Confronting Humanity & The Post-Modern
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009 · 2:04:53 · 18,031 words
cinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalideologyfascism-populismtechnology-ai-cyberspaceconsciousness-mindhistorycommunism-socialism
An informal seminar discussion in which Žižek ranges across Nazi cinema (Chaplin's Great Dictator, Leni Riefenstahl, Veit Harlan), the institutional history of psychoanalysis under fascism, and extensive close readings of Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds) set against Dziga Vertov's Soviet formalism. The philosophical core is a sustained critical engagement with Alain Badiou's ontology of event and world, Žižek proposes supplementing Badiou with a third level (anxiety/death drive) between the human animal and the event, arguing there is no 'pure' human animal since humanity is constitutively dislocated by drive. Subsidiary threads include Bolshevik machine-utopia and anti-sexuality, the Habermas–Sloterdijk biotechnology debate, brain–computer interfaces, and the ethics of political correctness.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “technological gnosis”
The contemporary transhumanist dream, shared with the Soviet 1920s machine-utopians, that technology will achieve immortality, digital upload of personal identity, and liberation from biological finitude.
The structural feature of Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho whereby the film could have ended at a natural closure point but instead a second incompatible narrative begins, creating an irreducible gap.
as “communist art”
Žižek's provocative description of cinema that operates not through explicit narrative but through a thickness of formal motifs reverberating beneath the surface, linking Hitchcock and Vertov.
as “divine-to-evil gaze”
Hitchcock's formal device in which an objective God's-point-of-view shot is suddenly subjectivized as the gaze of an evil or impossible subject, used in Psycho (Arbogast murder), The Birds, and Murder!.
Loss of reality triggered when intensity goes beyond what a world's transcendental constitution can sustain; Žižek illustrates it with the thought experiment of watching someone's eye being extracted.
In Badiou's phenomenology, a transcendentally constituted space with minimum and maximum intensities; Žižek supplements it with a point of excessive intensity that makes the world collapse.
The condition in which immanent intensity within a world exceeds the threshold of reality-constitution, producing a Realitätsverlust (loss of reality), illustrated by pornography's prohibition on combining emotional narrative with explicit sex.
as “maître et l'hystérique”
Lacan's couple of master and hysteric; Žižek self-deprecatingly assigns Badiou the role of master (the calm one) and himself the role of hysteric (constantly writing polemical pages against Badiou).
Badiou's measure of existence within a world; Žižek argues each world has a point of over-intensity, an immanent excess that dissolves the world itself, which Badiou does not theorize.
Badiou's concept of a rupture that exceeds a world's ontological coordinates; Žižek argues the first reaction to an event is always anxiety, not enthusiasm.
as “enthusiasm”
The obverse of anxiety and the authentic subjective response to the event; Žižek, revising Badiou's terror–anxiety–courage–justice schema, replaces 'justice' with enthusiasm as the term courage transforms anxiety into.
Lacan's object-cause of desire; invoked against Heidegger's claim that anxiety has no object, for Lacan anxiety does have an object, namely objet a.
Badiou's ethical category of sustained commitment to an event's consequences; Žižek agrees with this against cynical post-fantasy wisdom but questions how fidelity relates to the domain of being.
Althusser's mechanism of ideology constituting subjects by hailing them; Žižek adds that the first reaction to the 'Hey you!' call is anxiety ('Why me?'), not identification.
Žižek's polemical characterization of the division in Badiou between the vulgar human animal and the subject touched by the event's grace, a quasi-religious split Badiou himself would resist.
Badiou's name for the dominant ideology in which only bodies, languages, and pleasures exist; Žižek invokes it to characterize what Badiou's 'human animal' inhabits.
Badiou's term for ordinary human existence governed by the pleasure principle and democratic materialism, which Žižek critiques as a fiction, there is no pure human animal because humanity is already dislocated by the death drive.
as “being towards death”
Heidegger's Sein zum Tode; Žižek criticizes Badiou for reducing it to mere animal fear of dying, arguing it must be rehabilitated as structurally linked to the gap that makes us human.
Freud's concept of a beyond-pleasure-principle dislocation that for Žižek constitutes the gap between animal-animals and human beings, equivalent to Hegel's abyss of freedom and radical negativity.
German Idealism's term (Hegel/Schelling) for radical negativity that Žižek equates with Freud's death drive and the gap between animal-animals and human beings.
What Žižek calls the ordinary human animal's organized world: not the primary condition of humanity but a defensive imposition of order on the constitutive traumatic gap of the death drive.
For Lacan (following Freud) the only affect that does not deceive; Žižek claims it is the primordial reaction to any event, and that even those who deny an event are first struck by anxiety.
Lacan's concept of confronting the void behind the fantasy; Žižek criticizes the Lacanian reading of this as a singular, individual experience that returns one to illusion-laden ordinary life.
The post-ideological attitude of accepting 'a little corruption' after traversing the fantasy; Žižek rejects this stance (associated with Jacques-Alain Miller) as politically catastrophic.
Lacan's term for the decisive mark that organizes a symbolic field; Žižek equates it with Badiou's 'point' (le point) that decides yes/no in a world.
In Badiou's Logics of Worlds, the element of minimal existence whose reversal into maximal existence signals the collapse or transformation of a world; Žižek reads it as requiring a symbolic/signifying system.
Stories he reaches for 1
In Chaplin's film, the Lohengrin overture accompanies both Hynkel's globe-balloon dance and the Jewish barber's sentimental closing speech; Žižek argues this signals that the good-guy speech is structurally indistinguishable from what Hynkel would have said, fascism and anti-fascist sentimentality converge.
“Far more pessimistic one. It's that maybe the two are not so radically opposed, the good guy and the bad guy and so on, no?”
Works invoked 33
Vertigo film
Extended formal analysis: the spiral motif running throughout, the narrative duality gap that constitutes Hitchcock's genius, and the film as illustration of how cinema can be 'communist art' through formal background thickness.
Antigone play
Sophocles' tragedy; for Badiou the canonical text of terror and anxiety, tragic pessimism, the register Lacanians privilege but Žižek wants to move beyond.
Psycho film
The same narrative duality gap as Vertigo; Arbogast's murder analyzed for the divine-to-evil gaze transition; 'no tragic continuity between first and second part, another dimension brutally intrudes'.
Žižek's own book in which he quotes Trotsky's statement about reconstructing man and discusses the Soviet machine-utopia.
The Great Dictator film
Žižek uses the shared Lohengrin music for both Hynkel and the barber to argue for a darker reading: the film suggests good sentimentality and fascist sentimentality are structurally indistinguishable.
The Birds film
The Bodega Bay fire scene used to illustrate the divine-to-evil gaze shift accomplished within a single uncut shot as birds enter from behind.
Being and Event book
Badiou's major ontological work; Žižek's key target for critique: the idea that event is event only for those engaged in it, and the dualism of human animal / event.
Freud sent a signed copy to Mussolini as thanks for securing his exit from Vienna, 'from one great mind to another great mind'.
Logics of Worlds book
Badiou's phenomenological sequel; Žižek accepts the triple ontology with two provisos: no world exists outside language, and there must be a point of excessive intensity. He finds it closer to Deleuze than Badiou would admit.
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's attempt to combine hardcore explicitness with narrative emotional intensity; Žižek claims it doesn't fully work, hence its limited public success.
Ivan the Terrible film
Eisenstein's late masterpiece, invoked alongside Vertov's formal work as built on a recurring 'moment of rage', extra-intensity as formal organizing principle.
Chevengur book
Andrei Platonov's novel; linked by Žižek to the Soviet anti-sexual utopia current of the 1920s.
Contains the monkey/whiskey/gypsy joke that got Žižek attacked at Stanford for 'speciesism'.
Gone with the Wind film
The model Goebbels wanted to replicate with Kolberg, a mega-spectacle to give German soldiers new elan.
Looking Awry book
Žižek's second book; contains the Out of Africa / pornography thought experiment about over-intensity.
We book
Zamyatin's dystopian novel, 'the best science fiction novel', written from inside the Soviet system at the moment of the machine-utopia movement it depicts.
Opfergang film
Veit Harlan's melodrama about a wife who disguises herself as her dead husband to comfort his dying mistress; Žižek calls it 'one of the most effective melodramas I've ever seen' and has done detailed analysis of the final shot.
Sloterdijk's bestseller arguing the post-secular religious revival is really a new form of self-formation anthropology (practice, discipline, training); the Ron Hubbard analysis convinces Žižek.
Žižek's co-edited volume; mentioned as the place where he developed the analysis of Hitchcock's recurring falling-face / body-drop motif across films.
Kolberg film
Veit Harlan's 1945 Nazi epic commissioned by Goebbels; Žižek uses it as an emblem of ideological madness, soldiers withdrawn from the front to produce it, reels air-dropped into besieged La Rochelle.
Hitchcock's 1931 early talkie; 'a bit boring' but contains the first instance of the falling-head / body-drop formal mechanism later perfected in Psycho (Arbogast) and the divine-to-evil gaze.
Oresteia play
Aeschylus's trilogy; for Badiou it exemplifies the movement from terror/anxiety through courage to justice (enthusiasm in Žižek's revision), contrasted with Sophocles' tragic pessimism.
Out of Africa film
Žižek dislikes the film personally but uses it for the thought experiment: imagine the Redford-Streep love scene continued with explicit penetration, it would destroy the emotional intensity, proving the over-intensity prohibition.
Theory of Subject book
Žižek, following Bosteels, considers this Badiou's best and most radical book; Being and Event and Logics of Worlds are 'renormalizations' of its terrifying breakthrough, which already links anxiety to event via the Aeschylus–Sophocles opposition.
Triumph of the Will film
Žižek semi-defends Riefenstahl's self-description: the film actually contains minimal military propaganda and no anti-semitism, only promises of work, order, and stability.
Der ewige Jude film
Described as 'really disgusting', a fake-documentary about Jews using footage of ghetto conditions as 'proof' Jews live like rats, with geographical parallels to rat invasions; Žižek says even an anti-semite should become anti-anti-semitic after seeing it.
Adorno's 1957 attack on Lukács as a Stalinist conformist who 'confuses his chains with the world spirit'; Žižek finds it cynical given Lukács was literally imprisoned at that moment, in a CIA-financed journal.
Jud Süß film
Harlan's virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda film; Žižek has seen it but mentions it only as evidence that Harlan was 'the really bad guy'.
Out of This World book
Peter Hallward's critique of Deleuze; Žižek agrees with Hallward that its true target is Badiou, showing that event can be 'out of this world'.
By Paul Watzlawick; describes how human strategy can only be understood if we assume a compulsion to sabotage things when they go well, supports Žižek's claim that the death drive negates the happiness ideal.
Sloterdijk's text arguing biotechnology forces genuinely new ethical dilemmas; Žižek defends it against Habermas's 'slightly ridiculous' attack branding it neo-Nazi genetics.
Tiefland film
Riefenstahl's melodrama she prolonged for four or five years during WWII, Žižek reads this as a form of internal emigration to avoid producing further Nazi work.
Documentary in which Riefenstahl defends Triumph of the Will; Žižek uses her comments to partially support her self-defense.
People invoked 41
Sloterdijk's example of the central religious figure of the twentieth century: he wrote pulp sci-fi then repackaged it as religious truth, inverting the secular direction of desacralization.
Director of The Pervert's Guide; told Žižek his pornography analysis was outdated and introduced him to 'gonzo', interactive embedded pornography.
Michel Chion negative
Žižek's 'friend, the French guy'; Chion's optimistic reading of the shared Wagner music in The Great Dictator (nothing is unredeemable) is rejected in favor of a darker interpretation.
Mentioned as an intermediary in Freud's escape from Nazi Vienna, though Žižek corrects that the key intermediary was actually Mussolini.
Leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, from whose family Freud bought the Berggasse house; Dora's real name was Ida Bauer, showing Freud's personal links to socialist circles, suppressed by Jones's biography calling Bauer merely 'a journalist'.
Georg Lukács positive
Žižek defends Lukács against Adorno's attack as a Stalinist conformist: as Minister of Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic he created utopian cultural policy; he participated in the 1956 uprising, was imprisoned, and gave the pen-as-weapon gesture of intellectual heroism.
Žižek criticizes Adorno's 'Extorted Reconciliation' attack on Lukács as cynical: written while Lukács was literally in prison, published in a CIA-financed journal, 'a little bit cynical of Adorno'.
Jacques Lacan positive
Fundamental reference throughout: anxiety that does not deceive, objet a as object of anxiety (against Heidegger), the master-hysteric couple, traversing the fantasy, Žižek defends Lacan but criticizes the Lacanian political pessimism about collectivity.
Louis Althusser positive
Ideological interpellation ('Hey you!') used as basis for Žižek's argument that anxiety precedes identification in the constitution of subjects.
Referenced via Hallward's critique Out of This World and Badiou's intensities; Žižek notes that Badiou's Logics of Worlds moves him 'very close to Deleuze'.
Yevgeny Zamyatin positive
Author of We, described as the best science fiction novel, written from inside the Soviet system at the time of the machine-utopia movement.
Ernest Jones negative
Žižek calls him 'the bad guy of psychoanalytic movement': he negotiated a shameful deal with the Nazis, was an 'ultimate anti-communist conformist', lost his license in Toronto for abusing patients, and suppressed Freud's socialist connections in his biography.
Benedict XVI negative
Co-wrote a text with Habermas rejecting genetic manipulation on grounds of human dignity; Žižek rejects this position as impracticable.
Anthony Mann positive
Western director admired by both Rancière (who has published an essay on him) and Žižek; Žižek's other candidate is Delmer Daves.
Catherine Breillat negative
Her films Romance etc. try to combine hardcore explicitness with dramatic narrative intensity; Žižek claims this is why her commercial success is limited, the prohibition on simultaneous over-intensity is real.
Bruno Bosteels positive
Badiou's US deputy; his translation of and commentary on Theory of the Subject convinces Žižek that it remains Badiou's most radical book, and his reading of anxiety–event links is endorsed.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek's 'maybe best friend' and main philosophical interlocutor; he treats Badiou's event ontology as the most vital living philosophy but offers sustained critique: missing the third level of anxiety/death drive, the implicit linguisticity of 'worlds', and a residual gnostic dualism.
Andrei Platonov positive
Now being rediscovered as a great classic; his Chevengur is linked to the anti-sexual machine-utopia current of the 1920s Soviet Union.
François Furet negative
Exemplifies Badiou's category of liberal event-denial: treats the French Revolution as a misdirection of French history, reducing it to a non-event.
Leon Trotsky positive
Quoted for his arrogant 1920s statement about reconstructing man to 'say goodbye Homo sapiens'; credited as defending Freud against the anti-Freudian machine-utopians by writing to Pavlov.
First university psychoanalytic professor (appointed by Lukács in 1919); part of the Freudian left; Žižek finds him sympathetic but 'a little bit crazy' for reversing the analyst-patient roles.
Fredric Jameson positive
Provided Žižek with the argument about the irony of Adorno attacking Lukács exactly when Lukács was imprisoned for the 1956 uprising.
The Soviet machine-utopians sought Pavlov's conditional-reflex psychology as scientific backing for their anti-emotional program; Trotsky wrote to Pavlov urging him to give Freud a chance.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek defends Sloterdijk against Habermas's attack: Rules for the Human Zoo merely demanded openness to new biotechnological ethical dilemmas; Du musst dein Leben ändern on self-formation practice and Ron Hubbard is praised as good.
Jacques Rancière positive
Praised for his talk on Vertov and aesthetics at the same event; Žižek uses Rancière's reading of Vertov as a springboard and partly corrects it, Rancière missed how formal echoes between shots do the work; he and Žižek share an interest in Anthony Mann westerns.
Anxiety without object (vs. Lacan's anxiety with object petit a); being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode); Ereignis as anonymous game of historical destinings; Žižek respects Heidegger but finds Heideggerianism 'exhausted'.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Žižek finds his political evolution 'terrifying': Miller accepts 'a little corruption' as realistic, writes for right-of-center French press (Le Point, Le Figaro), and is fascinated by VIP access as a form of cynical wisdom, the decline of radical Lacanianism.
Dziga Vertov positive
His montage of spontaneous communism works through subtle formal echoes between gestures, not simply juxtaposition of disparate elements; Žižek reveals he was part of the anti-sexuality machine-utopia movement but treats his cinema with genuine analytical interest.
Žižek partially defends her, she protested atrocities in Poland, entered internal emigration, and Triumph of the Will contains no military propaganda, while acknowledging she cannot be redeemed; he knew her personally on the Maldives.
The 'real bad guy' of Nazi cinema who made Jud Süß and Kolberg; yet Žižek analyzes his melodrama Opfergang as 'one of the most effective melodramas I've ever seen', admiring the form while condemning the person.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Named as one of the few live philosophical options today alongside Badiou under the heading of speculative realism.
Peter Hallward positive
Badiou's UK deputy; Žižek partly sides with Hallward's critique that Badiou's critique of Deleuze in Out of This World has Badiou himself as its true target; Žižek also shares Hallward's interest in the event's inscription into being.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Extended formal analysis of Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and Murder!; Žižek regards Hitchcock as uniquely capable of subjectivizing divine objectivity into evil gaze and of creating narrative duality gaps, 'as far as I know only Hitchcock was able to do things like this'.
Russell Jacoby positive
His book on the Freudian left (covering Otto Fenichel's circle) is praised as an interesting journalistic scoop revealing a sustained clandestine Freudian left into the 1940s-50s.
Mentioned in passing as an example of someone who, like Riefenstahl, continued functioning publicly into extreme old age.
Jürgen Habermas negative
His position against genetic manipulation (co-authored with Ratzinger) is rejected as impracticable and as a 'fiasco of enlightenment'; his attack on Sloterdijk as neo-Nazi genetics was 'slightly ridiculous'; as a philosopher he is 'no longer alive'.
Placed in charge of music policy by Lukács during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, part of the brief utopian cultural miracle.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked for the death drive, anxiety, the pleasure principle, and his historical entanglements (Mussolini, Bauer family, socialist circles); Žižek defends Freud's political connections suppressed by Jones.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Negation of negation (illustrated by the Nazi 'Relativität-Jude' taunt), radical negativity / abyss of freedom as equivalent to death drive, and the triadic schema organizing the philosophical trio; Žižek is a systematic Hegelian throughout.
Immanuel Kant positive
Referenced for the enthusiasm–sublime link (enthusiasm as a limit experience where senses are overwhelmed) and the trio of pure reason / practical reason / aesthetic judgment that maps onto the Badiou–Žižek–Rancière philosophical triad.
Paul Watzlawick positive
Author of The Pursuit of Unhappiness; invoked to support the claim that human psychology is constitutively oriented toward self-sabotage rather than happiness.
What it argues
Badiou's event ontology and its limitsanxiety as the primordial human condition beyond pleasure principleHitchcock's formal devices: spiral motif, divine-to-evil gaze shiftSoviet machine-utopia and anti-sexuality in the 1920sNazi cinema: sentimentality, brutality, and melodramapsychoanalytic movement's political compromises under fascismpornography as the most censored genre: intensity and narrative prohibition
Dialectical moves 10
“Far from being oppressed, psychoanalysis was officially supported by the early Bolsheviks — Trotsky wrote to Pavlov on Freud's behalf.”
Inverts the standard narrative that psychoanalysis was suppressed under communism: in the early Soviet period it was the anti-Freudian machine-utopians, not the state, who were hostile.
“The very idea of punishment and show trials paradoxically brought back the idea of responsible ethical subjects — although it was all fake.”
Stalinist show trials, however perverted, formally reinstated moral responsibility against the early Bolshevik reduction of crime to machine malfunction, a cruel dialectical irony.
“Pornography is the most heavily censored genre of them all — of course, you see everything.”
The genre that shows most is structurally the most censored: what it prohibits is not explicit content but the combination of explicitness with genuine emotional involvement.
“There is no human animal — what Badiou calls the human animal is already a secondary stabilization, a defense against the constitutive traumatic gap.”
Inverts Badiou's schema: the 'base level' of animal existence is not a given but an achievement, a defensive construction built over the primordial dislocation of drive.
“It is not in our nature the pursuit of happiness — on the contrary, we try to sabotage things when they go well.”
Rejects the American constitutional ideal of happiness as natural: Freudian death drive means humans constitutively undermine their own wellbeing.
“The first reaction to the event is always anxiety — even those who ignore the event were scared to shit; anxiety is the way the event affects everyone.”
Inverts Badiou's privileging of enthusiasm and fidelity: the universal mediation of the event is not affirmative but anxious, even for its opponents.
“After Schönberg's atonal music, if you continue with Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, it's not the same as before — you are already a fake, a kitsch.”
Once a true event occurs, those who pretend it didn't happen are not neutral but actively falsified, ignoring the event already constitutes a betrayal.
“The objective divine God's-point-of-view shot itself gets subjectivized as a kind of evil subjectivity — divine neutrality becomes evil gaze.”
In Hitchcock, the most 'neutral' omniscient perspective is revealed to be the most sinister: objectivity is not outside ideology but is ideology's most dangerous form.
“For me the Relativity Jew — almost if you want to understand what is the negation of negation, this Hegelian double movement.”
Žižek reads the Nazi taunt 'Relativität-Jude' as an unwitting illustration of the negation of negation: their racist insult points to a dialectical structure they cannot see.
“I attacked the guy as anti-Christian — he doesn't get it that that's the whole point of Jesus Christ. He was crucified as one of us.”
When accused of mocking religion, Žižek reverses: the accusation is itself anti-Christian because it denies Christ's radical human vulnerability and replaces it with pagan divinity.
