Apocalyptic & Post Apocalyptic – pandemic, dystopia, horror, climate change, & so on
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2021-10-14 · 1:35:56 · 11,456 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologyecology-climatetechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalethicsrace-antisemitismcinema-art-culturesubjectivityhistory
Delivered at the Käte Hamburger Center, this lecture ranges across multiple interlinked 'apocalypses': surveillance capitalism and brain-machine interfaces as ends of freedom, the pornographic actor's need for Pornhub as a sexual apocalypse of lost fantasy, the double end of philosophy from scientific triumphalism and Heideggerian transcendental historicism, and Heidegger-Schelling-Hegel's claim that man is ontologically a catastrophe. Žižek argues that catastrophe is not coming but has always already happened, and that the proper post-apocalyptic stance is not humble ecological modesty but active universal management. He concludes with a reading of Antigone's 'aber' as a primordial founding ethical act that creates order by negating a prior order as mere chaos, and connects this to Black Lives Matter and the Haitian revolution as examples of particular exceptions that open authentic universality.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 34
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek reads Kant's Enlightenment formula not as 'don't obey, think' but as 'obey but think freely', obey pandemic measures as citizens but retain the duty of free critical inquiry.
as “öffentliches Gebrauch der Vernunft”
Kant's concept of the public use of reason, invoked by Žižek at the opening to define the institute's mission: obeying reasonable civic measures while exercising free and critical public thought.
Žižek invokes Lacan's quilting point (Steppunkt) to ask which of today's multiple catastrophes, pandemic, global warming, social tensions, will serve as the master-signifier that totalizes and organizes all the others.
Like anti-Semitism is a mystified form of anti-capitalism, Žižek argues that the struggle against vaccination is a displaced, ideologically distorted form of class struggle against those in power.
Günther Anders's concept of an apocalypse that is pure downfall without any opening onto a new kingdom or positive state of affairs, exemplified by the prospect of nuclear catastrophe.
Shoshana Zuboff's concept, cited by Žižek as an important but not yet decisive form of domination in which knowledge and power rest with digital capital that treats humans as natural resources.
The digital-age analogue of surplus value: when users surf, buy, or stream, they give more than they receive, laying their habits bare to surveillance capital and enabling its exploitation.
The most dangerous form of unfreedom is that which is not perceived as such, as when users experience web-surfing (which surveils and exploits them) as the highest exercise of freedom.
as “the distance between inner life and external reality”
For Žižek, human freedom resides precisely in the gap between thought and reality: we can think, dream, and experiment with no direct consequences, and it is this gap that brain-machine interfaces threaten to abolish.
as “brain-machine interface”
Žižek treats the prospect of direct brain-machine linkage as the true 'end of history': once inner life is directly connected to and regulated by external reality, the constitutive distance that grounds human freedom collapses entirely.
Žižek's characterization of our current era: having passed from Fukuyama's end of history through 9/11 and back to catastrophe, we live in a time when the end just keeps dragging on, generating its own enjoyment.
Žižek's formulation that every sexual interaction is potentially structured like masturbation in which the partner's body is used as a prop to actualize one's own fantasy, an irreducible gap between bodily reality and fantasy that cannot be reduced to patriarchal distortion.
as “transcendental historicism”
Žižek's label for the continental philosophical approach (Heidegger, Foucault) that reduces philosophy to the description of historical epistemes or disclosures of being, treating naive realist questions as inadmissible.
The domain opened by modern physics where previously purely philosophical questions (contingency, causality, free will, the beginning of the universe) have become subjects of empirical laboratory investigation.
as “truth effects”
Foucault's notion, cited by Žižek, that different historical discourses produce their own criteria of truth rather than truth being a direct property of statements.
as “Unhintergehbares”
The German philosophical term for what you cannot reach behind, for Foucault this is the historically specified episteme; for Heidegger it is the historical disclosure of being.
as “madness as formal possibility constitutive of the human mind”
Following Hegel's Anthropologie, Žižek argues that madness is not an accidental illness but a structural threat that must be overcome for normality to emerge, normality is therefore a defense against madness, not its opposite.
For Žižek this is precisely what Heidegger misses: the libidinal body organized around erogenous zones is neither animalistic nor biological but a non-natural body first theorized by psychoanalysis.
A Heidegger formulation (via Schelling) that Žižek adopts and radicalizes: the human being is itself an ontological catastrophe, not an observer of catastrophe but its very site.
The claim that apocalypse is not a future threat to be avoided but the permanent condition we inhabit, those who spread panic about a coming apocalypse fail to confront this already-present reality.
Alenka Zupančič's formulation (cited by Žižek approvingly) that people choose literal death over the psychic confrontation with apocalyptic danger and the need to change their way of life.
as “deep ecology arrogance”
Žižek's paradoxical claim that the apparently most modest deep ecologists who advocate for rivers and forests having rights are in fact the most arrogant, since they posit humans as the universal managers who speak for all of nature.
as “universal beings (Marx)”
Marx's concept, invoked by Žižek against ecological humility: humans are not just one species among others but universal beings, the general managers of life on earth, making gigantic collective interventions the ecological necessity rather than modest withdrawal.
as “false authority”
Following Arendt, Žižek argues that even if parental authority in an uncertain world is factually unjustified, it must be maintained: withdrawing into honest helplessness is an ethical failure, not honesty.
as “the law of exception”
Antigone's operative law: not a universal rule (everyone deserves burial) applied to a particular case, but rather the particular exception itself is the law, with all others subject to rotting.
Modeled on Hölderlin's poetic technique of beginning with 'but' without naming what came before, Žižek proposes a post-apocalyptic stance that starts from the exception/interruption rather than from a prior stable order.
as “Antigone's 'aber' (the founding but)”
Žižek reads Antigone's exception for her brother as a primordial founding ethical act modeled on Hölderlin's poetic 'aber': not a disturbance of a preceding order but an interruption of pre-ethical chaos that simultaneously retroactively denounces the preceding order as merely a mask for chaos.
Vampires are reactionary (usually rich nobles living among us); zombies are the working class (mindless, numerous, attacking). The true class struggle in horror literature is vampires versus zombies.
as “concrete universality vs. abstract universality”
Žižek contrasts the liberal abstract universalism ('all lives matter') with the Hegelian concrete universality opened by a particular exception ('Black Lives Matter'), arguing that only the latter achieves genuine universality without exclusion.
as “radical evil (radikal böse)”
Kant's concept in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which Žižek argues Kant introduces but then retreats from: an evil act that formally mirrors the good because it is done purely for its own sake and not for any pathological (pleasure-seeking) reason.
as “demoniac evil”
Kant's briefly mentioned figure of an evil done purely for its own sake, indistinguishable formally from moral good, which Kant recoils from by redefining radical evil as mere propensity to pathological motivation.
Žižek's Hegelian thesis: the Good is not the opposite of evil but evil that has won out over other particular evils and elevated itself to universality.
as “Felix Culpa (happy fall)”
The theological concept that God's permitting the Fall was ultimately fortunate, which Žižek uses to argue that God deliberately staged the Fall because Hegel shows that the fall into evil is the beginning of humanity.
as “Unbehagen in der Kultur (constitutive cultural pathology)”
Žižek invokes Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents to argue that symptoms are never mere individual deviations but signs of what is wrong in the culture itself, parallel to Marx's view that economic crises are moments of truth, not aberrations.
Stories he reaches for 8
Malcolm X chose his name not as a mourning of lost African roots but, per Žižek, as a Hegelian genius move: the void left by slavery uniquely positions Black Americans to build a new, more authentic universality from a position of structural openness.
The overlooked lines in which Antigone explicitly says that for a husband or child she would let the corpse rot and not defy the city's law, only for her irreplaceable brother does she act. Žižek reads this not as scandal but as the key to her ethics: her 'universal rule' is to let bodies rot, with only one exception.
“For Creon's law I would bow to it if a husband or a son had died. I would let their bodies rot in the steaming dust, unburied and alone.”
The post-revolution Haitian constitution defined all citizens of Haiti, regardless of skin color, as black, a perfect exemplar of Žižek's logic of the particular exception opening genuine universality: not new masters, but a new standard that anyone can meet.
“all citizens of Haiti independently of the color of their skin are black”
Žižek's communist mother was genuinely friendly with a Jewish neighbor but, when the woman counted money carefully upon leaving, his mother commented in a knowing tone: 'Did you notice how strangely intense she was?', a perfect miniature of everyday anti-Semitism: the alien identified by a single uncanny detail.
“she is a nice lady this old Jewish kind woman but did you notice in what strange intense way she counted the money”
In thousands of Chinese elementary schools, pupils wear metal rings that monitor brain activity so the teacher's screen shows in real time if they are inattentive, a present-day prototype of brain-machine surveillance.
“in thousands of Chinese elementary school pupils have to wear some kind of a metal ring, which cannot read their thoughts yet but controls their brain activity”
A porn actor loses his erection and, rather than re-engaging with the real naked woman below him, grabs his phone and searches Pornhub for phantasmatic support, illustrating that even 'real' sex requires fantasy as its supplement.
“he turns away from the woman naked below him, he grabs his phone and desperately searches for Pornhub”
Žižek opens with an anecdote that Heidegger once slipped and fell on Heidelberg's famous Philosophers' Walk; he uses this to frame his own intervention as a comment on another, more consequential slip of Heidegger as a thinker.
“I was told that Martin Heidegger once took a walk on your famous Philosophenweg, slipped on a sharp turn and ingloriously fell down”
Žižek calls the Haitian Revolution perhaps greater than the French Revolution, citing Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian constitution's definition of all citizens as black as a supreme example of universality achieved through a particular exception.
“the greatest event for me maybe greater than French Revolution Toussaint Louverture Haiti Revolution”
Works invoked 21
Antigone play
Sophocles' play is the focus of Žižek's ethical climax: the 'I would let them rot' lines are read as showing Antigone's law of exception, not liberal universalism but brutal particularity as the founding ethical act.
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin's film is briefly invoked for the scene of Hynkel stopping the crowd's applause, Žižek playfully threatens to do the same.
Melancholia film
Lars von Trier's apocalyptic film is singled out as the best cinematic depiction of apocalypse; Žižek reads it as optimistic (human race disappears, peaceful universe remains) and praises its refined ending, the heroine's imaginary tent as a space of inner freedom.
Being and Time book
Heidegger's foundational work, referenced for the concept of 'Dasein' as the name for the human being.
Freiheitsschrift book
Schelling's text on human freedom is cited as the source of the notion that evil's origin lies in an ontological madness, a derangement of man's position among beings.
Kant's book is cited for the concept of radical evil (radikal böse) and demoniac evil, which Žižek argues Kant introduces but then retreats from by redefining it as mere propensity to pathological motivation.
Harry Potter film
The final Harry Potter film is invoked for the villains' attack on Hogwarts, which Žižek provocatively reads as a working-class rebellion wrongly defeated.
Jon Ronson's podcast about internet porn is the source of the Pornhub/porn-actor anecdote that launches Žižek's analysis of the sexual apocalypse.
Antigone's Claim book
Butler's book on Antigone is praised personally but criticized intellectually for its liberal-humanist universalist reading that Žižek claims misses Antigone's true brutal particularity.
Günther Anders's essay introducing 'naked apocalypse', pure downfall without a new kingdom, as the category for nuclear catastrophe.
The Postman film
Kevin Costner's film is cited as the exemplar of reactionary apocalypse: pseudo-apocalyptic in that it restores the prior order (mail delivery, American civilization) rather than founding something new.
Enjoyed by Žižek particularly for the scene where Americans queue to enter Mexico, a satisfying geopolitical reversal even in a mainstream disaster film.
The Grand Design book
Stephen Hawking's book opens with the triumphant claim that 'philosophy is dead'; Žižek describes but does not endorse this.
Poe's short story about an act done purely for its own perverse sake is cited as the literary instantiation of Kantian radical/demoniac evil.
Freud's text is cited as establishing the key parallel: symptoms are not individual aberrations but signs of what is wrong in culture itself, there is constitutive pathology in every cultural formation.
Andenken (hymn) other
Hölderlin's hymn containing the line 'Was bleibet aber stiften die Dichter', central to Žižek's argument that post-apocalyptic thinking begins with 'aber' (but) without a preceding general.
Hegel's Anthropologie is quoted to establish that madness is a formal possibility constitutive of human mind, not an accidental illness.
Kant's essay on Enlightenment is the opening reference for the formula 'obey but think freely' and the distinction between public and private uses of reason.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right is cited in the passage Žižek quotes from the Anthropologie: crime appears there as necessary manifestation of human will without being a factual necessity for every individual.
Shoshana Zuboff's book is cited for the concepts of surveillance capital, behavioral surplus, and the native-people metaphor for watched users; accepted as valid but not yet the true game changer.
Zollikon Seminars book
Heidegger's seminars in which he dismisses Freud as a simple mechanical causal determinist, a reading Žižek argues is fundamentally mistaken.
People invoked 36
Eva Wiseman positive
Her Guardian comment on the porn actor's Pornhub incident, 'something is rotten in the state of sex', is the starting point for Žižek's analysis of the sexual apocalypse.
Frantz Fanon positive
Mentioned as the intellectual predecessor of the Afro-pessimists who argue that anti-Black racism is a more fundamental zero level than other racisms.
Kevin Costner negative
The Postman is cited as the exemplar of reactionary apocalypse: restoring the prior order (carrying mail, maintaining the USA) rather than founding something genuinely new.
Mary Wollstonecraft positive
Cited as an example of the universalist form of human rights immediately triggering its own expansion: women demanded inclusion as soon as the universal form was declared.
Alenka Zupančič positive
A close colleague whose formulation, 'we prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death', Žižek cites as capturing his own view.
Lars von Trier positive
Melancholia is singled out as the best cinematic depiction of apocalypse, and praised for its 'very refined ending' and its counter-intuitive optimism.
Charlie Chaplin positive
The Great Dictator scene (Hynkel stopping the applause) is invoked playfully after Žižek's lecture ends.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Briefly cited for quoting Rimbaud's 'il faut être absolument moderne', the imperative to be absolutely modern, endorsed by Žižek.
Shoshana Zuboff positive
Cited for her concept of 'surveillance capitalism' and the notion of 'behavioral surplus' playing the role of surplus value; Žižek accepts but moves beyond her framework.
Edgar Allan Poe positive
The Imp of the Perversity is cited as the literary figure of demoniac/radical evil, an act done purely for its own sake.
Jacques Lacan positive
The concept of 'point de capiton' is invoked to frame the question of which catastrophe will serve as the quilting point organizing all others.
Stephen Hawking negative
Cited for his declaration (in The Grand Design) that 'philosophy is dead', which Žižek describes but does not endorse.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis (liberal democracy as the finally discovered best system) is cited as a dream that ended with a crude awakening on September 11th.
Toussaint Louverture positive
Cited as the leader of what Žižek calls possibly the greatest event in history, the Haitian Revolution, which produced the constitution defining all citizens as black.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek says 'I like Judith Butler but here I have some misunderstanding with her': her reading of Antigone as liberal-humanist universalist (everyone deserves burial) is rejected as missing Antigone's brutal particularity; her ecological call for human modesty is also explicitly opposed.
His podcast series The Butterfly Effect about internet porn is the source of the Pornhub/porn-actor anecdote.
Malcolm X positive
Described as a 'Hegelian genius' who read the X not as mourning for lost African roots but as a void from which to build a new authentic universality, rated more deeply than Martin Luther King.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited as exemplar of transcendental historicism (truth as historically produced effect); Žižek compares him to Hegel, saying Hegel is more Foucauldian than Foucault himself.
