god, he is one of us. she's even black. but this is the true way of overcoming racism, that you don't have to notice all the time, you know, his blackness and so on. so we forgive you that you.
but today. this this is the good point of globalization, i. you really get one i wrote a review of Jeremy's wonderful book on Haiti revolution and its echo in art. you get black otos. vera. you forget that they are black, not in this sense white liberal. oh my god, he is one of us. she's even black. but this is the true way of overcoming racism, that you don't have to notice all the time, you know, his blackness and so on. so we forgive you that you.
Moderator
without we don't notice it until you mention it. shall we open it to the audience now? oh,.
without we don't notice it until you mention it. shall we open it to the audience now? oh,.
Slavoj Žižek
please. i am sorry.
please. i am sorry.
Moderator
you need another one.
you need another one.
Audience Member
okay. do you have to throw it?
okay. do you have to throw it?
Moderator
there is such a thing.
there is such a thing.
Slavoj Žižek
is there a passage or do we have to go out on the street? oh no,. third, third row, yes.
is there a passage or do we have to go out on the street? oh no,. third, third row, yes.
Audience Member
well... i want to mention three names of power. mlli understood from his own historical context of being in the renaissance that citizens tend towards decrepitude. and further, also in his of pag, makes that philosophicalological argument against se as well. the issue of sexual consent making a company argumentannah arndt over her view that power is not only by an individual but by the masses and it therefore an individual give power the masses. is it therefore this dangerous to compare? sistral consent. yeah. the marxism of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. and in sexual consent, is it simply an issue of rights versus virtue? uh. surely you should be making surely... we might over the issue of consent to return to the argument of. oh you make an argument for the comments. in the. the the comments the. can rebel against the absolute power of the eu the traditions of the.
well... i want to mention three names of power. mlli understood from his own historical context of being in the renaissance that citizens tend towards decrepitude. and further, also in his of pag, makes that philosophicalological argument against se as well. the issue of sexual consent making a company argumentannah arndt over her view that power is not only by an individual but by the masses and it therefore an individual give power the masses. is it therefore this dangerous to compare? sistral consent. yeah. the marxism of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. and in sexual consent, is it simply an issue of rights versus virtue? uh. surely you should be making surely... we might over the issue of consent to return to the argument of. oh you make an argument for the comments. in the. the the comments the. can rebel against the absolute power of the eu the traditions of the.
Slavoj Žižek
i like to say i... first, i don't want to break the rules. should we answer shortly. i am. i'm not sure i followed exactly your argument and i thought it bit critical towards me, but nonetheless, basically, if i got it correctly, i agree with you because my approach, i don't know if we agree here, towards met too is precisely that. it's underlying. anthropological whatever position is extremely individualized one.
i like to say i... first, i don't want to break the rules. should we answer shortly. i am. i'm not sure i followed exactly your argument and i thought it bit critical towards me, but nonetheless, basically, if i got it correctly, i agree with you because my approach, i don't know if we agree here, towards met too is precisely that. it's underlying. anthropological whatever position is extremely individualized one.
Audience Member
h.
h.
Slavoj Žižek
that it's strictly individual, you know, i interact with you how to guarantee that and so on and so on. i think that if we accept more this, approach of the commons. we should also note one thing. i know that i will appear here incurably romantic. but, you know, this obsession of some political people with power. the moment there is power, it cannot be really consensual and so on and so on. well, i have here some paradoxical conclusions. the first one is, you may agree with me here, but i insist.
that it's strictly individual, you know, i interact with you how to guarantee that and so on and so on. i think that if we accept more this, approach of the commons. we should also note one thing. i know that i will appear here incurably romantic. but, you know, this obsession of some political people with power. the moment there is power, it cannot be really consensual and so on and so on. well, i have here some paradoxical conclusions. the first one is, you may agree with me here, but i insist.
Moderator
easy.
easy.
Slavoj Žižek
by human rights. we understand. the be. so. equality, mutual respect, recognition and so on.
by human rights. we understand. the be. so. equality, mutual respect, recognition and so on.
Audience Member
dead.
dead.
Slavoj Žižek
i don't think that. human rights and sexuality are ultimately compatible. of course they are in a general sense, like we should be against coercion and all that. but again, it gets so complex. because said... what if, you know, the problem with sexual relations is that... everything that may appear as a falling stay disturbing image. like elements of violence and so on can also unfortunately work as a factor of sexualization. i don't believe in this. we take away our social positions, whatever, and we are just pure naked beings confronting each other and so sexuality is terribly un, my god. you are a beautiful man or woman and you attract all the attention even if you are an and you cannot regulate this. you know which for me here, i've written about it. symptomatic point. you know them. they're the true madmen. a subdivision of american alt-right, so-called incest, involuntary celibators.
i don't think that. human rights and sexuality are ultimately compatible. of course they are in a general sense, like we should be against coercion and all that. but again, it gets so complex. because said... what if, you know, the problem with sexual relations is that... everything that may appear as a falling stay disturbing image. like elements of violence and so on can also unfortunately work as a factor of sexualization. i don't believe in this. we take away our social positions, whatever, and we are just pure naked beings confronting each other and so sexuality is terribly un, my god. you are a beautiful man or woman and you attract all the attention even if you are an and you cannot regulate this. you know which for me here, i've written about it. symptomatic point. you know them. they're the true madmen. a subdivision of american alt-right, so-called incest, involuntary celibators.