Claims 21
asserts
The same Wagner music (Lohengrin overture) used for Hynkel's balloon dance and the barber's sentimental speech in Chaplin's The Great Dictator suggests the two figures are not radically opposed — good and bad sentimentality converge.fascism and sentimentality in Chaplin's The Great Dictator
reframes
Leni Riefenstahl, while not redeemable, is less culpable than commonly supposed: she protested a war atrocity in Poland and retreated into internal emigration by endlessly prolonging Tiefland to avoid further Nazi work.Leni Riefenstahl's moral status
asserts
Ernst Jones was the main bad influence in psychoanalytic history: he negotiated a shameful deal with the Nazis (expelling Jews, renaming psychoanalysis as 'dynamic psychiatry') and downplayed Freud's connections to socialist circles.Ernst Jones and psychoanalysis under Nazism
asserts
Stalinist socialist realism and even the show trials paradoxically represented a return to traditional ethics (culpability, punishment, emotional identification) against the radical anti-humanist machine-utopia of early Bolshevism.Stalinism as ideological reaction to early Bolshevik machine-utopia
asserts
Hitchcock's genius in Vertigo is that the film does not end at the logical closure of Madeleine's suicide but proceeds to an incompatible second narrative, creating an irreducible structural gap.Hitchcock's narrative structure in Vertigo
asserts
The central formal motif of Vertigo is the spiral, which appears in the title sequence, Scotty's circular pursuit, the camera movement during the embrace, the staircase, and Carlotta's hair.formal analysis of Vertigo
asserts
Hitchcock systematically converts an objective 'God's point of view' shot into the subjective gaze of an impossible evil subject — a formal device found in Psycho, The Birds, and the early film Murder!.Hitchcock's formal grammar and negative theology of the gaze
asserts
Pornography is the most censored genre of all, not because it shows little but because it strictly prohibits combining full sexual explicitness with genuine emotional narrative — having both simultaneously would produce an unbearable over-intensity.pornography and the logic of censorship
asserts
Badiou's ontology needs a third level — the traumatic gap of the death drive — between being (the human animal) and the event; there is no pure human animal because humanity is constitutively dislocated.critique of Badiou's human animal / event dualism
asserts
The first reaction to any event — including the Resurrection — is anxiety, not enthusiasm; enthusiasm only emerges as anxiety is converted through courage, and this primordial anxiety affects even those who deny the event.the phenomenology of the event: anxiety before enthusiasm
asserts
Badiou's schema of terror–anxiety–courage–justice should replace 'justice' with 'enthusiasm', since the first three are subjective attitudes while justice is something categorically different.revision of Badiou's four subjective stances
rejects
The dominant Lacanian political attitude — traversing the fantasy leads to singular individual encounter with the Real, and collectivity is irreducibly illusory — is politically catastrophic; Žižek sides with Badiou that anxiety can be collectivized as enthusiasm.Lacanian pessimism about collective emancipatory politics
rejects
Jacques-Alain Miller's acceptance of 'a little corruption' as politically realistic represents a cynical post-fantasy wisdom that is politically catastrophic, epitomized by his failure to oppose Berlusconi.Jacques-Alain Miller's political stance
asserts
Badiou's Logics of Worlds presupposes a symbolic-signifying system: concepts like 'the point' and the symptomal reversal of non-existence only work within language, contradicting Badiou's anti-linguistic-turn stance.the implicit linguisticity of Badiou's world-ontology
asserts
Badiou's two major works (Being and Event; Logics of Worlds) are attempts to renormalize the radical breakthrough of Theory of the Subject, which remains his most genuinely disruptive book.Badiou's philosophical development
rejects
The Habermas–Ratzinger position against genetic manipulation fails because it presupposes an undefended notion of human dignity and is simply impracticable given what China and India are already doing.Habermas and Ratzinger's ethics of biotechnology
reframes
Sloterdijk's Rules for the Human Zoo merely argued that biotechnology forces new ethical dilemmas and cannot be answered by old norms — Habermas's attack branding it neo-Nazi genetics was slightly ridiculous.Sloterdijk vs. Habermas on biotechnology
rejects
Lukács was personally heroic, not the Stalinist conformist Adorno portrayed: he participated in the 1956 uprising, refused to testify against colleagues even under duress, and Adorno's attack was published in a CIA-financed journal.Adorno's critique of Lukács as a Stalinist sellout
asserts
The early 1920s Soviet experiment — attempting to reconstruct daily life rituals (marriage, death, sexuality) without relying on old forms — was the true test of whether an event can inscribe its traces into the order of being, and the Bolsheviks failed it.the early Soviet attempt to reconstruct everyday life
asserts
The interpellation mechanism (Althusser's 'Hey you!') works not by immediate identification but by first triggering anxiety ('Why me?'); identification comes second, as a way to escape that anxiety.anxiety as prior to ideological identification
asserts
The Soviet Proletkult machine-utopia of the 1920s was not a fringe phenomenon but a mass movement of hundreds of thousands, constituting the dominant form of collective ideology throughout the decade.Soviet 1920s machine-utopia and anti-sexuality
Quotes 15
“There is always to fascism, they always mixed brutality with excessive sentimentality.”Slavoj Žižek · fascism and sentimentality as structural pair
“Pornography if anything is the most heavily censored genre of them all — of course, you see everything.”Slavoj Žižek · pornography as the most censored genre
“What is prohibited is to have both at the same time. Either you have an emotionally engaging story or you see it all. That's the prohibited.”Slavoj Žižek · over-intensity prohibition in pornography
“There is no human animal. If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that the American Constitution is wrong — it's not in our nature the pursuit of happiness.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive negates the human animal
“If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that American Constitution is wrong. That is to say that it's not in our nature the pursuit of happiness.”Slavoj Žižek · Freudian critique of happiness as natural end
“Divine neutrality itself gets subjectivized as a kind of evil subjectivity. There is a whole negative theology here.”Slavoj Žižek · Hitchcock's gaze: objectivity becomes evil subjectivity
“The first shock of the event is anxiety, always. Christ has arisen from the dead. The first reaction is anxiety, shit what is going on.”Slavoj Žižek · anxiety as the universal first reaction to any event
“The ultimate choice is virtue or corruption. A little bit of corruption we have to accept it — this was Miller's message. I find this terrifying.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of cynical political wisdom
“Every world has not only non-existent minimum and maximum intensity but also a point of excessive intensity which is nonetheless inherent to it.”Slavoj Žižek · point of excessive intensity as supplement to Badiou
“He's the master I'm the hysteric... I told him 'Do you hate me? Do you want to ruin our friendship?' We decided that's our fate — I will endlessly write about him, he will persist in this royal attitude.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek and Badiou as master-hysteric couple
“Lukács went for his pen and said 'That's the only weapon I have.' It's a nice gesture, whatever you say.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual integrity and symbolic heroism
“I said 'Why don't we exchange? You write a report on Balkan war, leave Hitchcock to me.'”Slavoj Žižek · critique of political correctness as cultural racism
“The 20s are still the enigma. You cannot simply play the game of the good early time and then what happened after.”Slavoj Žižek · complexity of Soviet history in the 1920s
“What really matters is not the explicit narrative — it's all this thickness of the background, all these formal motives which sustain it. This is where cinema becomes art, maybe a communist art.”Slavoj Žižek · formal motifs as the basis of cinematic art
“Enthusiasm is always the obverse of anxiety. It's very close to anxiety — Kant describes enthusiasm as this limit experience where your senses are overwhelmed.”Slavoj Žižek · enthusiasm and anxiety as paired limit experiences
Transcript 55 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Did you notice one of the mysteries in the Great, if you're talking about Chaplin? Yeah, right. Aha, the Great, right. One of the things to interpret there is so nicely ambiguous is that did you notice that the same music is used at two opposite occasions? First, in the famous scene Hynkel-Hitler playing with the balloon, and at the end when the Jewish barber taking over the place of Hynkel gives that shitty sentimental speech. It's Wagner, Lohengrin overture. Now what does this mean? You can read it, my friend Michel Chion, the French guy, tries to read it in an optimistic, positive way, that it means nothing is unredeemable. Like even something that appears to be appropriated by the bad guys can be turned, blah blah blah. But my idea is far more pessimistic one. It's that if you look closely at the speech that Hynkel, sorry, the barber delivers at the end, it may appear to be a speech of love, blah blah. But what he is basically saying, probably what Hynkel himself would have been saying. I mean, you know that there is always to fascism, they always mixed brutality with excessive sentimentality, how should I put it, no? That it's rather a much more darker insight that maybe the two are not so radically opposed, the good guy and the bad guy and so on, no? Like
Did you notice one of the mysteries in the Great, if you're talking about Chaplin? Yeah, right. Aha, the Great, right. One of the things to interpret there is so nicely ambiguous is that did you notice that the same music is used at two opposite occasions? First, in the famous scene Hynkel-Hitler playing with the balloon, and at the end when the Jewish barber taking over the place of Hynkel gives that shitty sentimental speech. It's Wagner, Lohengrin overture. Now what does this mean? You can read it, my friend Michel Chion, the French guy, tries to read it in an optimistic, positive way, that it means nothing is unredeemable. Like even something that appears to be appropriated by the bad guys can be turned, blah blah blah. But my idea is far more pessimistic one. It's that if you look closely at the speech that Hynkel, sorry, the barber delivers at the end, it may appear to be a speech of love, blah blah. But what he is basically saying, probably what Hynkel himself would have been saying. I mean, you know that there is always to fascism, they always mixed brutality with excessive sentimentality, how should I put it, no? That it's rather a much more darker insight that maybe the two are not so radically opposed, the good guy and the bad guy and so on, no? Like
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Hitler's Nuremberg speech? Yes. Um, in Triumph of the Will. Oh yeah, yeah. The speech is so
Hitler's Nuremberg speech? Yes. Um, in Triumph of the Will. Oh yeah, yeah. The speech is so
Slavoj Žižek
sentimental. Yeah. But, but this is where I am again a little bit on the side of the horrible Leni Riefenstahl. Because if you look at Triumph of the Will, from her standpoint, that is to say hearing her comment on it in a documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of, blah blah. The
sentimental. Yeah. But, but this is where I am again a little bit on the side of the horrible Leni Riefenstahl. Because if you look at Triumph of the Will, from her standpoint, that is to say hearing her comment on it in a documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of, blah blah. The
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Wonderful
Wonderful
Slavoj Žižek
Horrible Life? Wonderful Life, yes. It's true that if you look at it and I checked it up, I think that with the exception of maybe one short outburst of Julius Streicher, there is no military propaganda. Hitler appears there only, "I will bring work," blah blah blah. And no war, anti-semitism and so on. Because that's her defense, that I emphasized just this: Nazism means stability, order, people will be put to work, peace and so on. That was her defense. And she didn't totally lie. Because if you look closely at how she behaved during World War II, do you know that story that at the beginning of the war she volunteered to be a war reporter? Then she was in Poland and she witnessed a scene when some German soldiers were shooting, I don't know, some Polish civilians or, and do you know that it's a unique document? There is, somebody took a photo of her at that moment. And you see her totally desperate. She went to the officer to protest, like "Do German soldiers behave like this?" and she was basically told "Fuck off bitch, that's none of your business." And then she resigned. And she resigned. She went back to Berlin and stayed away from it and then basically she went into some kind of internal emigration. That is to say, you know that she was then doing that ridiculous melodrama Tiefland. She was protracting it on and on for four, five years and so on, no? Tiefland? Sorry? Tiefland. Yeah, for four, five years on and on, basically just to gain time to do nothing. So, I am not redeeming her in any way. I am saying there are definitely guys who are darker than her. You know, it's always unjust, it's always... Did you ever talk to her? Sorry, did you ever talk to her? No, but almost, I knew her. You knew her? I spent three weeks of my holidays with her once, on the Maldives, when like... Really? Yeah, and she was, she was
Horrible Life? Wonderful Life, yes. It's true that if you look at it and I checked it up, I think that with the exception of maybe one short outburst of Julius Streicher, there is no military propaganda. Hitler appears there only, "I will bring work," blah blah blah. And no war, anti-semitism and so on. Because that's her defense, that I emphasized just this: Nazism means stability, order, people will be put to work, peace and so on. That was her defense. And she didn't totally lie. Because if you look closely at how she behaved during World War II, do you know that story that at the beginning of the war she volunteered to be a war reporter? Then she was in Poland and she witnessed a scene when some German soldiers were shooting, I don't know, some Polish civilians or, and do you know that it's a unique document? There is, somebody took a photo of her at that moment. And you see her totally desperate. She went to the officer to protest, like "Do German soldiers behave like this?" and she was basically told "Fuck off bitch, that's none of your business." And then she resigned. And she resigned. She went back to Berlin and stayed away from it and then basically she went into some kind of internal emigration. That is to say, you know that she was then doing that ridiculous melodrama Tiefland. She was protracting it on and on for four, five years and so on, no? Tiefland? Sorry? Tiefland. Yeah, for four, five years on and on, basically just to gain time to do nothing. So, I am not redeeming her in any way. I am saying there are definitely guys who are darker than her. You know, it's always unjust, it's always... Did you ever talk to her? Sorry, did you ever talk to her? No, but almost, I knew her. You knew her? I spent three weeks of my holidays with her once, on the Maldives, when like... Really? Yeah, and she was, she was
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like what, And she was
like what, And she was
Slavoj Žižek
shooting a underwater... I know, that's madness, I know. I know what is with these old Nazis, like her or Hans-Georg Gadamer. He was giving talks at I claim you should be like Simon Wiesenthal, you must be an old Nazi or an old Jew who survived Auschwitz. Only this type of guys can then function until But how was she, was she... she was probably a little bit of conceited, arrogant, but how was she? Well, like for
shooting a underwater... I know, that's madness, I know. I know what is with these old Nazis, like her or Hans-Georg Gadamer. He was giving talks at I claim you should be like Simon Wiesenthal, you must be an old Nazi or an old Jew who survived Auschwitz. Only this type of guys can then function until But how was she, was she... she was probably a little bit of conceited, arrogant, but how was she? Well, like for
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instance, she never left the house without complete makeup. So she was always perfectly styled. I mean, it's just what house is composed of, her. She always was wearing a mask, no? She was there with her sixty-year-old boyfriend,
instance, she never left the house without complete makeup. So she was always perfectly styled. I mean, it's just what house is composed of, her. She always was wearing a mask, no? She was there with her sixty-year-old boyfriend,
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and she was like, what, forty years older? Yeah, And, and she was
and she was like, what, forty years older? Yeah, And, and she was
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always perfectly styled. That was amazing. She went diving first thing, she goes home two hours, puts on everything, and she was putting these really eccentric colors, like blue and pink and in her eye... Yeah, but
always perfectly styled. That was amazing. She went diving first thing, she goes home two hours, puts on everything, and she was putting these really eccentric colors, like blue and pink and in her eye... Yeah, but
Slavoj Žižek
wasn't there nonetheless underneath, maybe an attack of the ridiculous in this, like? Yeah,
wasn't there nonetheless underneath, maybe an attack of the ridiculous in this, like? Yeah,
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somehow. But, but but not for her. Not for her. Aha. Not for her. For her it was like her hair, she was just wearing her hair like this all the time. And she was like commanding this boyfriend around, so
somehow. But, but but not for her. Not for her. Aha. Not for her. For her it was like her hair, she was just wearing her hair like this all the time. And she was like commanding this boyfriend around, so
Slavoj Žižek
he was like
he was like
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her slave. Oh really? Oh yeah.
her slave. Oh really? Oh yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
I would like to have a woman to command me like this. No problem. Yeah. But, but you know what interests me? And she was the queen of the island, of course. Of the, of the island, the queen of the island. She was very,
I would like to have a woman to command me like this. No problem. Yeah. But, but you know what interests me? And she was the queen of the island, of course. Of the, of the island, the queen of the island. She was very,
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not arrogance, but very self-conscious and very aware that she is like
not arrogance, but very self-conscious and very aware that she is like
Slavoj Žižek
the... I mean, of course I know that she was cheating how she always said like Kristallnacht, "Oh I was on the way to America, I didn't know," she never heard, you know, like...
the... I mean, of course I know that she was cheating how she always said like Kristallnacht, "Oh I was on the way to America, I didn't know," she never heard, you know, like...
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But she, you know, in, in Wonderful Horrible Life, she is very defensive about the questions about that period. She gets angry and when she starts defending herself she, and it's usually a sign of Freud's insight... Uh-huh, my brother was working there and I was just hanging...
But she, you know, in, in Wonderful Horrible Life, she is very defensive about the questions about that period. She gets angry and when she starts defending herself she, and it's usually a sign of Freud's insight... Uh-huh, my brother was working there and I was just hanging...
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Of repressed guilt. After repressed
Of repressed guilt. After repressed
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guilt. Mhm.
guilt. Mhm.
Slavoj Žižek
But but let me go a step further. You know, this is not my lowest pro-Nazi, how should I put it? You know, I've written about him in my Kieslowski book. You know whom I quite admire but he is and he cannot be redeemed in any way. You know Veit Harlan? No. He is the bad guy, the really bad guy. You know he did Jud Süß. Right. Then he did Kolberg. You know that? Ah, that's total. You should see it. Now you can get it legally in Germany. Kolberg is, you know, you know that Goebbels got an idea after seeing Gone with the Wind, that it looks crazy that, it's not a joke, that the only thing that can save Germany is to do a big mega hit like Gone with the Wind and then showing it to the soldiers it will give them new elan. So in the summer of '44, they started to shoot the biggest spectacle, it's called Kolberg. Kolberg is a small city now in the north of Poland which was the city which resisted to Napoleon to the end. And then in the last minute it survived. Not as Veit Harlan presented it because of their heroism, but because simply there was then a temporary truce and... okay. But the point is that the idea was to present the heroism of this city as, and it was madness. In the fall of '44, you know Germans, everything bombed, needing soldiers, everything. Goebbels got it that they withdrew some thousand soldiers from the Eastern Front. They put them in, they made that how do you call it the military factories producing the uniforms. They made them produce tens of the thousands of uniforms from Napoleonic times. They built big, how do you call it, sets and so on to do this. It was total madness. And it didn't, of course it didn't work. But how, the problem is that it was finished only in the early '45. So when half of the France was already liberated and there was that shitty city, it's well known on the Atlantic coast, La Rochelle, where Nazis were still holding the city but it was already surrounded by the allies. So this is the famous Goebbels' extravaganza: a German plane dropped the reels into the city. The idea was that if the defenders there will see this city, this movie, they will resist. It's total, total madness, this film. Can you still get this movie? You can get in Germany, Kolberg, simply K-O-L Kolberg. You can get it in Germany. It's, uh... I think even you can get it, you know that interesting Chicago distributing house Facets? No, I don't know it. You should, Facets, like F-A-S, maybe I don't pronounce it correctly, F-A-C-E-T-S, Facets. It's, they are the biggest for the distribution of all this Third World art and so on, but also all kinds of extravaganza and so on, old movies, silent movies. They are, they are extraordinary. They have... Yeah, yeah, no no you should. They you even can go, they have a store in this, sorry, west of center, in those where the Chicago becomes this boring stretched city, whatever, not in the skyscraper domain. So you can but the problem is that it doesn't... the problem is that... Is it online, can you download it right now? Sorry? Is it online? Yeah yeah, of course you can do it online. But that's the sad thing that if you go there, you just get a catalog with names. You know it. You don't have to... No no, no, I mean I'm downloading the film. Ah, Kolberg. Ah that's true, maybe you can, you get many of these things on YouTube, that's true, yes. But you know which is the absolute melodrama? I analyzed it. In between his Nazi stuff, Veit Harlan did three melodramas, Die goldene Stadt (Golden City), Immensee, and this my favorite, Opfergang (Sacrifice, Sacrificial Gang). Which are, I think especially the last one, one of the most effective melodramas I've ever seen. It has this, the ultimate perfect story of sacrifice. It's, it's so incredibly well done as a melodrama. It all focuses with, you see here what a woman's two lines. A guy who has a beautiful cold wife gets in love with a more lively girl. And then they are, the girl gets, catches some strange illness and is maybe dying. And then the guy, they have an affair. The guy, this is the original story, the guy also dies. But the wife knows that they had a ritual because the guy was not allowed to, to visit his mistress because of the illness, that every afternoon she, she rode on a horse past her house where she was very ill, the mistress, and waved at her. And so after the guy dies, the wife dresses up as her husband to save the mis— you know, sacrifices herself to give to her the illusion that her lover is still alive. Like the ultimate wife's sacrifice to personify, to embody her own husband to save the mistress and so on. It's so, it's so beautifully done. And then I analyze in detail the final shot and so on. It's breathtaking, it's breathtaking. What's it called again? Opfergang. Or Der Opfergang. Now, usually it's just translated as Sacrifice. This one, unfortunately, I don't know what's the situation now. I mean, I like this about Germany. I don't know how it was when you were in Austria, but in Germany, you know they had this nice, when I was there for two years, coded name. When you asked for Nazi films, you didn't say Nazi films, you said "Do you, do you have some historical German films?" like, no? But this didn't mean all, it meant specifically if you meant Weimar, you said Weimar. Do
But but let me go a step further. You know, this is not my lowest pro-Nazi, how should I put it? You know, I've written about him in my Kieslowski book. You know whom I quite admire but he is and he cannot be redeemed in any way. You know Veit Harlan? No. He is the bad guy, the really bad guy. You know he did Jud Süß. Right. Then he did Kolberg. You know that? Ah, that's total. You should see it. Now you can get it legally in Germany. Kolberg is, you know, you know that Goebbels got an idea after seeing Gone with the Wind, that it looks crazy that, it's not a joke, that the only thing that can save Germany is to do a big mega hit like Gone with the Wind and then showing it to the soldiers it will give them new elan. So in the summer of '44, they started to shoot the biggest spectacle, it's called Kolberg. Kolberg is a small city now in the north of Poland which was the city which resisted to Napoleon to the end. And then in the last minute it survived. Not as Veit Harlan presented it because of their heroism, but because simply there was then a temporary truce and... okay. But the point is that the idea was to present the heroism of this city as, and it was madness. In the fall of '44, you know Germans, everything bombed, needing soldiers, everything. Goebbels got it that they withdrew some thousand soldiers from the Eastern Front. They put them in, they made that how do you call it the military factories producing the uniforms. They made them produce tens of the thousands of uniforms from Napoleonic times. They built big, how do you call it, sets and so on to do this. It was total madness. And it didn't, of course it didn't work. But how, the problem is that it was finished only in the early '45. So when half of the France was already liberated and there was that shitty city, it's well known on the Atlantic coast, La Rochelle, where Nazis were still holding the city but it was already surrounded by the allies. So this is the famous Goebbels' extravaganza: a German plane dropped the reels into the city. The idea was that if the defenders there will see this city, this movie, they will resist. It's total, total madness, this film. Can you still get this movie? You can get in Germany, Kolberg, simply K-O-L Kolberg. You can get it in Germany. It's, uh... I think even you can get it, you know that interesting Chicago distributing house Facets? No, I don't know it. You should, Facets, like F-A-S, maybe I don't pronounce it correctly, F-A-C-E-T-S, Facets. It's, they are the biggest for the distribution of all this Third World art and so on, but also all kinds of extravaganza and so on, old movies, silent movies. They are, they are extraordinary. They have... Yeah, yeah, no no you should. They you even can go, they have a store in this, sorry, west of center, in those where the Chicago becomes this boring stretched city, whatever, not in the skyscraper domain. So you can but the problem is that it doesn't... the problem is that... Is it online, can you download it right now? Sorry? Is it online? Yeah yeah, of course you can do it online. But that's the sad thing that if you go there, you just get a catalog with names. You know it. You don't have to... No no, no, I mean I'm downloading the film. Ah, Kolberg. Ah that's true, maybe you can, you get many of these things on YouTube, that's true, yes. But you know which is the absolute melodrama? I analyzed it. In between his Nazi stuff, Veit Harlan did three melodramas, Die goldene Stadt (Golden City), Immensee, and this my favorite, Opfergang (Sacrifice, Sacrificial Gang). Which are, I think especially the last one, one of the most effective melodramas I've ever seen. It has this, the ultimate perfect story of sacrifice. It's, it's so incredibly well done as a melodrama. It all focuses with, you see here what a woman's two lines. A guy who has a beautiful cold wife gets in love with a more lively girl. And then they are, the girl gets, catches some strange illness and is maybe dying. And then the guy, they have an affair. The guy, this is the original story, the guy also dies. But the wife knows that they had a ritual because the guy was not allowed to, to visit his mistress because of the illness, that every afternoon she, she rode on a horse past her house where she was very ill, the mistress, and waved at her. And so after the guy dies, the wife dresses up as her husband to save the mis— you know, sacrifices herself to give to her the illusion that her lover is still alive. Like the ultimate wife's sacrifice to personify, to embody her own husband to save the mistress and so on. It's so, it's so beautifully done. And then I analyze in detail the final shot and so on. It's breathtaking, it's breathtaking. What's it called again? Opfergang. Or Der Opfergang. Now, usually it's just translated as Sacrifice. This one, unfortunately, I don't know what's the situation now. I mean, I like this about Germany. I don't know how it was when you were in Austria, but in Germany, you know they had this nice, when I was there for two years, coded name. When you asked for Nazi films, you didn't say Nazi films, you said "Do you, do you have some historical German films?" like, no? But this didn't mean all, it meant specifically if you meant Weimar, you said Weimar. Do