Martin Heidegger positive
Central interlocutor: praised as the ultimate transcendental philosopher who brought philosophy to its end; criticized for missing psychoanalysis and the libidinal body, and for his reductive reading of Freud in the Zollikon Seminars.
Arthur Rimbaud positive
His dictum 'il faut être absolument moderne' is cited (via Adorno) as the correct stance toward modernity, however catastrophic, there is no pre-modern golden age.
Dan Patrick negative
The Texas Lieutenant Governor who said seniors should be willing to die rather than sacrifice the economy is cited as a case study in cowardice disguised as heroic self-sacrifice.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe negative
Among the scholars who claimed the controversial 'I would let them rot' lines of Antigone must be a later interpolation, a view Žižek rejects as missing Antigone's true radicalism.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited approvingly for her argument that even unjustified parental authority must be maintained, withdrawing from authority in honest helplessness is an ethical failure.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
The Freiheitsschrift (Treatise on Human Freedom) is referenced as a text that discerns the origin of evil in ontological madness; Heidegger's reading of Schelling is cited as the source of his 'derangement' passage.
The Day After Tomorrow is praised for the geopolitically satisfying reversal of Americans queuing at the Mexican border.
Günther Anders positive
Anders's concept of 'naked apocalypse' (apocalypse without a new kingdom) is the framework Žižek uses to distinguish catastrophe from revelatory apocalypse.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked for the mystical notion that there is pain and nostalgia in nature, and that when humans begin to speak, this otherwise speechless pain in nature is articulated, cited alongside Heidegger's late speculations.
Friedrich Hölderlin positive
Praised for his translation of Antigone and for his distinctive poetic technique of beginning lines with 'aber' (but) without the preceding general, read by Žižek as the model of post-apocalyptic thinking.
Jürgen Habermas positive
Invoked for his critique of cognitive science's circularity, science presupposes a scientific approach it cannot ground from within itself, which Žižek endorses.
Jakob Böhme positive
Mentioned as one of the late medieval European mystics who claimed the catastrophe happens already in God, reality arising because something went wrong in God himself.
Augustine of Hippo negative
Cited for trying hypocritically to save the Felix Culpa argument by utilitarian calculation, the evil of the Fall is outweighed by good outcomes, which Žižek rejects, comparing it to defenders of Stalinist crimes.
Martin Luther King Jr. negative
Mentioned briefly as less deep a thinker than Malcolm X, in Žižek's estimation.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for the concept of universal beings, the parallel between symptoms/crises as moments of truth rather than aberrations, and the dialectic of form (human rights as formally universal even when ideologically partial).
Sigmund Freud positive
Defended against Heidegger's dismissal: the Freudian unconscious is grounded in traumatic cuts, not causal completeness; Unbehagen in der Kultur establishes the constitutive pathology of culture; becoming normal is a traumatic, non-natural process.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Repeatedly invoked: for the constitutive role of madness in human spirit (Anthropologie), for reading God's permission of the Fall, for das Gute as universalized evil, and for the dialectic of concrete universality.
Immanuel Kant positive
Invoked at opening for the Enlightenment formula (obey but think freely) and the public use of reason; later analyzed critically for his introduction and retreat from 'radical evil' in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
What it argues
apocalypse vs. catastrophe: the always-already of ontological ruinthe end of philosophy from two directions (science and transcendental historicism)sexuality, fantasy, and the need for pornographic supplementman as the only catastrophe in the midst of beings (Heidegger-Schelling)Antigone's 'aber' as a founding ethical act beyond universal lawparticular exception as the opening of authentic universality (BLM, Haiti)surveillance capitalism, brain-machine interfaces, and post-human unfreedom
Dialectical moves 11
“The most dangerous unfreedom is unfreedom which is experienced as freedom — you are not even aware of it.”
The reversal targets liberal self-understanding: the sense of being free (e.g. surfing the web) is the very form taken by one's most complete subjection to digital capital.
“What if apocalypse in the full sense never happens? What if truth is something constructed afterwards to make sense of the catastrophe?”
The inversion of the standard apocalyptic schema: rather than catastrophe revealing a pre-existing hidden truth, truth is a retroactive narrative imposed on catastrophe.
“Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic. We are already in apocalypse.”
Rather than apocalypse being a future event to be feared, it is the always-already of our condition; the panic-mongers are not too pessimistic but too optimistic in thinking it still lies ahead.
“Far from being the most arrogant stance, humanism — treating ourselves as universal managers of life on earth — is the truth beneath all the talk of our finitude and mortality.”
Deep ecologists who preach modesty and place nature at the center are in fact the most arrogant, since they still posit humans as the voice of nature's rights; the honest stance is to embrace our gigantic managerial role.
“Antigone's universal rule is not 'everybody deserves burial' applied to Polynices as a particular case. Her universal rule is 'let the bodies rot' — and she honors it with only one exception.”
The reversal of the standard humanist reading: Antigone is not a liberal universalist but a brutally particularist figure whose 'law' is exception, not inclusion.
“An act does not just introduce order into chaos — it simultaneously annihilates a preceding order, denouncing it as a false mask of chaos.”
The structure of the founding act: it does not presuppose a prior chaos and impose order, but retroactively transforms the previously existing order into mere chaos.
“If you say 'all lives matter' you are exclusionary. If you say 'Black Lives Matter' you open up a way for effectively universal inclusion without exceptions.”
Abstract universality ('all lives') is already overdetermined by a particular (white, middle-class) standpoint; only a particular that explicitly marks its specificity can function as genuinely universal.
“Das Gute (the Good) is universalized evil — evil which wins over other particular evils.”
The Good is not the opposite of evil but its most successful form; the ethical is the dialectical overcoming of competing evils, not their negation.
“Normal mind itself is a defense against the threat of madness — normality can only arise as the overcoming of this threat.”
Sanity is not the natural state from which madness is a deviation; rather madness is the structural threat that must be actively overcome for normality to be constituted.
“We prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death.”
The paradox of cowardice dressed as courage: choosing literal death (e.g. sacrificing grandparents for the economy) rather than the psychic confrontation with danger that would require changing one's way of life.
“In Japan, fidelity to your spouse was once a pathology; now infidelity is the pathology. There is a constitutive pathology in culture formations as such.”
The inversion shows that normality is not a natural given but is culturally and historically constituted, and every norm conceals a pathology rather than eliminating it.
Claims 19
asserts
The most dangerous form of unfreedom is unfreedom experienced as freedom — as in the United States, where people genuinely believe they are free while being surveilled and exploited by digital capital.surveillance capitalism and ideology
asserts
The brain-machine interface, not surveillance capitalism, is the true game-changer and today's main candidate for the end of history, because it would abolish the inner distance constitutive of human freedom.technology and freedom
asserts
Human sexuality is inherently perverted and structured like masturbation with a real partner; the gap between bodily reality and fantasy cannot be reduced to patriarchal distortion.sexuality and psychoanalysis
asserts
We live in a moment when philosophy faces two simultaneous ends: the positive sciences colonizing metaphysical questions, and transcendental historicism (Heidegger, Foucault) dissolving the very possibility of naive realist questions.the end of philosophy
rejects
Heidegger totally misses the Freudian unconscious: rather than providing causal continuity, the unconscious is grounded in the traumatic encounter with otherness that breaks causal continuity.Heidegger's reading of Freud
asserts
Man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings; catastrophe is not something awaiting us but has always already happened, and we humans are what remains.ontological status of catastrophe
rejects
The proper response to ecological crisis is not humble modesty and withdrawal (as Judith Butler advocates) but gigantic collective intervention as universal managers of life on earth.deep ecology and ecological ethics
rejects
Antigone's act is not a liberal-humanist defense of universal rights to burial but a brutally particular exception — she would let her husband and children rot — and this particularity, not universality, is what founds her ethical act.Judith Butler's reading of Antigone
asserts
An authentic founding act does not introduce order into chaos but simultaneously annihilates the preceding order by retrospectively denouncing it as a false mask of chaos.the structure of ethical founding acts
asserts
The anti-vaccination movement is ideologically analogous to anti-Semitism: both are displaced, mystified forms of the class struggle against those in power.anti-vaccination ideology
asserts
Those who prefer to die rather than confront apocalyptic threat and change their way of life (like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick) display cowardice, not heroic self-sacrifice.ethics of confronting catastrophe
asserts
Saying 'all lives matter' in the United States is exclusionary because universality is already overdetermined by white middle-class values; 'Black Lives Matter' as a particular claim paradoxically opens genuine universality.race, universality, and Black Lives Matter
asserts
Kant introduces but then retreats from 'radical evil' because accepting it would make evil formally indistinguishable from the good — both are done purely for their own sake.Kant's ethics and radical evil
asserts
For Hegel, das Gute (the Good) is not the opposite of evil but evil universalized — evil that wins out over other particular evils and elevates itself to the universal.Hegel's dialectic of good and evil
asserts
God deliberately engineered the Fall because (following Hegel) the fall into evil is the beginning of humanity; the prohibition on the tree of knowledge with the tree placed at the center of Paradise was a deliberately cruel set-up.theology and the Fall
asserts
Psychoanalytic theory was the first to touch the key problem that Heidegger himself admitted philosophy had not addressed — the non-animalistic, eroticized, libidinal body.psychoanalysis and embodiment
rejects
Moral relativism — the historicist claim that we cannot judge the past by our standards — is wrong; we have the right and duty to judge retroactively, provided the standards are genuinely universal rather than merely Western.moral relativism and historicism
rejects
The catastrophe that befell communist regimes in 1989 was not an authentic apocalypse revealing liberal democracy as the final truth; that Fukuyama dream ended with 9/11.Fukuyama's end of history thesis
asserts
Psychoanalytic symptoms are never mere individual aberrations but signs of what is wrong in the culture itself — there is a constitutive pathology in every cultural formation.psychoanalysis and culture
Quotes 18
“The most dangerous unfreedom is unfreedom which is experienced as freedom. You are not even aware of it.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological unfreedom
“Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like a masturbation with a real partner. I hold you naked in my hands but I just use you as a prop to actualize my fantasy.”Slavoj Žižek · the fantasy structure of sexuality
“If you lose the dream what remains it's a nightmare basically.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessity of fantasy
“Man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological status of the human
“Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophe as always-already
“It seems that we prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death.”Slavoj Žižek · cowardice in the face of catastrophe
“The most apparently most modest deep ecologists are the most arrogant that you can imagine. They posit us humans as the general managers.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of deep ecology
“Her universal rule is let the bodies rot. And she fully honors the rule with only the exception of her particular case.”Slavoj Žižek · Antigone's law of exception
“An act does not just introduce order into chaos, it simultaneously annihilates a preceding order denouncing it as a false mask of chaos.”Slavoj Žižek · structure of the founding ethical act
“If you say today in the United States all lives matter, the universality is already overdetermined colored by middle-class white values. Paradoxically if you say all lives matter you are exclusionary.”Slavoj Žižek · abstract vs. concrete universality
“All citizens of Haiti independently of the color of their skin are black. Excellent. That's what we want.”Slavoj Žižek · particular exception as genuine universality
“Das Gute ist universalized evil. Evil which wins over other particular evils.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's dialectic of good and evil
“Normal mind itself is a defense against a threat of madness. We must also remember that Heidegger wrote the lines of madness in the years of his intense reading of Schelling's Freiheitsschrift.”Slavoj Žižek · normality as defense against constitutive madness
“At the beginning is a but. But poets establish what remains, which means that poets establish what remains after what, after the catastrophe.”Slavoj Žižek · post-apocalyptic founding through exception
“The body phenomenon is the most difficult problem. The body, das Leibliche, in the human is not something animalistic.”Slavoj Žižek · the problem of embodiment (Heidegger, cited by Žižek)
“It was a fake choice. It was a very cruel act by God.”Slavoj Žižek · God's deliberate engineering of the Fall
“Vampires are reactionary. They live among us they are usually rich noblemen. Zombies are the working class.”Slavoj Žižek · class struggle in horror genre
“I'm a pessimist but before it was just another version of the same shit.”Slavoj Žižek · radical pessimism about historical progress
Transcript 41 turns
Slavoj Žižek
But nonetheless I want to say something. I am deeply impressed by the institute and you know why. The beautiful introductions made a nice point and I would if you Robert agree mention Kant here. In his famous short Schrift, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?, he emphasizes that the formula of Aufklärung is not against the old authoritarianism, don’t think obey, or don’t obey think, it is obey but think freely. And this is what we need today. When we have reasonable measures against the pandemic and so on, if society decides something obey the measures, but think think freely. And I think what you were after esteemed colleagues who introduced me was precisely what you almost pronounced some of you the word, what Kant meant by what’s the German term, öffentliches Gebrauch der Vernunft, the public use of reason. And Kant uses this term in a wonderfully counter-intuitive way. For him private use of reason is the use by the state. He names Theologische Fakultät, Rechtsfakultät, where the scope of what you can inquire into is predetermined by the interest of the state and so on, while what we are doing here is outside in this sense private state domain. It’s public use of reason. We should obey as citizens but it’s our duty to ask it’s our duty to ask questions. Okay. So have some patience and let me begin although I must say I cannot resist slight bad taste but nothing compared to hamburgers when I hear that Käte Hamburger Center Apocalypse, maybe at the level of food the apocalypse is if you eat too many hamburgers instead of our own good food. But that’s a totally different idea. Okay let me not get lost. I have a quite long substance speech. When I visited Heidelberg the first time some years ago, I was told that Martin Heidegger once took a walk on your famous Philosophenweg, slipped on a sharp turn and ingloriously fell down. My intervention here can also be taken as a comment on another slip of Heidegger, the one that happened on his Holzwege as a thinker. It concerns precisely our topic, apocalypse, catastrophe, the end of history. Namely we live in a weird moment when multiple catastrophes, pandemic, global warming, social tensions, the prospect of full digital control over our thinking and so on, compete for primacy. Also primacy in the sense of which of them will count as what Jacques Lacan called point de capiton, the quilting point, Stepppunkt I think it’s translated into German, which totalizes all others. The main candidate in the public discourse today for this Stepppunkt is global warming, while lately the antagonism which in our part of the world at least appears as the crucial one is the one between partisans of vaccination and vaccine skeptics. The problem is here that for the COVID skeptics, the main catastrophe is today the fake vision of the pandemic catastrophe itself, which is as they claim manipulated, even created by those in power to strengthen social control and economic exploitation. If one takes a closer look at how the struggle against vaccination condenses other struggles, struggle against state control, struggle against science, struggle against corporate economic exploitation, struggle for the defense of our way of life and so on, it becomes clear that this key role of the struggle against vaccination is I think the outcome of an ideological mystification in some aspects even similar to anti-Semitism. In the same way that anti-Semitism is a displaced mystified form of anti-capitalism, the struggle against vaccination is also a displaced mystified form of the class struggle against those in power. To find a way in this mess, we should maybe mobilize the distinction between apocalypse and catastrophe, reserving the term catastrophe for what Günther Anders called naked apocalypse, namely as you all know I’m sure apocalypse an uncovering in ancient Greek is a disclosure or revelation of knowledge. In a religious speech what apocalypse discloses is something hidden, the ultimate truth we are blind for in our ordinary lives. In his essay "Apocalypse Without Kingdom," Anders introduced the concept of naked apocalypse. Quote from his text: "The apocalypse that consists of a of mere downfall, which doesn't represent the opening of a new positive state of affairs, or a new kingdom." End of quote. Anders' idea was that a nuclear catastrophe would be precisely such a naked apocalypse. No new kingdom will arrive out of it. Just the obliteration of ourselves and our world. And the question we should raise today is what kind of apocalypse is announced in the plurality of catastrophes that today pose a threat to all of us. Let me begin with the obvious candidate. What kind of apocalypse announces itself by the prospect of full digitalization of our lives? When the threat posed by digitalization is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new face of capitalism called by Shoshana Zuboff you probably at least many of you know her book *Surveillance Capitalism*. Quote from her book: "Knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely human natural resources. We are the native people now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience." End of quote. So we, the watched, observed by the digital machinery, are not just material, we are also exploited, involved in an unequal exchange, which is why the term behavioral surplus playing the role of surplus value is fully justified here. When we are surfing, buying, watching TV and so on, we get what we want but we give more. We lay ourselves bare. We make the details of our life and its habits transparent to the digital big other. The paradox is of course that we experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us, as our highest exercise of freedom. What is more free than freely surfing on the web? That's I think the danger of our societies. That's why we should also analyze our free world. In China everybody knows who is the boss. They don't have any illusions. But in United States my god they really think they are free or should I put it no? And I think that the most dangerous unfreedom is unfreedom which is experienced as freedom. You are not even aware of it. However, important as this surveillance capitalism is, it is not yet the true game changer I think. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface, which is I think today's main candidate for the end of history. After it will take place, if it will take place, the rest will not be history, at least not history as we know it and experience it. The distance between our inner life, the line of thoughts, and external reality is the basis of the perception of ourselves as free. We are free in our thoughts precisely insofar as they are at a distance from external reality, so that we can play with our thoughts, make thought experiments, engage in dreaming and so on with no direct consequences in reality. No one can control us here. But once our inner life is directly linked to reality, so that our thoughts have direct consequences, or can be directly regulated by a machine that is part of reality, and they are in this sense no longer ours, we effectively enter a post-human state. Now often when I develop this people tell me but it is this is a utopia, it will not happen. Well don't be too optimistic here. It is already going on like just a detail. Although I hate mentioning China all the time, they are just doing things that we are also all doing them just a little bit more discreetly. But you know that in in thousands of Chinese elementary school pupils have to wear some kind of a metal ring, which cannot read their thoughts yet but controls their brain activity, so that the teacher no longer has to watch them, are you falling asleep and so on. If you are not attentive it shows directly on his screen. Okay. We now I come to the next point. We regularly hear complaints about how the digital virtualization of our reality, complaints about this, of how we are losing contact with full reality, sex included. But if we talk about material reality, it is mostly about the exhaustion or growing shortage of natural resources. But I think it’s crucial to note that there is also the opposite, the excess, the exploding abundance of waste in all its forms, from millions of tons of plastic waste circulating in oceans to air pollution. The name for this surplus is emissions. What is emitted is a surplus which cannot be recycled, reintegrated into the circulation of nature. A surplus which persists as an unnatural remainder, growing ad infinitum. This waste is I think the material counterpart of homeless refugees who form a kind of human waste. Waste of course from the standpoint of global commodity circulation. The conclusion that imposes itself here is, what if apocalypse in the full sense of the term, which also includes apocalypse in the sense of the disclosure of something that was till now invisible truth, what if it never happens? What if truth, die Wahrheit, is something that is constructed afterwards as an essay to make sense of the catastrophe? Some would argue that the disintegration of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in was an authentic apocalypse. It brought out the truth that socialism doesn't work, that liberal democracy is the finally discovered best possible socio-economic system. But this Fukuyama's dream of the end of history ended with a crude awakening a decade later, let’s say on September 11th. So that we live today in an era which is best characterized as the end of the end. The the circle is closed. We passed from catastrophe to apocalypse and then back to catastrophe. We hear again and again that we are at the end of history but this end just drags on and even brings its own enjoyment. Now I want to go a little bit further. Our usual notion of catastrophe is that it takes place when the intrusion of some brutal real, earthquake, war, ruins the symbolic fiction which is our reality, which structures our experience of social reality. But perhaps there is no less a catastrophe when reality remains as it is and just the symbolic fiction that sustains our approach to reality dissolves. Let me give you a shocking for some of you maybe obscene example. Let’s take the case of sexuality since nowhere do fictions play a more crucial role than in sexuality. In an interesting comment on the role of consent in sexual relations, Eve Wiseman in a comment in *The Guardian* refers to a moment in *The Butterfly Effect*, Jon Ronson’s podcast series about internet porn. On the set of a porn film an actor lost his erection mid-scene. To get it back, the erection, he turns away from the woman naked below him, he grabs his phone and desperately searches for Pornhub. And Eve Wiseman writes this struck me as vaguely apocalyptic. Why? Wiseman’s comment: something is rotten in the state of sex. I agree but I would add the lesson of psychoanalysis. Human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sadomasochist reversals and specifically to the mixture of reality and fantasy. Even when I am alone with my partner, my sexual interaction with him or her is inextricably intertwined with my fantasies. Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like a masturbation with a real partner. I hold you, don't take it personally abstractly, I hold you naked in my hands but I just use you as a prop to actualize my fantasy. I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to enact fantasies. We cannot reduce this gap between the bodily reality of my partner and myself and the universe of fantasies. We cannot reduce it to a distortion opened up by patriarchy and social domination or exploitation. I think the gap is here from the very beginning. So I quite understand the actor who in order to regain erection searched on his iPhone Pornhub. He was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance. Such a loss of fiction is what happened to the hardcore actor, is what happened to him who needed Pornhub images to sustain his sex activity. Think about it. There is something again terrifying in this. It’s it’s not only if you cannot make love for whatever reason you don’t find a partner you are impotent you dream about it. No, you need to dream even if you make real sex. If you lose the dream what remains it’s a nightmare basically. This brings us to another apocalyptic end and I want to focus now the second part of my talk. Please don’t be too bored to this. The long foretold end of philosophy. You know when people talk about end of philosophy, my god are we aware that from Kant onwards end of philosophy was a feature of every post-Kantian philosophy. For Kant it’s conditions of possibility of philosophy not yet metaphysics. Fichte, Hegel, Schelling the same. Hegel you know no longer philosophy but Wissenschaft selbst. Marx it’s clear whoever you want Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on and so on. But today I think we live in a unique moment when we have two ends of philosophy. The one in positive sciences occupying the field of old metaphysical speculations and the one announced by Heidegger among others. Heidegger brought the transcendental approach to its radical conclusion reducing philosophy to the description of the historical events, Ereignisse, modes of disclosure of being. In the last decades technological progress in experimental physics has opened up a new domain unthinkable in the classical scientific universe, that of the experimental metaphysics. Questions previously thought to be a matter for philosophical debate have been brought into the orbit of empirical inquiry. What was till now the topic of mental experiments is gradually becoming the topic of actual laboratory experiments. For example the properly metaphysical questions of is there contingency in reality or not, is that is causality limited by time space locally conditioned, what is the status of reality independently of our observation, even big questions like does our universe have a beginning temporal and spatial an end, do we have free will. Today, and I don’t agree with it I just describe it, today we don’t ask philosophers this question, we expect an answer from quantum cosmologists, from cognitive sciences and so on and so on. This is why at the very beginning of his last book *The Grand Design*, Stephen Hawking triumphantly proclaims that philosophy is dead. But on the other hand with today’s still in at least so-called continental philosophy, what Americans call continental philosophy, predominant approach, I call it I will immediately explain why transcendental historicism, naive questions about reality are accepted precisely as naive, which means they cannot provide the ultimate cognitive frame of our knowledge. For example Michel Foucault. His notion of Wahrheit, truth, can be summed up in the claim that truth-untruth is not a direct property of our statements, but that in different historical conditions different discourses produce each its own truth effect. It implies its own criteria of what claim of what is true. A brief quote from Michel Foucault: "The problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which are neither true nor false." End of quote. So science defines truth in its own terms. The truth of a proposition which should be formulated in clear explicit preferably formalized terms is established by experimental procedures which could be repeated by anyone. Religious discourse operates in a different way. Its truth is established through complex rhetorical ways which generate the experience of inhabiting a meaningful world benevolently controlled by a higher power. So for example if one were to ask Michel Foucault a big metaphysical question like do I have a free will, his answer would have been something like this question only has meaning, it can only be raised within a certain episteme, field of knowledge and power which determines under what conditions it is true or false. And all we can ultimately do is to describe this episteme. For Foucault, what in German is called Unhintergehbares, what you cannot reach behind, is simply the historically specified episteme. These two approaches, scientific and transcendental, do not complement each other. They are mutually exclusive, but the immanent insufficiency of each of them opens up the space for the other. Sciences cannot close the circle and ground in its object the approach it the science uses when analyzing its object. Only transcendental philosophy can do it. Like here not only Heidegger although they are very different even Habermas, Heidegger's great opponent, has a point when he says about the cognitive scientific attempts to develop our very ability to think that they are circular, they already presuppose a certain scientific approach to reality which is not immanently proven out of the scientific project itself. On the other hand transcendental philosophy limits itself to describing different disclosures of being and has to ignore the naive ontic question how are entities outside of the horizon of how they appear to us. And science fills in the void about the nature of thing like science raises this question. Now back to Heidegger. Although Heidegger is the ultimate transcendental philosopher, you know what I mean by this, I think Heidegger really brought in some sense philosophy to the end. For him the most radical thing thinking can do is simply describe historical epochal disclosures of being, like in modern for Heidegger for example what we experience as reality changed from medieval times to modernity. In pre-modern times meaning, deeper sense and so on, was part of reality itself. With modernity reality in itself is supposed to be gray regulated by mechanistic law and meaning is just projected into it by us. But that’s it for Heidegger. You cannot reach behind this and ask the naive question okay okay but is there anything prior to its historical disclosure to us? Now what is so interesting and here I want to push Heidegger to the edge is that in his elaboration of the notion of untruth, Verborgenheit, Lethe, older than the very dimension of truth, Heidegger emphasizes how men's quote from Heidegger "stepping into the essential unfolding of truth is a transformation of the being of men in the sense of a derangement, Verrückung, going mad of his position among beings." End of quote. The derangement to which Heidegger refers is of course not a psychological or clinical category of madness. It signals a much more radical properly ontological aberration reversal when in its very foundation the universe itself is in a way out of joint. Among great philosophers I think Schelling and Hegel already clearly saw this dimension. Read Hegel. He is more Foucauldian, referring to Michel Foucault, than Foucault himself in his well-known books about the history of madness. So for Hegel madness is not an accidental lapse distortion illness of human spirit but something which is inscribed into individual spirit as its basic ontological constitution. To be a human being means to be potentially mad. Quote from Hegel "Anthropologie," the first part of *Philosophy of Spirit*. "This interpretation of insanity as a necessarily occurring form or stage in the development of the soul is of course not to be understood as if we were asserting that every mind every soul must go through the stage of extreme derangement. Such an assertion would be as absurd as to assume that because in his *Rechtsphilosophie* crime is considered as a necessary manifestation of the human will therefore to commit crime is an inevitable necessity for every individual. Crime and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general has to overcome in the course of its development." End of quote. So although not a factual necessity madness is a formal possibility constitutive of human mind. It is something whose the threat of which has to be overcome if we are to emerge as normal subject, which means that normality can only arise as overcoming of this threat. It’s not that we have first normal mind and then some of us unfortunately cannot do it regress into madness. No, normal mind itself is a defense against a threat of madness. We must also remember that Heidegger wrote the lines of madness in the years of his intense reading of Schelling’s *Freiheitsschrift*, Treatise on Human Freedom, a text which discerns the origin of evil precisely in a kind of ontological madness, the derangement of men's position among beings. Quote from Heidegger: "Man in his very essence is a catastrophe, a reversal that turns him away from the genuine essence. Man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings." Just suffer a little bit more and then lighter or even darker things will come soon. Okay. So for Heidegger the ultimate cause of the derangement, Verrücktheit, that pertains to Dasein, Heidegger's name from *Being and Time* on for the human being, resides in the fact that Dasein is by definition embodied. And towards the end of his life Heidegger conceded that for philosophy I quote: "The body phenomenon is the most difficult problem. The body, das Leibliche, in the human is not something animalistic. The manner of understanding that accompanies it is something that metaphysics up till now has not touched on." End of quote. I am tempted to risk I cannot develop it today the hypothesis that it is precisely psychoanalyse, psychoanalytic theory, which was the first to touch this key question. Is not the Freudian eroticized body sustained by libido organized around erogenous zones? Is it not the non-animalistic and not biological body? This is what unfortunately Heidegger doesn't see. Heidegger totally misses this dimension when in his Zollikon Seminars he dismisses Freud as simple mechanical causal determinist. A quote from Heidegger: "He, Freud, postulates for the conscious human phenomena that they can be explained without gaps. That is to say with the continuity of causal connections. Since there are no such connections in our consciousness Freud had to invent the unconscious in which there have to be the causal links without gaps." This interpretation may appear correct. Is it not that Freud tries to discover a causal order in what appears to our consciousness as confused contingent mess of mental facts, slips of slips of tongue, dreams, symptoms and so on, and in this way to close the chain of causal links that regulate our psychic life. However, I think that Heidegger misses the way the Freudian Unbewusste, unconscious, is grounded in the traumatic encounter of an otherness whose intrusion precisely breaks interrupts the continuity of the causal link. What we get in the unconscious is not a complete causal link but the repercussions the aftershocks of a traumatic cut. What Freud calls symptoms are ways to deal with this traumatic cut while fantasy is a formation destined to cover this cut. Now we face the key question. If man is man the only catastrophe in the midst of beings, is man rather human being an exception? So that if we assume the impossible point of view of looking at the universe from a safe distance, we see a universal texture of beings just not deranged by catastrophes since man is a catastrophe only from our standpoint. So should we adopt then the Kantian position? We are a catastrophe but only for ourselves. Because of our finitude we always see reality from a distorted deranged Verrücktes standpoint but not in itself. I think I don’t have time to go into this now of course but I think that our answer here should be as it was already mentioned in your graceful introduction in the line of much more radical thinking which occurs I’m just giving you hints in some of modern okay modern late Middle Age European mystics like Jakob Böhme in Schelling and so on, who claim that no, the catastrophe happens already in God itself. From that how should I put it, God there is a world, reality because something went wrong in God himself. And I think this is, that's why I call myself a little bit ironically atheist Christian, this is what Christianity knows. You know the key all other religions say you live in a fallen world, pray be good and you can elevate yourself at least a little bit towards God. Christian message is the opposite one. When you think you are abandoned by God identify with Christ on the cross who is also abandoned by his father. You know that famous Eli Eli lama and that only you overcome your humanity you identify by God only by identifying with the fall radical gap in God himself. And this is I think I don't have time to develop all this now of course. This is my ontological stance about apocalypse catastrophe and so on and so on. Every image that we make of reality in itself even the top scientific ones quantum physics relativity theory formulations are already not false but simply they involve our standpoint. The only touch with the real independently of us is when we experience this psychotic breakdown madness at our origin. And now just to conclude I want just to justify myself why focusing on Heidegger. Because you know Heidegger is Heidegger admits this. He is usually dismissed as a obsessed with question of being. But in one of his late writings he openly admits that the question of but how is reality or whatever we call it in itself out of a historical disclosure of being, that he totally ignored this point. A quote: "I often ask myself this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me what nature would be without man." And only at the end he approaches this with some mystical speculations in the sense of even Walter Benjamin, claiming that there is some kind of a pain and nostalgia in nature and then when we humans begin to speak Benjamin Walter also says it that this pain in nature which in nature remains speechless is is articulated. Okay, not to go for too long the rather sad conclusion to be drawn from all this is that a catastrophe is not something awaiting us in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in not only its basic ontological sense is something that always already happened and we humans are what remains. At all levels even in the most empirical sense. Do the immense reserves of oil and coal till now our most important source of energy not bear witness of immense catastrophes that took place on our earth before the rise of humankind? Our normality is by definition post post apocalyptic. So I think that our basic stance should be we are already in apocalypse and the problem with those who are spreading panic you know will there be an apocalypse is not that they are too pessimistic, but that they are afraid to accept to confront the danger. I quote my colleague Alenka Zupančič who wrote: "It seems that we prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death." You think she is dreaming I will give you an example. In the spring of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, said that grandparents like him, he was years at that point, don’t don’t want to sacrifice the country’s economy and way of life during the coronavirus crisis. A quote from a speech by Dan Patrick: "No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping America that all Americans love, keeping it alive for your children and grandchildren." Patrick said: "If that’s the exchange I am in it." So his idea is the most important thing is American economy, way of life, and even if it means all people above will die, we should accept it. I think this is not an act of courage, not a heroic self-sacrifice, but it is an act of cowardice. Patrick prefers to die rather to courageously confront the threat of the catastrophe, the need to change our way of our way of life. So what should we do in such a predicament? Now I’m slowly approaching the conclusion but my crazy ideas I warn you awaken if you were sleeping come now. I think the biggest threat is the common wisdom according to which you know the lesson of the ecological crisis is that we are part of nature not its center. So we have to change our way of life, limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, accept our modest place in the life of on our earth. This is what one commonly hears no? Modesty we are not the center of the world or to quote Judith Butler: "An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own." End of quote. I totally oppose this view. Is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the fragile forms fragile balance of forms of life. When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below two degrees Celsius, we talk and try to act not as one particular entity, subspecies, but as general managers of the life on earth. Not as one modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon our smaller and more mindful role. It depends upon our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk of our finitude and mortality. As Marx would