Moderator
d
d
Slavoj Žižek
radical tr against equality, hierarchy and so on, except sexuality. they claim we are ugly, we don't get women, so their idea esprit,iert ist some kind of... callaul, what even better songs, my good friend, jordan. echo in some sense. return to monogamy where some social institution, in direct, brutal way or not, should take care that every man, even the fat, ugly one, will get a woman. i think that the only solution here is that we have to accept the injustice of. i don't believe in ah yogurt. you believe. you out of russia where... no just if we believe our media. you know what i want yeah. the question of power. i think that i know it's not my marriage, some marriages and so on, where my doctor uh. there is a clear power difference. in some cases, men has more power, i know a couple of examples than women has, and i'm sorry if i... if you're an incurable romantic here, but. love! enables them at least for some time to overcome this. love does do miracles here, i claim. because if you try to erase traces of power, then my god, almost nobody can sleep with anybody else. what remains is only this kind of totally anonymous relations where you don't even know who the other is..
radical tr against equality, hierarchy and so on, except sexuality. they claim we are ugly, we don't get women, so their idea esprit,iert ist some kind of... callaul, what even better songs, my good friend, jordan. echo in some sense. return to monogamy where some social institution, in direct, brutal way or not, should take care that every man, even the fat, ugly one, will get a woman. i think that the only solution here is that we have to accept the injustice of. i don't believe in ah yogurt. you believe. you out of russia where... no just if we believe our media. you know what i want yeah. the question of power. i think that i know it's not my marriage, some marriages and so on, where my doctor uh. there is a clear power difference. in some cases, men has more power, i know a couple of examples than women has, and i'm sorry if i... if you're an incurable romantic here, but. love! enables them at least for some time to overcome this. love does do miracles here, i claim. because if you try to erase traces of power, then my god, almost nobody can sleep with anybody else. what remains is only this kind of totally anonymous relations where you don't even know who the other is..
Audience Member
i have a question. where the mind.
i have a question. where the mind.
Slavoj Žižek
so. and also ar.
so. and also ar.
Audience Member
i you. don't know how much i need to. but you mentioned only the profit from victimhood. you didn't mention the profit from... this sadistic circus. so there is masochistic circus pleasure, but there is also sadistic circle. but at the same time, there is always expectation from the point of view of masochistic martyrs sad pleasure, that the monster will refuse to be a monster. and this you have in ben hoven's film a. so she is the victim and she is expecting this monster all the time, but at the same time, knowing that she is the victim and getting this sexual pleasure from the victim, there is always this expectation that maybe this sadists will not use this sexual pleasure. and this is the point. so media not.
i you. don't know how much i need to. but you mentioned only the profit from victimhood. you didn't mention the profit from... this sadistic circus. so there is masochistic circus pleasure, but there is also sadistic circle. but at the same time, there is always expectation from the point of view of masochistic martyrs sad pleasure, that the monster will refuse to be a monster. and this you have in ben hoven's film a. so she is the victim and she is expecting this monster all the time, but at the same time, knowing that she is the victim and getting this sexual pleasure from the victim, there is always this expectation that maybe this sadists will not use this sexual pleasure. and this is the point. so media not.
Slavoj Žižek
the mob.
the mob.
Audience Member
i.
i.
Slavoj Žižek
of the he will not be.
of the he will not be.
Audience Member
he will not. the same is happening in han's dns. so she is compelling him to produce all these sadistic things over her voluntary metabolismism, but clandestinely expecting that he will refuse this sadazist scenario.
he will not. the same is happening in han's dns. so she is compelling him to produce all these sadistic things over her voluntary metabolismism, but clandestinely expecting that he will refuse this sadazist scenario.
Slavoj Žižek
okay, i see of course, very nice one. just... i more of the pessim is here because you know, my painting group be say. i call here in that. a shady. does not objectize. he. they are all peace victims. sh this. totally self-instrumentalized. a true self this, just brutally as an instrumental object that his work.
okay, i see of course, very nice one. just... i more of the pessim is here because you know, my painting group be say. i call here in that. a shady. does not objectize. he. they are all peace victims. sh this. totally self-instrumentalized. a true self this, just brutally as an instrumental object that his work.
Audience Member
i don't talk about two studies but...
i don't talk about two studies but...
Slavoj Žižek
i about.
i about.
Audience Member
but i wanted to make e!
but i wanted to make e!
Slavoj Žižek
it refers directly to our experience. let us for la. you know, what said is enjoys is not torturing or whatever the victory. and the but this moral discussion please shame that this produces in the victim. the paradoxically through said subjectizes. but in this perverted way, you know, i no, you don't think it. i talk to you, i see how bad you are and long you are afraid of what is happening to me. dreams out of my pleasure. and what i am saying is that. i'm sorry for this wild speculation. i couldn't do it. my god, know who. only once in my life did i hit a person. not really like this. my shot. he really annoyed me. i did one this and the result was that not he, i started crying. but nonetheless, i like my jacket everybody.
it refers directly to our experience. let us for la. you know, what said is enjoys is not torturing or whatever the victory. and the but this moral discussion please shame that this produces in the victim. the paradoxically through said subjectizes. but in this perverted way, you know, i no, you don't think it. i talk to you, i see how bad you are and long you are afraid of what is happening to me. dreams out of my pleasure. and what i am saying is that. i'm sorry for this wild speculation. i couldn't do it. my god, know who. only once in my life did i hit a person. not really like this. my shot. he really annoyed me. i did one this and the result was that not he, i started crying. but nonetheless, i like my jacket everybody.