unknown
you know this really good documentation from Arte on how the, how the neo-Nazis in Europe distribute their
you know this really good documentation from Arte on how the, how the neo-Nazis in Europe distribute their
Slavoj Žižek
videos? Really? No, no. I'll give you the name. I hope I'm not part of that because I got from my friends... No, you're not. No, but let me tell you something. All my, art Germans, really, even the left, the neo-Nazis, because all the Germans that I, my German leftist friends, they say "You have this to analyze it and then my god, they all have all the Nazi stocks in I—". I saw Jud Süß, I saw... Did you see that Der ewige Jude? That terrifying documentary on the Jews? It's really disgusting. I mean, that one is disgusting. Like I claim if you have a minimum of decency, even if you are anti-semitic, that movie should make you anti-anti-semitic, no? It's a kind of a scientific documentary about the Jews. And it has all the nastiest manipulations you can imagine. For example, of course when it was shot in where '41 when Poland was already occupied and the Jews were condensed in, how do you call it, in the ghetto, no? And of course they were there poor and dirty. So the movie uses that shots to prove how the Jews live like rats. And then it's like our friend Badiou, rat man, you know. What I like is that like it's horrible is that then you have some scientist who draws a parallel—you remember this nice scene how rats infested Europe from the Middle East? And draws an exact geographical parallel between the rat invasion and the Jewish invasion. And then it does some wonderful, I couldn't but laugh, it portrays all the evil Jews and so on, no? And they make fun of Einstein, no, calling him a Relativität-Jude, no? I like this term, like the relativity Jew. Because, I like when right-wingers get bitchy in this vulgar funny way, like the best one. It's a nice, almost if you want to understand what is the negation of negation, this Hegelian double movement. Uh, when, you know, when Freud left Vienna. Now there is a dark aspect to it. You know when Freud in '38. You know who was the key intermediate? Marie Bonaparte? Go lower. Go lower. Benito? Benito. Yeah, yeah, Mussolini. And then, you know, this is what Freudians don't like to emphasize. Mussolini wrote a letter directly, not to Hitler, to that Seyss-Inquart, I don't know who was the Gauleiter of Austria. And then as a sign of gratitude, Freud sent to Mussolini a copy of *Unbehagen in der Kultur* with a signature of "one great mind to another great
videos? Really? No, no. I'll give you the name. I hope I'm not part of that because I got from my friends... No, you're not. No, but let me tell you something. All my, art Germans, really, even the left, the neo-Nazis, because all the Germans that I, my German leftist friends, they say "You have this to analyze it and then my god, they all have all the Nazi stocks in I—". I saw Jud Süß, I saw... Did you see that Der ewige Jude? That terrifying documentary on the Jews? It's really disgusting. I mean, that one is disgusting. Like I claim if you have a minimum of decency, even if you are anti-semitic, that movie should make you anti-anti-semitic, no? It's a kind of a scientific documentary about the Jews. And it has all the nastiest manipulations you can imagine. For example, of course when it was shot in where '41 when Poland was already occupied and the Jews were condensed in, how do you call it, in the ghetto, no? And of course they were there poor and dirty. So the movie uses that shots to prove how the Jews live like rats. And then it's like our friend Badiou, rat man, you know. What I like is that like it's horrible is that then you have some scientist who draws a parallel—you remember this nice scene how rats infested Europe from the Middle East? And draws an exact geographical parallel between the rat invasion and the Jewish invasion. And then it does some wonderful, I couldn't but laugh, it portrays all the evil Jews and so on, no? And they make fun of Einstein, no, calling him a Relativität-Jude, no? I like this term, like the relativity Jew. Because, I like when right-wingers get bitchy in this vulgar funny way, like the best one. It's a nice, almost if you want to understand what is the negation of negation, this Hegelian double movement. Uh, when, you know, when Freud left Vienna. Now there is a dark aspect to it. You know when Freud in '38. You know who was the key intermediate? Marie Bonaparte? Go lower. Go lower. Benito? Benito. Yeah, yeah, Mussolini. And then, you know, this is what Freudians don't like to emphasize. Mussolini wrote a letter directly, not to Hitler, to that Seyss-Inquart, I don't know who was the Gauleiter of Austria. And then as a sign of gratitude, Freud sent to Mussolini a copy of *Unbehagen in der Kultur* with a signature of "one great mind to another great
unknown
mind who admired each other". Blah. Things happen in
mind who admired each other". Blah. Things happen in
Slavoj Žižek
history, how should we put it, no? And but what is so nice is that on his way to England, Freud stopped for a couple of days in Paris. And one of those right-wing popular magazines have a, has a wonderful anti-semitic outburst. They say, uh, no, sorry, I'm confused now totally typically. This is not about Freud but about Einstein. When Einstein left Berlin, he passed on his way to United States through Paris. And one of these Paris shitty populist right-wing, uh, journals had this passage, it's wonderful. They say, "Uh, we admit we don't understand relativity theory. We don't know what it's about. Some people claim, probably it's true, that even Einstein himself doesn't understand it. But we do understand one thing: there is now one Jew more in Paris than before," you know? It's so vulgar, I mean. No, no, no, I mean it's... Sorry? It gets old. Yeah, I know, I know. No, no, but how should I put it? It's, it's interesting how this problem of how to take it the set thing something unites and here they were really bad guys, partisans of Einstein and of Freud. The bad guy is here, how is he called? Ernst Jones. They made a very dirty pact. Do you know that even Freud was shocked? Jones was for me if you ask me the bad guy of psychoanalytic movement. He was the ultimate anti-communist conformist. You know how you can detect this? Look at his... You know how he ended up? No, how? In Toronto, and he lost his license for abusing his patients. No wonder, no wonder. Because he played this English gentleman and so on. But look, if you look at his big official biography of Freud, look at for example, you learn that he had to report this, that Freud bought the famous house on Berggasse from, from, how is he called, who was the great guy, from Bauer, Bauer family, Otto Bauer. And then you have of course a footnote where he says "Bauer, a well-known Austrian journalist, friend of Freud." Fuck, Otto Bauer was the leader of the Social Democratic Party. You know he... I mean, it's ridiculous. It's the same as to say Trotsky or Lenin a journalist. Of course they were but they were not that, how should I put it, no? It's the same way you say Stalin was the Soviet writer of short comments or what, no? You know you have a whole series of censorship like this of downplaying the link. Because even, you know, to give you another link of the depth of the connection. You know Dora, the big case Dora. You know what's Dora's name? Ida Bauer. No? So it was all connected. So this gives you another image that Freud was even personally involved with social democratic circles. That has to disappear. The second really dark thing is that, uh, Jones when
history, how should we put it, no? And but what is so nice is that on his way to England, Freud stopped for a couple of days in Paris. And one of those right-wing popular magazines have a, has a wonderful anti-semitic outburst. They say, uh, no, sorry, I'm confused now totally typically. This is not about Freud but about Einstein. When Einstein left Berlin, he passed on his way to United States through Paris. And one of these Paris shitty populist right-wing, uh, journals had this passage, it's wonderful. They say, "Uh, we admit we don't understand relativity theory. We don't know what it's about. Some people claim, probably it's true, that even Einstein himself doesn't understand it. But we do understand one thing: there is now one Jew more in Paris than before," you know? It's so vulgar, I mean. No, no, no, I mean it's... Sorry? It gets old. Yeah, I know, I know. No, no, but how should I put it? It's, it's interesting how this problem of how to take it the set thing something unites and here they were really bad guys, partisans of Einstein and of Freud. The bad guy is here, how is he called? Ernst Jones. They made a very dirty pact. Do you know that even Freud was shocked? Jones was for me if you ask me the bad guy of psychoanalytic movement. He was the ultimate anti-communist conformist. You know how you can detect this? Look at his... You know how he ended up? No, how? In Toronto, and he lost his license for abusing his patients. No wonder, no wonder. Because he played this English gentleman and so on. But look, if you look at his big official biography of Freud, look at for example, you learn that he had to report this, that Freud bought the famous house on Berggasse from, from, how is he called, who was the great guy, from Bauer, Bauer family, Otto Bauer. And then you have of course a footnote where he says "Bauer, a well-known Austrian journalist, friend of Freud." Fuck, Otto Bauer was the leader of the Social Democratic Party. You know he... I mean, it's ridiculous. It's the same as to say Trotsky or Lenin a journalist. Of course they were but they were not that, how should I put it, no? It's the same way you say Stalin was the Soviet writer of short comments or what, no? You know you have a whole series of censorship like this of downplaying the link. Because even, you know, to give you another link of the depth of the connection. You know Dora, the big case Dora. You know what's Dora's name? Ida Bauer. No? So it was all connected. So this gives you another image that Freud was even personally involved with social democratic circles. That has to disappear. The second really dark thing is that, uh, Jones when
unknown
the Nazis took
the Nazis took
Slavoj Žižek
over, Ernst Jones negotiated with the Nazis, the good guy under quotation marks. Good guy only in the sense that he wanted nonetheless to somehow incorporate psychoanalysis. This was, you know the story, it's a wonderfully sad story. It was I forgot the name, the brother of Hermann Göring. Another Göring who was a big German psychiatrist and he negotiated, he made a deal and Ernst Jones was, and he wrote to Freud an enthusiastic letter, "Listen I saved our movement from Germany." But the conditions were shameless, how should I put it. First, of course it was non-negotiable all Jews are out. Second, they had to change, they had to replace change all the terms. Like it was no longer called psychoanalysis, it was called—and incidentally even today sometimes it's referred to dynamic approach. They invented this term "dynamic psychiatry," "dynamic approach" and so on. The irony is that it then worked tremendously well. And Freud accepted it but was totally shocked. Like Freud was shocked morally like, doesn't, doesn't Ernst Jones see what he is doing, how should I put it, no? That he is practically accepting... Now, Jones was also one of those dirty guys who, you know that famous Olympics Samaranch the bad Spanish guy, you know when they negotiated the Berlin Olympics in '36 and you know what was his answer to "My God, we cannot have Olympics in a country which is doing to Jews what"? That that sport is above politics, we shouldn't be concerned by religious conflicts in Germany. I mean, this was almost Ernst Jones' line. You know that he in a letter he even has some speculations on how maybe one can understand Germans that a healthy national body can sustain, not to lose its vitality, only a certain amount of foreign blood. And then he goes into this extremely tasteless speculations on how is it or percent, even proposes a kind of a scientific estimation of how many foreign blood— no, no, he really was. And he was also the main bad influence in, you know this is one of the more shame, shame— one of the shameless acts of psychoanalysis. You know when there was in '34 the basically Dollfuss the rightist coup d'etat in Austria. They abolished democracy. Austrian social democrat, all the honors go to them, they at least organized some street fight resistance, there were in the red suburbs of Vienna fights going on and the official party line of psycho-German-Austrian psychoanalytic association was: we stay out of this, it's not our struggle. But of course, fuck it, staying out of it meant de facto accepting. It was again the only good guys were for example I think Sándor Ferenczi, no? And some of them who were like a little bit more of the left wing. You know if you are looking for the golden era of European university there you can say whatever you want about how's the guy called, György Lukács, the great Marxist, no? But this was the first miracle. You know that in in the spring of or when, you know you have for a couple of months the Soviet Republic in Hungary. And Lukács was the Minister of Education. I mean, it's a dream what he did then. He, although he personally was not too much sympathetic to psychoanalysis, he nominated as a minister Sándor Ferenczi as the head of the first, it's the first university psychoanalytic department. Then he put Béla Bartók music and so on. It's, it's a miracle, it's a miracle for and Lukács maybe you know the story, I quote it somewhere, it's a, it's a wonderful story. Lukács was personally a kind of a hero. I don't like Adorno who attacks Lukács as a kind of a conformist selling him... No, listen, Fredric Jameson maybe you know the story gave me a wonderful argument here. You know Adorno wrote in '57 I think well-known text brilliantly written as it is all by Adorno, called *Die erpresste Versöhnung*, the "Extorted Reconciliation". It's basically an attack on Lukács as selling his critical thought to Stalinism blah blah. Okay, okay, of course Lukács did his big shot in issues in the twenties it's true. But nonetheless as Fredric Jameson drew attention to this that there are a couple of things which disturb this image. The irony is that at the very point, at the very moment when Adorno was writing this, Lukács was in prison in, in Bucharest. You know because Lukács heroically did participate in the '56 rebellion. He even again joined the Imre Nagy government and then was arrested by Russians and and they were all put in to the— for one year and then somewhere shot, some not. But you know it's a little bit cynical of for example the last lines there stylistically brilliantly. This is the most famous anti-Lukács line of Adorno. He says that Lukács is a guy who confuses the sound of his chains with the voice of the world spirit of history, you know. But unfortunately at that point Lukács did have literal chains, no? And to, and to go even further the very journal, Neue Rundschau whatever, where Adorno published his text was financed by CIA as anti-communist cultural struggle. So, uh, you know it's not as innocent. Also, this is for me a true ethics. I read in a biography of Lukács that they, by "they" I mean the new regime, Kádár, when they organized a trial against Imre Nagy and those who led the '56 rebellion they wanted Lukács as a witness. Why? Because they of course, how do you call it, taped secretly recorded the phone conversations among the member of this new anti-Soviet whatever government and they heard there how Lukács often didn't agree with them. He said, "No this means we rejoin bourgeois capitalism, I don't agree, I'm still a socialist." And they told Lukács, "We don't want you to lie, just say publicly what you said to them." And he said, "No, that wouldn't be fair. I said that in private, you know, like it would be put to a totally different—" he insisted to the end and he really risked they let him leave then partially rehabilitate him, but he— and then ah you know the nicest story, then we go to Hegel don't take it's a beautiful story that it's a gesture that when when a policeman came to arrest Lukács after the Soviet army took over Budapest, you know an NKVD officer approached him, came in, "Please give us any weapons you have." Lukács went for his pen and said "That's the only weapon I have." Ah, it's a nice gesture, whatever you say it's a nice gesture. What do you think of Ferenczi? Sorry? Ferenczi? Sándor Ferenczi. The psychoanalyst. Which one? Ferenczi. Yeah. What do you think of his work? Uh, unfortunately no. I'm not too— he is interesting blah blah, but I don't... he was a little bit crazy if you ask me because okay, he was doing things which cannot but appear extremely sympathetic. For example, he did something which again many of those libertarian psychoanalysts found so attractive. He was well known sometimes to do something again which in a way is marvelous. When he was doing analysis and the patient was doing his associations he often interrupted "No! This gave me now an idea, please you stand up I lay down" and he added his associations and so on, you know. Okay, it's sympathetic and so on and so on. He was part of that so-called Otto Fenichel also you know of that so-called Freudian left. You know the guy who is more a kind of a liberal, but you know Russell Jacoby. He wrote an interesting book on the Freudian left. It's even a good journalistic scoop discovering that there was a circle way into the 40s-50s of a couple of them, Otto Fenichel, I don't know and so on, who were exchanged regularly letters, a kind of a Freudian left and so on and so on, no? He gives also a wonderful portrait of the confusion of Freudians you know when all these typically middle European Germans found, uh found themselves found found themselves in the, in the United States, how they didn't understand the culture, all the all the problems with... it's a it's a wonderful part. But okay, I'm doing too much now, maybe. Let me just maybe we should begin with something I couldn't resist adding some remarks on. I really liked it, the yesterday's you were all there of course I hope, yesterday's talk by Rancière. And incidentally I always like this Hegelian systematizing. Did you notice how Badiou, me, Rancière, how we formed a very nice classical philosophical triad? You know this triad of to put it in religious terms: the true, the good, the beautiful. Or in Kantian terms: pure reason, practical reason, aesthetic judgment. Badiou was doing pure reason, ontology, logic, I was doing politics, practical, Rancière was doing aesthetics. So we were a nice philosophical trio, no? And did you, what I this morning I had a brief conversation with and we talked about how, you know that Rancière likes westerns by Anthony Mann. Yeah, it's even translated in one of his English books now, his wonderful essay on Anthony Mann. And now I was asking him because the other candidate for me is Delmer Daves. But okay, let's go on to more serious stuff. Let me tell you well where I thought he will agree with me but he didn't. And I'm still not sure with what. You remember that wonderful vision of, and it worked very well, it almost it did the impossible. I noticed that some of you wanted to applaud me also, namely you think Hitchcock is unbeatable. But it worked so nice the Dziga Vertov clips, no? That they far from being overshadowed by the Hitchcock clips, it worked almost better. Okay. But first, I see some nonetheless dark moments in it. I verified it yesterday evening on Wikipedia and so on. That as I hinted yesterday, Vertov was member of that, how should I call it, uh gnostic materialist mechanic movement which was not a kind of a freaky marginal movement, but the most popular form of collective ideology, hundreds of thousands of people participating in it throughout the 20s in the Soviet Union. It was a kind of a, it really points towards today's so-called technological gnosis. The idea was that man is a deficient being with regard to machines and that the future should be to make ourselves totally disposable to ourselves biologically, to make us totally reproducible without sexuality. Sexuality was for, was for them the last vestige of the bourgeois ideology and so on. And, and to turn us into machines. The model was precisely man is not a well-made machine. I quote in my *In Defense of Lost Causes* book even Trotsky has one wonderfully arrogant statement where he says the next big task of the Bolshevik movement is to reconstruct man. And he says openly: first we must study biologically and as Trotsky puts it and also that part of neuronal biology which is usually called psychology, and there we must reconstruct man so that, it's a wonderful rhetorical ending, so that we can then say goodbye Homo sapiens. You did your work now we need something higher and so on. And so that this idea totally with today's tech-gnosis that, that, that science is enabling us today to reach immortality, they already had this dream which is today the dream of digital immortality, you know that you change our personal identity into a software which can then be reproduced, copied from one to another hardware and in this way you have immortality. It was really a kind of a meta and metaphysical dream which was, I emphasize this, this wasn't a couple of freaks, this was hundreds of thousands, extremely important. And again, Vertov was part of that. His reliance on camera was precisely that the problem of humans-machines is that they are less than less reliable than cameras. What was very interesting here was that this mechanical however you call them mechanic utopias got connected with Pavlov, Pavlovian this conditional reflex psychology. And they developed an entire theory ferociously against sexuality. That sexuality is that as Rancière put yesterday, that moment of destabilization, fascination, which disturbs this blissful plurality of the flow of life. So they tried to demonstrate even physiologically that sexuality that from the standpoint of the health of the organism, sexuality is as such pathological. And now comes the nice point of irony. This is how it was in '24, '25 in Russia. They were so aggressive looking for the support of Pavlov, that Trotsky, he was here a good guy who was for Freud, Trotsky on behalf of the Bolshevik oppress wrote a desperate letter to Pavlov trying to convince him "Give Freud a chance perhaps nonetheless." So you see far from being oppressed, no, psychoanalysis was how should I put it, officially supported by the early Bolsheviks and so on. But I want to say, sorry what I want to say is that this was an extremely strong, strong tendency. Uh, what should interest you is also what was their view of psychology? They had literal plans to turn humans into machines. One of their theorists said that emotions are something outdated. That man should become like a machine where for example, you know how a machine if the machine gets too hot it doesn't cry. Just you have a measure which shows you what's the temperature. That we should develop the same functionalization of emotions. Emotions are just a wrongly confused, outdated way for an organism to measure its malfunctioning. We should replace emotions—sorry, yeah. There's a great novel that was written exactly at that time by someone from within the system is the best science fiction novel. You mean this Zamyatin, *We*? Zamyatin. Ah, but you know I know this one, but you know also others which are the big hero of now. He is discovered as the greatest classic I think he was Andrei Platonov. He also did in *The Chevengur* and so on this— he was also member of this how should I put it anti-sexual utopia. Now we come to the, to the shock which on which I rely a lot in my book. That this is how paradoxically we should understand Stalin's popularity. Stalin ideologically meant a break with this crazy utopia and a return to common sense. Because Stalin, Stalin's message was, which is why Stalin when Stalin introduced socialist realism it was so immensely popular, no? Stalin's message was "Enough of this stupid like what you saw yesterday, formalist experiments. We need stories where people will cry, identify and so on." Even horrible as it may sound, the Stalinist show trials can be read as some kind of return to traditional morality. Because the line of this radical utopian gnostic Bolsheviks was that "Culpability is a bourgeois notion. Or if you are a criminal we should treat you as a machine which malfunctioned and it's not a question of you don't punish a machine, you either destroy it if it's too runs too bad or reconstruct." And they strictly insisted that that's how you should— so the very idea paradoxically, that's the cruel irony, the very idea of, of punishment show trials paradoxically brought back this although I mean I'm not an idiot it was all a fake I know, I know. But formally it brought back the idea of "We are responsible ethical subjects, responsible for what we do and we should be punished for that," no? No, no, no, it's a things how should I put it. I think that the history of the Soviet Union is very complex and the 20s are still the enigma. You cannot simply play the game of, you know, the good early time and then what happened after... but let's not get lost in it. What I want to do is can I, can I, can I imply something that you all know *Vertigo*? I mean, we are in a civilized society, no? I hope. This is how I treated my small son. I told him "Listen, you should stick to the great values of Western civilization." He asked me what does this mean. Then I told him, "If you know the difference between *King Oedipus* and *Oedipus at Colonus*, that's bullshit, that's your problem. If you don't know the difference between first and second version of Hitchcock's *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, then that's different, serious stuff," no? Okay so seriously, uh, there are so many interesting things to add. I improvised a little bit crazily yesterday to what Rancière said about, about *Vertigo*. I mean, we could have made a whole seminar on *Vertigo* illustrating precisely the points I was making here. Uh, for example, the same mental experiment you remember which I mentioned quickly yesterday, about *Vertigo* as how and I think that's the key to the story, that's Hitchcock's greatness, how this is the true break with the classical narrative. Following the classical narrative, the movie should have ended with the first Madeleine's suicide. And then it would have been a kind of a standard ultra-romantic story, it even could have been given a feminist touch like "The violence of male love pushes the woman towards suicide" and so on and so on. You can again just imagine Scotty witnessing the sui— and then that trial and Scotty desperate wandering alone and that's the end of the movie. It's a complete fully consistent narrative. Hitchcock's genius is that then the story goes on. But how does it go on? Things are things are pretty mysterious there. Okay, I will not spend all the time saying this. To give you another idea. Uh, did you notice okay, if you know *Vertigo* you know *Psycho* of course, everybody knows *Psycho*. Did you notice that *Psycho* relies on exactly the same narrative duality gap? Imagine *Psycho* ending just before the shower murder. With, uh, Marion deciding "I will return to Phoenix, I will back the buy" and then as if to purify herself taking a shower. It would be a perfect short moralistic like kind of a moral short story movie about a woman, young woman, because of her difficult situation