have put it although I’m very critical of Marx, we are universal beings. Especially I think the so-called deep ecologists. You know when they claim not only other living beings, even rivers, forest have their own rights to be alive. Yes, but they don't know it. We humans stand for their rights. The most apparently most modest deep ecologists are the most arrogant that you are you can imagine. They posit us humans as the general as it were the general managers. Now not to talk for too long I want to skip a very important part where I talk about authority. I am very critical about Hannah Arendt who was incidentally Günther Anders' wife but she says something very deep in a text of her about authority. She says that although in today’s world especially it’s even more true than in her time, you cannot really provide your children who knows what the future will be we don’t control it. You would be fully justified to tell to your children when they ask you mommy I’m afraid what life will be, pandemic, global warming, the apparently honest answer would have been shit I also don’t know it survive what can I do. The ethical tragedy is that even if this is true you should stick to your authority even if it’s a false one. You don’t have the right to withdraw in such a comfortable way. So what should be our ethical stance? Now comes my moment of madness. Don't be afraid no sex nothing dirty. I would like to return to Antigone. I wrote a piece which nobody likes, alternate version of Antigone, but here I want to take a more positive view of Antigone. From the standpoint of Eumonia, a good lawful order of the city, Antigone is definitely demoniac, uncanny. Her defying act expresses a stand of demeasured excessive insistence which disturbs the beautiful order of the city. The irony is that while Antigone presents herself as the guardian of the immemorial laws which sustain human order, she acts as a freakish and ruthless abomination. There definitely is something cold and monstrous about her. If you look for this kitschy image of femininity, gentle understanding, it’s Ismene her sister, it’s not Antigone. Now let me prove it. You know when we try to grasp why Antigone does it. I like Judith Butler but here I have some misunderstanding with her. We usually take the Judith Butler global humanist line. We quote that I think overrated passage about the unwritten laws older than the gods themselves which prescribe that every human being had the right for a respectful funeral and so on. But I’m sorry to say this is not Antigone’s true position. Antigone’s true position comes later when she in a ferocious dialogue with her uncle Creon when she finally answers the key question, which was the law which pushed her to defend insist on the funeral of Polynices, her brother. Let me quote the standard translation into English, sorry, which is basically correct: "I would never have done it for children of my own. Not as their mother nor for a dead husband lying in decay. No, not in defiance of the citizens or city's law. What law do I appeal to claiming this? If my husband died there would be another one. And if I were to lose a child of mine I would have another one with some other man. But since my father and my mother are hidden away in Hades' house, dead, I'll never have another living brother. That was the law that I used to honor my brother." Let's just read this carefully. These lines caused as you may know a scandal for century, with many interpreters, Goethe especially, claiming that they must be a later interpolation. Even the translation, at least into English I noticed, try to soften this point. I found the translation which is totally false, like: whether a mother of children or a wife I would always take up this struggle and go against the city’s laws. No, she says exactly the opposite. If it were my husband or my children I would let them rot. Then there are translations which delete this brutal mention of rotting corpses. They just say like if my son or husband were to die I would not perform the ritual. Then but my favorite translation is the one by David Feldshuh, who translated it radically. I quote that line: "For Creon's law I would bow to it if a husband or a son had died. I would let their bodies rot in the steaming dust, unburied and alone." So, I would let their bodies rot. This is not just the statement of the fact that okay there is an unburied corpse there I would ignore it. It’s an active stance like I would let them rot. So we can see here how Antigone is the very opposite of this Judith Butler humanist world ethic stance of just This is basically although I like her book, *Antigone's Claim*, her universal liberal humanist, she was mad when I once characterized her as that, stance. You know most of us get proper funeral but there are those on the edge half excluded and this is a typical liberal project, let’s bring them all in, let all the excluded who are not fully integrated let’s bring them in, they also deserve it. No Antigone is not saying this. She does not enact a universal rule that covers everybody. Her point is not my god everybody even a criminal like Polynices deserves a proper burial. No, she said I don’t care about everybody. I would let them rot. It’s only for Polynices that I am doing it. So although then there are attempts then to save Antigone for our ethics, claiming that nonetheless she is universal, like her special case is Polynices but every Polynices every evil guy had somebody who may maybe probably loved him or her. So basically all deaths are exceptions. I don't think we can read Antigone like this. To put it very simply Antigone must have been aware that for hundreds at least who died in the battle for the city, don't forget Polynices was a traitor who attacked the city of Thebe, the same holds as for Polynices and she ignores them. Plus her reasoning is very strange. If her husband or her child were to die she would let let them rot only because she would be able to replace them. Why should respect for the dead be unconditional only for those who cannot be replaced? Doesn't the procedure of replacement she evokes, she can find another husband, breed another child, strangely ignore the uniqueness of each person? Why should another husband be able to replace a husband whom she probably would love in his singularity? So but okay that's another problem let me conclude. The fact so remains that Antigone does what Antigone does is something quite unique. Her universal rule is not everybody deserve to be properly buried and then applied to particularity oh my god Polynices also. No, her universal rule is let the bodies rot. And she fully honors the rule with only the exception of her particular case. The law that she obeys in properly burying Polynices is the law of exception and this is a very brutal law, far from any human reconciliation. Antigone makes here I think a kind of Hegelian step further with regard to the triad of law and its examples. She transposes the gap that separates examples ordinary examples from the law into law itself. We have law, ordinary examples, we should bury people and she says I don’t care about that. I only care about my unique exemplum, my brother. So just to conclude what’s my point here. Antigone’s big among the big translations sorry of Antigone, Hölderlin's is deservedly praised as unique. And one cannot but know how her exception, her readiness to perform the proper funeral of her brother, can be read in the light of a specific feature of Hölderlin's late poetry. You must know this. Instead of first describing a state of things and then mentioning the exception, things are like this but there is an exception, Hölderlin often begins a sentence or a line with aber, but, without noticing what’s the preceding general. He begins with aber. Like the famous example the famous lines from his hymn "Andenken": "Was bleibet aber stifle die Dichter." But poets establish what remains. The standard reading is of course here that after the events poets are able to perceive the situation from the mature standpoint, from a safe distance. However in Hölderlin there is nothing before but, just a nameless chaos and a world constructed by a poet emerges as a but, as an act of disturbing a chaotic void. And I think this should be a proper post-apocalyptic thinking. At the beginning is a but. But poets establish what remains, which means that poets sie stiften, a strophe, the opening line of a poem, which is what remains after what, after the catastrophe. In this sense Antigone’s choice of brother is I think an authentic primordial ethical act. It does not disturb a preceding universal ethical law. It just interrupts the pre-ethical chaos of letting them rot. The pre-ethical chaos is cut short by that's how Hölderlin probably would have imagined Antigone but aber mein Bruder, but my brother, and nothing before. Now you will say but is it not that Antigone's acts is so problematic because it does disturb a pre-existing order of customs? It's not chaos, it's Creon's state with its own laws. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from here. With her act, with her but, aber, Antigone herself devalues the preceding order of customs, reducing it to a chaos of rotting corpses. An act does not just introduce order into chaos, it simultaneously annihilates a preceding order denouncing it as a false mask of chaos. Today we need such acts more than ever. Today you begin thinking by saying okay we live in an apparent order but this order is really a chaos and we have to begin with aber, but, we can but is the beginning. Thank you very much for your patience. Please stop stop. I am here referring to did you see Chaplin’s Chaplin’s *The Great Dictator* where people applaud Hynkel Hitler and then Hitler makes "aah" and they stop applauding. I am tempted to act like this. Okay. Let me do some Q&A now, I owe it to you. Okay how do I do it with the let me put me ah thank you very much. It works? Yes no? Okay okay alles klar alles klar. Okay bitte? No no no not necessarily. Sie können natürlich Fragen auf Deutsch stellen, aber leider ist meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug um... Okay well I am just here... Ah again why do you speak no German? This is well... It's no problem for me my god. Yeah yeah but it might be a problem for some people. I should I should feel guilty for not speaking German here. No sorry can't do it. It's not possible. Also... Just don't tell me good manners. You're a bourgeois individual Mr. Yes bourgeois manners yes yes. Okay this is okay now that's the time to for the Q&A. Well you heard a talk that's difficult to summarize I won't even try. I mean this was at at some point we had the working titles of figures of the end. I mean we had here different sorts of endings of catastrophes of apocalypses, a sexual apocalypse, the end of philosophy, insanity etc. etc. and the also the food apocalypse. And on this anecdotes I mean we actually received a lot of very very good proposals and there was actually one proposal on food and the apocalypse. Think about it I mean it's really a topic. Ich habe nicht deine mit dir brauche ich manchmal ein deutscher Übersetzer. Sag's auf Deutsch. You see to avoid a misunderstanding that's my rule. I consider you my friend. And for me this hypocritical praising is always hypocrisy. The only form of true friendship is that I can be aggressive and we both know that our friendship will survive this. When somebody praises me I always suspect what is behind. Okay so since we we have resolved this one so this is sorry I told you when we the people take over he will get I lowered his sentence to three years of of this Zwangsarbeit. Yeah yeah this is I think it was again more time yesterday it was less. Four years. You asked a question that you are not allowed you got one year more. Sorry that's my... Okay this is not about me this is about Slavoj Žižek and you. So comments and questions. Just then there you see the microphone here. I mean if you have if you want to say something I mean you have to walk up to it I mean that's also due to the regulations we have. Okay. Somebody? Yeah. Please be as aggressive as you can and this is not a rhetorical point you know like... Mr. Žižek what in your opinion what’s the greatest depiction of apocalypse in general of all time in cinema? In cinema? Hmm yeah. This is a good point it’s the obvious answer but I did something extremely perverted about it. I saw it as an optimist movie, Lars von Trier Melancholia. Melancholia great movie. It’s an optimist movie good news this disgusting human race disappears from the earth. There will be a nice peaceful universe after that. I really think that it has the movie a very refined ending. You remember when the ethical heroine played by Kirsten Dunst built a kind of imaginary tent enclosed space just with four sticks and says to the other two we are safe here. It’s a very refined gesture because it’s not a false consolation. They all know they will die. But she constructs what in politically correct jargon is they like to use the term but in a wrong way safe space. It’s not that you are safe in this sense it’s simply more in an almost Buddhist sense a space of inner freedom, a space of to refer to other apocalyptic movies a space of undeadness. You are alive but already as alive you are dead. So I always had this tendency if we talk okay this is not apocalypse this is horror movies. An American friend of mine developed I plagiarized him a good point about the opposition between vampires and zombies. Vampires are reactionary. They live among us they are usually rich noblemen. Zombies are the working class. They just and so I think the true class struggle in horror literature is vampires versus zombies. That's why I shocked my friend who played in Harry Potter movies, I hope you saw the last one where the bad guys attack that stupid school and so on and I said at that Hogwarts whatever and I said it's the wrong end of the movie. The bad guy played without nose by played by Ralph Fiennes, this is the working class rebellion. They should kill them all my god you know. I will turn around the movie. So to go back there are not many good catastrophe films. The ones I like are more this type of how should I call them modest even B-level catastrophe. No big space battles catastrophes and so on but where you think life goes on just. Then you notice my god but something is strange in this city you know. That type of movies where you know what this reminds me of. I’m very solidary with Palestinians on the West Bank but at the same time my god I know what is anti-Semitism. And what shocked me is how in my country ordinary normal people she was a communist my mother who is already dead, how I noticed her anti-Semitism. She was very friendly with Jews there was an old lady her best friend. And once she had some I don't know even who borrowed money from whom but when this lady they counted some money left our apartment my mother just turned to me and said she is a nice lady this old Jewish kind woman but did you notice in what strange intense way she counted the money. Ah ah ah. This was the sign that she is an alien you know. That's why in good apocalyptic movies the aliens are not big frogs on what. I love those movies who they are like us there is just one detail. In some movies they have too much skin between fingers or some strange sign here that you identify them. So this is the the apocalypse movies. Although I must say that I even like *The Day After Tomorrow* by your great compatriot Roland Emmerich. Isn't that a you remember a beautiful scene where things are turned around because United States are in a new ice age Americans wait for entrance to Mexico you know and... I like them but again they you know what I hate sorry I will stop immediately I talk too much. I hate these pseudo-apocalyptic movies which between the lines are the worst kind of utopia where the post-apocalyptic world is the same world as ours just without the Jewish capitalist foreigner excess it’s like zero level honest good capitalism. These are the worst like the one which deservedly failed, Kevin Costner's *The Postman*. It’s the most stupidly patriarchal civilization ends and United States just divide small community and what Kevin Costner does he finds an old uniform of a postman and pretends that United States still exist. He simply starts carrying did you see it carrying post from one to the other. This is for me the reactionary apocalypse. Sorry I talk too much. Okay so I I have to warn you I mean this is this Q we will never get through... No you have to warn me more to be honest I speak too much. To warn you? Yes. Hi. On your concluding point when you were referring to the Antigone story where she was explicitly rejecting an order and turning it into chaos or not chaos specifically but rather rejecting it as an order and just saying oh this is just a mask for chaos you then spoke about how she said "aber mein Bruder." No she didn't say this this is my read. Well okay that's how you might... Yeah yeah yeah yeah. You then spoke of how people should be doing this more often this kind of proclamation of but my brother. I don't exactly know where you're trying to go with that. I will give you another example. I hope you will I’m not I’m not advocating particularism here. I think that the proper political gesture is then to gradually universalize this aber itself, changing it into Hegelian terms more authentic concrete universality. Let me give you another very simple example. In United States although I’m often viewed as suspicious by politically correct jerks I was always for Black Lives Matter. Because the liberal answer to them is this naive you know anti-Antigone. But why only Black Lives Matter? Don't all lives matter? No. If you say today in the United States all lives matter, the universality is already overdetermined colored by middle-class white values. Paradoxically if you say all lives matter you are exclusionary. If you say Black Lives Matter you opened up a way for effectively all universality without exceptions. You know who knew this although they screwed it up later when the greatest event for me maybe greater than French Revolution Toussaint Louverture Haiti Revolution, where then later in they wrote a new constitution of Haiti. And you know how it defines the citizens of Haiti in this Black Lives Matter sense? All citizens
But nonetheless I want to say something. I am deeply impressed by the institute and you know why. The beautiful introductions made a nice point and I would if you Robert agree mention Kant here. In his famous short Schrift, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?, he emphasizes that the formula of Aufklärung is not against the old authoritarianism, don’t think obey, or don’t obey think, it is obey but think freely. And this is what we need today. When we have reasonable measures against the pandemic and so on, if society decides something obey the measures, but think think freely. And I think what you were after esteemed colleagues who introduced me was precisely what you almost pronounced some of you the word, what Kant meant by what’s the German term, öffentliches Gebrauch der Vernunft, the public use of reason. And Kant uses this term in a wonderfully counter-intuitive way. For him private use of reason is the use by the state. He names Theologische Fakultät, Rechtsfakultät, where the scope of what you can inquire into is predetermined by the interest of the state and so on, while what we are doing here is outside in this sense private state domain. It’s public use of reason. We should obey as citizens but it’s our duty to ask it’s our duty to ask questions. Okay. So have some patience and let me begin although I must say I cannot resist slight bad taste but nothing compared to hamburgers when I hear that Käte Hamburger Center Apocalypse, maybe at the level of food the apocalypse is if you eat too many hamburgers instead of our own good food. But that’s a totally different idea. Okay let me not get lost. I have a quite long substance speech. When I visited Heidelberg the first time some years ago, I was told that Martin Heidegger once took a walk on your famous Philosophenweg, slipped on a sharp turn and ingloriously fell down. My intervention here can also be taken as a comment on another slip of Heidegger, the one that happened on his Holzwege as a thinker. It concerns precisely our topic, apocalypse, catastrophe, the end of history. Namely we live in a weird moment when multiple catastrophes, pandemic, global warming, social tensions, the prospect of full digital control over our thinking and so on, compete for primacy. Also primacy in the sense of which of them will count as what Jacques Lacan called point de capiton, the quilting point, Stepppunkt I think it’s translated into German, which totalizes all others. The main candidate in the public discourse today for this Stepppunkt is global warming, while lately the antagonism which in our part of the world at least appears as the crucial one is the one between partisans of vaccination and vaccine skeptics. The problem is here that for the COVID skeptics, the main catastrophe is today the fake vision of the pandemic catastrophe itself, which is as they claim manipulated, even created by those in power to strengthen social control and economic exploitation. If one takes a closer look at how the struggle against vaccination condenses other struggles, struggle against state control, struggle against science, struggle against corporate economic exploitation, struggle for the defense of our way of life and so on, it becomes clear that this key role of the struggle against vaccination is I think the outcome of an ideological mystification in some aspects even similar to anti-Semitism. In the same way that anti-Semitism is a displaced mystified form of anti-capitalism, the struggle against vaccination is also a displaced mystified form of the class struggle against those in power. To find a way in this mess, we should maybe mobilize the distinction