Audience Member
a.
a.
Slavoj Žižek
if i were to be a truth sage, i would give notice to what you mentioned. and i will say, k, i got her here. let's see for how long i can torture her and even stupid make this, you know. i can easily imagine an intelligent, and they are not necessarily stupid say. counting on the hickory code. expectation. and you... to score the dig even more. always against remember this also against this idea that for.
if i were to be a truth sage, i would give notice to what you mentioned. and i will say, k, i got her here. let's see for how long i can torture her and even stupid make this, you know. i can easily imagine an intelligent, and they are not necessarily stupid say. counting on the hickory code. expectation. and you... to score the dig even more. always against remember this also against this idea that for.
Audience Member
it comes the consent to be marked.
it comes the consent to be marked.
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely.
absolutely.
Audience Member
yes.
yes.
Slavoj Žižek
i can't move to talk to.
i can't move to talk to.
Audience Member
one more question here.
one more question here.
Slavoj Žižek
white don't do it's not.
white don't do it's not.
Audience Member
h.
h.
Audience Member
. so i want to ask this question. i was. um.
. so i want to ask this question. i was. um.
Co-Discussant
what the german would call.
what the german would call.
Audience Member
so i find it really very, i mean, it strikes truth in the sense that when you say that the perception of the shadow, so, okay, i'll start it differently. i would say that you start of two kind of positions in this relationship in the role of the shadows. so there are the business on the one hand, and then there's the master. so i'd like to balance review show that there's a problem with marx himself in the sense that the way he determines the working class as the proletariat is's kind of negative as that it's a product of capitalist production so very in this sense. but then there's a problem of i would call it fundamentalism in marxism, the idea that to be the the only limited how can we expect them to actually act upon that the. and i mean, from what from what i understood, it sounds as if you are, because you makes, i was thinking of ram, and i was thinking of the modern prince text, which was about necessity, the necessity, but the experimental necessity. i mean, sorry you. but with the masters, it's kind of now. it so. with the subject, but then what kind of master would be? because i the master would be the party and party as the master works actually organizes power people.
so i find it really very, i mean, it strikes truth in the sense that when you say that the perception of the shadow, so, okay, i'll start it differently. i would say that you start of two kind of positions in this relationship in the role of the shadows. so there are the business on the one hand, and then there's the master. so i'd like to balance review show that there's a problem with marx himself in the sense that the way he determines the working class as the proletariat is's kind of negative as that it's a product of capitalist production so very in this sense. but then there's a problem of i would call it fundamentalism in marxism, the idea that to be the the only limited how can we expect them to actually act upon that the. and i mean, from what from what i understood, it sounds as if you are, because you makes, i was thinking of ram, and i was thinking of the modern prince text, which was about necessity, the necessity, but the experimental necessity. i mean, sorry you. but with the masters, it's kind of now. it so. with the subject, but then what kind of master would be? because i the master would be the party and party as the master works actually organizes power people.
Co-Discussant
yeah, i mean, just very, very quickly, three points. first one, recall that hegel. calls the science of logic a logic of shadows right? i mean and it's about sch yeah
yeah, i mean, just very, very quickly, three points. first one, recall that hegel. calls the science of logic a logic of shadows right? i mean and it's about sch yeah
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Co-Discussant
which ends it's basically the whole logic depicts, as megalomaniacally crazy this may sound. the creation of the new world, of a world. this is why he says it's basically the thoughts of god while he created it, right? i mean and this can only be done in shadows. that means on a level of abstraction. i mean, he had this educational idea that in the beginning, children should paint colorful pictures, but when they grow up, they should just be forbidden colors, simply because thereby they learn to abstract, and see and so forth. that is anecdotal. second thing. well, someone already indicated, namely alain, but you made allusions to these kind of, isn't this, i mean, he said that first when there was the financial crisis, and he basically said, everyone is looking. as if totally thrilled by it in a weird action movie which is about us but where we nonetheless the spectators what the... rate five or six or seven, right that are about to save the world will do, obama and merkel and all them, right which is a weird kind of position to put oneself in, right? this spectatorial position. but right now the true answer and i mean it's a conceptual answer, but remember... what lenin says about the structure of the entire social sphere, he says there're basically masses, masses are organized into classes, classes are organized into parties, and parties are led by leaders. so right now, going purely for the masses, as for a long period of time, people who believe, for example, in the becoming conscious of the revolutionary class, right? i mean, if people just see how fucked it is and how dependent on themselves, then they will stand up and trash the thing, never happened, right? at least not in the sense and not fully successfully. so the masses reference seems to be problematic per se. it's what populism mobilizes. the class reference seems to be kind of hijacked because if you look at trump, i mean, it's a bit as if he's saying, well, look, there is class struggle, but, well, we won this time, right? so shut up. i'm not sure about going directly for the revolutionary party. but the leader thing seems to kind of work sometimes, right? i mean, and that's not a joke, but a bit, i'm not saying that because i'm a german, right? sorry. but i mean, think about figures who have mobilizing capacity. this is what i'm trying to say with the master, right? and the leninist term for that is the leader. and he... i i mean, you find it now sl has done this endlessly, in what hegel says about the monarch and the function of the monarch right in the state. i mean, this is the kind of, i think, mobilizing function that i would see. but what i wanted to add to that is that one nonetheless needs the volunteers, right? a different kind of volunteering. because it's not definition yes yes. yes. was that an answer?.