over, Ernst Jones negotiated with the Nazis, the good guy under quotation marks. Good guy only in the sense that he wanted nonetheless to somehow incorporate psychoanalysis. This was, you know the story, it's a wonderfully sad story. It was I forgot the name, the brother of Hermann Göring. Another Göring who was a big German psychiatrist and he negotiated, he made a deal and Ernst Jones was, and he wrote to Freud an enthusiastic letter, "Listen I saved our movement from Germany." But the conditions were shameless, how should I put it. First, of course it was non-negotiable all Jews are out. Second, they had to change, they had to replace change all the terms. Like it was no longer called psychoanalysis, it was called—and incidentally even today sometimes it's referred to dynamic approach. They invented this term "dynamic psychiatry," "dynamic approach" and so on. The irony is that it then worked tremendously well. And Freud accepted it but was totally shocked. Like Freud was shocked morally like, doesn't, doesn't Ernst Jones see what he is doing, how should I put it, no? That he is practically accepting... Now, Jones was also one of those dirty guys who, you know that famous Olympics Samaranch the bad Spanish guy, you know when they negotiated the Berlin Olympics in '36 and you know what was his answer to "My God, we cannot have Olympics in a country which is doing to Jews what"? That that sport is above politics, we shouldn't be concerned by religious conflicts in Germany. I mean, this was almost Ernst Jones' line. You know that he in a letter he even has some speculations on how maybe one can understand Germans that a healthy national body can sustain, not to lose its vitality, only a certain amount of foreign blood. And then he goes into this extremely tasteless speculations on how is it or percent, even proposes a kind of a scientific estimation of how many foreign blood— no, no, he really was. And he was also the main bad influence in, you know this is one of the more shame, shame— one of the shameless acts of psychoanalysis. You know when there was in '34 the basically Dollfuss the rightist coup d'etat in Austria. They abolished democracy. Austrian social democrat, all the honors go to them, they at least organized some street fight resistance, there were in the red suburbs of Vienna fights going on and the official party line of psycho-German-Austrian psychoanalytic association was: we stay out of this, it's not our struggle. But of course, fuck it, staying out of it meant de facto accepting. It was again the only good guys were for example I think Sándor Ferenczi, no? And some of them who were like a little bit more of the left wing. You know if you are looking for the golden era of European university there you can say whatever you want about how's the guy called, György Lukács, the great Marxist, no? But this was the first miracle. You know that in in the spring of or when, you know you have for a couple of months the Soviet Republic in Hungary. And Lukács was the Minister of Education. I mean, it's a dream what he did then. He, although he personally was not too much sympathetic to psychoanalysis, he nominated as a minister Sándor Ferenczi as the head of the first, it's the first university psychoanalytic department. Then he put Béla Bartók music and so on. It's, it's a miracle, it's a miracle for and Lukács maybe you know the story, I quote it somewhere, it's a, it's a wonderful story. Lukács was personally a kind of a hero. I don't like Adorno who attacks Lukács as a kind of a conformist selling him... No, listen, Fredric Jameson maybe you know the story gave me a wonderful argument here. You know Adorno wrote in '57 I think well-known text brilliantly written as it is all by Adorno, called *Die erpresste Versöhnung*, the "Extorted Reconciliation". It's basically an attack on Lukács as selling his critical thought to Stalinism blah blah. Okay, okay, of course Lukács did his big shot in issues in the twenties it's true. But nonetheless as Fredric Jameson drew attention to this that there are a couple of things which disturb this image. The irony is that at the very point, at the very moment when Adorno was writing this, Lukács was in prison in, in Bucharest. You know because Lukács heroically did participate in the '56 rebellion. He even again joined the Imre Nagy government and then was arrested by Russians and and they were all put in to the— for one year and then somewhere shot, some not. But you know it's a little bit cynical of for example the last lines there stylistically brilliantly. This is the most famous anti-Lukács line of Adorno. He says that Lukács is a guy who confuses the sound of his chains with the voice of the world spirit of history, you know. But unfortunately at that point Lukács did have literal chains, no? And to, and to go even further the very journal, Neue Rundschau whatever, where Adorno published his text was financed by CIA as anti-communist cultural struggle. So, uh, you know it's not as innocent. Also, this is for me a true ethics. I read in a biography of Lukács that they, by "they" I mean the new regime, Kádár, when they organized a trial against Imre Nagy and those who led the '56 rebellion they wanted Lukács as a witness. Why? Because they of course, how do you call it, taped secretly recorded the phone conversations among the member of this new anti-Soviet whatever government and they heard there how Lukács often didn't agree with them. He said, "No this means we rejoin bourgeois capitalism, I don't agree, I'm still a socialist." And they told Lukács, "We don't want you to lie, just say publicly what you said to them." And he said, "No, that wouldn't be fair. I said that in private, you know, like it would be put to a totally different—" he insisted to the end and he really risked they let him leave then partially rehabilitate him, but he— and then ah you know the nicest story, then we go to Hegel don't take it's a beautiful story that it's a gesture that when when a policeman came to arrest Lukács after the Soviet army took over Budapest, you know an NKVD officer approached him, came in, "Please give us any weapons you have." Lukács went for his pen and said "That's the only weapon I have." Ah, it's a nice gesture, whatever you say it's a nice gesture. What do you think of Ferenczi? Sorry? Ferenczi? Sándor Ferenczi. The psychoanalyst. Which one? Ferenczi. Yeah. What do you think of his work? Uh, unfortunately no. I'm not too— he is interesting blah blah, but I don't... he was a little bit crazy if you ask me because okay, he was doing things which cannot but appear extremely sympathetic. For example, he did something which again many of those libertarian psychoanalysts found so attractive. He was well known sometimes to do something again which in a way is marvelous. When he was doing analysis and the patient was doing his associations he often interrupted "No! This gave me now an idea, please you stand up I lay down" and he added his associations and so on, you know. Okay, it's sympathetic and so on and so on. He was part of that so-called Otto Fenichel also you know of that so-called Freudian left. You know the guy who is more a kind of a liberal, but you know Russell Jacoby. He wrote an interesting book on the Freudian left. It's even a good journalistic scoop discovering that there was a circle way into the 40s-50s of a couple of them, Otto Fenichel, I don't know and so on, who were exchanged regularly letters, a kind of a Freudian left and so on and so on, no? He gives also a wonderful portrait of the confusion of Freudians you know when all these typically middle European Germans found, uh found themselves found found themselves in the, in the United States, how they didn't understand the culture, all the all the problems with... it's a it's a wonderful part. But okay, I'm doing too much now, maybe. Let me just maybe we should begin with something I couldn't resist adding some remarks on. I really liked it, the yesterday's you were all there of course I hope, yesterday's talk by Rancière. And incidentally I always like this Hegelian systematizing. Did you notice how Badiou, me, Rancière, how we formed a very nice classical philosophical triad? You know this triad of to put it in religious terms: the true, the good, the beautiful. Or in Kantian terms: pure reason, practical reason, aesthetic judgment. Badiou was doing pure reason, ontology, logic, I was doing politics, practical, Rancière was doing aesthetics. So we were a nice philosophical trio, no? And did you, what I this morning I had a brief conversation with and we talked about how, you know that Rancière likes westerns by Anthony Mann. Yeah, it's even translated in one of his English books now, his wonderful essay on Anthony Mann. And now I was asking him because the other candidate for me is Delmer Daves. But okay, let's go on to more serious stuff. Let me tell you well where I thought he will agree with me but he didn't. And I'm still not sure with what. You remember that wonderful vision of, and it worked very well, it almost it did the impossible. I noticed that some of you wanted to applaud me also, namely you think Hitchcock is unbeatable. But it worked so nice the Dziga Vertov clips, no? That they far from being overshadowed by the Hitchcock clips, it worked almost better. Okay. But first, I see some nonetheless dark moments in it. I verified it yesterday evening on Wikipedia and so on. That as I hinted yesterday, Vertov was member of that, how should I call it, uh gnostic materialist mechanic movement which was not a kind of a freaky marginal movement, but the most popular form of collective ideology, hundreds of thousands of people participating in it throughout the 20s in the Soviet Union. It was a kind of a, it really points towards today's so-called technological gnosis. The idea was that man is a deficient being with regard to machines and that the future should be to make ourselves totally disposable to ourselves biologically, to make us totally reproducible without sexuality. Sexuality was for, was for them the last vestige of the bourgeois ideology and so on. And, and to turn us into machines. The model was precisely man is not a well-made machine. I quote in my *In Defense of Lost Causes* book even Trotsky has one wonderfully arrogant statement where he says the next big task of the Bolshevik movement is to reconstruct man. And he says openly: first we must study biologically and as Trotsky puts it and also that part of neuronal biology which is usually called psychology, and there we must reconstruct man so that, it's a wonderful rhetorical ending, so that we can then say goodbye Homo sapiens. You did your work now we need something higher and so on. And so that this idea totally with today's tech-gnosis that, that, that science is enabling us today to reach immortality, they already had this dream which is today the dream of digital immortality, you know that you change our personal identity into a software which can then be reproduced, copied from one to another hardware and in this way you have immortality. It was really a kind of a meta and metaphysical dream which was, I emphasize this, this wasn't a couple of freaks, this was hundreds of thousands, extremely important. And again, Vertov was part of that. His reliance on camera was precisely that the problem of humans-machines is that they are less than less reliable than cameras. What was very interesting here was that this mechanical however you call them mechanic utopias got connected with Pavlov, Pavlovian this conditional reflex psychology. And they developed an entire theory ferociously against sexuality. That sexuality is that as Rancière put yesterday, that moment of destabilization, fascination, which disturbs this blissful plurality of the flow of life. So they tried to demonstrate even physiologically that sexuality that from the standpoint of the health of the organism, sexuality is as such pathological. And now comes the nice point of irony. This is how it was in '24, '25 in Russia. They were so aggressive looking for the support of Pavlov, that Trotsky, he was here a good guy who was for Freud, Trotsky on behalf of the Bolshevik oppress wrote a desperate letter to Pavlov trying to convince him "Give Freud a chance perhaps nonetheless." So you see far from being oppressed, no, psychoanalysis was how should I put it, officially supported by the early Bolsheviks and so on. But I want to say, sorry what I want to say is that this was an extremely strong, strong tendency. Uh, what should interest you is also what was their view of psychology? They had literal plans to turn humans into machines. One of their theorists said that emotions are something outdated. That man should become like a machine where for example, you know how a machine if the machine gets too hot it doesn't cry. Just you have a measure which shows you what's the temperature. That we should develop the same functionalization of emotions. Emotions are just a wrongly confused, outdated way for an organism to measure its malfunctioning. We should replace emotions—sorry, yeah. There's a great novel that was written exactly at that time by someone from within the system is the best science fiction novel. You mean this Zamyatin, *We*? Zamyatin. Ah, but you know I know this one, but you know also others which are the big hero of now. He is discovered as the greatest classic I think he was Andrei Platonov. He also did in *The Chevengur* and so on this— he was also member of this how should I put it anti-sexual utopia. Now we come to the, to the shock which on which I rely a lot in my book. That this is how paradoxically we should understand Stalin's popularity. Stalin ideologically meant a break with this crazy utopia and a return to common sense. Because Stalin, Stalin's message was, which is why Stalin when Stalin introduced socialist realism it was so immensely popular, no? Stalin's message was "Enough of this stupid like what you saw yesterday, formalist experiments. We need stories where people will cry, identify and so on." Even horrible as it may sound, the Stalinist show trials can be read as some kind of return to traditional morality. Because the line of this radical utopian gnostic Bolsheviks was that "Culpability is a bourgeois notion. Or if you are a criminal we should treat you as a machine which malfunctioned and it's not a question of you don't punish a machine, you either destroy it if it's too runs too bad or reconstruct." And they strictly insisted that that's how you should— so the very idea paradoxically, that's the cruel irony, the very idea of, of punishment show trials paradoxically brought back this although I mean I'm not an idiot it was all a fake I know, I know. But formally it brought back the idea of "We are responsible ethical subjects, responsible for what we do and we should be punished for that," no? No, no, no, it's a things how should I put it. I think that the history of the Soviet Union is very complex and the 20s are still the enigma. You cannot simply play the game of, you know, the good early time and then what happened after... but let's not get lost in it. What I want to do is can I, can I, can I imply something that you all know *Vertigo*? I mean, we are in a civilized society, no? I hope. This is how I treated my small son. I told him "Listen, you should stick to the great values of Western civilization." He asked me what does this mean. Then I told him, "If you know the difference between *King Oedipus* and *Oedipus at Colonus*, that's bullshit, that's your problem. If you don't know the difference between first and second version of Hitchcock's *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, then that's different, serious stuff," no? Okay so seriously, uh, there are so many interesting things to add. I improvised a little bit crazily yesterday to what Rancière said about, about *Vertigo*. I mean, we could have made a whole seminar on *Vertigo* illustrating precisely the points I was making here. Uh, for example, the same mental experiment you remember which I mentioned quickly yesterday, about *Vertigo* as how and I think that's the key to the story, that's Hitchcock's greatness, how this is the true break with the classical narrative. Following the classical narrative, the movie should have ended with the first Madeleine's suicide. And then it would have been a kind of a standard ultra-romantic story, it even could have been given a feminist touch like "The violence of male love pushes the woman towards suicide" and so on and so on. You can again just imagine Scotty witnessing the sui— and then that trial and Scotty desperate wandering alone and that's the end of the movie. It's a complete fully consistent narrative. Hitchcock's genius is that then the story goes on. But how does it go on? Things are things are pretty mysterious there. Okay, I will not spend all the time saying this. To give you another idea. Uh, did you notice okay, if you know *Vertigo* you know *Psycho* of course, everybody knows *Psycho*. Did you notice that *Psycho* relies on exactly the same narrative duality gap? Imagine *Psycho* ending just before the shower murder. With, uh, Marion deciding "I will return to Phoenix, I will back the buy" and then as if to purify herself taking a shower. It would be a perfect short moralistic like kind of a moral short story movie about a woman, young woman, because of her difficult situation
unknown
tempted
tempted
Slavoj Žižek
by the path of crime and then discovering, and then encountering in the figure of Norman her own future if she follows this path of crime. This is like a warning, like "If I go to the end I will end up like that madman." And then this sobers her, you know, of innocence saved in the last minute. Are you aware that it works perfectly as a kind of a moralistic short novel or whatever a kind of I think that it would have been about 45-minute story, no? And again what one should emphasize for is that there is no in *Psycho* no tragic continuity between first and second part. I think it's totally wrong to claim like I don't know uh that Norman sometimes they play on this, you know, the similarity of names, the mirror relationship: Marion, Norman. That Norman is the dark shadow... no, it's, it's total gap. There is no necessity, another dimension brutally intrudes. Let's go further. Uh, I think that what what was so fascinating for Rancière in Vertov, you know, how how did that montage of the multiplicity of this spontaneous communism work so that you had this basically it was formalist in the elementary sense of that. I think and Rancière I later or this morning talked with him, he immediately confessed this point that it's not simply that you put different things which are not connected and count on oh somehow all these are elements of the plurality of spontaneous communism. He was playing on this subtle formal echoes of of gestures, you know, like the round gesture here, the gesture of the— you know like the the scenes were formally echoing each other at a purely formal level and I think that you should never underestimate the level to which Hitchcock also worked in this way. For example, he didn't go far enough here Rancière. You know that the central formal motive of *Vertigo* is the spiral, no? Which you, you get it how? First you get it in the very credit sequence. The spirals coming out of the eye. Then you get it the spiral of, of Scotty this making the tours all the time following Madeleine. Then you get it at two central scenes: when he Scotty embraces here Madeleine, the spiral the full circle movement of the camera. Then you have the spiral, okay not full circle but nonetheless up the stairs. Then you have absolutely central, uh, the spiral in the hair, you know that Carlotta Valdes' hair has a spiral here and so on and so on. I think that this is the way to read Hitchcock. This, how should I put it, this the and this is I think where cinema one of the ways to claim where cinema becomes art maybe a communist art, no? In the sense of uh what really matters is not the explicit narrative is all this thickness how should I call it of the background of all these formal motives which sustain it. And I once in one of my books I mention for example the other late Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece *Ivan the Terrible*, which is all also all built on this moment of rage which can be shouting, visual rage, just a kind of extra intensity. I'm so sad we don't have time to to go to debate more Badiou, as you can see, okay. I propose you a deal. Uh, I have your ah-ha-ha I have your email, no? Can I send you and you have their email? Yeah. So you are my access to orgy, how should I put it collectively, yeah. Can I, that's the only or if you are interested in my shit you don't have to read it. Because you know what I really hate: people who give me their book and then ask you "Oh did you already read it?" and so on, you know. Like if I give you something you can also use it as a toilet paper I will not be there counting, no? Uh, what if I simply send you one or two texts unpublished where I developed so that you will get all of it, no? But let me go yeah so and again, uh I send it to you, you send it further. Okay, that's done. You will get it like this this evening probably I can... when are you leaving? Um, leaving? No, no, not leaving in like life, but leaving like fucking off, like going. Oh, we're leaving in three weeks but tomorrow... I'll send you stuff tonight or tomorrow. You know, you see how I am a pure philosopher but I had to express myself in plastic terms so that you can follow my sublime thought, no? What is it, what is it on if it's on Badiou, the text? Uh, no no, also yes because now I my god I'm getting old senile I lost the connection because at some point here okay it will come later to me. I have a problem, no. Let's go back to this psycho and so on, yes to this how should I call it, this yes this density of motives which formal motives which reverberate and so on and so on. Uh, did you for example, I mean to read Hitchcock in this Vertovian way would have been wonderful. For example, do you remember, do you remember the scene from that slightly ridiculous dream sequence, the scene of that, uh, James Stewart's face terrified staring into the camera, just the head and all those lines behind moving. And then followed by a body falling, correct? For example, just name that for example. Did you notice how in *Psycho* the second murder which is for me the crucial one much more effective, Arbogast murder, detective, is done in exactly, you have the same the counter-position of two motives. You remember when the detective Arbogast is falling down the stairs? You have the same oh his head like this and the background moving and then a jump to his body falling down. And I did an analysis somewhere where I showed it's already in Hitchcock's early, it's a bit of a boring film but it has some masterful moments, *The Murder!*, where you have for the first time the same mechanism. Or as I developed maybe you read it now it's out of print but they will reprint it fuck them, uh that book that I co-edited *Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)*, no? I find there another motive which I think is crucial to entire Hitchcock. If you look at Arbogast murder in *Psycho*, you remember how it is done? The detective Arbogast enters the mother's house, you see the stairs, Arbogast goes up, approaches the stairs. Until this point you have a standard procedure of exchanging subjective that is to say point of view and objective shot. You have shots of Arbogast climbing up and you have the shots of point of view what Arbogast sees. Okay, that any idiot can do that. But look at it and you will notice then something typically Hitchcockian happens. Then the in an extremely complicated so-called crane shot and the irony is that Marion is Marion Crane, crane turn, uh the camera moves up to this almost geometric what in Hitchcockian literature is called God's point of view shot. Up you see up from up like seeing a plan and then from this totally objective up then, uh mother-Norman we don't know who is the monster enters. And then we have the jump to that face of, okay. What I'm saying is that what Hitchcock does here is something very interesting at the level of subjective economy. He he first produces let's call it a divine all-knowing shot and then jumps to a very strange subjective point of view shot which is the point of view shot from an impossible subjectivity. Impossible in the sense of too intense, too crazy. The the violence of that shot oh when we see, uh detective Arbogast falling, is that it's supposed to be from the standpoint of the murderer. But we are thrown violently into the standpoint, point of view of someone whom we even don't do not know who he is. I claim that there is a whole negative theology here. It is as if this divine neutrality itself gets subjectivized as a kind of evil subjectivity. And I claim that throughout Hitchcock you find the same mechanism. You find it already in *Murder!