between apocalypse and catastrophe, reserving the term catastrophe for what Günther Anders called naked apocalypse, namely as you all know I’m sure apocalypse an uncovering in ancient Greek is a disclosure or revelation of knowledge. In a religious speech what apocalypse discloses is something hidden, the ultimate truth we are blind for in our ordinary lives. In his essay "Apocalypse Without Kingdom," Anders introduced the concept of naked apocalypse. Quote from his text: "The apocalypse that consists of a of mere downfall, which doesn't represent the opening of a new positive state of affairs, or a new kingdom." End of quote. Anders' idea was that a nuclear catastrophe would be precisely such a naked apocalypse. No new kingdom will arrive out of it. Just the obliteration of ourselves and our world. And the question we should raise today is what kind of apocalypse is announced in the plurality of catastrophes that today pose a threat to all of us. Let me begin with the obvious candidate. What kind of apocalypse announces itself by the prospect of full digitalization of our lives? When the threat posed by digitalization is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new face of capitalism called by Shoshana Zuboff you probably at least many of you know her book *Surveillance Capitalism*. Quote from her book: "Knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely human natural resources. We are the native people now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience." End of quote. So we, the watched, observed by the digital machinery, are not just material, we are also exploited, involved in an unequal exchange, which is why the term behavioral surplus playing the role of surplus value is fully justified here. When we are surfing, buying, watching TV and so on, we get what we want but we give more. We lay ourselves bare. We make the details of our life and its habits transparent to the digital big other. The paradox is of course that we experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us, as our highest exercise of freedom. What is more free than freely surfing on the web? That's I think the danger of our societies. That's why we should also analyze our free world. In China everybody knows who is the boss. They don't have any illusions. But in United States my god they really think they are free or should I put it no? And I think that the most dangerous unfreedom is unfreedom which is experienced as freedom. You are not even aware of it. However, important as this surveillance capitalism is, it is not yet the true game changer I think. I see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface, which is I think today's main candidate for the end of history. After it will take place, if it will take place, the rest will not be history, at least not history as we know it and experience it. The distance between our inner life, the line of thoughts, and external reality is the basis of the perception of ourselves as free. We are free in our thoughts precisely insofar as they are at a distance from external reality, so that we can play with our thoughts, make thought experiments, engage in dreaming and so on with no direct consequences in reality. No one can control us here. But once our inner life is directly linked to reality, so that our thoughts have direct consequences, or can be directly regulated by a machine that is part of reality, and they are in this sense no longer ours, we effectively enter a post-human state. Now often when I develop this people tell me but it is this is a utopia, it will not happen. Well don't be too optimistic here. It is already going on like just a detail. Although I hate mentioning China all the time, they are just doing things that we are also all doing them just a little bit more discreetly. But you know that in in thousands of Chinese elementary school pupils have to wear some kind of a metal ring, which cannot read their thoughts yet but controls their brain activity, so that the teacher no longer has to watch them, are you falling asleep and so on. If you are not attentive it shows directly on his screen. Okay. We now I come to the next point. We regularly hear complaints about how the digital virtualization of our reality, complaints about this, of how we are losing contact with full reality, sex included. But if we talk about material reality, it is mostly about the exhaustion or growing shortage of natural resources. But I think it’s crucial to note that there is also the opposite, the excess, the exploding abundance of waste in all its forms, from millions of tons of plastic waste circulating in oceans to air pollution. The name for this surplus is emissions. What is emitted is a surplus which cannot be recycled, reintegrated into the circulation of nature. A surplus which persists as an unnatural remainder, growing ad infinitum. This waste is I think the material counterpart of homeless refugees who form a kind of human waste. Waste of course from the standpoint of global commodity circulation. The conclusion that imposes itself here is, what if apocalypse in the full sense of the term, which also includes apocalypse in the sense of the disclosure of something that was till now invisible truth, what if it never happens? What if truth, die Wahrheit, is something that is constructed afterwards as an essay to make sense of the catastrophe? Some would argue that the disintegration of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in was an authentic apocalypse. It brought out the truth that socialism doesn't work, that liberal democracy is the finally discovered best possible socio-economic system. But this Fukuyama's dream of the end of history ended with a crude awakening a decade later, let’s say on September 11th. So that we live today in an era which is best characterized as the end of the end. The the circle is closed. We passed from catastrophe to apocalypse and then back to catastrophe. We hear again and again that we are at the end of history but this end just drags on and even brings its own enjoyment. Now I want to go a little bit further. Our usual notion of catastrophe is that it takes place when the intrusion of some brutal real, earthquake, war, ruins the symbolic fiction which is our reality, which structures our experience of social reality. But perhaps there is no less a catastrophe when reality remains as it is and just the symbolic fiction that sustains our approach to reality dissolves. Let me give you a shocking for some of you maybe obscene example. Let’s take the case of sexuality since nowhere do fictions play a more crucial role than in sexuality. In an interesting comment on the role of consent in sexual relations, Eve Wiseman in a comment in *The Guardian* refers to a moment in *The Butterfly Effect*, Jon Ronson’s podcast series about internet porn. On the set of a porn film an actor lost his erection mid-scene. To get it back, the erection, he turns away from the woman naked below him, he grabs his phone and desperately searches for Pornhub. And Eve Wiseman writes this struck me as vaguely apocalyptic. Why? Wiseman’s comment: something is rotten in the state of sex. I agree but I would add the lesson of psychoanalysis. Human sexuality is in itself perverted, exposed to sadomasochist reversals and specifically to the mixture of reality and fantasy. Even when I am alone with my partner, my sexual interaction with him or her is inextricably intertwined with my fantasies. Every sexual interaction is potentially structured like a masturbation with a real partner. I hold you, don't take it personally abstractly, I hold you naked in my hands but I just use you as a prop to actualize my fantasy. I use the flesh and body of my partner as a prop to enact fantasies. We cannot reduce this gap between the bodily reality of my partner and myself and the universe of fantasies. We cannot reduce it to a distortion opened up by patriarchy and social domination or exploitation. I think the gap is here from the very beginning. So I quite understand the actor who in order to regain erection searched on his iPhone Pornhub. He was looking for a phantasmatic support of his performance. Such a loss of fiction is what happened to the hardcore actor, is what happened to him who needed Pornhub images to sustain his sex activity. Think about it. There is something again terrifying in this. It’s it’s not only if you cannot make love for whatever reason you don’t find a partner you are impotent you dream about it. No, you need to dream even if you make real sex. If you lose the dream what remains it’s a nightmare basically. This brings us to another apocalyptic end and I want to focus now the second part of my talk. Please don’t be too bored to this. The long foretold end of philosophy. You know when people talk about end of philosophy, my god are we aware that from Kant onwards end of philosophy was a feature of every post-Kantian philosophy. For Kant it’s conditions of possibility of philosophy not yet metaphysics. Fichte, Hegel, Schelling the same. Hegel you know no longer philosophy but Wissenschaft selbst. Marx it’s clear whoever you want Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on and so on. But today I think we live in a unique moment when we have two ends of philosophy. The one in positive sciences occupying the field of old metaphysical speculations and the one announced by Heidegger among others. Heidegger brought the transcendental approach to its radical conclusion reducing philosophy to the description of the historical events, Ereignisse, modes of disclosure of being. In the last decades technological progress in experimental physics has opened up a new domain unthinkable in the classical scientific universe, that of the experimental metaphysics. Questions previously thought to be a matter for philosophical debate have been brought into the orbit of empirical inquiry. What was till now the topic of mental experiments is gradually becoming the topic of actual laboratory experiments. For example the properly metaphysical questions of is there contingency in reality or not, is that is causality limited by time space locally conditioned, what is the status of reality independently of our observation, even big questions like does our universe have a beginning temporal and spatial an end, do we have free will. Today, and I don’t agree with it I just describe it, today we don’t ask philosophers this question, we expect an answer from quantum cosmologists, from cognitive sciences and so on and so on. This is why at the very beginning of his last book *The Grand Design*, Stephen Hawking triumphantly proclaims that philosophy is dead. But on the other hand with today’s still in at least so-called continental philosophy, what Americans call continental philosophy, predominant approach, I call it I will immediately explain why transcendental historicism, naive questions about reality are accepted precisely as naive, which means they cannot provide the ultimate cognitive frame of our knowledge. For example Michel Foucault. His notion of Wahrheit, truth, can be summed up in the claim that truth-untruth is not a direct property of our statements, but that in different historical conditions different discourses produce each its own truth effect. It implies its own criteria of what claim of what is true. A brief quote from Michel Foucault: "The problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which are neither true nor false." End of quote. So science defines truth in its own terms. The truth of a proposition which should be formulated in clear explicit preferably formalized terms is established by experimental procedures which could be repeated by anyone. Religious discourse operates in a different way. Its truth is established through complex rhetorical ways which generate the experience of inhabiting a meaningful world benevolently controlled by a higher power. So for example if one were to ask Michel Foucault a big metaphysical question like do I have a free will, his answer would have been something like this question only has meaning, it can only be raised within a certain episteme, field of knowledge and power which determines under what conditions it is true or false. And all we can ultimately do is to describe this episteme. For Foucault, what in German is called Unhintergehbares, what you cannot reach behind, is simply the historically specified episteme. These two approaches, scientific and transcendental, do not complement each other. They are mutually exclusive, but the immanent insufficiency of each of them opens up the space for the other. Sciences cannot close the circle and ground in its object the approach it the science uses when analyzing its object. Only transcendental philosophy can do it. Like here not only Heidegger although they are very different even Habermas, Heidegger's great opponent, has a point when he says about the cognitive scientific attempts to develop our very ability to think that they are circular, they already presuppose a certain scientific approach to reality which is not immanently proven out of the scientific project itself. On the other hand transcendental philosophy limits itself to describing different disclosures of being and has to ignore the naive ontic question how are entities outside of the horizon of how they appear to us. And science fills in the void about the nature of thing like science raises this question. Now back to Heidegger. Although Heidegger is the ultimate transcendental philosopher, you know what I mean by this, I think Heidegger really brought in some sense philosophy to the end. For him the most radical thing thinking can do is simply describe historical epochal disclosures of being, like in modern for Heidegger for example what we experience as reality changed from medieval times to modernity. In pre-modern times meaning, deeper sense and so on, was part of reality itself. With modernity reality in itself is supposed to be gray regulated by mechanistic law and meaning is just projected into it by us. But that’s it for Heidegger. You cannot reach behind this and ask the naive question okay okay but is there anything prior to its historical disclosure to us? Now what is so interesting and here I want to push Heidegger to the edge is that in his elaboration of the notion of untruth, Verborgenheit, Lethe, older than the very dimension of truth, Heidegger emphasizes how men's quote from Heidegger "stepping into the essential unfolding of truth is a transformation of the being of men in the sense of a derangement, Verrückung, going mad of his position among beings." End of quote. The derangement to which Heidegger refers is of course not a psychological or clinical category of madness. It signals a much more radical properly ontological aberration reversal when in its very foundation the universe itself is in a way out of joint. Among great philosophers I think Schelling and Hegel already clearly saw this dimension. Read Hegel. He is more Foucauldian, referring to Michel Foucault, than Foucault himself in his well-known books about the history of madness. So for Hegel madness is not an accidental lapse distortion illness of human spirit but something which is inscribed into individual spirit as its basic ontological constitution. To be a human being means to be potentially mad. Quote from Hegel "Anthropologie," the first part of *Philosophy of Spirit*. "This interpretation of insanity as a necessarily occurring form or stage in the development of the soul is of course not to be understood as if we were asserting that every mind every soul must go through the stage of extreme derangement. Such an assertion would be as absurd as to assume that because in his *Rechtsphilosophie* crime is considered as a necessary manifestation of the human will therefore to commit crime is an inevitable necessity for every individual. Crime and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general has to overcome in the course of its development." End of quote. So although not a factual necessity madness is a formal possibility constitutive of human mind. It is something whose the threat of which has to be overcome if we are to emerge as normal subject, which means that normality can only arise as overcoming of this threat. It’s not that we have first normal mind and then some of us unfortunately cannot do it regress into madness. No, normal mind itself is a defense against a threat of madness. We must also remember that Heidegger wrote the lines of madness in the years of his intense reading of Schelling’s *Freiheitsschrift*, Treatise on Human Freedom, a text which discerns the origin of evil precisely in a kind of ontological madness, the derangement of men's position among beings. Quote from Heidegger: "Man in his very essence is a catastrophe, a reversal that turns him away from the genuine essence. Man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings." Just suffer a little bit more and then lighter or even darker things will come soon. Okay. So for Heidegger the ultimate cause of the derangement, Verrücktheit, that pertains to Dasein, Heidegger's name from *Being and Time* on for the human being, resides in the fact that Dasein is by definition embodied. And towards the end of his life Heidegger conceded that for philosophy I quote: "The body phenomenon is the most difficult problem. The body, das Leibliche, in the human is not something animalistic. The manner of understanding that accompanies it is something that metaphysics up till now has not touched on." End of quote. I am tempted to risk I cannot develop it today the hypothesis that it is precisely psychoanalyse, psychoanalytic theory, which was the first to touch this key question. Is not the Freudian eroticized body sustained by libido organized around erogenous zones? Is it not the non-animalistic and not biological body? This is what unfortunately Heidegger doesn't see. Heidegger totally misses this dimension when in his Zollikon Seminars he dismisses Freud as simple mechanical causal determinist. A quote from Heidegger: "He, Freud, postulates for the conscious human phenomena that they can be explained without gaps. That is to say with the continuity of causal connections. Since there are no such connections in our consciousness Freud had to invent the unconscious in which there have to be the causal links without gaps." This interpretation may appear correct. Is it not that Freud tries to discover a causal order in what appears to our consciousness as confused contingent mess of mental facts, slips of slips of tongue, dreams, symptoms and so on, and in this way to close the chain of causal links that regulate our psychic life. However, I think that Heidegger misses the way the Freudian Unbewusste, unconscious, is grounded in the traumatic encounter of an otherness whose intrusion precisely breaks interrupts the continuity of the causal link. What we get in the unconscious is not a complete causal link but the repercussions the aftershocks of a traumatic cut. What Freud calls symptoms are ways to deal with this traumatic cut while fantasy is a formation destined to cover this cut. Now we face the key question. If man is man the only catastrophe in the midst of beings, is man rather human being an exception? So that if we assume the impossible point of view of looking at the universe from a safe distance, we see a universal texture of beings just not deranged by catastrophes since man is a catastrophe only from our standpoint. So should we adopt then the Kantian position? We are a catastrophe but only for ourselves. Because of our finitude we always see reality from a distorted deranged Verrücktes standpoint but not in itself. I think I don’t have time to go into this now of course but I think that our answer here should be as it was already mentioned in your graceful introduction in the line of much more radical thinking which occurs I’m just giving you hints in some of modern okay modern late Middle Age European mystics like Jakob Böhme in Schelling and so on, who claim that no, the catastrophe happens already in God itself. From that how should I put it, God there is a world, reality because something went wrong in God himself. And I think this is, that's why I call myself a little bit ironically atheist Christian, this is what Christianity knows. You know the key all other religions say you live in a fallen world, pray be good and you can elevate yourself at least a little bit towards God. Christian message is the opposite one. When you think you are abandoned by God identify with Christ on the cross who is also abandoned by his father. You know that famous Eli Eli lama and that only you overcome your humanity you identify by God only by identifying with the fall radical gap in God himself. And this is I think I don't have time to develop all this now of course. This is my ontological stance about apocalypse catastrophe and so on and so on. Every image that we make of reality in itself even the top scientific ones quantum physics relativity theory formulations are already not false but simply they involve our standpoint. The only touch with the real independently of us is when we experience this psychotic breakdown madness at our origin. And now just to conclude I want just to justify myself why focusing on Heidegger. Because you know Heidegger is Heidegger admits this. He is usually dismissed as a obsessed with question of being. But in one of his late writings he openly admits that the question of but how is reality or whatever we call it in itself out of a historical disclosure of being, that he totally ignored this point. A quote: "I often ask myself this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me what nature would be without man." And only at the end he approaches this with some mystical speculations in the sense of even Walter Benjamin, claiming that there is some kind of a pain and nostalgia in nature and then when we humans begin to speak Benjamin Walter also says it that this pain in nature which in nature remains speechless is is articulated. Okay, not