which ends it's basically the whole logic depicts, as megalomaniacally crazy this may sound. the creation of the new world, of a world. this is why he says it's basically the thoughts of god while he created it, right? i mean and this can only be done in shadows. that means on a level of abstraction. i mean, he had this educational idea that in the beginning, children should paint colorful pictures, but when they grow up, they should just be forbidden colors, simply because thereby they learn to abstract, and see and so forth. that is anecdotal. second thing. well, someone already indicated, namely alain, but you made allusions to these kind of, isn't this, i mean, he said that first when there was the financial crisis, and he basically said, everyone is looking. as if totally thrilled by it in a weird action movie which is about us but where we nonetheless the spectators what the... rate five or six or seven, right that are about to save the world will do, obama and merkel and all them, right which is a weird kind of position to put oneself in, right? this spectatorial position. but right now the true answer and i mean it's a conceptual answer, but remember... what lenin says about the structure of the entire social sphere, he says there're basically masses, masses are organized into classes, classes are organized into parties, and parties are led by leaders. so right now, going purely for the masses, as for a long period of time, people who believe, for example, in the becoming conscious of the revolutionary class, right? i mean, if people just see how fucked it is and how dependent on themselves, then they will stand up and trash the thing, never happened, right? at least not in the sense and not fully successfully. so the masses reference seems to be problematic per se. it's what populism mobilizes. the class reference seems to be kind of hijacked because if you look at trump, i mean, it's a bit as if he's saying, well, look, there is class struggle, but, well, we won this time, right? so shut up. i'm not sure about going directly for the revolutionary party. but the leader thing seems to kind of work sometimes, right? i mean, and that's not a joke, but a bit, i'm not saying that because i'm a german, right? sorry. but i mean, think about figures who have mobilizing capacity. this is what i'm trying to say with the master, right? and the leninist term for that is the leader. and he... i i mean, you find it now sl has done this endlessly, in what hegel says about the monarch and the function of the monarch right in the state. i mean, this is the kind of, i think, mobilizing function that i would see. but what i wanted to add to that is that one nonetheless needs the volunteers, right? a different kind of volunteering. because it's not definition yes yes. yes. was that an answer?.
Slavoj Žižek
but you put this very nicely when he said that precisely as free in the very platonic way, precisely today in our consumerist society, as free individuals without a master, we are absolutely slaves.
but you put this very nicely when he said that precisely as free in the very platonic way, precisely today in our consumerist society, as free individuals without a master, we are absolutely slaves.
Co-Discussant
g.
g.
Slavoj Žižek
we need the master to get out of slavery. and again, we have to. she you... had a good teacher. you must have experienced it by master, i don't mean somebody who knows better than you in this stalinist way what you really want. a master simply opens up, makes you aware of the potentials in you. the true recognition of a master is, my god, only now do i know what i really want. and then, as you wrote nicely in this book, who knows? in the second stage then, maybe my stalinist idea aha what you do to the master them? of course not. but all i'm saying is that, and that's also the lesson of psychoanalysis, without what psychoanalysis calls transference, it has to come from outside. i don't believe in this pure self-reliance of the individual. you't know. talk only about this magic recognition. through some external agency you become aware of what you can do.
we need the master to get out of slavery. and again, we have to. she you... had a good teacher. you must have experienced it by master, i don't mean somebody who knows better than you in this stalinist way what you really want. a master simply opens up, makes you aware of the potentials in you. the true recognition of a master is, my god, only now do i know what i really want. and then, as you wrote nicely in this book, who knows? in the second stage then, maybe my stalinist idea aha what you do to the master them? of course not. but all i'm saying is that, and that's also the lesson of psychoanalysis, without what psychoanalysis calls transference, it has to come from outside. i don't believe in this pure self-reliance of the individual. you't know. talk only about this magic recognition. through some external agency you become aware of what you can do.
Audience Member
mm
mm
Audience Member
it't that complicated. doesn't count things complicated. objective structural relations to power. because what you said today is the continuation of what you did in.
it't that complicated. doesn't count things complicated. objective structural relations to power. because what you said today is the continuation of what you did in.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, yeah.
yeah, yeah.
Audience Member
rel money to wind. jump. you know, there is a transference there and so it doesn't then complicate. everything you've said about structural and objective. power relations. i get what i'm saying. so. before you respond. yes.
rel money to wind. jump. you know, there is a transference there and so it doesn't then complicate. everything you've said about structural and objective. power relations. i get what i'm saying. so. before you respond. yes.
Moderator
another
another
Audience Member
s.
s.
Moderator
question.
question.
Audience Member
that from that.
that from that.