* from not don't confuse it with *Dial M for Murder*, from '31, one of his first talking movies. Then, uh you remember the classical scene from when there is fire in that shitty Bodega Bay from *The Birds*. It's exactly the same. After the gas station catches fire, you get the exchange of point of view and objective shot of, uh, Melanie, Tippi Hedren. Melanie shocked and what she sees. Then you get again this, remember it's wonderfully done, this divine point of view shot from above of the entire Bodega Bay. You see everything, the whole city, fire and so on. And here Hitchcock does the same shift from objectivity to impossible subjectivity, but he does it within the same shot. It's wonderfully done. It's, uh because he tricks you, he dupes you by cheating you: first you think that the whole point of that objective shot from far above the whole city is just the logic of what we call establishing shot, you know, so that you don't get lost in detail quick cuts and so on local shots so that you get the overview of the entire scene. But you remember what then happens within the same shot? From behind first one bird enters then another bird and so on so that the objectivity itself is subjectivized and as such it becomes an evil gaze. It's a, one it's a, it's a, it's wonderfully done. I mean, as far as I know only Hitchcock was able to was able to do things like this. So, uh, back to Badiou, yes. Now I come to Badiou. Now I talked with him about this and he of course doesn't agree. But I still think I am right, so I will as they put it in California share my experience with you, no? So, uh, you know his idea you just have to know the basics. He developed it up there in the next house of this idea of his, uh ontology or rather phenomenology of the worlds based on the notions of intensity. How you have minimum intensity, maximum intensity like where let's say the world is a social world, maximum intensity is that element which fully stands for what it is characterizes it and so on and so on. Uh, he only operates between these two limits: minimum, maximum intensity. What I am tempted to do and that was the point of, uh, how when I was was I developing here or at my talk? I don't know where. This idea of how, ah yes, when I was talking about referring to Deleuze about this, uh, viewing things with an inhuman view, with too much intensity. In the sense that that what you see becomes, you know when I mentioned for example if CIA has some shots of what happens in the last minutes or if we were to get shots of how Jews were actually killing Jews. Of course, my point is the following one. Of course this is part of reality. But it's so intense that if you effectively were to confront it, it would, you would have endured a Realitätsverlust. You would have as it were lost your reality. I mean, no, who will be now the victim? B-U, please. Okay. It's just a mental experiment. I warn you, attention. I mean this is, I am a gentle person. I am only doing this to sacrifice myself so that you will understand it again. So, okay. Let's say that I will now I don't know take scissors and pick up one of your eyes and swallow it. I claim that momentarily you would have gotten the loss of reality. You would say "No, this cannot—" you know, like the intensity would have been too much. It doesn't fit the coordinates of our life. What so I claim that that, uh, this is, uh, how I would in a very friendly way of constructive criticism and so on supplement Badiou. I claim that each world, what he calls world this transcendentally constituted space, has not only non-existent minimum and maximum intensity but also has a point of excessive intensity which is nonetheless inherent to it. I am not talking about you have a certain world like our world and then I don't know aliens are coming all of a sudden this glass starts to talk or whatever and then of course we lose the sense of reality like "Where are we?". No, no, no, I'm saying that the very implicit logic of the intensity of the system, of a— a world, you know what I mean, shouldn't reach beyond a certain limit. If you go beyond over-intensity, the world falls apart. And I think again, this mechanism is crucial for event, for, uh, for how to account for event, how to account for, uh, how to account for falling apart of a certain world and so on. That you know like when intensity but again which is still the the immanent intensity. For example, in the most naive sense again what I said the inten— it can be the intensity of sexual pleasure, it can be the intensity of, of, of torture pain. Which is why, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here, which is why, uh this is I think one of the— if you want to experience this gap at the level of intensity, pornography is a case I thought. You know probably you know it, it's my old motive of how pornography if anything is the most heavily censored genre of them all. In what sense? Of course, ho-ho you see everything, no? But okay, not only is it censored in the way I already developed, you know all those feminine expressions face censored, but more radical— did you notice my old story I know— did you notice something very strange about pornography how at least the classical hardcore pornography the story has to be ridiculous? I mean, stories are so stupid, stories that you, that you, that introduce the act and so on, that I think they are so stupid that you cannot say oh these are stupid cheap guys who are... no they they cannot be so stupid. I think they follow some kind of ethical code injunction, the narrative has to be stupid. I mean, I will not bore you with examples. I remember once even now I am a traumatized when I was young you know the classical story you know like the wife is home alone, a plumber comes and says "I fixed the hole in the kitchen," then she says "But I have another hole, can you also...". You know like you are, you are deep— I mean this was at some point even for me the most funny part this totally ridiculous. What is prohibited is to have both at the same time. The choice is this one: either you have an emotionally engaging story or you see it all. What you cannot have, that's the prohibited is, that would have been too much of intensity. It's a full melodrama when you cry. In my second book *Looking Awry*, I used the tasteless example of: imagine, I don't like the movie so much, *Out of Africa*. You know the scene where, uh, Robert Redford and, uh, Meryl Streep finally do it? Imagine the same film, the same scene, just minutes more. When they embrace you see the penis penetrating and so on and so on. It doesn't work. You have to make a choice. Now I know what you will say, but am I aware idiot that precisely where I am here Catherine Breillat was here you know the French director who is trying to do precisely this. Did you see her *Romance* or what? Which tries to be a hardcore movie in the sense that you see everything but nonetheless with all the how should I call it naively narrative dramatic intensity. I claim that's why she doesn't work. In the sense of that's why her success is limited. For the general public there is some kind of resistance there. Now you will tell me that was the standard reproach to me. Sophie Fiennes, the big of *Pervert's Guide*, told me "He-he Slavoj you really must be old. Where do you live, don't you know that this type of hardcore you got it like half a century ago, no?" And then okay I asked her okay I want to follow new tendencies, what is going on now. She told me gonzo so-called. And then I looked at it. Gonzo is even worse. You know the so-called gonzo? It's let's call it interactive embedded pornography. It's where, stupid as the story is, they don't even pretend that it's a story, but the actors in a comical way interact with the camera, you know. You hear the voice say "Why don't you spread your legs a little bit more?" the actress makes a funny remark and so on this kind of. And I think the censorship is here even stronger. They are afraid even of that minimum of comical stupid narrative. Narrative must be totally prohibited. You must be all the time reminded "No no no, it's just a movie, it's not a real story" and so on and so on, no? So again, this is how I would have attacked— let's stick behind the back of my maybe best friend, Badiou. But the only way to prove that he's my best friend is to— and incidentally you know that once we made talking in B-U a wonderful comical clinical analysis where as you maybe know if some of you are have something with psychoanalysis that the ideal cou— one of the ideal couples in psychoanalysis is *le maître et l'hystérique*, master and the hysteric. Master the peaceful one just says and hysteric the one who is bothering. And well, it's clear. Alain and me, he's the master I'm the hysteric, you know. Even at the level of texts, you know, I write all the time hundreds of pages about him against him. He just from time to time does one line in a footnote and so on. And we decided to go on like this. We said "No." He even proposed "Why don't we have a big debate?" I told him, "Do you hate me? Do you want to ruin our friendship?" I told him, "Do you want Anti-Casablanca? Do you know us to walk out and say 'That's the end of a beautiful friendship' or what?" And then we decided that that's our fate. I will endlessly write about him, he will persist in this royal attitude, you know, of kind of a interest— kind of a, you know, for example there is one one kind of a patronizingly benevolent critical remark in in his *Logics of Worlds* I think. And, uh, I love it I love it this way. So again, going on with Badiou, some bad things about the guy. But you know what this means incidentally. This means that he is, how should I put it, he is one of the few, he is at least for me I think so many other philosophical options today are exhausted. They did great things but they are exhausted. Heideggerianism I respect it together with Alain, but it's exhausted. It reached it did reach its limit. And so on and so on. And he and then some of his followers around him like that speculative realism stuff Quentin Meillassoux and others. If you ask me these are the only things that things are happening today that philosophy is alive. Or even in Germany. Again, I mentioned Sloterdijk. I'm sorry to tell you but I think he is alive. He may be the political enemy, but— and that's the tragedy of Habermas. That's why I think Habermas— you remember there was a big philosophical scandal in Europe I think some ten years a little bit less ago, when, uh, Sloterdijk wrote a text something like *Regeln für den Menschenpark* (The Rules of the Human Zoo), where, uh, he was what he wanted there I was totally on Sloterdijk's side. Because all he wanted to say and here I totally agree with him was that the fact of biotechnology and so on forces us to re— confronts us with new ethical dilemmas, deadlocks where you can no longer simply apply the old norms. And the ultimate proof I think is Habermas himself here. What what is Habermas' answer? It's "Let's not do it." No wonder Habermas co-wrote, not co-wrote, they just put together texts a book with, with Pope with Cardinal Ratzinger. Both had this conclusion: if we start to manipulate genetically or with pharmaco-chemistry whatever our psychic properties, this ruins the fundamentals of our ethics and of our idea of human dignity where to get something you have hardly to work for it and so on and so on, no? You know all these stories for example if I can if you're a oh no I will be the bad guy. If I am a coward and you give me a pill which simply which simply strengthens my courage then suddenly, uh, being courageous or not loses its status of an autonomous ethical decision. It simply a matter of self-manipulation or how others manipulate me and so on and so on. So their idea is to simplify Ratzinger and Habermas it's a very sad one, it's a fiasco of enlightenment if it is. If we go too far here in genetic manipulations, we ruin the basic notion of our ethical autonomy, so let's not do it. So let's put a frontier there. I think that not only is this impracticable de facto, like uh what I was so interested when I visited Shanghai was, I mean we here in Europe bother with some shitty ethical dilemmas, they are doing it like crazy there, no? In China. Like they already have plans to control in the long term the entire population, the basic features and so on and everybody is doing it. You know that recently I spoke with some American investigative journalist who told me that the latest thing going on in military technology and that not only Americans, all, Americans, Chinese are already doing it like crazy is a new level of how should I call it pharmaconeuronal psychological warfare where, uh, it's what for example they told me that they did this I speak in the past past tense they already hacked to this. It's very primitive logic basically. They discovered that when you are really afraid full of shit in a true panic, uh, your brains emit a certain electromagnetic radiation whatsoever. So then they draw the obvious conclusion: why don't we do it the other way around? And they discovered that it works. If you bombard me with this type of waves I will be automatically physiologically thrown into a panic. And, uh, again it's primitive but it works and I was told that they already have it's still clumsy but some kind of elementary machines where a certain space like a baseball field something like that, every human being there simply you press a button they are all in panic. I mean that's the future. And I simply think, I mean Chinese know how to do it now in this combination of authoritarian socialism and and capitalism. One thing is the state wants to control the entire population. On the other hand, they are already building they even showed me some plans in the suburbs of Shanghai mega clinics for the rich Western medical tourists. The idea is that in a year or two they told me you will be able to go there if you are rich they will do all the genetic research you know all this. They're already doing it in India. Yeah but in what sense is it already a mass, massive? It is? Well in in India you can get all the health care you want cheaper nicer service and all that than is easily... No, no, no I know, I know. Maybe I focus too much on China, no. So what I'm saying is that or you know what really why I really think we are approaching some kind of apocalyptic times, not in the bad sense, maybe it will be the hope of something new, which we must just become aware that we are approaching some zero point. For example, I'm so interested in following this trend where I was told that you already can do it, that you can directly link your neurons to a computer so that then for example you can move objects only by thinking. You know you don't even need that Stephen Hawking famous one finger that he can move. No you can and they of course it's still done on a very primitive at a very primitive level but I was told for example they already can decode by wiring you your neurons this element— very elementary mental signals of up, down, left, right. So at NYU even I think I was told they already have a computer game that you can play just with your mind. You don't have this joystick. I never got it why it's joystick, it sounds so masturbatory or whatever. I know that like you move but you know what's so horrible is that you can intervene into reality by the mere power of thinking and of course the way they do it with technology to make us swallow this they always start with how this will help invalids and so on and so on. I saw a report, maybe you did, a couple of months ago it was reported it was reported that in, uh, that in London they already had this how do you call it— it's politically incorrect to say crip, how do you say crippled people? Movement challenged or what? Okay whatever, disabled, yeah okay sorry no fun here intended just bad taste. Uh, that you know you don't even have to that you can simply move the wheelchair or what, uh simply... Those technologies are a decade old where they fuse the nerves into a... Yeah but the point is this will get more and more developed and what interests me that's the philosophical question clearly is how will this affect our self-identity? I claim that our self-identity is based on this distinction between "that's me," "that's out there reality." I think what I want, reality is out there. Our notion of freedom is based on this because the next thing as that military example reminds us immediately, you know if it goes out it goes in. That is to say if you can move an object with your thought then your thoughts can also be moved by, uh, sorry. There is a problem though with that. A friend of mine is a computer scientist in Ireland and he's working on, uh, reading the neural signals. Ah I know you. You are the, the rapist priest advocate. Yeah, let's skip it. No no, no, but, um, no, but, uh, apparently there there are certain things that your brain does and it doesn't function as as we want it to. Yeah. For example, if if I ask you you know what's plus And you say there's a part of your brain that does the mathematics. And if I keep asking you the same thing, it'll go from the part of the brain that does the mathematics to memory, right? Yeah. So but if I keep giving you different additions, like you know plus plus whatever we keep going on, it should constantly fire the mathematical part of your brain, but every so often it fires some other part of the brain that's just unexplainable. It's it's actually ruined my friend's postdoc. Ah really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's they've all gone back to the drawing board now so it's... because you know what makes this interesting that is it truly just some kind of you know like in every mechanism things misfire from time to time or can you read some deeper defense or whatever mechanism meaning into it? Um, I'm not sure. No, no it's it really is just the story way we want the brain to work or way it has to work as a machine it's just not doing it. Because I think I don't know if there's some some quantum element to it or something... Yeah okay, okay, yeah yeah. No no, okay, sorry where were we? Ah yeah, yeah, yeah. With yeah, okay intensity all this stuff and so on. So here I think that we should take seriously what goes on in today's brain sciences and so on. Now I am not here I think the trick is to avoid on the one hand this naive tech-gnosis, oh wonderful we will be became like gods, we will you know just moving things with our immersed into the world, whatever. But also we should avoid this nihilistic pessimism, oh the end of humanity, the end of being human and so on and so on. All I am saying is that we should openly confront the problem. And that coming back to Sloterdijk I think all he wanted is this and Habermas and some of his groupies how should I put it around mounted in Germany a ferocious attack proclaiming Sloterdijk an advocate or kind of a neo-Nazi genetics and so on and so on. I mean it was slightly ridiculous how should I put it, no? So coming back to what I was saying, uh, I don't agree with Sloterdijk but for example his last book which is even a big bestseller in Germany, uh, *Du mußt dein Leben ändern* (You Must Change Your Life). The idea it's a nice one is that what we misread as this post-secular rise of the religious, it's not this, it's simply it has nothing to do with religious spirituality, that is just the new form of emerging anthropology where the idea is almost like Judith Butler, Foucault, that through practice you have to form, reform yourself. And that's why he finds a wonderful underlying concept where he puts together people like creative thinkers, models, top sportsmen and so on, you know. All these totally different levels where the constant is through hard work, discipline, training you form, form yourself. And, uh, then there comes the per— he he claims that and he convinced me, that the central religious figure of the twentieth century is, how is that creep called, uh... I forgot his name, uh... who who is the founder of, of Scientology? L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, Ron Hubbard, yeah. Because he says that that, and he focuses on something which I find prof— fascinating. How Ron Hubbard inverted the usual historical line, which is something was, let's say if you are modern secular atheist, you are respectful. You say old sacred texts, your line is once they were taken immediately seriously today we should admire them but not for their cognitive ethical value but as beautiful monuments, aesthetics and so on. Ron Hubbard did the opposite. Do you know that— and you can prove it by letters, I love this— do you know that he started writing shitty science fiction novels? Then he said, "Maybe they will sell better if I sell them as a religion, as truth," how should I put it, no? And again, he— it's a very good book by Sloterdijk. He focused some fundamental problem about how beliefs function today that we shouldn't read— it's a very important insight into how it's not really the return of the religious in the old sense. So again, this is why I even know some people who are close to Habermas they told me, Habermas I don't hate him, he is in a almost tragic personal position. On the one hand he is respected, you know, for example friends told me ten years ago or five when Tony Blair was still in power in England, whenever Habermas made a philosophy trip there to I don't know London School of Economics or when for one evening he always disappeared and it was known it was an evening with with Tony Blair and so on. He was meeting Helmut Schmidt when he was Chancellor. I mean he is he is de facto or was till now at least, how should I put it, European community Staatsphilosoph, state philosopher. But at the same time he is bitterly aware that as a philosopher he is no longer alive. It's
by the path of crime and then discovering, and then encountering in the figure of Norman her own future if she follows this path of crime. This is like a warning, like "If I go to the end I will end up like that madman." And then this sobers her, you know, of innocence saved in the last minute. Are you aware that it works perfectly as a kind of a moralistic short novel or whatever a kind of I think that it would have been about 45-minute story, no? And again what one should emphasize for is that there is no in *Psycho* no tragic continuity between first and second part. I think it's totally wrong to claim like I don't know uh that Norman sometimes they play on this, you know, the similarity of names, the mirror relationship: Marion, Norman. That Norman is the dark shadow... no, it's, it's total gap. There is no necessity, another dimension brutally intrudes. Let's go further. Uh, I think that what what was so fascinating for Rancière in Vertov, you know, how how did that montage of the multiplicity of this spontaneous communism work so that you had this basically it was formalist in the elementary sense of that. I think and Rancière I later or this morning talked with him, he immediately confessed this point that it's not simply that you put different things which are not connected and count on oh somehow all these are elements of the plurality of spontaneous communism. He was playing on this subtle formal echoes of of gestures, you know, like the round gesture here, the gesture of the— you know like the the scenes were formally echoing each other at a purely formal level and I think that you should never underestimate the level to which Hitchcock also worked in this way. For example, he didn't go far enough here Rancière. You know that the central formal motive of *Vertigo* is the spiral, no? Which you, you get it how? First you get it in the very credit sequence. The spirals coming out of the eye. Then you get it the spiral of, of Scotty this making the tours all the time following Madeleine. Then you get it at two central scenes: when he Scotty embraces here Madeleine, the spiral the full circle movement of the camera. Then you have the spiral, okay not full circle but nonetheless up the stairs. Then you have absolutely central, uh, the spiral in the hair, you know that Carlotta Valdes' hair has a spiral here and so on and so on. I think that this is the way to read Hitchcock. This, how should I put it, this the and this is I think where cinema one of the ways to claim where cinema becomes art maybe a communist art, no? In the sense of uh what really matters is not the explicit narrative is all this thickness how should I call it of the background of all these formal motives which sustain it. And I once in one of my books I mention for example the other late Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece *Ivan the Terrible*, which is all also all built on this moment of rage which can be shouting, visual rage, just a kind of extra intensity. I'm so sad we don't have time to to go to debate more Badiou, as you can see, okay. I propose you a deal. Uh, I have your ah-ha-ha I have your email, no? Can I send you and you have their email? Yeah. So you are my access to orgy, how should I put it collectively, yeah. Can I, that's the only or if you are interested in my shit you don't have to read it. Because you know what I really hate: people who give me their book and then ask you "Oh did you already read it?" and so on, you know. Like if I give you something you can also use it as a toilet paper I will not be there counting, no? Uh, what if I simply send you one or two texts unpublished where I developed so that you will get all of it, no? But let me go yeah so and again, uh I send it to you, you send it further. Okay, that's done. You will get it like this this evening probably I can... when are you leaving? Um, leaving? No, no, not leaving in like life, but leaving like fucking off, like going. Oh, we're leaving in three weeks but tomorrow... I'll send you stuff tonight or tomorrow. You know, you see how I am a pure philosopher but I had to express myself in plastic terms so that you can follow my sublime thought, no? What is it, what is it on if it's on Badiou, the text? Uh, no no, also yes because now I my god I'm getting old senile I lost the connection because at some point here okay it will come later to me. I have a problem, no. Let's go back to this psycho and so on, yes to this how should I call it, this yes this density of motives which formal motives which reverberate and so on and so on. Uh, did you for example, I mean to read Hitchcock in this Vertovian way would have been wonderful. For example, do you remember, do you remember the scene from that slightly ridiculous dream sequence, the scene of that, uh, James Stewart's face terrified staring into the camera, just the head and all those lines behind moving. And then followed by a body falling, correct? For example, just name that for example. Did you notice how in *Psycho* the second murder which is for me the crucial one much more effective, Arbogast murder, detective, is done in exactly, you have the same the counter-position of two motives. You remember when the detective Arbogast is falling down the stairs? You have the same oh his head like this and the background moving and then a jump to his body falling down. And I did an analysis somewhere where I showed it's already in Hitchcock's early, it's a bit of a boring film but it has some masterful moments, *The Murder!*, where you have for the first time the same mechanism. Or as I developed maybe you read it now it's out of print but they will reprint it fuck them, uh that book that I co-edited *Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)*, no? I find there another motive which I think is crucial to entire Hitchcock. If you look at Arbogast murder in *Psycho*, you remember how it is done? The detective Arbogast enters the mother's house, you see the stairs, Arbogast goes up, approaches the stairs. Until this point you have a standard procedure of exchanging subjective that is to say point of view and objective shot. You have shots of Arbogast climbing up and you have the shots of point of view what Arbogast sees. Okay, that any idiot can do that. But look at it and you will notice then something typically Hitchcockian happens. Then the in an extremely complicated so-called crane shot and the irony is that Marion is Marion Crane, crane turn, uh the camera moves up to this almost geometric what in Hitchcockian literature is called God's point of view shot. Up you see up from up like seeing a plan and then from this totally objective up then, uh mother-Norman we don't know who is the monster enters. And then we have the jump to that face of, okay. What I'm saying is that what Hitchcock does here is something very interesting at the level of subjective economy. He he first produces let's call it a divine all-knowing shot and then jumps to a very strange subjective point of view shot which is the point of view shot from an impossible subjectivity. Impossible in the sense of too intense, too crazy. The the violence of that shot oh when we see, uh detective Arbogast falling, is that it's supposed to be from the standpoint of the murderer. But we are thrown violently into the standpoint, point of view of someone whom we even don't do not know who he is. I claim that there is a whole negative theology here. It is as if this divine neutrality itself gets subjectivized as a kind of evil subjectivity. And I claim that throughout Hitchcock you find the same mechanism. You find it already in *Murder!