to go for too long the rather sad conclusion to be drawn from all this is that a catastrophe is not something awaiting us in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in not only its basic ontological sense is something that always already happened and we humans are what remains. At all levels even in the most empirical sense. Do the immense reserves of oil and coal till now our most important source of energy not bear witness of immense catastrophes that took place on our earth before the rise of humankind? Our normality is by definition post post apocalyptic. So I think that our basic stance should be we are already in apocalypse and the problem with those who are spreading panic you know will there be an apocalypse is not that they are too pessimistic, but that they are afraid to accept to confront the danger. I quote my colleague Alenka Zupančič who wrote: "It seems that we prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death." You think she is dreaming I will give you an example. In the spring of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, said that grandparents like him, he was years at that point, don’t don’t want to sacrifice the country’s economy and way of life during the coronavirus crisis. A quote from a speech by Dan Patrick: "No one reached out to me and said as a senior citizen are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping America that all Americans love, keeping it alive for your children and grandchildren." Patrick said: "If that’s the exchange I am in it." So his idea is the most important thing is American economy, way of life, and even if it means all people above will die, we should accept it. I think this is not an act of courage, not a heroic self-sacrifice, but it is an act of cowardice. Patrick prefers to die rather to courageously confront the threat of the catastrophe, the need to change our way of our way of life. So what should we do in such a predicament? Now I’m slowly approaching the conclusion but my crazy ideas I warn you awaken if you were sleeping come now. I think the biggest threat is the common wisdom according to which you know the lesson of the ecological crisis is that we are part of nature not its center. So we have to change our way of life, limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, accept our modest place in the life of on our earth. This is what one commonly hears no? Modesty we are not the center of the world or to quote Judith Butler: "An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own." End of quote. I totally oppose this view. Is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the fragile forms fragile balance of forms of life. When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below two degrees Celsius, we talk and try to act not as one particular entity, subspecies, but as general managers of the life on earth. Not as one modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon our smaller and more mindful role. It depends upon our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk of our finitude and mortality. As Marx would have put it although I’m very critical of Marx, we are universal beings. Especially I think the so-called deep ecologists. You know when they claim not only other living beings, even rivers, forest have their own rights to be alive. Yes, but they don't know it. We humans stand for their rights. The most apparently most modest deep ecologists are the most arrogant that you are you can imagine. They posit us humans as the general as it were the general managers. Now not to talk for too long I want to skip a very important part where I talk about authority. I am very critical about Hannah Arendt who was incidentally Günther Anders' wife but she says something very deep in a text of her about authority. She says that although in today’s world especially it’s even more true than in her time, you cannot really provide your children who knows what the future will be we don’t control it. You would be fully justified to tell to your children when they ask you mommy I’m afraid what life will be, pandemic, global warming, the apparently honest answer would have been shit I also don’t know it survive what can I do. The ethical tragedy is that even if this is true you should stick to your authority even if it’s a false one. You don’t have the right to withdraw in such a comfortable way. So what should be our ethical stance? Now comes my moment of madness. Don't be afraid no sex nothing dirty. I would like to return to Antigone. I wrote a piece which nobody likes, alternate version of Antigone, but here I want to take a more positive view of Antigone. From the standpoint of Eumonia, a good lawful order of the city, Antigone is definitely demoniac, uncanny. Her defying act expresses a stand of demeasured excessive insistence which disturbs the beautiful order of the city. The irony is that while Antigone presents herself as the guardian of the immemorial laws which sustain human order, she acts as a freakish and ruthless abomination. There definitely is something cold and monstrous about her. If you look for this kitschy image of femininity, gentle understanding, it’s Ismene her sister, it’s not Antigone. Now let me prove it. You know when we try to grasp why Antigone does it. I like Judith Butler but here I have some misunderstanding with her. We usually take the Judith Butler global humanist line. We quote that I think overrated passage about the unwritten laws older than the gods themselves which prescribe that every human being had the right for a respectful funeral and so on. But I’m sorry to say this is not Antigone’s true position. Antigone’s true position comes later when she in a ferocious dialogue with her uncle Creon when she finally answers the key question, which was the law which pushed her to defend insist on the funeral of Polynices, her brother. Let me quote the standard translation into English, sorry, which is basically correct: "I would never have done it for children of my own. Not as their mother nor for a dead husband lying in decay. No, not in defiance of the citizens or city's law. What law do I appeal to claiming this? If my husband died there would be another one. And if I were to lose a child of mine I would have another one with some other man. But since my father and my mother are hidden away in Hades' house, dead, I'll never have another living brother. That was the law that I used to honor my brother." Let's just read this carefully. These lines caused as you may know a scandal for century, with many interpreters, Goethe especially, claiming that they must be a later interpolation. Even the translation, at least into English I noticed, try to soften this point. I found the translation which is totally false, like: whether a mother of children or a wife I would always take up this struggle and go against the city’s laws. No, she says exactly the opposite. If it were my husband or my children I would let them rot. Then there are translations which delete this brutal mention of rotting corpses. They just say like if my son or husband were to die I would not perform the ritual. Then but my favorite translation is the one by David Feldshuh, who translated it radically. I quote that line: "For Creon's law I would bow to it if a husband or a son had died. I would let their bodies rot in the steaming dust, unburied and alone." So, I would let their bodies rot. This is not just the statement of the fact that okay there is an unburied corpse there I would ignore it. It’s an active stance like I would let them rot. So we can see here how Antigone is the very opposite of this Judith Butler humanist world ethic stance of just This is basically although I like her book, *Antigone's Claim*, her universal liberal humanist, she was mad when I once characterized her as that, stance. You know most of us get proper funeral but there are those on the edge half excluded and this is a typical liberal project, let’s bring them all in, let all the excluded who are not fully integrated let’s bring them in, they also deserve it. No Antigone is not saying this. She does not enact a universal rule that covers everybody. Her point is not my god everybody even a criminal like Polynices deserves a proper burial. No, she said I don’t care about everybody. I would let them rot. It’s only for Polynices that I am doing it. So although then there are attempts then to save Antigone for our ethics, claiming that nonetheless she is universal, like her special case is Polynices but every Polynices every evil guy had somebody who may maybe probably loved him or her. So basically all deaths are exceptions. I don't think we can read Antigone like this. To put it very simply Antigone must have been aware that for hundreds at least who died in the battle for the city, don't forget Polynices was a traitor who attacked the city of Thebe, the same holds as for Polynices and she ignores them. Plus her reasoning is very strange. If her husband or her child were to die she would let let them rot only because she would be able to replace them. Why should respect for the dead be unconditional only for those who cannot be replaced? Doesn't the procedure of replacement she evokes, she can find another husband, breed another child, strangely ignore the uniqueness of each person? Why should another husband be able to replace a husband whom she probably would love in his singularity? So but okay that's another problem let me conclude. The fact so remains that Antigone does what Antigone does is something quite unique. Her universal rule is not everybody deserve to be properly buried and then applied to particularity oh my god Polynices also. No, her universal rule is let the bodies rot. And she fully honors the rule with only the exception of her particular case. The law that she obeys in properly burying Polynices is the law of exception and this is a very brutal law, far from any human reconciliation. Antigone makes here I think a kind of Hegelian step further with regard to the triad of law and its examples. She transposes the gap that separates examples ordinary examples from the law into law itself. We have law, ordinary examples, we should bury people and she says I don’t care about that. I only care about my unique exemplum, my brother. So just to conclude what’s my point here. Antigone’s big among the big translations sorry of Antigone, Hölderlin's is deservedly praised as unique. And one cannot but know how her exception, her readiness to perform the proper funeral of her brother, can be read in the light of a specific feature of Hölderlin's late poetry. You must know this. Instead of first describing a state of things and then mentioning the exception, things are like this but there is an exception, Hölderlin often begins a sentence or a line with aber, but, without noticing what’s the preceding general. He begins with aber. Like the famous example the famous lines from his hymn "Andenken": "Was bleibet aber stifle die Dichter." But poets establish what remains. The standard reading is of course here that after the events poets are able to perceive the situation from the mature standpoint, from a safe distance. However in Hölderlin there is nothing before but, just a nameless chaos and a world constructed by a poet emerges as a but, as an act of disturbing a chaotic void. And I think this should be a proper post-apocalyptic thinking. At the beginning is a but. But poets establish what remains, which means that poets sie stiften, a strophe, the opening line of a poem, which is what remains after what, after the catastrophe. In this sense Antigone’s choice of brother is I think an authentic primordial ethical act. It does not disturb a preceding universal ethical law. It just interrupts the pre-ethical chaos of letting them rot. The pre-ethical chaos is cut short by that's how Hölderlin probably would have imagined Antigone but aber mein Bruder, but my brother, and nothing before. Now you will say but is it not that Antigone's acts is so problematic because it does disturb a pre-existing order of customs? It's not chaos, it's Creon's state with its own laws. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from here. With her act, with her but, aber, Antigone herself devalues the preceding order of customs, reducing it to a chaos of rotting corpses. An act does not just introduce order into chaos, it simultaneously annihilates a preceding order denouncing it as a false mask of chaos. Today we need such acts more than ever. Today you begin thinking by saying okay we live in an apparent order but this order is really a chaos and we have to begin with aber, but, we can but is the beginning. Thank you very much for your patience. Please stop stop. I am here referring to did you see Chaplin’s Chaplin’s *The Great Dictator* where people applaud Hynkel Hitler and then Hitler makes "aah" and they stop applauding. I am tempted to act like this. Okay. Let me do some Q&A now, I owe it to you. Okay how do I do it with the let me put me ah thank you very much. It works? Yes no? Okay okay alles klar alles klar. Okay bitte? No no no not necessarily. Sie können natürlich Fragen auf Deutsch stellen, aber leider ist meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug um... Okay well I am just here... Ah again why do you speak no German? This is well... It's no problem for me my god. Yeah yeah but it might be a problem for some people. I should I should feel guilty for not speaking German here. No sorry can't do it. It's not possible. Also... Just don't tell me good manners. You're a bourgeois individual Mr. Yes bourgeois manners yes yes. Okay this is okay now that's the time to for the Q&A. Well you heard a talk that's difficult to summarize I won't even try. I mean this was at at some point we had the working titles of figures of the end. I mean we had here different sorts of endings of catastrophes of apocalypses, a sexual apocalypse, the end of philosophy, insanity etc. etc. and the also the food apocalypse. And on this anecdotes I mean we actually received a lot of very very good proposals and there was actually one proposal on food and the apocalypse. Think about it I mean it's really a topic. Ich habe nicht deine mit dir brauche ich manchmal ein deutscher Übersetzer. Sag's auf Deutsch. You see to avoid a misunderstanding that's my rule. I consider you my friend. And for me this hypocritical praising is always hypocrisy. The only form of true friendship is that I can be aggressive and we both know that our friendship will survive this. When somebody praises me I always suspect what is behind. Okay so since we we have resolved this one so this is sorry I told you when we the people take over he will get I lowered his sentence to three years of of this Zwangsarbeit. Yeah yeah this is I think it was again more time yesterday it was less. Four years. You asked a question that you are not allowed you got one year more. Sorry that's my... Okay this is not about me this is about Slavoj Žižek and you. So comments and questions. Just then there you see the microphone here. I mean if you have if you want to say something I mean you have to walk up to it I mean that's also due to the regulations we have. Okay. Somebody? Yeah. Please be as aggressive as you can and this is not a rhetorical point you know like... Mr. Žižek what in your opinion what’s the greatest depiction of apocalypse in general of all time in cinema? In cinema? Hmm yeah. This is a good point it’s the obvious answer but I did something extremely perverted about it. I saw it as an optimist movie, Lars von Trier Melancholia. Melancholia great movie. It’s an optimist movie good news this disgusting human race disappears from the earth. There will be a nice peaceful universe after that. I really think that it has the movie a very refined ending. You remember when the ethical heroine played by Kirsten Dunst built a kind of imaginary tent enclosed space just with four sticks and says to the other two we are safe here. It’s a very refined gesture because it’s not a false consolation. They all know they will die. But she constructs what in politically correct jargon is they like to use the term but in a wrong way safe space. It’s not that you are safe in this sense it’s simply more in an almost Buddhist sense a space of inner freedom, a space of to refer to other apocalyptic movies a space of undeadness. You are alive but already as alive you are dead. So I always had this tendency if we talk okay this is not apocalypse this is horror movies. An American friend of mine developed I plagiarized him a good point about the opposition between vampires and zombies. Vampires are reactionary. They live among us they are usually rich noblemen. Zombies are the working class. They just and so I think the true class struggle in horror literature is vampires versus zombies. That's why I shocked my friend who played in Harry Potter movies, I hope you saw the last one where the bad guys attack that stupid school and so on and I said at that Hogwarts whatever and I said it's the wrong end of the movie. The bad guy played without nose by played by Ralph Fiennes, this is the working class rebellion. They should kill them all my god you know. I will turn around the movie. So to go back there are not many good catastrophe films. The ones I like are more this type of how should I call them modest even B-level catastrophe. No big space battles catastrophes and so on but where you think life goes on just. Then you notice my god but something is strange in this city you know. That type of movies where you know what this reminds me of. I’m very solidary with Palestinians on the West Bank but at the same time my god I know what is anti-Semitism. And what shocked me is how in my country ordinary normal people she was a communist my mother who is already dead, how I noticed her anti-Semitism. She was very friendly with Jews there was an old lady her best friend. And once she had some I don't know even who borrowed money from whom but when this lady they counted some money left our apartment my mother just turned to me and said she is a nice lady this old Jewish kind woman but did you notice in what strange intense way she counted the money. Ah ah ah. This was the sign that she is an alien you know. That's why in good apocalyptic movies the aliens are not big frogs on what. I love those movies who they are like us there is just one detail. In some movies they have too much skin between fingers or some strange sign here that you identify them. So this is the the apocalypse movies. Although I must say that I even like *The Day After Tomorrow* by your great compatriot Roland Emmerich. Isn't that a you remember a beautiful scene where things are turned around because United States are in a new ice age Americans wait for entrance to Mexico you know and... I like them but again they you know what I hate sorry I will stop immediately I talk too much. I hate these pseudo-apocalyptic movies which between the lines are the worst kind of utopia where the post-apocalyptic world is the same world as ours just without the Jewish capitalist foreigner excess it’s like zero level honest good capitalism. These are the worst like the one which deservedly failed, Kevin Costner's *The Postman*. It’s the most stupidly patriarchal civilization ends and United States just divide small community and what Kevin Costner does he finds an old uniform of a postman and pretends that United States still exist. He simply starts carrying did you see it carrying post from one to the other. This is for me the reactionary apocalypse. Sorry I talk too much. Okay so I I have to warn you I mean this is this Q we will never get through... No you have to warn me more to be honest I speak too much. To warn you? Yes. Hi. On your concluding point when you were referring to the Antigone story where she was explicitly rejecting an order and turning it into chaos or not chaos specifically but rather rejecting it as an order and just saying oh this is just a mask for chaos you then spoke about how she said "aber mein Bruder." No she didn't say this this is my read. Well okay that's how you might... Yeah yeah yeah yeah. You then spoke of how people should be doing this more often this kind of proclamation of but my brother. I don't exactly know where you're trying to go with that. I will give you another example. I hope you will I’m not I’m not advocating particularism here. I think that the proper political gesture is then to gradually universalize this aber itself, changing it into Hegelian terms more authentic concrete universality. Let me give you another very simple example. In United States although I’m often viewed as suspicious by politically correct jerks I was always for Black Lives Matter. Because the liberal answer to them is this naive you know anti-Antigone. But why only Black Lives Matter? Don't all lives matter? No. If you say today in the United States all lives matter, the universality is already overdetermined colored by middle-class white values. Paradoxically if you say all lives matter you are exclusionary. If you say Black Lives Matter you opened up a way for effectively all universality without exceptions. You know who knew this although they screwed it up later when the greatest event for me maybe greater than French Revolution Toussaint Louverture Haiti Revolution, where then later in they wrote a new constitution of Haiti. And you know how it defines the citizens of Haiti in this Black Lives Matter sense? All citizens
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of
of
Slavoj Žižek
Haiti independently of the color of their skin are black. Excellent. That's what we want. Everybody can be there but no, it will no longer be white standard, it will be black standard, not
Haiti independently of the color of their skin are black. Excellent. That's what we want. Everybody can be there but no, it will no longer be white standard, it will be black standard, not
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not because blacks are now the new masters more.