Slavoj Žižek
i just want to throw down. first first when i was talking about factual relations, i didn't talk about maybe, to be very short this time really, i didn't talk about structural relations in an objective sense. i was talking about... purely transential, if you want, symbolic, social space, wherever. and this is whilst you were there, i think, maybe you heard the word Milner made. somebody. can be very rich in reality structurally. it has great power over you. but structurally he or she can claim i am... the weaker point here. so again, maybe this would be the beginning of my answer. i agree with you that it's much more complex but when i again, when i mention this relations of power and victimhood, i... my paradox, that's why i mentioned and i agree, i'm now much more critical she Avital Ronell did crazy things. but nonetheless, basically she is perceived as the master who disabuse her power and so on. although if you look precisely the objective social position, she's the total loser. she lost everything. and that's what interests me. how somebody can be a total loser but still she is the master and so on. but i don't want to
i just want to throw down. first first when i was talking about factual relations, i didn't talk about maybe, to be very short this time really, i didn't talk about structural relations in an objective sense. i was talking about... purely transential, if you want, symbolic, social space, wherever. and this is whilst you were there, i think, maybe you heard the word Milner made. somebody. can be very rich in reality structurally. it has great power over you. but structurally he or she can claim i am... the weaker point here. so again, maybe this would be the beginning of my answer. i agree with you that it's much more complex but when i again, when i mention this relations of power and victimhood, i... my paradox, that's why i mentioned and i agree, i'm now much more critical she Avital Ronell did crazy things. but nonetheless, basically she is perceived as the master who disabuse her power and so on. although if you look precisely the objective social position, she's the total loser. she lost everything. and that's what interests me. how somebody can be a total loser but still she is the master and so on. but i don't want to
Moderator
okay, there's one more here and another other the pack afterwards.
okay, there's one more here and another other the pack afterwards.
Audience Member
i had to take this i. as someone who lives in australia, missed the contracts that we were talking about. it may have been that we were change prime ministers, which you seem to do quite often, but it also may be that i come from queensland. and to use a poor joke in zero to do them, i guess would they look at if it was in tasmania that these contracts would exist within families or between families.
i had to take this i. as someone who lives in australia, missed the contracts that we were talking about. it may have been that we were change prime ministers, which you seem to do quite often, but it also may be that i come from queensland. and to use a poor joke in zero to do them, i guess would they look at if it was in tasmania that these contracts would exist within families or between families.
Moderator
oh.
oh.
Audience Member
putting that aside and putting aside financial prostitution. are you saying that the sexual contract, if such a thing is drawn up, commoditizes sex? and if so, how? the other thing that i would say is that i come as an economist, not as a psychoanalyst. i fail to see whether labour theory of value explained exists within the sexual act, and if it does, where surplus value comes from. and i understand that reduces that all down to financial. but financial accumulation is at the end of the day what the logic of capital is about rather than the other things.
putting that aside and putting aside financial prostitution. are you saying that the sexual contract, if such a thing is drawn up, commoditizes sex? and if so, how? the other thing that i would say is that i come as an economist, not as a psychoanalyst. i fail to see whether labour theory of value explained exists within the sexual act, and if it does, where surplus value comes from. and i understand that reduces that all down to financial. but financial accumulation is at the end of the day what the logic of capital is about rather than the other things.
Slavoj Žižek
very british. first about australia. no, i'm not saying how all australia is talking about it, but i did objective that this exists as a law in new south wales. i don't know how it is meant. i don't know how to practice it and so on. and you know, i even know the detailed story frank sent me material. there was a famous judicial case where i am all of the side of the woman. ma va. and if woman check, how do you know? i never said anything.
very british. first about australia. no, i'm not saying how all australia is talking about it, but i did objective that this exists as a law in new south wales. i don't know how it is meant. i don't know how to practice it and so on. and you know, i even know the detailed story frank sent me material. there was a famous judicial case where i am all of the side of the woman. ma va. and if woman check, how do you know? i never said anything.
Questioner
mm-h
mm-h
Slavoj Žižek
and based on this, they tried to solve the problem in this way. for my, i was not talking in sexual contract. it's not prostitution. although prostitution is for me, i'm generally opposed to it. but it's a very interesting phenomenon because in the sense that you know what for me, the only... apart from horrors, the only attractive feature of prostitution, if you ask me. it's that and i can understand i consider this legitimate. what if you just want plain raw sex and you hate all the emotional entanglements and so on and so on and it's something wonderful like if a lady says why shouldn't she have the right to say it? i want to get properly banked, i hate all intersubjective relationships, and i can even earn some money and so on. there is some a weird aspect of freedom in it. i think that where we should abandon this idiotic idea that we always have to be you know totally engaged, authentically and so on. one should also learn to enjoy alienation. i don't trust this. that's why i find so oppressive this ideologies who focus on no, women should not be objectified and so on and so on. i know very many women who are very strong as women. but when they were sex, their message is, please, i just want to be objectified.
and based on this, they tried to solve the problem in this way. for my, i was not talking in sexual contract. it's not prostitution. although prostitution is for me, i'm generally opposed to it. but it's a very interesting phenomenon because in the sense that you know what for me, the only... apart from horrors, the only attractive feature of prostitution, if you ask me. it's that and i can understand i consider this legitimate. what if you just want plain raw sex and you hate all the emotional entanglements and so on and so on and it's something wonderful like if a lady says why shouldn't she have the right to say it? i want to get properly banked, i hate all intersubjective relationships, and i can even earn some money and so on. there is some a weird aspect of freedom in it. i think that where we should abandon this idiotic idea that we always have to be you know totally engaged, authentically and so on. one should also learn to enjoy alienation. i don't trust this. that's why i find so oppressive this ideologies who focus on no, women should not be objectified and so on and so on. i know very many women who are very strong as women. but when they were sex, their message is, please, i just want to be objectified.
Audience Member
doctor- that's not about prostitution. prostitution is about market of perversions, which you can buy, but it's not about.
doctor- that's not about prostitution. prostitution is about market of perversions, which you can buy, but it's not about.