* from not don't confuse it with *Dial M for Murder*, from '31, one of his first talking movies. Then, uh you remember the classical scene from when there is fire in that shitty Bodega Bay from *The Birds*. It's exactly the same. After the gas station catches fire, you get the exchange of point of view and objective shot of, uh, Melanie, Tippi Hedren. Melanie shocked and what she sees. Then you get again this, remember it's wonderfully done, this divine point of view shot from above of the entire Bodega Bay. You see everything, the whole city, fire and so on. And here Hitchcock does the same shift from objectivity to impossible subjectivity, but he does it within the same shot. It's wonderfully done. It's, uh because he tricks you, he dupes you by cheating you: first you think that the whole point of that objective shot from far above the whole city is just the logic of what we call establishing shot, you know, so that you don't get lost in detail quick cuts and so on local shots so that you get the overview of the entire scene. But you remember what then happens within the same shot? From behind first one bird enters then another bird and so on so that the objectivity itself is subjectivized and as such it becomes an evil gaze. It's a, one it's a, it's a, it's wonderfully done. I mean, as far as I know only Hitchcock was able to was able to do things like this. So, uh, back to Badiou, yes. Now I come to Badiou. Now I talked with him about this and he of course doesn't agree. But I still think I am right, so I will as they put it in California share my experience with you, no? So, uh, you know his idea you just have to know the basics. He developed it up there in the next house of this idea of his, uh ontology or rather phenomenology of the worlds based on the notions of intensity. How you have minimum intensity, maximum intensity like where let's say the world is a social world, maximum intensity is that element which fully stands for what it is characterizes it and so on and so on. Uh, he only operates between these two limits: minimum, maximum intensity. What I am tempted to do and that was the point of, uh, how when I was was I developing here or at my talk? I don't know where. This idea of how, ah yes, when I was talking about referring to Deleuze about this, uh, viewing things with an inhuman view, with too much intensity. In the sense that that what you see becomes, you know when I mentioned for example if CIA has some shots of what happens in the last minutes or if we were to get shots of how Jews were actually killing Jews. Of course, my point is the following one. Of course this is part of reality. But it's so intense that if you effectively were to confront it, it would, you would have endured a Realitätsverlust. You would have as it were lost your reality. I mean, no, who will be now the victim? B-U, please. Okay. It's just a mental experiment. I warn you, attention. I mean this is, I am a gentle person. I am only doing this to sacrifice myself so that you will understand it again. So, okay. Let's say that I will now I don't know take scissors and pick up one of your eyes and swallow it. I claim that momentarily you would have gotten the loss of reality. You would say "No, this cannot—" you know, like the intensity would have been too much. It doesn't fit the coordinates of our life. What so I claim that that, uh, this is, uh, how I would in a very friendly way of constructive criticism and so on supplement Badiou. I claim that each world, what he calls world this transcendentally constituted space, has not only non-existent minimum and maximum intensity but also has a point of excessive intensity which is nonetheless inherent to it. I am not talking about you have a certain world like our world and then I don't know aliens are coming all of a sudden this glass starts to talk or whatever and then of course we lose the sense of reality like "Where are we?". No, no, no, I'm saying that the very implicit logic of the intensity of the system, of a— a world, you know what I mean, shouldn't reach beyond a certain limit. If you go beyond over-intensity, the world falls apart. And I think again, this mechanism is crucial for event, for, uh, for how to account for event, how to account for, uh, how to account for falling apart of a certain world and so on. That you know like when intensity but again which is still the the immanent intensity. For example, in the most naive sense again what I said the inten— it can be the intensity of sexual pleasure, it can be the intensity of, of, of torture pain. Which is why, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here, which is why, uh this is I think one of the— if you want to experience this gap at the level of intensity, pornography is a case I thought. You know probably you know it, it's my old motive of how pornography if anything is the most heavily censored genre of them all. In what sense? Of course, ho-ho you see everything, no? But okay, not only is it censored in the way I already developed, you know all those feminine expressions face censored, but more radical— did you notice my old story I know— did you notice something very strange about pornography how at least the classical hardcore pornography the story has to be ridiculous? I mean, stories are so stupid, stories that you, that you, that introduce the act and so on, that I think they are so stupid that you cannot say oh these are stupid cheap guys who are... no they they cannot be so stupid. I think they follow some kind of ethical code injunction, the narrative has to be stupid. I mean, I will not bore you with examples. I remember once even now I am a traumatized when I was young you know the classical story you know like the wife is home alone, a plumber comes and says "I fixed the hole in the kitchen," then she says "But I have another hole, can you also...". You know like you are, you are deep— I mean this was at some point even for me the most funny part this totally ridiculous. What is prohibited is to have both at the same time. The choice is this one: either you have an emotionally engaging story or you see it all. What you cannot have, that's the prohibited is, that would have been too much of intensity. It's a full melodrama when you cry. In my second book *Looking Awry*, I used the tasteless example of: imagine, I don't like the movie so much, *Out of Africa*. You know the scene where, uh, Robert Redford and, uh, Meryl Streep finally do it? Imagine the same film, the same scene, just minutes more. When they embrace you see the penis penetrating and so on and so on. It doesn't work. You have to make a choice. Now I know what you will say, but am I aware idiot that precisely where I am here Catherine Breillat was here you know the French director who is trying to do precisely this. Did you see her *Romance* or what? Which tries to be a hardcore movie in the sense that you see everything but nonetheless with all the how should I call it naively narrative dramatic intensity. I claim that's why she doesn't work. In the sense of that's why her success is limited. For the general public there is some kind of resistance there. Now you will tell me that was the standard reproach to me. Sophie Fiennes, the big of *Pervert's Guide*, told me "He-he Slavoj you really must be old. Where do you live, don't you know that this type of hardcore you got it like half a century ago, no?" And then okay I asked her okay I want to follow new tendencies, what is going on now. She told me gonzo so-called. And then I looked at it. Gonzo is even worse. You know the so-called gonzo? It's let's call it interactive embedded pornography. It's where, stupid as the story is, they don't even pretend that it's a story, but the actors in a comical way interact with the camera, you know. You hear the voice say "Why don't you spread your legs a little bit more?" the actress makes a funny remark and so on this kind of. And I think the censorship is here even stronger. They are afraid even of that minimum of comical stupid narrative. Narrative must be totally prohibited. You must be all the time reminded "No no no, it's just a movie, it's not a real story" and so on and so on, no? So again, this is how I would have attacked— let's stick behind the back of my maybe best friend, Badiou. But the only way to prove that he's my best friend is to— and incidentally you know that once we made talking in B-U a wonderful comical clinical analysis where as you maybe know if some of you are have something with psychoanalysis that the ideal cou— one of the ideal couples in psychoanalysis is *le maître et l'hystérique*, master and the hysteric. Master the peaceful one just says and hysteric the one who is bothering. And well, it's clear. Alain and me, he's the master I'm the hysteric, you know. Even at the level of texts, you know, I write all the time hundreds of pages about him against him. He just from time to time does one line in a footnote and so on. And we decided to go on like this. We said "No." He even proposed "Why don't we have a big debate?" I told him, "Do you hate me? Do you want to ruin our friendship?" I told him, "Do you want Anti-Casablanca? Do you know us to walk out and say 'That's the end of a beautiful friendship' or what?" And then we decided that that's our fate. I will endlessly write about him, he will persist in this royal attitude, you know, of kind of a interest— kind of a, you know, for example there is one one kind of a patronizingly benevolent critical remark in in his *Logics of Worlds* I think. And, uh, I love it I love it this way. So again, going on with Badiou, some bad things about the guy. But you know what this means incidentally. This means that he is, how should I put it, he is one of the few, he is at least for me I think so many other philosophical options today are exhausted. They did great things but they are exhausted. Heideggerianism I respect it together with Alain, but it's exhausted. It reached it did reach its limit. And so on and so on. And he and then some of his followers around him like that speculative realism stuff Quentin Meillassoux and others. If you ask me these are the only things that things are happening today that philosophy is alive. Or even in Germany. Again, I mentioned Sloterdijk. I'm sorry to tell you but I think he is alive. He may be the political enemy, but— and that's the tragedy of Habermas. That's why I think Habermas— you remember there was a big philosophical scandal in Europe I think some ten years a little bit less ago, when, uh, Sloterdijk wrote a text something like *Regeln für den Menschenpark* (The Rules of the Human Zoo), where, uh, he was what he wanted there I was totally on Sloterdijk's side. Because all he wanted to say and here I totally agree with him was that the fact of biotechnology and so on forces us to re— confronts us with new ethical dilemmas, deadlocks where you can no longer simply apply the old norms. And the ultimate proof I think is Habermas himself here. What what is Habermas' answer? It's "Let's not do it." No wonder Habermas co-wrote, not co-wrote, they just put together texts a book with, with Pope with Cardinal Ratzinger. Both had this conclusion: if we start to manipulate genetically or with pharmaco-chemistry whatever our psychic properties, this ruins the fundamentals of our ethics and of our idea of human dignity where to get something you have hardly to work for it and so on and so on, no? You know all these stories for example if I can if you're a oh no I will be the bad guy. If I am a coward and you give me a pill which simply which simply strengthens my courage then suddenly, uh, being courageous or not loses its status of an autonomous ethical decision. It simply a matter of self-manipulation or how others manipulate me and so on and so on. So their idea is to simplify Ratzinger and Habermas it's a very sad one, it's a fiasco of enlightenment if it is. If we go too far here in genetic manipulations, we ruin the basic notion of our ethical autonomy, so let's not do it. So let's put a frontier there. I think that not only is this impracticable de facto, like uh what I was so interested when I visited Shanghai was, I mean we here in Europe bother with some shitty ethical dilemmas, they are doing it like crazy there, no? In China. Like they already have plans to control in the long term the entire population, the basic features and so on and everybody is doing it. You know that recently I spoke with some American investigative journalist who told me that the latest thing going on in military technology and that not only Americans, all, Americans, Chinese are already doing it like crazy is a new level of how should I call it pharmaconeuronal psychological warfare where, uh, it's what for example they told me that they did this I speak in the past past tense they already hacked to this. It's very primitive logic basically. They discovered that when you are really afraid full of shit in a true panic, uh, your brains emit a certain electromagnetic radiation whatsoever. So then they draw the obvious conclusion: why don't we do it the other way around? And they discovered that it works. If you bombard me with this type of waves I will be automatically physiologically thrown into a panic. And, uh, again it's primitive but it works and I was told that they already have it's still clumsy but some kind of elementary machines where a certain space like a baseball field something like that, every human being there simply you press a button they are all in panic. I mean that's the future. And I simply think, I mean Chinese know how to do it now in this combination of authoritarian socialism and and capitalism. One thing is the state wants to control the entire population. On the other hand, they are already building they even showed me some plans in the suburbs of Shanghai mega clinics for the rich Western medical tourists. The idea is that in a year or two they told me you will be able to go there if you are rich they will do all the genetic research you know all this. They're already doing it in India. Yeah but in what sense is it already a mass, massive? It is? Well in in India you can get all the health care you want cheaper nicer service and all that than is easily... No, no, no I know, I know. Maybe I focus too much on China, no. So what I'm saying is that or you know what really why I really think we are approaching some kind of apocalyptic times, not in the bad sense, maybe it will be the hope of something new, which we must just become aware that we are approaching some zero point. For example, I'm so interested in following this trend where I was told that you already can do it, that you can directly link your neurons to a computer so that then for example you can move objects only by thinking. You know you don't even need that Stephen Hawking famous one finger that he can move. No you can and they of course it's still done on a very primitive at a very primitive level but I was told for example they already can decode by wiring you your neurons this element— very elementary mental signals of up, down, left, right. So at NYU even I think I was told they already have a computer game that you can play just with your mind. You don't have this joystick. I never got it why it's joystick, it sounds so masturbatory or whatever. I know that like you move but you know what's so horrible is that you can intervene into reality by the mere power of thinking and of course the way they do it with technology to make us swallow this they always start with how this will help invalids and so on and so on. I saw a report, maybe you did, a couple of months ago it was reported it was reported that in, uh, that in London they already had this how do you call it— it's politically incorrect to say crip, how do you say crippled people? Movement challenged or what? Okay whatever, disabled, yeah okay sorry no fun here intended just bad taste. Uh, that you know you don't even have to that you can simply move the wheelchair or what, uh simply... Those technologies are a decade old where they fuse the nerves into a... Yeah but the point is this will get more and more developed and what interests me that's the philosophical question clearly is how will this affect our self-identity? I claim that our self-identity is based on this distinction between "that's me," "that's out there reality." I think what I want, reality is out there. Our notion of freedom is based on this because the next thing as that military example reminds us immediately, you know if it goes out it goes in. That is to say if you can move an object with your thought then your thoughts can also be moved by, uh, sorry. There is a problem though with that. A friend of mine is a computer scientist in Ireland and he's working on, uh, reading the neural signals. Ah I know you. You are the, the rapist priest advocate. Yeah, let's skip it. No no, no, but, um, no, but, uh, apparently there there are certain things that your brain does and it doesn't function as as we want it to. Yeah. For example, if if I ask you you know what's plus And you say there's a part of your brain that does the mathematics. And if I keep asking you the same thing, it'll go from the part of the brain that does the mathematics to memory, right? Yeah. So but if I keep giving you different additions, like you know plus plus whatever we keep going on, it should constantly fire the mathematical part of your brain, but every so often it fires some other part of the brain that's just unexplainable. It's it's actually ruined my friend's postdoc. Ah really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's they've all gone back to the drawing board now so it's... because you know what makes this interesting that is it truly just some kind of you know like in every mechanism things misfire from time to time or can you read some deeper defense or whatever mechanism meaning into it? Um, I'm not sure. No, no it's it really is just the story way we want the brain to work or way it has to work as a machine it's just not doing it. Because I think I don't know if there's some some quantum element to it or something... Yeah okay, okay, yeah yeah. No no, okay, sorry where were we? Ah yeah, yeah, yeah. With yeah, okay intensity all this stuff and so on. So here I think that we should take seriously what goes on in today's brain sciences and so on. Now I am not here I think the trick is to avoid on the one hand this naive tech-gnosis, oh wonderful we will be became like gods, we will you know just moving things with our immersed into the world, whatever. But also we should avoid this nihilistic pessimism, oh the end of humanity, the end of being human and so on and so on. All I am saying is that we should openly confront the problem. And that coming back to Sloterdijk I think all he wanted is this and Habermas and some of his groupies how should I put it around mounted in Germany a ferocious attack proclaiming Sloterdijk an advocate or kind of a neo-Nazi genetics and so on and so on. I mean it was slightly ridiculous how should I put it, no? So coming back to what I was saying, uh, I don't agree with Sloterdijk but for example his last book which is even a big bestseller in Germany, uh, *Du mußt dein Leben ändern* (You Must Change Your Life). The idea it's a nice one is that what we misread as this post-secular rise of the religious, it's not this, it's simply it has nothing to do with religious spirituality, that is just the new form of emerging anthropology where the idea is almost like Judith Butler, Foucault, that through practice you have to form, reform yourself. And that's why he finds a wonderful underlying concept where he puts together people like creative thinkers, models, top sportsmen and so on, you know. All these totally different levels where the constant is through hard work, discipline, training you form, form yourself. And, uh, then there comes the per— he he claims that and he convinced me, that the central religious figure of the twentieth century is, how is that creep called, uh... I forgot his name, uh... who who is the founder of, of Scientology? L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, Ron Hubbard, yeah. Because he says that that, and he focuses on something which I find prof— fascinating. How Ron Hubbard inverted the usual historical line, which is something was, let's say if you are modern secular atheist, you are respectful. You say old sacred texts, your line is once they were taken immediately seriously today we should admire them but not for their cognitive ethical value but as beautiful monuments, aesthetics and so on. Ron Hubbard did the opposite. Do you know that— and you can prove it by letters, I love this— do you know that he started writing shitty science fiction novels? Then he said, "Maybe they will sell better if I sell them as a religion, as truth," how should I put it, no? And again, he— it's a very good book by Sloterdijk. He focused some fundamental problem about how beliefs function today that we shouldn't read— it's a very important insight into how it's not really the return of the religious in the old sense. So again, this is why I even know some people who are close to Habermas they told me, Habermas I don't hate him, he is in a almost tragic personal position. On the one hand he is respected, you know, for example friends told me ten years ago or five when Tony Blair was still in power in England, whenever Habermas made a philosophy trip there to I don't know London School of Economics or when for one evening he always disappeared and it was known it was an evening with with Tony Blair and so on. He was meeting Helmut Schmidt when he was Chancellor. I mean he is he is de facto or was till now at least, how should I put it, European community Staatsphilosoph, state philosopher. But at the same time he is bitterly aware that as a philosopher he is no longer alive. It's
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simply
Slavoj Žižek
in a way irrelevant how should I put it, no? So again, back to Badiou, I consider him extremely relevant. Did you just say irrelevant or relevant? My god. Okay, I mean my defense will be this one: you know, if I am a Freudian then the rule that slips of tongue mean something don't apply, you know? So whatever I said— no, I meant to say relevant, of course. No, no, no, what I want— what I want to say is that you know okay, let me so that we don't get lost here present you just another no at least I should not get lost more than one or two levels, no? Let's keep it within a certain limit. Why did you not finish that point about Badiou's idea, why do you not agree? Yeah, yeah, that, yeah. Another, sorry, one line is this idea of extra intensity. I think he should develop it with this that that an intensity which is as intensity constitutive for a certain transcendental world can get too intense. This play with intensities and so on. Another problem I have with him but he is aware of it is the way being event or world relate to each other. Not just what I was telling you. The problem the problems which I see are the following ones. First, Badiou's line, original in *Being and Event*, was as I already told you here was that an event is an event only for those engaged in it. Event is not a neutral event. Okay, I found this sympathetic, but I claim it's not as simple as that. Because you remember and he emphasized this very nicely in his talk, how in his new book, *Logics of the Worlds*, he develops three or four, I forgot, types of how you can relate subjectively to an event. You can be a direct partisan of the event, that's the authentic blah blah. Then you can be— this would have been for him this kind of a liberal attitude— you— no, first it would have been this let's talk vaguely "reactionary" attitude. You formally stick to the event but you betray it by reinscribing it into the old world. Like as social democrat you say "Yeah, yeah, communism important but let's be realistic, let's do what we can," blah blah. Then you can deny the event. This would have been the classical liberal line: October Revolution wasn't really a great event, it was just some coup d'etat by Bolsheviks blah blah. Or the whole against how's the guy called François, not Furet, the the French Furet, François Furet, no? French Revolution was just a freakish sorry event, the misdirection of French history doesn't— okay. In this sense you deny event, you treat event as a non-event. And then you have of course this fascist passionate counter-attack destroy
in a way irrelevant how should I put it, no? So again, back to Badiou, I consider him extremely relevant. Did you just say irrelevant or relevant? My god. Okay, I mean my defense will be this one: you know, if I am a Freudian then the rule that slips of tongue mean something don't apply, you know? So whatever I said— no, I meant to say relevant, of course. No, no, no, what I want— what I want to say is that you know okay, let me so that we don't get lost here present you just another no at least I should not get lost more than one or two levels, no? Let's keep it within a certain limit. Why did you not finish that point about Badiou's idea, why do you not agree? Yeah, yeah, that, yeah. Another, sorry, one line is this idea of extra intensity. I think he should develop it with this that that an intensity which is as intensity constitutive for a certain transcendental world can get too intense. This play with intensities and so on. Another problem I have with him but he is aware of it is the way being event or world relate to each other. Not just what I was telling you. The problem the problems which I see are the following ones. First, Badiou's line, original in *Being and Event*, was as I already told you here was that an event is an event only for those engaged in it. Event is not a neutral event. Okay, I found this sympathetic, but I claim it's not as simple as that. Because you remember and he emphasized this very nicely in his talk, how in his new book, *Logics of the Worlds*, he develops three or four, I forgot, types of how you can relate subjectively to an event. You can be a direct partisan of the event, that's the authentic blah blah. Then you can be— this would have been for him this kind of a liberal attitude— you— no, first it would have been this let's talk vaguely "reactionary" attitude. You formally stick to the event but you betray it by reinscribing it into the old world. Like as social democrat you say "Yeah, yeah, communism important but let's be realistic, let's do what we can," blah blah. Then you can deny the event. This would have been the classical liberal line: October Revolution wasn't really a great event, it was just some coup d'etat by Bolsheviks blah blah. Or the whole against how's the guy called François, not Furet, the the French Furet, François Furet, no? French Revolution was just a freakish sorry event, the misdirection of French history doesn't— okay. In this sense you deny event, you treat event as a non-event. And then you have of course this fascist passionate counter-attack destroy
unknown
the event, whatever. What I don't get is how then can in in this case then it's not enough to
the event, whatever. What I don't get is how then can in in this case then it's not enough to
Slavoj Žižek
say that you are either in
say that you are either in
unknown
or out. An event can have effects on the entire field. I'm much more close to this and he is moving in this direction Badiou to this more Hegelian view that when an event, a true event happens, and I agree here with Badiou be careful here: event is only event within a certain world. Then everything in this within this world is in a way affected. Even if you ignore the event you are already a fake. It's already mediated by the event. It's like you remember the example that I gave you days ago of dialectical mediation: how after Schönberg atonal music, this was this is for Badiou the event. If you continue the Rachmaninoff shit, Tchaikovsky, it's not the same as before. You are already a fake, a kitsch. You are consciously, not consciously precisely not
or out. An event can have effects on the entire field. I'm much more close to this and he is moving in this direction Badiou to this more Hegelian view that when an event, a true event happens, and I agree here with Badiou be careful here: event is only event within a certain world. Then everything in this within this world is in a way affected. Even if you ignore the event you are already a fake. It's already mediated by the event. It's like you remember the example that I gave you days ago of dialectical mediation: how after Schönberg atonal music, this was this is for Badiou the event. If you continue the Rachmaninoff shit, Tchaikovsky, it's not the same as before. You are already a fake, a kitsch. You are consciously, not consciously precisely not
Slavoj Žižek
consciously, ignoring denying it and so on and so on. So what what interests
consciously, ignoring denying it and so on and so on. So what what interests
unknown
me is uh what mechanism are we dealing with here? How does
me is uh what mechanism are we dealing with here? How does
Slavoj Žižek
how can how can an event affect the entire field also those who ignore it and so... you know some some more elaborate— you have the answer? I have a follow-up question rather. I mean the, I was interested in the way Stan Gillespie is trying to answer that question by by by connecting it with the with Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis. This idea of like, uh, like this sort of like maximum, the maximum intensity being anxiety. Uh-huh. And so not giving up on your desire is just not trying to get rid of the anxiety, not trying to like, even if it was if it's going to affect you that much to stick with it, not repress it, to sort of allow your reality to... Yeah but again, that would have been precisely being faithful to the event. Yeah. Or what what interests me is how anxiety, I think and this would work very well, yes. I think that precisely an event, I'll put it in this way, uh I had a debate with Alain and here we agree that, now I will give you just the very simplistic coordinates, that for Lacan following Freud the only authentic emotion or affect— they are different, I know, I know Damasio but I simplify now— uh is anxiety, you know that's the classical Freudian point already, other emotions can cheat, potentially cheat, only anxiety doesn't cheat. I think one should add enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is al— always the obverse of anxiety. It's very close to anxiety, you know how already Kant describes enthusiasm as this limit experience where your senses are overwhelmed and so on and so on. So uh, you know Kant's theory of enthusiasm in his, uh, sublime. Enthusiasm is linked the sublime, yeah. Couldn't anxiety be read as the some appropriation of Heidegger's anxiety? Sorry of some— some of Heidegger's anxiety? And then this enthusiasm and affirmation seem just to sort of... Ah, here we enter the crucial question. Again, I don't have time to go into it now but the crucial thing is to that to put it very simply, I simplify it again, the great break between Lacan and Freud, sorry Lacan and Heidegger is that for Lacan— Heidegger's basic point is that anxiety doesn't have an object, anxiety you confront the void itself, but that fear has an object, an ontic object. Anxiety is precisely when you are no longer afraid of something. For Lacan precisely anxiety does have an object. For interpreting Freud. And this object is of course haha object small a and so on all that stuff, no? So here we can go into it but another thing is important here. That uh again for Lacan it's anxiety. Uh, with Badiou it gets— Badiou's fidelity to the event would have been somehow on the side of enthusiasm. And where I tend to agree with you is that I claim that even when you are that how should I put it, enthusiasm can only arise against the background of anxiety. That the first shock of the event is anxiety, always. Like okay let's play the Christian event— I'm not crazy it didn't happen but— Christ has arisen from the dead. My I mean fuck it, the first reaction is anxiety, shit what is going on and so on, no? Then you can but you know what I mean that maybe anxiety as always being the obverse of enthusiasm is the way the new the event affects everyone. If you are a liberal who ignores it means you may pretend oh oh it's nothing just a shitty thing but they were scared to shit, how should I put it, no? There was anxiety. So that the first reaction is anxiety, it's a little bit the same thing I want to do here as with Althusser. Yes immediately, uh, that a guy who is otherwise I don't have good relations with him I forgot his name... uh... uh... Australian-Canadian I think. My god I forgot. Who wrote a good book on fetishism? He's linked with a conductor... doesn't matter. Okay. He proposed this thesis which I developed in one of my lesser-known books so I can repeat the joke here. You know Althusserian notion of ideological interpellation. How the agency, nation, whatever addresses you, "Be whatever," and then you become subject by identifying with it. "Yes, I recognize myself in the call. I am. I recognize myself as communist, fascist, democrat, whatever," this kind of the big other addresses as a fundamental ideological mechanism. But this guy introduced in a wonderful way a complication. He claimed that the way it works, and he didn't mean it just as an empirical complication which has no conceptual value but at the very abstract level, when you are addressed, for example Althusser's own example is "Hey you!" when the police interpellates you, "Hey you!" And even if you are not guilty the moment you turn around you identify and in this way constitute yourself as. The point of this guy was that let's look close how it really works when you answer the call, "Hey you!" The first reaction is not identification but it's anxiety, "Why me? What did I do? Is it really me?" and so on. And then to avoid this anxiety you identify. That you know the first address of the other is "Hey you!" means "Who are you? What do you want?" You know, you are at the that's a more elementary level of anxiety. After again and then only then comes yes... and along this lines again of claiming that the first again to recapitulate it, the first reaction to the event is anxiety and then the authentically taking over the event means transforming anxiety into enthusiasm. And we all know that enthusiasm is always close to horror. I mean take do take Kant's own examples of enthusiasm, sorry, sublime, experience of the sublime, you know the horror of I don't know nature and so on, you know it's along this lines but okay where then do I see a problem with with with Badiou? Okay, this is one minimal problem. No but the uh I have an elementary problem with Badiou. We talked a lot and uh I don't know where we are. I'll tell you right now. You know how Badiou talks usually about the human animal? Now I will say something horrible. Sometimes I detect in him something that I'm almost sometimes tempted to call gnostic dualism. By this I mean the following one. He has this sometimes rather crude division of what he dismissively calls the human animal, we in our daily lives when we just follow pleasures, what he dismissively calls servicing the good and so on, no? And for him our post-political world consumerist society is this at its lowest. Then this is our universal human condition, to be human animals, intelligent animals, tool-making, whatever, but it's there is no event, no truth. And then from time to time these individuals, human animals as individuals are shocked, touched by grace, as he puts it ironically in his atheist theology, of the event. You are torn out of the... Okay, what's wrong here? Usually Badiou is criticized I think from exactly the wrong side. The standard reproach is this naive materialist one: "But isn't Badiou here implying some kind of a religious dualism? That we have the vulgar materiality of our animal, what he calls in a wonderful term democratic materialism, what matters is pleasure, language and so on. And then sometimes as if by grace we are touched by another dimension of the event." Uh, so then the idea is nonetheless should we really insist to the end on this duality? Shouldn't we