not because blacks are now the new masters more.
Slavoj Žižek
But I also take very seriously these new theoreticians
But I also take very seriously these new theoreticians
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who follow
who follow
Slavoj Žižek
some lines of of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, the
some lines of of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, the
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so-called Afro-pessimists. They have a very authentic
so-called Afro-pessimists. They have a very authentic
Slavoj Žižek
message that they are a certain zero level level. The racism against blacks is much
message that they are a certain zero level level. The racism against blacks is much
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more substantial
more substantial
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than our racism against Latinos and so
than our racism against Latinos and so
Slavoj Žižek
on and so on and we have to again to go through that zero point. Sorry it was
on and so on and we have to again to go through that zero point. Sorry it was
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but I was also a little bit shorter than before so moving in the right direction. And that's why also incidentally sorry my hero is Malcolm X he was a Hegelian genius. You know Malcolm X you know how he read the X not as oh we were deprived by our family roots let’s return to them, he explicitly wrote Malcolm X because we are deprived of our original African roots, we are in a unique position to be in the void to build a new more authentic universality. He wasn't an idiot. He was a much deeper thinker than than than Martin Luther King I think. Malcolm X. But
but I was also a little bit shorter than before so moving in the right direction. And that's why also incidentally sorry my hero is Malcolm X he was a Hegelian genius. You know Malcolm X you know how he read the X not as oh we were deprived by our family roots let’s return to them, he explicitly wrote Malcolm X because we are deprived of our original African roots, we are in a unique position to be in the void to build a new more authentic universality. He wasn't an idiot. He was a much deeper thinker than than than Martin Luther King I think. Malcolm X. But
Slavoj Žižek
okay that's another story. Ich folge ihrer Bitte auf Deutsch zu sprechen wenn es in Ordnung ist. Bitte endlich. Ja. Ich habe eine Frage. Wie stehen für Sie die Begriffe des Guten und des Bösen im Zusammenhang zu Apokalypse und Post-Apokalypse, da ich mich bei Ihren Ausführungen über Antigone gewundert habe, als es hieß, dass sie für sich eine Ausnahme macht für ihren Bruder und ihn
okay that's another story. Ich folge ihrer Bitte auf Deutsch zu sprechen wenn es in Ordnung ist. Bitte endlich. Ja. Ich habe eine Frage. Wie stehen für Sie die Begriffe des Guten und des Bösen im Zusammenhang zu Apokalypse und Post-Apokalypse, da ich mich bei Ihren Ausführungen über Antigone gewundert habe, als es hieß, dass sie für sich eine Ausnahme macht für ihren Bruder und ihn
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beerdigen möchte, dass gerade dieses Für-sich-eine-Ausnahme-Machen
beerdigen möchte, dass gerade dieses Für-sich-eine-Ausnahme-Machen
Slavoj Žižek
quasi eine Art Stiftungsakt des Ethischen darstellt Ihrer Interpretation zufolge, während
quasi eine Art Stiftungsakt des Ethischen darstellt Ihrer Interpretation zufolge, während
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ja gerade bei Kant in der Religionsschrift es heißt, dass das Böse ja gerade sei, für sich eine
ja gerade bei Kant in der Religionsschrift es heißt, dass das Böse ja gerade sei, für sich eine
Slavoj Žižek
Ausnahme zu machen vom universalen Gesetz, also vom Moralgesetz
Ausnahme zu machen vom universalen Gesetz, also vom Moralgesetz
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und das mittels... Be careful here because you know as you kindly mentioned in my younger years which means years before not only me but also Alenka Zupančič published by Suhrkamp, it's still reprinted, *Kant mit Lacan* oder was a very good reading of Kant. Kant is much
und das mittels... Be careful here because you know as you kindly mentioned in my younger years which means years before not only me but also Alenka Zupančič published by Suhrkamp, it's still reprinted, *Kant mit Lacan* oder was a very good reading of Kant. Kant is much
Slavoj Žižek
more ambiguous here. I know Kant... Oh ich wollte hinaus. Ah bitte bitte. Dann bitte bringen Sie die Frage zu End. Genau. Und dieses Für-sich-eine-Ausnahme-Machen fußt ja auf einer sogenannten intelligiblen Tat in der man seinen moralischen Charakter sozusagen bestimmt hat und sozusagen auch eine Art
more ambiguous here. I know Kant... Oh ich wollte hinaus. Ah bitte bitte. Dann bitte bringen Sie die Frage zu End. Genau. Und dieses Für-sich-eine-Ausnahme-Machen fußt ja auf einer sogenannten intelligiblen Tat in der man seinen moralischen Charakter sozusagen bestimmt hat und sozusagen auch eine Art
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Entscheidung
Entscheidung
Slavoj Žižek
gebracht hat zwischen Gut und Böse und sich für das Böse entschieden hat und dass dann quasi jeder Mensch sich eigentlich notwendig immer schon fürs Böse entschieden hat, wie auch Schelling in der Freiheitsschrift letzten Endes behaupten musste, dass die Geburt des Bösen eigentlich auch die Geburt des Geistes sei. Aber diese moralische Konnotation und auch Heidegger lässt sie dann in seiner Vorlesung über Schelling eigentlich weg, wird ja auch von Ihnen eher weggelassen. Muss man sagen Moralität ist da eher so das vermeintlich Gute einer alten bestehend habenden Ordnung wird durch ein neues Gutes ersetzt und wird dann retrospektiv als böse an angesehen, also sind sozusagen Moralität bloß eben Sitte, Brauch, oder gehört zu diesem stiftenden Akt zu diesem "aber" doch auch irgendwie ein Sinn von Gut und Böse? You know what would be I don't have the time but it's a wonderful question because it touches the crucial point. You know where I think Kant breaks down. Not so much in *Kritik der praktischen Vernunft* but in his *Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft* where he introduces the notion which would have been the authentic one of radikal böse. This is for him he he proposes it for a brief moment as an evil act which formally responds to the definition of the good. For Kant good is something that you don't do for any pathological reasons, for Kant pathological is not pathology simply for any particular happiness, glory whatever. You do it just for the sake of it, in the same way that for Kant you do duty just for the sake of duty. And then Kant gets afraid of this because if you accept the hypothesis in this sense of radikal böse, or he even mentions once the term dämonisch demoniac evil, then in some sense formally the evil is indistinguishable from the good because it fits the same formal category, it's done just for the sake of it. So then Kant imperceptibly redefines radikal böse not as this pure ethically evil act where you don't do it for profit or anything just for he replaces it with radically evil in the sense of an eternal propensity of human spirit to do things for pathological reasons and so on, you know. Although at his time in Romanticism with Byron and so on, this demoniac evil precisely in this sense that you do it just for the sake of it, was already circulating. For example Edgar Allan Poe’s short story "The Imp of the Perversity" is precisely about the one. So what I think is that we should go here and Hegel does it. For Hegel, it’s not that we have das Gute and then fall into evil. No, das Gute ist universalized evil. Evil which wins over other particular evils. I think this this is the true Hegel. So I think that you can even do it I like theological debates. You know I debated with many priests monks and so on and I always ask them this most evil naive question. One question is of course when Christ is suffering of the on the cross is he bluffing or not? And it's a very serious question because if he is bluffing then God in himself was divided. Like how could he Christ remember is not a a messiah of God he is God embodied. How could he really suffer? That’s why incidentally the early heresies were all about Gnostic heresies about how Christ it’s an extremely disgusting interpretation of Christianity, Christ was just bluffing to suffer for the people there in reality his spirit was
gebracht hat zwischen Gut und Böse und sich für das Böse entschieden hat und dass dann quasi jeder Mensch sich eigentlich notwendig immer schon fürs Böse entschieden hat, wie auch Schelling in der Freiheitsschrift letzten Endes behaupten musste, dass die Geburt des Bösen eigentlich auch die Geburt des Geistes sei. Aber diese moralische Konnotation und auch Heidegger lässt sie dann in seiner Vorlesung über Schelling eigentlich weg, wird ja auch von Ihnen eher weggelassen. Muss man sagen Moralität ist da eher so das vermeintlich Gute einer alten bestehend habenden Ordnung wird durch ein neues Gutes ersetzt und wird dann retrospektiv als böse an angesehen, also sind sozusagen Moralität bloß eben Sitte, Brauch, oder gehört zu diesem stiftenden Akt zu diesem "aber" doch auch irgendwie ein Sinn von Gut und Böse? You know what would be I don't have the time but it's a wonderful question because it touches the crucial point. You know where I think Kant breaks down. Not so much in *Kritik der praktischen Vernunft* but in his *Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft* where he introduces the notion which would have been the authentic one of radikal böse. This is for him he he proposes it for a brief moment as an evil act which formally responds to the definition of the good. For Kant good is something that you don't do for any pathological reasons, for Kant pathological is not pathology simply for any particular happiness, glory whatever. You do it just for the sake of it, in the same way that for Kant you do duty just for the sake of duty. And then Kant gets afraid of this because if you accept the hypothesis in this sense of radikal böse, or he even mentions once the term dämonisch demoniac evil, then in some sense formally the evil is indistinguishable from the good because it fits the same formal category, it's done just for the sake of it. So then Kant imperceptibly redefines radikal böse not as this pure ethically evil act where you don't do it for profit or anything just for he replaces it with radically evil in the sense of an eternal propensity of human spirit to do things for pathological reasons and so on, you know. Although at his time in Romanticism with Byron and so on, this demoniac evil precisely in this sense that you do it just for the sake of it, was already circulating. For example Edgar Allan Poe’s short story "The Imp of the Perversity" is precisely about the one. So what I think is that we should go here and Hegel does it. For Hegel, it’s not that we have das Gute and then fall into evil. No, das Gute ist universalized evil. Evil which wins over other particular evils. I think this this is the true Hegel. So I think that you can even do it I like theological debates. You know I debated with many priests monks and so on and I always ask them this most evil naive question. One question is of course when Christ is suffering of the on the cross is he bluffing or not? And it's a very serious question because if he is bluffing then God in himself was divided. Like how could he Christ remember is not a a messiah of God he is God embodied. How could he really suffer? That’s why incidentally the early heresies were all about Gnostic heresies about how Christ it’s an extremely disgusting interpretation of Christianity, Christ was just bluffing to suffer for the people there in reality his spirit was
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above them and some of them even say ah he was like
above them and some of them even say ah he was like
Slavoj Žižek
look
look
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the idiots down there whatever. Or if you say this again that Christ was not suffering then you have a cynical spectacle staged by God you know. And again another question in this direction is the wonderful topic of Felix Culpa, the heavy fall. This means it's obvious that in Paradise God was cheating like crazy. He consciously pushed Eve and Adam to sin. Listen, you prohibit to eat from the from the tree of knowledge,
the idiots down there whatever. Or if you say this again that Christ was not suffering then you have a cynical spectacle staged by God you know. And again another question in this direction is the wonderful topic of Felix Culpa, the heavy fall. This means it's obvious that in Paradise God was cheating like crazy. He consciously pushed Eve and Adam to sin. Listen, you prohibit to eat from the from the tree of knowledge,
Slavoj Žižek
the apple. Thanks very much why did then God put this tree in the very middle of Paradise for everybody to see. It’s clearly that he because God was aware Hegel reads him like that, that fall into evil is the beginning of humanity. You it was it was a fake choice. It was a very cruel act by God. Some like Augustine try to save this in a hypocritical way by saying that God calculated and discovered that okay there will be many evil but the overall you know like some idiots who try to save Stalinism at say okay there were crimes millions died but overall picture is nonetheless positive of socialism you know. No no no I think that God fully accept this is why I like those Gnostics who claim that God the Father is simply Devil himself. And the death of Christ is in a way the apology of God for all the evil God has brought to this earth. So in this sense I’m not now let me be very clear here, I’m not a relativist here and I’m not preaching any retroactive Aufhebung in the sense of I know some desperate Jews even accept this because they are so afraid of meaninglessness that they claim even Holocaust has a deeper meaning, it gave us the state of Israel because without Holocaust there wouldn't be sympathy. I totally reject this logic of direct theo- I think catastrophes genuinely happen and sometimes it’s contingent. We may profit of them by apocalyptic revelation but even Hegel doesn't say all catastrophes has a deeper meaning. For example think about Mongols. The nightmare they destroyed half of Europe Arab civilization and so on and Hegel never says oh this was a moment in the progress of of since then. No, I think Hegel is truly a much more a radical pessimist. Since we are talking about higher powers I mean this is there’s powers higher and you embody the higher power that's your point. No no no no no no. Maybe I'm also just bluffing. Okay we we have to if and this I can say this in German... the question and answer stay
the apple. Thanks very much why did then God put this tree in the very middle of Paradise for everybody to see. It’s clearly that he because God was aware Hegel reads him like that, that fall into evil is the beginning of humanity. You it was it was a fake choice. It was a very cruel act by God. Some like Augustine try to save this in a hypocritical way by saying that God calculated and discovered that okay there will be many evil but the overall you know like some idiots who try to save Stalinism at say okay there were crimes millions died but overall picture is nonetheless positive of socialism you know. No no no I think that God fully accept this is why I like those Gnostics who claim that God the Father is simply Devil himself. And the death of Christ is in a way the apology of God for all the evil God has brought to this earth. So in this sense I’m not now let me be very clear here, I’m not a relativist here and I’m not preaching any retroactive Aufhebung in the sense of I know some desperate Jews even accept this because they are so afraid of meaninglessness that they claim even Holocaust has a deeper meaning, it gave us the state of Israel because without Holocaust there wouldn't be sympathy. I totally reject this logic of direct theo- I think catastrophes genuinely happen and sometimes it’s contingent. We may profit of them by apocalyptic revelation but even Hegel doesn't say all catastrophes has a deeper meaning. For example think about Mongols. The nightmare they destroyed half of Europe Arab civilization and so on and Hegel never says oh this was a moment in the progress of of since then. No, I think Hegel is truly a much more a radical pessimist. Since we are talking about higher powers I mean this is there’s powers higher and you embody the higher power that's your point. No no no no no no. Maybe I'm also just bluffing. Okay we we have to if and this I can say this in German... the question and answer stay
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short then we have a maximum of two people still. Okay but Kurz cannot be too Klein you know what everybody in Slovenia laughed. You know that in ordinary Slovene the word Kurz is an extremely vulgar expression for penis. So when it was in our newspapers Kurz visited Slovenia ha ha ha. So I would say when we say Kurz short not too short. Okay please. Would you consider modernity and pluralism as the downfall of