Slavoj Žižek
that. you know i know. i know about it. underestimate it's the same in psychoanalysis. why lacconbe insisted apart from the fact that he was a greedy guy and so on, why laccon insisted and psychoanal on man? precisely, the psychoanal fear was that you get involved in certain libidinal game. and you have a triumphant example. with muriel gardiner, the american. very leftist psychoanal who worked with freud you know, it's a wonderful old volume. it's not now reprinted on wolfmann. you know what was freud's big mistake in analysis of wolfmann? after october revolution, wolfmann from a rich russian family lost money, his family and freud as a good guy. k. continue the analysis even gave scheme. predictably the result was paranoia. because instead of having this neutral relation to your analyst at a distance, wolmann started to ask, my god, what does he see in me? does he want me to marry his daughter? what pervert games he's playing in it? so that it was later, typically a woman analyst, muriel gardiner, who really cured him later in mid-20s only, and very successfully. he lived till early 50s in vienna, an old guy that would be wonderful. they're painting trees and painters but what i'm trying to say here that but when i talk about h contract, i know. money. doesn't enter in a direct way, but what lacune tries to show is precisely, we can debate if it's justified or not, a parallel between surplus enjoyment and surplus value and i think that precisely as i indicated in sexual interaction there is always a surplus enjoyment, not in the vulgar new age way of we had such intense sex it was surplus orgasm, but precisely surplus enjoyment in the sense that something that may appear as an obstacle like i don't just want to enjoy, i want to make the lady or the guy enjoy. i want to be a good instrument. you find enjoyment in precisely this, in subtle renunciation of your enjoyment.
that. you know i know. i know about it. underestimate it's the same in psychoanalysis. why lacconbe insisted apart from the fact that he was a greedy guy and so on, why laccon insisted and psychoanal on man? precisely, the psychoanal fear was that you get involved in certain libidinal game. and you have a triumphant example. with muriel gardiner, the american. very leftist psychoanal who worked with freud you know, it's a wonderful old volume. it's not now reprinted on wolfmann. you know what was freud's big mistake in analysis of wolfmann? after october revolution, wolfmann from a rich russian family lost money, his family and freud as a good guy. k. continue the analysis even gave scheme. predictably the result was paranoia. because instead of having this neutral relation to your analyst at a distance, wolmann started to ask, my god, what does he see in me? does he want me to marry his daughter? what pervert games he's playing in it? so that it was later, typically a woman analyst, muriel gardiner, who really cured him later in mid-20s only, and very successfully. he lived till early 50s in vienna, an old guy that would be wonderful. they're painting trees and painters but what i'm trying to say here that but when i talk about h contract, i know. money. doesn't enter in a direct way, but what lacune tries to show is precisely, we can debate if it's justified or not, a parallel between surplus enjoyment and surplus value and i think that precisely as i indicated in sexual interaction there is always a surplus enjoyment, not in the vulgar new age way of we had such intense sex it was surplus orgasm, but precisely surplus enjoyment in the sense that something that may appear as an obstacle like i don't just want to enjoy, i want to make the lady or the guy enjoy. i want to be a good instrument. you find enjoyment in precisely this, in subtle renunciation of your enjoyment.
Audience Member
mm
mm
Slavoj Žižek
and at this level, i think, but i don't want to talk too long now with the parallel work.
and at this level, i think, but i don't want to talk too long now with the parallel work.
Moderator
one last question.
one last question.
Questioner
yeah, it's a slightly different question. i'm afraid of my own the boy.
yeah, it's a slightly different question. i'm afraid of my own the boy.
Slavoj Žižek
but when you begin like this, you are carving your knife attack.
but when you begin like this, you are carving your knife attack.
Questioner
i'm a great admirer of your pyroteic views of dialectics and in the way that you demystifies the so-called self-inspection of the liberal world it seems to itself and actually absorbs itself. but by shifting a little bit onto the international geopolitical situation, which we're witnessing basically a retrenchment of the liberal world in itself in a way. and we have this binary, almost schistocratic duality between the liberal so-called liberal left and it's passionate itself about debates such as the one that you. so it eloquently. and you know a very brutal advance of basically a very brutal right-wing sort of. br i think that we maybe should play the devil's advocate here and try to shift the look and our critique towards this impending tidal wave of fascism, which i believe in a way through the troroy horse of so-called populism is going to monopolize the public. discourse in the so-called liberal west. and i know i would like to if you could shed some
i'm a great admirer of your pyroteic views of dialectics and in the way that you demystifies the so-called self-inspection of the liberal world it seems to itself and actually absorbs itself. but by shifting a little bit onto the international geopolitical situation, which we're witnessing basically a retrenchment of the liberal world in itself in a way. and we have this binary, almost schistocratic duality between the liberal so-called liberal left and it's passionate itself about debates such as the one that you. so it eloquently. and you know a very brutal advance of basically a very brutal right-wing sort of. br i think that we maybe should play the devil's advocate here and try to shift the look and our critique towards this impending tidal wave of fascism, which i believe in a way through the troroy horse of so-called populism is going to monopolize the public. discourse in the so-called liberal west. and i know i would like to if you could shed some
Slavoj Žižek
.
.
Questioner
come.
come.
Slavoj Žižek
maybe we disagree here, but i feel your course.
maybe we disagree here, but i feel your course.