how can how can an event affect the entire field also those who ignore it and so... you know some some more elaborate— you have the answer? I have a follow-up question rather. I mean the, I was interested in the way Stan Gillespie is trying to answer that question by by by connecting it with the with Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis. This idea of like, uh, like this sort of like maximum, the maximum intensity being anxiety. Uh-huh. And so not giving up on your desire is just not trying to get rid of the anxiety, not trying to like, even if it was if it's going to affect you that much to stick with it, not repress it, to sort of allow your reality to... Yeah but again, that would have been precisely being faithful to the event. Yeah. Or what what interests me is how anxiety, I think and this would work very well, yes. I think that precisely an event, I'll put it in this way, uh I had a debate with Alain and here we agree that, now I will give you just the very simplistic coordinates, that for Lacan following Freud the only authentic emotion or affect— they are different, I know, I know Damasio but I simplify now— uh is anxiety, you know that's the classical Freudian point already, other emotions can cheat, potentially cheat, only anxiety doesn't cheat. I think one should add enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is al— always the obverse of anxiety. It's very close to anxiety, you know how already Kant describes enthusiasm as this limit experience where your senses are overwhelmed and so on and so on. So uh, you know Kant's theory of enthusiasm in his, uh, sublime. Enthusiasm is linked the sublime, yeah. Couldn't anxiety be read as the some appropriation of Heidegger's anxiety? Sorry of some— some of Heidegger's anxiety? And then this enthusiasm and affirmation seem just to sort of... Ah, here we enter the crucial question. Again, I don't have time to go into it now but the crucial thing is to that to put it very simply, I simplify it again, the great break between Lacan and Freud, sorry Lacan and Heidegger is that for Lacan— Heidegger's basic point is that anxiety doesn't have an object, anxiety you confront the void itself, but that fear has an object, an ontic object. Anxiety is precisely when you are no longer afraid of something. For Lacan precisely anxiety does have an object. For interpreting Freud. And this object is of course haha object small a and so on all that stuff, no? So here we can go into it but another thing is important here. That uh again for Lacan it's anxiety. Uh, with Badiou it gets— Badiou's fidelity to the event would have been somehow on the side of enthusiasm. And where I tend to agree with you is that I claim that even when you are that how should I put it, enthusiasm can only arise against the background of anxiety. That the first shock of the event is anxiety, always. Like okay let's play the Christian event— I'm not crazy it didn't happen but— Christ has arisen from the dead. My I mean fuck it, the first reaction is anxiety, shit what is going on and so on, no? Then you can but you know what I mean that maybe anxiety as always being the obverse of enthusiasm is the way the new the event affects everyone. If you are a liberal who ignores it means you may pretend oh oh it's nothing just a shitty thing but they were scared to shit, how should I put it, no? There was anxiety. So that the first reaction is anxiety, it's a little bit the same thing I want to do here as with Althusser. Yes immediately, uh, that a guy who is otherwise I don't have good relations with him I forgot his name... uh... uh... Australian-Canadian I think. My god I forgot. Who wrote a good book on fetishism? He's linked with a conductor... doesn't matter. Okay. He proposed this thesis which I developed in one of my lesser-known books so I can repeat the joke here. You know Althusserian notion of ideological interpellation. How the agency, nation, whatever addresses you, "Be whatever," and then you become subject by identifying with it. "Yes, I recognize myself in the call. I am. I recognize myself as communist, fascist, democrat, whatever," this kind of the big other addresses as a fundamental ideological mechanism. But this guy introduced in a wonderful way a complication. He claimed that the way it works, and he didn't mean it just as an empirical complication which has no conceptual value but at the very abstract level, when you are addressed, for example Althusser's own example is "Hey you!" when the police interpellates you, "Hey you!" And even if you are not guilty the moment you turn around you identify and in this way constitute yourself as. The point of this guy was that let's look close how it really works when you answer the call, "Hey you!" The first reaction is not identification but it's anxiety, "Why me? What did I do? Is it really me?" and so on. And then to avoid this anxiety you identify. That you know the first address of the other is "Hey you!" means "Who are you? What do you want?" You know, you are at the that's a more elementary level of anxiety. After again and then only then comes yes... and along this lines again of claiming that the first again to recapitulate it, the first reaction to the event is anxiety and then the authentically taking over the event means transforming anxiety into enthusiasm. And we all know that enthusiasm is always close to horror. I mean take do take Kant's own examples of enthusiasm, sorry, sublime, experience of the sublime, you know the horror of I don't know nature and so on, you know it's along this lines but okay where then do I see a problem with with with Badiou? Okay, this is one minimal problem. No but the uh I have an elementary problem with Badiou. We talked a lot and uh I don't know where we are. I'll tell you right now. You know how Badiou talks usually about the human animal? Now I will say something horrible. Sometimes I detect in him something that I'm almost sometimes tempted to call gnostic dualism. By this I mean the following one. He has this sometimes rather crude division of what he dismissively calls the human animal, we in our daily lives when we just follow pleasures, what he dismissively calls servicing the good and so on, no? And for him our post-political world consumerist society is this at its lowest. Then this is our universal human condition, to be human animals, intelligent animals, tool-making, whatever, but it's there is no event, no truth. And then from time to time these individuals, human animals as individuals are shocked, touched by grace, as he puts it ironically in his atheist theology, of the event. You are torn out of the... Okay, what's wrong here? Usually Badiou is criticized I think from exactly the wrong side. The standard reproach is this naive materialist one: "But isn't Badiou here implying some kind of a religious dualism? That we have the vulgar materiality of our animal, what he calls in a wonderful term democratic materialism, what matters is pleasure, language and so on. And then sometimes as if by grace we are touched by another dimension of the event." Uh, so then the idea is nonetheless should we really insist to the end on this duality? Shouldn't we
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rather introduce some kind of mediation where you show how the event arises of certain contradictions, tensions in the domain of being which Badiou resists, no? I agree with him here. But you know what would be my line here? Maybe we are here coming back to Heidegger, anxiety and so on. That, uh if there is— this is why did you notice another as it were symptom in Badiou? His confusion with death drive. Sometimes he uses the term death drive almost in this
rather introduce some kind of mediation where you show how the event arises of certain contradictions, tensions in the domain of being which Badiou resists, no? I agree with him here. But you know what would be my line here? Maybe we are here coming back to Heidegger, anxiety and so on. That, uh if there is— this is why did you notice another as it were symptom in Badiou? His confusion with death drive. Sometimes he uses the term death drive almost in this
Slavoj Žižek
sense decadence and so on, human animal. His, Badiou, his almost violent denial of his reaction of what Heidegger calls *Sein zum Tode* (being towards death). This is part of his aversion to the motive of infinity, sorry of finitude. His violent reduction of Heideggerian being towards death to just animal fear of dying and so on. He has sometimes this simple even opposition: either that all this Heideggerian topic of death as the ultimate limit defines us as human animals. When you are called by an event you enter immortality, infinity and so on. First I don't quite think this works as a reading of Heidegger, but it doesn't matter. What I want to say is the following thing: my attack, my difference with Badiou would have been exactly the opposite one. If there is a lesson from psychoanalysis, then it is that the problem is not "We are all human animals and if we want to remain materialists we should somehow deduce event from being," no, otherwise we are idealists, dualists. No, my thesis is that
sense decadence and so on, human animal. His, Badiou, his almost violent denial of his reaction of what Heidegger calls *Sein zum Tode* (being towards death). This is part of his aversion to the motive of infinity, sorry of finitude. His violent reduction of Heideggerian being towards death to just animal fear of dying and so on. He has sometimes this simple even opposition: either that all this Heideggerian topic of death as the ultimate limit defines us as human animals. When you are called by an event you enter immortality, infinity and so on. First I don't quite think this works as a reading of Heidegger, but it doesn't matter. What I want to say is the following thing: my attack, my difference with Badiou would have been exactly the opposite one. If there is a lesson from psychoanalysis, then it is that the problem is not "We are all human animals and if we want to remain materialists we should somehow deduce event from being," no, otherwise we are idealists, dualists. No, my thesis is that
unknown
there is no human animal. What do you mean by this? Not that everything is event but that there is a third domain, anxiety, which is constitutive
there is no human animal. What do you mean by this? Not that everything is event but that there is a third domain, anxiety, which is constitutive
Slavoj Žižek
of being human. And that what he calls— okay I'll put it in this way: you know the Freudian theory of death drive? Death drive is this original— uh how should I call it? It's very simple what I will say: not that of course there is a human animal, in the sense that at some level we function following the pleasure principle and so on and so on. But that's not what defines us as human beings. What defines us is as Freud put it beyond the pleasure principle, some crazy dislocation, misadapt— something goes wrong which opens up the gap of anxiety. And here precisely following Heidegger I would say every world, in the sense of this narrow domain where we can thrive as stupid human animals, is already a reaction, a defense against anxiety. So you have animal-animals, to pass from animal-animals to human-animals you have to have that gap, which is the same gap where you remember when I was talking about how for Hegel and Kant you have that neither culture nor nature. That would have been drive, anxiety and so on. This is what again Freudians tried to conceptualize as death drive which I think in German idealism appears as the abyss of freedom, radical negativity and so on. So my point is that to cut a long story short you need a third level: that as there is no human animal, if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that we humans are the if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that American Constitution is wrong. That is to say that it's not in our nature the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, there is a wonderfully funny book by that, uh theorist I think follower of Bateson, Paul Watzlawick. I think the title of the book is *The Pursuit of Unhappiness*, and he goes into how the whole human strategy can only be understood if there is a horrible sense of things going well how you try to sabotage them and so on, no? So, uh, you got my point. I claim that what defines humanity is some kind of traumatic gap. Freudian name is death drive. And then what we call what Badiou calls human animal is already an attempt to impose some order on it. A kind of a secondary stabilization, how should I put it. And this is how I think you can also somehow mediate being and event. Being in the sense of simple human animal, that an event is possible in a materialist way precisely because being is never fully being. Because being in the sense of ordinary human animal existence already, you know behind every being, being in the sense of ordinary living in a world, human animal, happily, pleasure principle, anxiety already lurks. That excess of anxiety can be overturned into an event, into the enthusiasm of the event. That would be now I I put it in extremely simplified terms, no? But again this is always my problem with Badiou. Not this metaphysical one "Is there an event up there?" no, but "is it what he thinks is here," how should I put it, no? Because can I quote you something which you should like where I see I see this how should I call it... oh I hope I will find the fragment I must have it here my god... this wonderful moment of weakness where Badiou... just a second please give me a second... is it here or there? My god... Ah no, don't have it here. No the point is okay please I will try to be patient I will try somehow to reproduce it... the best that I... what... What is it on, if it's on Badiou the text? Oh we're having a break? Sorry? There's a stupid shitty break. Stupid shitty break so that I can get together my stupid shitty thoughts. Okay yeah yeah, that's a good idea. Okay let's do a break. Okay, okay. You know, uh, you can raise some questions about me in your opinions but these kind of constructive questions like "It intrigued us how this guy can be so deep and at the same time so funny or something," a kind of... yeah, yeah, no I find this so disgusting that's why I hate being a professor. In this idea that I don't like to judge others but I don't like others to judge me you know. And also can you really... I mean I know that most of the students are honest and they even don't like you to be permissive. I know that don't underestimate students like if you are a tough professor but if the students sense that you are tough on behalf of the course how should I put it, tough with them because you really... students are not idiots they much more prefer this than some kind of a cheap permissivity "You know I don't care" and so on and so on, no? But on the other hand don't you think that in every generation there are two, three of them who want to take some kind of revenge and so on, no? Yeah. Oh yeah. For example my worst experience was that once they tried to do me— I gave some religious example for what would be a true Christianity at a talk. And I said that, you know how in one type of quoting literature in the United States you have in the main text just the year and the page like Hegel page no? And then you have bibliography at the end. APA. Yeah, and I said wouldn't it be nice to treat Christ in this way? Like let's say BCD you have like Benjamin *Illuminations* New York '72 at the end in bibliography, no? And then you have Christ, Jesus, *Speeches* Jerusalem edited by Mark, and then the diagrammatology, and then to do this obscenity to have it in the text like when you talk about evil and sin "As to this compare also some interesting remarks in Christ especially chapter and so on. And then a guy denounced me for making fun of religion, whatever, whatever. And I did something totally crazy which worked. I attacked the guy as anti-Christian. I said that he doesn't get it that and I'm sincerely convinced that that's the whole point of Jesus Christ. He was crucified as a— you know, he he was fully human, one of us. It's strictly a pagan falsification which started in that Orthodox Church Constantinople to to to to to paint Christ as a divinity. I mean if you read the Bible you know what kind of a divinity was Christ. A kind of mocking clownish divinity who entered the city riding riding a monkey or whatever. Not a donkey, whatever, no. No, no. So, uh, no, no what and even do you know that another problem I have. Do you agree with me? I always get into a problem with a certain joke that I use in my, uh, how should you call it, *Plague of Fantasies*, which I consider a— and also this happened in Stanford. I was attacked. Even the lecture was interrupted but I exploded in fury back and it worked. It's you must know the joke it's the standard Yugoslav— we are the nastiest joke about— maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself— a guy sits at a bar and drinks whiskey. And then on the bar on the bar— a monkey comes by and washes his testicles in the whiskey glass. Simply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the guy surprised "What's going on?" The monkey comes again washes his testicles goes off and then the buy asks the guy asks the barman, "Do you know why is the monkey washing his balls in my whiskey?" He said, "I don't know, ask the gypsy, the gypsy band which is playing," no? And he calls the gypsy band leader "Hi, do you know why?" and the gypsy band says "Of course I do" and starts to sing a song "Oh why is a monkey washing..." No, the point is that the gypsy reads this as the title of a song like "Do you know the song 'The Guy with the Title Why'..." and I was attacked for speciesism. Making fun of animals. I told them "Are you crazy? I mean the the stupid victim is the white male. I cannot imagine a more politically correct joke. The monkey is the the big winner here," no? He washes his balls you can't do anything. The gypsy guy triumphs. The only— can you imagine my... Which is why I hate this, uh, that's what I don't like in Santa Cruz, one of the capitals of political correctness. They have these jokes I was told where they try to make abstract jokes to be sure that you don't offend anyone. You know like "What happens when a triangle meets a circle?" Fuck it, what do I care what happens. I mean somebody must be hurt to be... No, no, no I hate this so much. But here I'm quite serious now. My obsession is there is admitted a lot of— my great story of hypocrisy of political correctness charity or it's I mention this in one of my books. It happened in '91, '92 when the war was going on in ex-Yugoslavia and I participated— this was at Berkeley— at a Hitchcock conference. And I gave a paper on Hitchcock. And then some idiot attacked me, "How how why your country is in flames, how can you talk about such frivolous thing as Hitchcock?" And then of course I exploded. Like, I cannot you can. That's racism. I should behave I am only allowed your precious academic space if I play this victim from Gal— from Balkan, oh horrible nationalist we suffer while you can. I said "Why don't we exchange? You write a report on Balkan war, leave Hitchcock to me," how should I put it, no? No, no, it's quite breathtaking how how... Okay, but let's return to where we were. We were at Badiou, this idea of anxiety and so on. The interesting thing is, and then we end with Badiou. I tend to agree with Badiou's follower and he here Badiou is really lucky although I don't always agree with them. Badiou has two main how should I put it Anglo-Saxon deputies in this Jacobinic dictatorship sense. You nominate a deputy to run your affairs in this in this in this canton, in that part of the world. Uh, in United States Bruno Bosteels, in UK Peter Hallward. And Bosteels now translated *Theory of the Subject*. By this I think the best book still by Badiou, *Theory of the Subject*. And uh Bosteels' notion and I tend to agree with it is that the true radical breakthrough is there. And that both big books which come later, *Being and Event*, *Logics of the Worlds*, are really almost attempts to contain to norm— to how do you put this this measurement problems in quantum physics? To renormalize the terrifying. I know that book is a little bit inconsistent and so on. But it has the freshness of this radical breakthrough. So what I want to say is that there Badiou does
of being human. And that what he calls— okay I'll put it in this way: you know the Freudian theory of death drive? Death drive is this original— uh how should I call it? It's very simple what I will say: not that of course there is a human animal, in the sense that at some level we function following the pleasure principle and so on and so on. But that's not what defines us as human beings. What defines us is as Freud put it beyond the pleasure principle, some crazy dislocation, misadapt— something goes wrong which opens up the gap of anxiety. And here precisely following Heidegger I would say every world, in the sense of this narrow domain where we can thrive as stupid human animals, is already a reaction, a defense against anxiety. So you have animal-animals, to pass from animal-animals to human-animals you have to have that gap, which is the same gap where you remember when I was talking about how for Hegel and Kant you have that neither culture nor nature. That would have been drive, anxiety and so on. This is what again Freudians tried to conceptualize as death drive which I think in German idealism appears as the abyss of freedom, radical negativity and so on. So my point is that to cut a long story short you need a third level: that as there is no human animal, if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that we humans are the if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that American Constitution is wrong. That is to say that it's not in our nature the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, there is a wonderfully funny book by that, uh theorist I think follower of Bateson, Paul Watzlawick. I think the title of the book is *The Pursuit of Unhappiness*, and he goes into how the whole human strategy can only be understood if there is a horrible sense of things going well how you try to sabotage them and so on, no? So, uh, you got my point. I claim that what defines humanity is some kind of traumatic gap. Freudian name is death drive. And then what we call what Badiou calls human animal is already an attempt to impose some order on it. A kind of a secondary stabilization, how should I put it. And this is how I think you can also somehow mediate being and event. Being in the sense of simple human animal, that an event is possible in a materialist way precisely because being is never fully being. Because being in the sense of ordinary human animal existence already, you know behind every being, being in the sense of ordinary living in a world, human animal, happily, pleasure principle, anxiety already lurks. That excess of anxiety can be overturned into an event, into the enthusiasm of the event. That would be now I I put it in extremely simplified terms, no? But again this is always my problem with Badiou. Not this metaphysical one "Is there an event up there?" no, but "is it what he thinks is here," how should I put it, no? Because can I quote you something which you should like where I see I see this how should I call it... oh I hope I will find the fragment I must have it here my god... this wonderful moment of weakness where Badiou... just a second please give me a second... is it here or there? My god... Ah no, don't have it here. No the point is okay please I will try to be patient I will try somehow to reproduce it... the best that I... what... What is it on, if it's on Badiou the text? Oh we're having a break? Sorry? There's a stupid shitty break. Stupid shitty break so that I can get together my stupid shitty thoughts. Okay yeah yeah, that's a good idea. Okay let's do a break. Okay, okay. You know, uh, you can raise some questions about me in your opinions but these kind of constructive questions like "It intrigued us how this guy can be so deep and at the same time so funny or something," a kind of... yeah, yeah, no I find this so disgusting that's why I hate being a professor. In this idea that I don't like to judge others but I don't like others to judge me you know. And also can you really... I mean I know that most of the students are honest and they even don't like you to be permissive. I know that don't underestimate students like if you are a tough professor but if the students sense that you are tough on behalf of the course how should I put it, tough with them because you really... students are not idiots they much more prefer this than some kind of a cheap permissivity "You know I don't care" and so on and so on, no? But on the other hand don't you think that in every generation there are two, three of them who want to take some kind of revenge and so on, no? Yeah. Oh yeah. For example my worst experience was that once they tried to do me— I gave some religious example for what would be a true Christianity at a talk. And I said that, you know how in one type of quoting literature in the United States you have in the main text just the year and the page like Hegel page no? And then you have bibliography at the end. APA. Yeah, and I said wouldn't it be nice to treat Christ in this way? Like let's say BCD you have like Benjamin *Illuminations* New York '72 at the end in bibliography, no? And then you have Christ, Jesus, *Speeches* Jerusalem edited by Mark, and then the diagrammatology, and then to do this obscenity to have it in the text like when you talk about evil and sin "As to this compare also some interesting remarks in Christ especially chapter and so on. And then a guy denounced me for making fun of religion, whatever, whatever. And I did something totally crazy which worked. I attacked the guy as anti-Christian. I said that he doesn't get it that and I'm sincerely convinced that that's the whole point of Jesus Christ. He was crucified as a— you know, he he was fully human, one of us. It's strictly a pagan falsification which started in that Orthodox Church Constantinople to to to to to paint Christ as a divinity. I mean if you read the Bible you know what kind of a divinity was Christ. A kind of mocking clownish divinity who entered the city riding riding a monkey or whatever. Not a donkey, whatever, no. No, no. So, uh, no, no what and even do you know that another problem I have. Do you agree with me? I always get into a problem with a certain joke that I use in my, uh, how should you call it, *Plague of Fantasies*, which I consider a— and also this happened in Stanford. I was attacked. Even the lecture was interrupted but I exploded in fury back and it worked. It's you must know the joke it's the standard Yugoslav— we are the nastiest joke about— maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself— a guy sits at a bar and drinks whiskey. And then on the bar on the bar— a monkey comes by and washes his testicles in the whiskey glass. Simply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the guy surprised "What's going on?" The monkey comes again washes his testicles goes off and then the buy asks the guy asks the barman, "Do you know why is the monkey washing his balls in my whiskey?" He said, "I don't know, ask the gypsy, the gypsy band which is playing," no? And he calls the gypsy band leader "Hi, do you know why?" and the gypsy band says "Of course I do" and starts to sing a song "Oh why is a monkey washing..." No, the point is that the gypsy reads this as the title of a song like "Do you know the song 'The Guy with the Title Why'..." and I was attacked for speciesism. Making fun of animals. I told them "Are you crazy? I mean the the stupid victim is the white male. I cannot imagine a more politically correct joke. The monkey is the the big winner here," no? He washes his balls you can't do anything. The gypsy guy triumphs. The only— can you imagine my... Which is why I hate this, uh, that's what I don't like in Santa Cruz, one of the capitals of political correctness. They have these jokes I was told where they try to make abstract jokes to be sure that you don't offend anyone. You know like "What happens when a triangle meets a circle?" Fuck it, what do I care what happens. I mean somebody must be hurt to be... No, no, no I hate this so much. But here I'm quite serious now. My obsession is there is admitted a lot of— my great story of hypocrisy of political correctness charity or it's I mention this in one of my books. It happened in '91, '92 when the war was going on in ex-Yugoslavia and I participated— this was at Berkeley— at a Hitchcock conference. And I gave a paper on Hitchcock. And then some idiot attacked me, "How how why your country is in flames, how can you talk about such frivolous thing as Hitchcock?" And then of course I exploded. Like, I cannot you can. That's racism. I should behave I am only allowed your precious academic space if I play this victim from Gal— from Balkan, oh horrible nationalist we suffer while you can. I said "Why don't we exchange? You write a report on Balkan war, leave Hitchcock to me," how should I put it, no? No, no, it's quite breathtaking how how... Okay, but let's return to where we were. We were at Badiou, this idea of anxiety and so on. The interesting thing is, and then we end with Badiou. I tend to agree with Badiou's follower and he here Badiou is really lucky although I don't always agree with them. Badiou has two main how should I put it Anglo-Saxon deputies in this Jacobinic dictatorship sense. You nominate a deputy to run your affairs in this in this in this canton, in that part of the world. Uh, in United States Bruno Bosteels, in UK Peter Hallward. And Bosteels now translated *Theory of the Subject*. By this I think the best book still by Badiou, *Theory of the Subject*. And uh Bosteels' notion and I tend to agree with it is that the true radical breakthrough is there. And that both big books which come later, *Being and Event*, *Logics of the Worlds*, are really almost attempts to contain to norm— to how do you put this this measurement problems in quantum physics? To renormalize the terrifying. I know that book is a little bit inconsistent and so on. But it has the freshness of this radical breakthrough. So what I want to say is that there Badiou does