short then we have a maximum of two people still. Okay but Kurz cannot be too Klein you know what everybody in Slovenia laughed. You know that in ordinary Slovene the word Kurz is an extremely vulgar expression for penis. So when it was in our newspapers Kurz visited Slovenia ha ha ha. So I would say when we say Kurz short not too short. Okay please. Would you consider modernity and pluralism as the downfall of
Slavoj Žižek
stability? No. No I'm absolutely I follow here like Adorno he somewhere quotes this famous line in a letter I think by Arthur Rimbaud "Il faut être absolument moderne." I I think that yes modernity was a catastrophe, it's a horrible story what it did. But I'm a pessimist but before it was just another
stability? No. No I'm absolutely I follow here like Adorno he somewhere quotes this famous line in a letter I think by Arthur Rimbaud "Il faut être absolument moderne." I I think that yes modernity was a catastrophe, it's a horrible story what it did. But I'm a pessimist but before it was just another
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version of the same shit. I mean that's why as a feminist I don't believe in these stories of happy matriarchate and so on. Don't mix matriarchate with the actual role of women in matriarchal society. I read a wonderful study of some tribe in not even New Zealand New Guinea there where it appears matriarchal. The central sacred space is uhh it’s built in the form of a big vagina. So uhh matriarchy. Yeah but then you discover that only men have access to this and so on, not women and so on. You know I'm just a more radical pessimist and that's why I hope this will satisfy you. I am absolutely for retroactivity here. The most disgusting historicism is to say listen but okay we cannot judge the past with our standards. No in some sense we should. We shouldn't say okay it
version of the same shit. I mean that's why as a feminist I don't believe in these stories of happy matriarchate and so on. Don't mix matriarchate with the actual role of women in matriarchal society. I read a wonderful study of some tribe in not even New Zealand New Guinea there where it appears matriarchal. The central sacred space is uhh it’s built in the form of a big vagina. So uhh matriarchy. Yeah but then you discover that only men have access to this and so on, not women and so on. You know I'm just a more radical pessimist and that's why I hope this will satisfy you. I am absolutely for retroactivity here. The most disgusting historicism is to say listen but okay we cannot judge the past with our standards. No in some sense we should. We shouldn't say okay it
Slavoj Žižek
was nice to torture slaves it was part of their culture. No if we look at it closely women always rebelled just of oppressed slaves always rebelled. So I don't like this historicist approach. Let's not impose on others our standards. No we absolutely have the right and duty to do it. Just be careful that it's not only our West European standards but here this is even I'm not ashamed to say my Habermasian aspect you know. I hate this moral relativism who are we to judge and so on. I think that this topic of but we are all caught in our particular identities, how do we know that we are in universality. It’s a false problem. The point is that we are not even purely particular. Our particular identity is always split subverted and so on and so on. The pro- global capitalism means that we are much more universal already. Global capitalism is authentically universal. Take a Chinese and guy and a Latino American guy and a European. They they may be caught each in his her own world but when they exchange things on the market it perfectly works. That’s why again I’m universalist not just in the sense our long-term goal but that's the great thing about capitalism. It is not the good universality but it’s and don’t even even I even that’s why I don’t accept this primitive critique pseudo-Marxist of human rights they are just a mask of Western exploitation. Yes they were at the beginning but the universal form immediately triggered a process you know Mary Wollstonecraft women said hey hey sorry human rights why not us. Then blacks in Haiti said workers and so on. So that's Marxian dialectic. Form matters. Marx was never this primitive reductionist. Enough. Okay how do they say in Vienna? I have spoken. This is really the last question. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Ah can’t we go don’t be that hypocritical leftist. You know what my leftist friends use they say we could go on but there is a cleaning lady who has to do the cleaning and go home and so on. I am also sorry for these people who have to clean... Yeah yeah but now I will be a Marxist hypocrite. I'm sure that these people would be ready to sacrifice themselves for me to spread a progressive word. Okay please. Um so my question is perhaps to some extent a bit of a challenge. I’m wondering if we can consider the encounter with people with cognitive disabilities or even severe cognitive disabilities in our modern Western hyper-cognitive age as an encounter to some extent with what we want to object from and in that sense apocalyptic or perhaps catastrophic. And the reason I wanted to sort of bring this into fore is because we can also use the sort of it doesn't have to be escape I want to take it seriously but we can also sort of look to the big sort of ecological crisis kind of things and be you know catastrophize about this but this can also be a almost projective identification from the thing we’re trying to hide from which is that we’re faced with our own fragility, frailty, death, and in our autonomistic sort of culture and individualistic individualistic culture you know we don’t want to see what is almost the in-breaking of a life which we don’t want to accept is true of ourselves which is coming which would be Alzheimer’s other things like that. Um so I wanted to just ask you if you think cognitive disability in some sense can be seen apocalyptically or catastrophically and then as an adjunct to that question the question of psychoanalysis then becomes I think difficult and interesting because you have to then really make a distinction between
was nice to torture slaves it was part of their culture. No if we look at it closely women always rebelled just of oppressed slaves always rebelled. So I don't like this historicist approach. Let's not impose on others our standards. No we absolutely have the right and duty to do it. Just be careful that it's not only our West European standards but here this is even I'm not ashamed to say my Habermasian aspect you know. I hate this moral relativism who are we to judge and so on. I think that this topic of but we are all caught in our particular identities, how do we know that we are in universality. It’s a false problem. The point is that we are not even purely particular. Our particular identity is always split subverted and so on and so on. The pro- global capitalism means that we are much more universal already. Global capitalism is authentically universal. Take a Chinese and guy and a Latino American guy and a European. They they may be caught each in his her own world but when they exchange things on the market it perfectly works. That’s why again I’m universalist not just in the sense our long-term goal but that's the great thing about capitalism. It is not the good universality but it’s and don’t even even I even that’s why I don’t accept this primitive critique pseudo-Marxist of human rights they are just a mask of Western exploitation. Yes they were at the beginning but the universal form immediately triggered a process you know Mary Wollstonecraft women said hey hey sorry human rights why not us. Then blacks in Haiti said workers and so on. So that's Marxian dialectic. Form matters. Marx was never this primitive reductionist. Enough. Okay how do they say in Vienna? I have spoken. This is really the last question. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Ah can’t we go don’t be that hypocritical leftist. You know what my leftist friends use they say we could go on but there is a cleaning lady who has to do the cleaning and go home and so on. I am also sorry for these people who have to clean... Yeah yeah but now I will be a Marxist hypocrite. I'm sure that these people would be ready to sacrifice themselves for me to spread a progressive word. Okay please. Um so my question is perhaps to some extent a bit of a challenge. I’m wondering if we can consider the encounter with people with cognitive disabilities or even severe cognitive disabilities in our modern Western hyper-cognitive age as an encounter to some extent with what we want to object from and in that sense apocalyptic or perhaps catastrophic. And the reason I wanted to sort of bring this into fore is because we can also use the sort of it doesn't have to be escape I want to take it seriously but we can also sort of look to the big sort of ecological crisis kind of things and be you know catastrophize about this but this can also be a almost projective identification from the thing we’re trying to hide from which is that we’re faced with our own fragility, frailty, death, and in our autonomistic sort of culture and individualistic individualistic culture you know we don’t want to see what is almost the in-breaking of a life which we don’t want to accept is true of ourselves which is coming which would be Alzheimer’s other things like that. Um so I wanted to just ask you if you think cognitive disability in some sense can be seen apocalyptically or catastrophically and then as an adjunct to that question the question of psychoanalysis then becomes I think difficult and interesting because you have to then really make a distinction between
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madness and disability. And I think limit the limit in disability can give you this surplus within which you can have a creative something so life with it you know almost something productive like almost the limit which
madness and disability. And I think limit the limit in disability can give you this surplus within which you can have a creative something so life with it you know almost something productive like almost the limit which
Slavoj Žižek
you have in the sublime. I think what's ignored perhaps with disability or limit is that actually it's a chance for creativity a chance for something else maybe even beyond so to
you have in the sublime. I think what's ignored perhaps with disability or limit is that actually it's a chance for creativity a chance for something else maybe even beyond so to
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speak but it’s
speak but it’s
Slavoj Žižek
material. Um but I’m wondering if you think it’s possible psychoanalytically to actually make the distinction between the Eudaimonia or demonic in that sense. Surely this is a real hermeneutical issue in the psycho- psychoanalytic method. Yeah but thanks for the great question again. I don’t have full time to ah you know what would be my answer that authentic psychoanalysis is always immanently critical. Look it’s which which is the crucial hermeneutic point in psychoanalysis. Even Foucault a great critic of psychoanalysis knew this. You go to a psychiatrist and like will he say don't worry go on you are normal or does he or she your analyst consider you have real symptoms you need a treatment? And of course these criteria are culturally specific. And Freud knew this and I will tell you a funny example but absolutely true that I learned in Latin America when I was that married for two years in around in Argentina. That in when first wave of European psychoanalyst immigrated there, fidelity to your spouse, husband, wife, was considered normal. So if you cheated serially your partner it was considered a pathology. What trauma are you escaping from and so on. Now the situation is the opposite. If you’re faithful to your partner they say oh this must be a traumatic fixation you need a treatment. If you jump a you know and Freud’s answer is very clear here, *Unbehagen in der Kultur*. There is a constitutive pathology in culture formations at least until now as such. That every symptom is not a deviation from a culture. Here it’s a formal parallel between psychoanalysis and Marx. For Marx also crises are not deviations of normal functioning of
material. Um but I’m wondering if you think it’s possible psychoanalytically to actually make the distinction between the Eudaimonia or demonic in that sense. Surely this is a real hermeneutical issue in the psycho- psychoanalytic method. Yeah but thanks for the great question again. I don’t have full time to ah you know what would be my answer that authentic psychoanalysis is always immanently critical. Look it’s which which is the crucial hermeneutic point in psychoanalysis. Even Foucault a great critic of psychoanalysis knew this. You go to a psychiatrist and like will he say don't worry go on you are normal or does he or she your analyst consider you have real symptoms you need a treatment? And of course these criteria are culturally specific. And Freud knew this and I will tell you a funny example but absolutely true that I learned in Latin America when I was that married for two years in around in Argentina. That in when first wave of European psychoanalyst immigrated there, fidelity to your spouse, husband, wife, was considered normal. So if you cheated serially your partner it was considered a pathology. What trauma are you escaping from and so on. Now the situation is the opposite. If you’re faithful to your partner they say oh this must be a traumatic fixation you need a treatment. If you jump a you know and Freud’s answer is very clear here, *Unbehagen in der Kultur*. There is a constitutive pathology in culture formations at least until now as such. That every symptom is not a deviation from a culture. Here it’s a formal parallel between psychoanalysis and Marx. For Marx also crises are not deviations of normal functioning of
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capital. Crises are the
capital. Crises are the
Slavoj Žižek
moment of truth. And in the same sense for for Freud to understand human being you must begin with potential madness symptoms and so on and so on. That’s the basic lesson of Freud to become normal
moment of truth. And in the same sense for for Freud to understand human being you must begin with potential madness symptoms and so on and so on. That’s the basic lesson of Freud to become normal
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heterosexual is not
heterosexual is not
Slavoj Žižek
a natural evolution. It’s that’s the whole point of Freud
a natural evolution. It’s that’s the whole point of Freud
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on all that stuff you know symbolic castration trauma Oedipus. It’s a very traumatic violent process. So in this sense I think psychoanalysis can be successful because when it analyzes a
on all that stuff you know symbolic castration trauma Oedipus. It’s a very traumatic violent process. So in this sense I think psychoanalysis can be successful because when it analyzes a
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symptom, that's the whole meaning of Freud's *Unbehagen in der Kultur* self, its first question is always but this symptom is never just an individual aberration. It’s the sign of what is wrong in this culture itself, in its universality. And this I think can be helpful in the sense of even if you look I know all these multicultural stories like the standard reproach to psychoanalysis in Japan is that sorry when Freud talks about Verneinung, you say this is not my mother ah so it is your
symptom, that's the whole meaning of Freud's *Unbehagen in der Kultur* self, its first question is always but this symptom is never just an individual aberration. It’s the sign of what is wrong in this culture itself, in its universality. And this I think can be helpful in the sense of even if you look I know all these multicultural stories like the standard reproach to psychoanalysis in Japan is that sorry when Freud talks about Verneinung, you say this is not my mother ah so it is your
Slavoj Žižek
mother and so on. A friend psychoanalyst told me but in Japan it's complicated because in our polite society we have thirty ways to say no you know. In it’s totally different. So I’m saying that I see your problem but I think that authentic psychoanalysis, not its Anglo-Saxon but not only there normalization can give a convincing reply to your worry I think. Thank you very much.
mother and so on. A friend psychoanalyst told me but in Japan it's complicated because in our polite society we have thirty ways to say no you know. In it’s totally different. So I’m saying that I see your problem but I think that authentic psychoanalysis, not its Anglo-Saxon but not only there normalization can give a convincing reply to your worry I think. Thank you very much.