Questioner
i. i'm sorry. yes, i'm sorry. inibly complex and fluctuating concept it's something that so far historically seems to have pretty much shaken over everywhere. sometimes we might think that something has really warmed. when in a moment of deep crisis, as it finds itself in many areas of the world, the only thing that everyone wants to do is to save is. so there is this steep gulf, i think, between this incredibly effective critique of liberal thought and liberal hypocrisy and the risk that we are facing. we are ending up facing with something immensely nasty. i your coin. function.
i. i'm sorry. yes, i'm sorry. inibly complex and fluctuating concept it's something that so far historically seems to have pretty much shaken over everywhere. sometimes we might think that something has really warmed. when in a moment of deep crisis, as it finds itself in many areas of the world, the only thing that everyone wants to do is to save is. so there is this steep gulf, i think, between this incredibly effective critique of liberal thought and liberal hypocrisy and the risk that we are facing. we are ending up facing with something immensely nasty. i your coin. function.
Slavoj Žižek
speaking about new-capitalism and so on, just an empirical point. people are saying communism faith and so on. there is one case, i repeat it all the time. communism triumphed, at least in the political sense, incredibly. are we aware what is happening now in china? the left is usually... were afraid of two things. they had always two faces of the devil. on the one hand, white capitalist dynamic, market exploitation. on the other hand, this control described by foucault, surveiller, control, manipulation, strong power. what china did is they combined the two works in a model because are we aware that forget about those triumphs of capitalism and so on. what the chinese achieved in the last half a century is maybe unique even in the history of humanity. such an explosive economic progress. and this is for me much more than our populism, if you ask me, the true devil that is emerging. even trump is in some sense part of this new authoritarian capitalism. can i amuse you with a story? you know who told me this? Juan Feier, who is our friend, the philosopher. left. he told me that he wet one den. after m of death. and she told him a very mysterious, nice, horrible story. when Deng Xiaoping was dying, all the nomenclatura came to him to kiss his ass and ask him these narcissistic questions, can you tell us what do you think is your greatest achievement? expecting him to say it was the opening of china and he said, no, my greatest achievement was this. when we opened up economy to capitalism, many of my colleagues, even maybe majority, it was not marg, thought we should go all the way to democracy. i resisted that. and i think i was right. and my fear. is that he was right. because because i... don't trust liberals who think, oh, what would have china achieved if it were open itself up to democracy? no, maybe it would have been much more chaotic and so on. so what i'm saying is this. i agree with you. it is horror what is happening now. but nonetheless, we should ask a simple question. where does this sorrow come from? it was the iman. it's not even a guy like Joschka Fischer, the german ex-minister, said everything was more or less okay then as a matter of outer space trump came. no, trump did not fall from outer space. if there is a guy who clearly emerges out of the im weaknesses of... liberal democratic consensus. that's my only point. of course trump is a nightmare but the answer is not just criticizing trump but to learn from him. we should learn how to mobilize workers and so on. and especially let's be frank, i will be very brutal. what can we if we are still leftist? and i agree with you if you wanted to say some social democratic. i'm tempted la to say this. maybe the truly radical position today is good old honest social democrats. people often reproach corbyn sch, but they are just old-fashioned social democrats. where we live in strange times where maybe this is the only realistic subversive position. so ultimately isn't there the true problem that also the so-called radical left i don't think they really have not the detailed answer how to do it, but even a general vision. and the truth is it's moralization. moralization of politics is for me always an effect of.... so i agree with you. i don't play games here. and also my mocking support for trump was not a perverse game. i'm very careful here. i would never tell anybody vote for marine le pen. because hopefully united states are so divergent, complex that but france is so much centralized that to have marine le pen power france, it's a totally different game. so i agree with you. my only point other would have been very briefly that you know, you should be careful when you talk fascism. i agree here with alain that you could draw a comparison that our position is more the one which preceded world war i. like today when people say you maybe follow the new rational optimists who say, where is the crisis? for the first time in the history of humanity, obesity is a greater problem than hunger. look, relatively, we had one of the most peaceful periods in history. show the thought in 1990.
speaking about new-capitalism and so on, just an empirical point. people are saying communism faith and so on. there is one case, i repeat it all the time. communism triumphed, at least in the political sense, incredibly. are we aware what is happening now in china? the left is usually... were afraid of two things. they had always two faces of the devil. on the one hand, white capitalist dynamic, market exploitation. on the other hand, this control described by foucault, surveiller, control, manipulation, strong power. what china did is they combined the two works in a model because are we aware that forget about those triumphs of capitalism and so on. what the chinese achieved in the last half a century is maybe unique even in the history of humanity. such an explosive economic progress. and this is for me much more than our populism, if you ask me, the true devil that is emerging. even trump is in some sense part of this new authoritarian capitalism. can i amuse you with a story? you know who told me this? Juan Feier, who is our friend, the philosopher. left. he told me that he wet one den. after m of death. and she told him a very mysterious, nice, horrible story. when Deng Xiaoping was dying, all the nomenclatura came to him to kiss his ass and ask him these narcissistic questions, can you tell us what do you think is your greatest achievement? expecting him to say it was the opening of china and he said, no, my greatest achievement was this. when we opened up economy to capitalism, many of my colleagues, even maybe majority, it was not marg, thought we should go all the way to democracy. i resisted that. and i think i was right. and my fear. is that he was right. because because i... don't trust liberals who think, oh, what would have china achieved if it were open itself up to democracy? no, maybe it would have been much more chaotic and so on. so what i'm saying is this. i agree with you. it is horror what is happening now. but nonetheless, we should ask a simple question. where does this sorrow come from? it was the iman. it's not even a guy like Joschka Fischer, the german ex-minister, said everything was more or less okay then as a matter of outer space trump came. no, trump did not fall from outer space. if there is a guy who clearly emerges out of the im weaknesses of... liberal democratic consensus. that's my only point. of course trump is a nightmare but the answer is not just criticizing trump but to learn from him. we should learn how to mobilize workers and so on. and especially let's be frank, i will be very brutal. what can we if we are still leftist? and i agree with you if you wanted to say some social democratic. i'm tempted la to say this. maybe the truly radical position today is good old honest social democrats. people often reproach corbyn sch, but they are just old-fashioned social democrats. where we live in strange times where maybe this is the only realistic subversive position. so ultimately isn't there the true problem that also the so-called radical left i don't think they really have not the detailed answer how to do it, but even a general vision. and the truth is it's moralization. moralization of politics is for me always an effect of.... so i agree with you. i don't play games here. and also my mocking support for trump was not a perverse game. i'm very careful here. i would never tell anybody vote for marine le pen. because hopefully united states are so divergent, complex that but france is so much centralized that to have marine le pen power france, it's a totally different game. so i agree with you. my only point other would have been very briefly that you know, you should be careful when you talk fascism. i agree here with alain that you could draw a comparison that our position is more the one which preceded world war i. like today when people say you maybe follow the new rational optimists who say, where is the crisis? for the first time in the history of humanity, obesity is a greater problem than hunger. look, relatively, we had one of the most peaceful periods in history. show the thought in 1990.