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something wonderful. He proposes
something wonderful. He proposes
Slavoj Žižek
and only now he's slowly returning to it, there he already has this link between anxiety and event. His idea and it's done wonderfully Bruno Bosteels and already Badiou links this to the opposition between Aeschylus— I hope I pronounce these shitty names correctly— Aeschylus and Sophocles. Usually psychoanalysts like Sophocles, you know the great one *Antigone*, we all love that *Oedipus* myth. But for Badiou introduced four notions: terror, anxiety, terror, anxiety, courage, justice. And for him for Badiou, Sophocles is the poet writer of terror anxiety. *Antigone*, terror anxiety, death, this kind of a tragic pessimism. While Aeschylus
and only now he's slowly returning to it, there he already has this link between anxiety and event. His idea and it's done wonderfully Bruno Bosteels and already Badiou links this to the opposition between Aeschylus— I hope I pronounce these shitty names correctly— Aeschylus and Sophocles. Usually psychoanalysts like Sophocles, you know the great one *Antigone*, we all love that *Oedipus* myth. But for Badiou introduced four notions: terror, anxiety, terror, anxiety, courage, justice. And for him for Badiou, Sophocles is the poet writer of terror anxiety. *Antigone*, terror anxiety, death, this kind of a tragic pessimism. While Aeschylus
unknown
is
is
Slavoj Žižek
the one of courage justice. You also do have anxiety like in *Oresteia*, you know who is called the young creep who killed his father? Agamemnon? No not Agamemnon who killed him, the son, the name please... Orestes. Sorry? Orestes. Orestes, my god, *Oresteia*, I am like you stupid... you know you have terror anxiety but then it's overcome with courage and then at the end a new justice. Uh, I here suggested a correction to Badiou which this time I can say at least he claims to me— I don't know what he will tell to you behind my back— he accepted that justice sticks out here. I don't think it belongs here because all other three notions: terror, anxiety, courage name let's call them naively subjective attitudes, while justice is something different. So I suggested replacing justice with enthusiasm. That in the same terror is linked to anxiety in a homologous way courage is linked to enthusiasm. It's through courage that you when you are terrified and prone to anxiety through courage you overcome anxie— you convert as it were anxiety into enthusiasm. So uh why am I mentioning this? Because here nonetheless so that I don't say only bad things about Badiou. Here I agree with him against as I already hinted at against Lacanians. Lacanians for Lacanians this is not psychoanalytically correct and so on and so on but the stakes are extremely high here politically. Because what unfortunately predominates among the Lacanians is this kind of a psychoanalytic how should I call it naively sometimes almost cynical pessimism. The idea is that the ultimate confrontation with the real, the ultimate truth, is the traversing the fantasy you know this kind of a tragic as if looking sun into the eye and then it's a single first it's a an experience which cannot be protracted. The idea of Lacan is that you know it's like *Antigone*, you enter some prohibited domain you cannot stay there. You must return to ordinary reality full of illusions. And B, Lacan unfortunately insists on this one: this ultimate let's call it naively authentic subjective experience of traversing the fantasy is singular, individual. In the sense that for Lacanians although it looks sometimes more ambiguous but basically ultimately nonetheless, uh, collectivity as such is domain of illusion. Every collectivity is sustained by imaginary symbolic identification and the Real is masked all the shit and so on and so on. I I am here absolutely on Badiou's side. I think that you can losing nothing of the authenticity of anxiety, you can revert as it were, transform anxiety into enthusiasm and at the same time collectivizing it as it were, no? Collectivizing it as a... so that there is for I don't buy this game which then then you end up where Jacques-Alain Miller ended now, you know, writing regularly political comments for for *Le Point* and *Le Figaro*, the two big right-of-center and making square— it's a kind of a how should I call it... Badiou was right when in his love for Jacobin radicals he said that effectively the ultimate choice is virtue or corruption. And I was effectively shocked. You know how it became I think this was the the beginning of the decline of Miller, where already when when did Berlusconi first explode in Italy? Almost ten years ago, no? Yeah, yeah, even more, yeah. Uh, Miller used that in order to praise corruption. Miller openly said that a little bit of corruption we have realistically to accept it. That if you fight corruption you end up in some kind of totalitarian terror and so on or madness and he was not for Berlusconi but he— you know how Berlusconi came to power? It was that big action of the Mani pulite or whatever pure hand where the whole establishment of Christian democracy and so on disintegrated and then Berlusconi entered. So this was Miller's message as it were: we should be realistic, a little bit of corruption extra, and he was always fascinated by this. It's incredible to what extent for example he visited Slovenia already under communism when I was young, we invited him '79-'80, and when we told him "You see we shouldn't go here, this is just for high party functionaries but we can squeeze you in" "Oh you were the kind..." He's so fascinated by this small he and he thinks he is saying something very deep. This he considers this a wisdom that you know a certain amount of corruption you have to accept it to make things running and so on and so on. I find this terrifying. This is what I'm talking about this kind of attitude of cynical wisdom. In the sense of after you've gone through fantasy, you see the ultimate void, then you return to daily life but you are aware "This we are all just playing games, it's just a game, don't..." this kind of a cynical wisdom. I'm totally opposed to this attitude. I don't buy this. I don't buy this. Again, I think it's politically catastrophic, I even... Sorry but are you there scratching yourself or you did raise hand? Sorry please, yes. I just had a question about what you said about Badiou has been going— he has somewhat played an attempt to renormalize re-normalize you know his theory and make it fit in a bit of a framework. After *Being and Event* there were some comments in a huge debate where I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, it was Peter Hallward's comments that pushed Badiou to examine more closely take the the the attention from the event itself to the eventual side into how this works. Yeah yeah yeah, you mean towards fidelity and so on, yeah. So, uh, it was Peter Hallward's you know... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although okay please finish. What I realize now in this in this the last book, the *Logics of Worlds*, where there is explicit mentioning of intensity and so on. I tried to to put this question forward in the public lecture but he showed it off, you know, like nothing. Ah no, he is in his Stalin— I told I was told he wants only written questions now and so on. He-he I like this. This issue of intensity and privileging difference so much brings brings him so very close to Deleuze for me. That's a very good question which is why can I tell you I already mentioned this... was this your opinion on this because... No, I can just tell you something which confirms this. Do you know that— okay he will maybe deny this it was private was private conversation— after reading Peter Hallward's critique of Deleuze, *Out of This World*, I met at one of these shitty conferences there Peter and told him "But probably you know that the way you formulate your critique of Deleuze, the true target appears to be Badiou himself? That basically the point is that the event can be out of this world and so on?" And he said "Yeah, yeah, yeah I know" and so on and so on. So my answer to this, oh sorry, please finish. I mean even when you have close to... Yeah yeah, no no no I yeah, no no. My you know okay let me tell you where do I agree, where I don't agree. Uh, it is true Peter is right that although Badiou emphasizes that what matters are more and more I agree the consequences, the fidelity, or to put it in his Christian terms the work of love— underline work. Badiou I totally agree with him. It's precisely against this cynical idea of you encounter event er and then you return to corruption. No, the traces are all that counts. But I cannot, maybe I'm wrong, I cannot bring this fully together with his idea of a let's say eventual revolutionary series which then exhausts itself and then this was the ironic struggle we had when I mentioned you know that's why he wanted to kill me symbolically of course, when when I wrote that about Deng Xiaoping capitalism as the consequence of cultural revolution. He sees a gap here. He totally rejects this idea that when things the way things go on it's somehow the truth of... I agree with him here. But nonetheless for me, for example you know ask him how does he date the events. For him the event of October Revolution, you know when does it end? In For him the moment they took power they started to play the state-party game, it's over and so on. And he refuses to draw he simply thinks the event was exhausted and then you cannot play any game of "is the event itself responsible for the shit that followed" and so on and so on. Here I would be more on the Hallward side. I would have said as I always repeat it for me the single most interesting tragic but productive moment of Soviet Union was the early 20s. After the Civil War was over they confronted this problem of how should I put it reconstructing the everyday life. They had beautiful very naive problems like people marry, they die, they have holidays. How can we reconstruct all these how should I put it rituals which are holding daily life together without simply relying on the old rituals. They really try to reconstruct from sexual manners to I don't know what. This was for me the crucial test: how does an event inscribe itself its traces into the order of being. And so there they failed. There they failed. So uh in in this sense I am up to a point on Peter
the one of courage justice. You also do have anxiety like in *Oresteia*, you know who is called the young creep who killed his father? Agamemnon? No not Agamemnon who killed him, the son, the name please... Orestes. Sorry? Orestes. Orestes, my god, *Oresteia*, I am like you stupid... you know you have terror anxiety but then it's overcome with courage and then at the end a new justice. Uh, I here suggested a correction to Badiou which this time I can say at least he claims to me— I don't know what he will tell to you behind my back— he accepted that justice sticks out here. I don't think it belongs here because all other three notions: terror, anxiety, courage name let's call them naively subjective attitudes, while justice is something different. So I suggested replacing justice with enthusiasm. That in the same terror is linked to anxiety in a homologous way courage is linked to enthusiasm. It's through courage that you when you are terrified and prone to anxiety through courage you overcome anxie— you convert as it were anxiety into enthusiasm. So uh why am I mentioning this? Because here nonetheless so that I don't say only bad things about Badiou. Here I agree with him against as I already hinted at against Lacanians. Lacanians for Lacanians this is not psychoanalytically correct and so on and so on but the stakes are extremely high here politically. Because what unfortunately predominates among the Lacanians is this kind of a psychoanalytic how should I call it naively sometimes almost cynical pessimism. The idea is that the ultimate confrontation with the real, the ultimate truth, is the traversing the fantasy you know this kind of a tragic as if looking sun into the eye and then it's a single first it's a an experience which cannot be protracted. The idea of Lacan is that you know it's like *Antigone*, you enter some prohibited domain you cannot stay there. You must return to ordinary reality full of illusions. And B, Lacan unfortunately insists on this one: this ultimate let's call it naively authentic subjective experience of traversing the fantasy is singular, individual. In the sense that for Lacanians although it looks sometimes more ambiguous but basically ultimately nonetheless, uh, collectivity as such is domain of illusion. Every collectivity is sustained by imaginary symbolic identification and the Real is masked all the shit and so on and so on. I I am here absolutely on Badiou's side. I think that you can losing nothing of the authenticity of anxiety, you can revert as it were, transform anxiety into enthusiasm and at the same time collectivizing it as it were, no? Collectivizing it as a... so that there is for I don't buy this game which then then you end up where Jacques-Alain Miller ended now, you know, writing regularly political comments for for *Le Point* and *Le Figaro*, the two big right-of-center and making square— it's a kind of a how should I call it... Badiou was right when in his love for Jacobin radicals he said that effectively the ultimate choice is virtue or corruption. And I was effectively shocked. You know how it became I think this was the the beginning of the decline of Miller, where already when when did Berlusconi first explode in Italy? Almost ten years ago, no? Yeah, yeah, even more, yeah. Uh, Miller used that in order to praise corruption. Miller openly said that a little bit of corruption we have realistically to accept it. That if you fight corruption you end up in some kind of totalitarian terror and so on or madness and he was not for Berlusconi but he— you know how Berlusconi came to power? It was that big action of the Mani pulite or whatever pure hand where the whole establishment of Christian democracy and so on disintegrated and then Berlusconi entered. So this was Miller's message as it were: we should be realistic, a little bit of corruption extra, and he was always fascinated by this. It's incredible to what extent for example he visited Slovenia already under communism when I was young, we invited him '79-'80, and when we told him "You see we shouldn't go here, this is just for high party functionaries but we can squeeze you in" "Oh you were the kind..." He's so fascinated by this small he and he thinks he is saying something very deep. This he considers this a wisdom that you know a certain amount of corruption you have to accept it to make things running and so on and so on. I find this terrifying. This is what I'm talking about this kind of attitude of cynical wisdom. In the sense of after you've gone through fantasy, you see the ultimate void, then you return to daily life but you are aware "This we are all just playing games, it's just a game, don't..." this kind of a cynical wisdom. I'm totally opposed to this attitude. I don't buy this. I don't buy this. Again, I think it's politically catastrophic, I even... Sorry but are you there scratching yourself or you did raise hand? Sorry please, yes. I just had a question about what you said about Badiou has been going— he has somewhat played an attempt to renormalize re-normalize you know his theory and make it fit in a bit of a framework. After *Being and Event* there were some comments in a huge debate where I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, it was Peter Hallward's comments that pushed Badiou to examine more closely take the the the attention from the event itself to the eventual side into how this works. Yeah yeah yeah, you mean towards fidelity and so on, yeah. So, uh, it was Peter Hallward's you know... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although okay please finish. What I realize now in this in this the last book, the *Logics of Worlds*, where there is explicit mentioning of intensity and so on. I tried to to put this question forward in the public lecture but he showed it off, you know, like nothing. Ah no, he is in his Stalin— I told I was told he wants only written questions now and so on. He-he I like this. This issue of intensity and privileging difference so much brings brings him so very close to Deleuze for me. That's a very good question which is why can I tell you I already mentioned this... was this your opinion on this because... No, I can just tell you something which confirms this. Do you know that— okay he will maybe deny this it was private was private conversation— after reading Peter Hallward's critique of Deleuze, *Out of This World*, I met at one of these shitty conferences there Peter and told him "But probably you know that the way you formulate your critique of Deleuze, the true target appears to be Badiou himself? That basically the point is that the event can be out of this world and so on?" And he said "Yeah, yeah, yeah I know" and so on and so on. So my answer to this, oh sorry, please finish. I mean even when you have close to... Yeah yeah, no no no I yeah, no no. My you know okay let me tell you where do I agree, where I don't agree. Uh, it is true Peter is right that although Badiou emphasizes that what matters are more and more I agree the consequences, the fidelity, or to put it in his Christian terms the work of love— underline work. Badiou I totally agree with him. It's precisely against this cynical idea of you encounter event er and then you return to corruption. No, the traces are all that counts. But I cannot, maybe I'm wrong, I cannot bring this fully together with his idea of a let's say eventual revolutionary series which then exhausts itself and then this was the ironic struggle we had when I mentioned you know that's why he wanted to kill me symbolically of course, when when I wrote that about Deng Xiaoping capitalism as the consequence of cultural revolution. He sees a gap here. He totally rejects this idea that when things the way things go on it's somehow the truth of... I agree with him here. But nonetheless for me, for example you know ask him how does he date the events. For him the event of October Revolution, you know when does it end? In For him the moment they took power they started to play the state-party game, it's over and so on. And he refuses to draw he simply thinks the event was exhausted and then you cannot play any game of "is the event itself responsible for the shit that followed" and so on and so on. Here I would be more on the Hallward side. I would have said as I always repeat it for me the single most interesting tragic but productive moment of Soviet Union was the early 20s. After the Civil War was over they confronted this problem of how should I put it reconstructing the everyday life. They had beautiful very naive problems like people marry, they die, they have holidays. How can we reconstruct all these how should I put it rituals which are holding daily life together without simply relying on the old rituals. They really try to reconstruct from sexual manners to I don't know what. This was for me the crucial test: how does an event inscribe itself its traces into the order of being. And so there they failed. There they failed. So uh in in this sense I am up to a point on Peter
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Hallward's side that but here now we are coming to the big problem that I was looking for a quote okay fuck the quote I will reproduce it more or less. At some point I think I'm not sure but I think it's in the *Logics of the Worlds*, Badiou naively confronts this question, the big question, which is ultimately ontologically: how do being and event relate
Hallward's side that but here now we are coming to the big problem that I was looking for a quote okay fuck the quote I will reproduce it more or less. At some point I think I'm not sure but I think it's in the *Logics of the Worlds*, Badiou naively confronts this question, the big question, which is ultimately ontologically: how do being and event relate
Slavoj Žižek
to each other? Incidentally I have
to each other? Incidentally I have
unknown
another maybe I already
another maybe I already
Slavoj Žižek
told it
told it
unknown
to you I'm sorry if I repeat myself
to you I'm sorry if I repeat myself
Slavoj Žižek
misunderstanding with Badiou. I totally accept his triple ontology from uh from *Logics
misunderstanding with Badiou. I totally accept his triple ontology from uh from *Logics
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of
of
Slavoj Žižek
the World* but with two provisos. First— and he
the World* but with two provisos. First— and he
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violently
violently
Slavoj Žižek
disagrees with me here— I think there is no world outside language. I think that what he describes as world— no wonder that he all the time had to use the very terms referred to signifying mechanisms like you know the point, *le point*, which is simply his name for what Lacan calls master signifier, you know the one mark which decides yes or no or whatever. Or the entire symptomal structure, you know when he talks about this non-existence of a world as its symptomal point and so on and the reversal of as he puts it the reversal of non-existence into the most intense existence. I think this only works in a symbolic system. I think you don't have symptoms, you don't have points in nature. Now I agree with him in his trust against the philosophy of language. I agree that truth is not historically language specific. It's not you know this symbolic historicism whose ultimate expression maybe is Heidegger that the ultimate abyss that we can confront is death of Ereignis in the sense of the how should I put it subjectless anonymous game of different worlds being destined to us. We experience being like this, the stupid ancient Greeks experienced it like that or whatever, no? Uh, ah is there a Greek guy here? You were... yeah. Ah you know where I would you agree with me? This was really offensive but my Greek friends embraced me when I was in Athens. I did everything wrong there. First, they took me to a restaurant, I hated it because it was expensive. I prefer cheap popular restaurants. Down from Acropolis and we talked about politics and they told me how "Ooh, you know, uh, we are in deep crisis in Greece." And then I did some nasty remark. I pointed to Acropolis and said "Look that beautiful building, even that is falling apart, you really must be in crisis if you cannot..." and so on. But then I did something really nasty. You know this big debate Melina Mercouri started that you try to get back from especially England and Britain all those caryatids parts of Parthenon? I said, "But wait a minute, if you look at the history of modern Greece, you must know that the first capital in or when even wasn't Athens. That you at that point didn't perceive clearly this this idea that you are the descendants of the big ancient Greece. This was the colonialist view of..."
disagrees with me here— I think there is no world outside language. I think that what he describes as world— no wonder that he all the time had to use the very terms referred to signifying mechanisms like you know the point, *le point*, which is simply his name for what Lacan calls master signifier, you know the one mark which decides yes or no or whatever. Or the entire symptomal structure, you know when he talks about this non-existence of a world as its symptomal point and so on and the reversal of as he puts it the reversal of non-existence into the most intense existence. I think this only works in a symbolic system. I think you don't have symptoms, you don't have points in nature. Now I agree with him in his trust against the philosophy of language. I agree that truth is not historically language specific. It's not you know this symbolic historicism whose ultimate expression maybe is Heidegger that the ultimate abyss that we can confront is death of Ereignis in the sense of the how should I put it subjectless anonymous game of different worlds being destined to us. We experience being like this, the stupid ancient Greeks experienced it like that or whatever, no? Uh, ah is there a Greek guy here? You were... yeah. Ah you know where I would you agree with me? This was really offensive but my Greek friends embraced me when I was in Athens. I did everything wrong there. First, they took me to a restaurant, I hated it because it was expensive. I prefer cheap popular restaurants. Down from Acropolis and we talked about politics and they told me how "Ooh, you know, uh, we are in deep crisis in Greece." And then I did some nasty remark. I pointed to Acropolis and said "Look that beautiful building, even that is falling apart, you really must be in crisis if you cannot..." and so on. But then I did something really nasty. You know this big debate Melina Mercouri started that you try to get back from especially England and Britain all those caryatids parts of Parthenon? I said, "But wait a minute, if you look at the history of modern Greece, you must know that the first capital in or when even wasn't Athens. That you at that point didn't perceive clearly this this idea that you are the descendants of the big ancient Greece. This was the colonialist view of..."