Questioner
it price.
it price.
Slavoj Žižek
sorry?
sorry?
Questioner
precisely why capitalism is in crisis, because there has been too long. a piece.
precisely why capitalism is in crisis, because there has been too long. a piece.
Slavoj Žižek
but it's not only capitalism. i agree. i agree totally with you, but we were. we are now talking, which is may much more dangerous, the situation before world war one. and i agree with your perverted, not your perverted, but objectiveverted criticism. and there is one difference. i believe and agree here with you. lenin, but you, a. lenin was still able to say, okay. let's not be afraid of war. war will bring revolution. i doubt if such a war today would bring a revolution. i prefer not to think. and are we aware to what extent now the whole world is getting ready already for a new war? i read, i told this to my class and started bit myself. i read friend journalist excellent gave me a transcription, chinese military theoretical only in k but not public, published a strategic text which is horrifying. they claim... russia... america had one advantage over us, chinese. they all the time were engaged in small wars to test their army. you know, afghanistan, iraq, syria, chechnya. uh... sorry!
but it's not only capitalism. i agree. i agree totally with you, but we were. we are now talking, which is may much more dangerous, the situation before world war one. and i agree with your perverted, not your perverted, but objectiveverted criticism. and there is one difference. i believe and agree here with you. lenin, but you, a. lenin was still able to say, okay. let's not be afraid of war. war will bring revolution. i doubt if such a war today would bring a revolution. i prefer not to think. and are we aware to what extent now the whole world is getting ready already for a new war? i read, i told this to my class and started bit myself. i read friend journalist excellent gave me a transcription, chinese military theoretical only in k but not public, published a strategic text which is horrifying. they claim... russia... america had one advantage over us, chinese. they all the time were engaged in small wars to test their army. you know, afghanistan, iraq, syria, chechnya. uh... sorry!
Questioner
there being.
there being.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, but the chinese argument is...
yeah, but the chinese argument is...
Questioner
complete.
complete.
Slavoj Žižek
while our people's art is not tested, we need a one. that's extremely horrible.
while our people's art is not tested, we need a one. that's extremely horrible.
Moderator
yeah, that is... i was hoping we'll finish on a more optimistic note. i mean, we did start. actually, what the book does have back to and keeps repeating is the idea that 100 years ago, if the choice 100 years ago rosa, the choice was between socialism and fascismism. nowadays we've got barbaric capitalism or capitalist barbarism, as he called it. hopefully tonight.
yeah, that is... i was hoping we'll finish on a more optimistic note. i mean, we did start. actually, what the book does have back to and keeps repeating is the idea that 100 years ago, if the choice 100 years ago rosa, the choice was between socialism and fascismism. nowadays we've got barbaric capitalism or capitalist barbarism, as he called it. hopefully tonight.
Slavoj Žižek
.
.
Moderator
welots different from a kind of bab somala, j kruta and hamsa.
welots different from a kind of bab somala, j kruta and hamsa.
Slavoj Žižek
and we've got more ways of going forward.
and we've got more ways of going forward.
Moderator
sorry. marxist barbarism as read by jean-jac bin and ha. so let's thank them for your enlightenment. yeah.
sorry. marxist barbarism as read by jean-jac bin and ha. so let's thank them for your enlightenment. yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
i. are you responsible for it? why is my stupid fucking name on the first place?
i. are you responsible for it? why is my stupid fucking name on the first place?
Questioner
that's true.
that's true.
Moderator
look. should be the other.
look. should be the other.
Questioner
i i'm not...
i i'm not...
Slavoj Žižek
g.
g.
Questioner
i hit the short.
i hit the short.
Slavoj Žižek
against object-oriented ontology and i consider it more i don't deserve it. i'm saying without any hypocrisy and so on. this was hypocritical from you. thank you.
against object-oriented ontology and i consider it more i don't deserve it. i'm saying without any hypocrisy and so on. this was hypocritical from you. thank you.