Do we live in the End Times?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-04-13 · 1:45:07 · 13,304 words
hegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisideologycapitalismphilosophy-generalhistoryethics
Žižek delivers a dense seminar lecture exploring Hegel's thesis on the end of art and his two key limitations: his failure to grasp non-representational abstract art as spiritually mediated, and his blindness to the antagonistic dimension of modern post-tragic society. He argues that Hegel's framework is best extended not by going beyond Hegel but by being more Hegelian than Hegel himself, and draws in Marx's Capital, Lacan on comedy and the unconscious, Kant and Sade, Schelling on radical evil, and a critique of psychoanalytic notions of truth to develop these points. The talk concludes with a discussion of how truth speaks through ideology and symbolic appearance rather than through direct factual statement.
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
Hegel's thesis that modernity marks the close of art as a privileged site of contact with absolute truth, our knees no longer genuflect before it.
Hegel's characterization of ancient Greek culture: for the Greeks, privileged contact with the absolute came through artistic experience rather than religion or pure thought.
The Aristotelian/Greek theatrical concept of spiritual purification, which Žižek ironizes by noting that ancient Greek theater seats had holes for bodily elimination.
as “post-tragic comedy”
Žižek's claim that modernity, including Auschwitz and Stalinism, can only be adequately staged as comedy, not because events are funny, but because the tragic form presupposes a dignity the victims were systematically denied.
as “phallic vitality”
Lacan's term for the comic principle of unlimited resilience, the ability to always find a way out no matter the danger, as in Tom and Jerry or Benigni's Life is Beautiful.
The quality of cartoon or Sadean characters who survive any dismemberment and reconstitute magically, linked to Lacan's phallic vitality and the death drive.
as “spiritual mediation of form”
Even the most elementary non-representational artistic elements (colors, shapes) are already conceptually/spiritually mediated; this is what Hegel missed in abstract art.
as “substance to subject”
Hegel's fundamental dialectical movement, applied here to Marx's Capital: money (substance) becomes capital (subject) through self-reproductive investment.
Althusser's concept, refined here: not just complex mutual causation but a structure of self-relation where a particular element is doubly inscribed, embodying both itself and the universality it belongs to.
Hegel's term for reciprocal interaction, mere mutual determination of elements, which Žižek contrasts with true overdetermination as a more superficial account of causality.
Hegelian concept whereby one particular element of a totality directly embodies the universality of that totality rather than merely being one species among others.
The placeholder for the void, the element in any classificatory series whose function is merely to mark what the system cannot include, illustrated by Marx's Asiatic mode of production and Borges's Chinese encyclopedia.
Lacan's quilting point from Seminar III, which he later replaced with ego-ideal and ultimately master signifier; the nodal element that sutures the symbolic field.
Lacan's thesis, adopted and extended by Žižek, that Sade is already a Kantian: both share the structure of an apathetic act done purely for its own sake, without pathological motivation.
Lacan's psychoanalytic categorical imperative, do not compromise on your desire, arrived at by elevating desire itself to the status of law.
Sade's concept of a radical crime that does not recycle within nature's circular economy of generation and corruption but aims to interrupt the cycle itself.
Kant's term for any empirically grounded motivation (pleasure, gain, fame); a truly free moral act must be free of all such motivations.
Kant's concept of an innate human propensity to evil, weaker than diabolical evil; Žižek notes Kant pulled back from the more radical notion of evil done purely for its own sake, which would be indistinguishable from moral action.
Kant's stronger but quickly abandoned idea of evil pursued without pathological motivation, purely for its own sake, which Žižek shows is structurally identical to the moral act.
The ideological structure whereby a community requires you to freely sign what is in fact compulsory, illustrated by the Yugoslav soldier ordered to freely sign his oath.
The paradox that we always have a formal freedom of choice but are never at a moment where we truly exercise it for the first time, the choice is always already made.
Freud's dreamwork, the process of translating the latent dream-thought into manifest dream-texture, through which, Žižek notes, the unconscious inscribes itself not in the thought but in the texture of translation itself.
Lacan's formula for the unconscious: not a deeper substantial content but the Other's discourse speaking through the subject, which Žižek cautions against reducing to a simple excuse.
The Russian distinction between factual truth (istina) and deeper political-symbolic truth (pravda), deployed to illustrate Lacan's account of truth as speaking through the subject.
The fundamentalist practice of stating empirical falsehoods in the service of a higher truth, an ideological instance of pravda overriding istina.
Lacan's dictum that truth can only ever be half-said; Žižek stresses the complementary side: you also cannot escape the truth, it catches up with you.
Stories he reaches for 7
Hegel notices that Antigone, while suffering, compares herself to mythic figures, she is already staging her image for posterity, a comic move within tragedy: the tragic actor checking if they are convincing.
“she is already doing her PR building her image... Did I do this well? Did it convince you? Should I do more?”
A friend in Yugoslav military service refused to freely sign the compulsory oath; after debate, the officer gave him a written order to sign freely, a document that perfectly enacts the paradox of forced freedom.
“the officer... gave to this soldier a paper where he, officer, orders him to freely sign it. This is a pure document of ideology.”
In If This Is a Man, prisoners preparing for the SS doctor's snap selection, pinching themselves for color, holding their stomachs, is described by Žižek as comic in its total despair, like a grotesque exam.
“the doctor sneezed for a moment he didn't see you, but doctor was too lazy... okay let's put here or there this guy. This total ridicule of the situation. That was comedy at its most horrible.”
Žižek's student journal reported communist elections as if they were genuinely free ('Latest news: it looks that communists will win!'), which infuriated the Party more than direct denunciation would have.
“Latest news: it looks that communists will remain in power, will win!... We just treat this as a really free elections, what did we do wrong?”
Marx's Asiatic mode of production functions like the final entry in Borges's Chinese encyclopedia ('all dogs not in this list'), a placeholder for everything the system cannot classify.
“at the end, 'all dogs who are not included in this classification.' But the whole point of Hegel and Marx was aware of it is that you need such a... placeholder”
Jacques-Louis David's painting of the murdered Marat leaves the top half pure black, refusing the expected vision of future liberation that socialist realism would have inserted, marking the birth of modernist abstraction.
“all the upper half of the painting, even more, is just black... The void remains.”
Kant defines marriage as a contract for mutual use of sex organs for pleasure, then argues a wife can have police retrieve a fleeing husband because he has absconded with a body part contractually belonging to her.
“she has the right to bring him back by police... because he ran away with a part of his body which was contractually linked to her.”
Works invoked 34
Capital book
Marx's Capital is described as achieving something great, grasping the Hegelian structure of the self-reproductive movement of capital as substance becoming subject.
Antigone play
Sophocles's play is analyzed via Hegel and Lacan: the only truly tragic figure is Creon; Antigone's monologue is already a comic PR move; her desire is her law.
Grundrisse book
Marx's introduction to the Grundrisse is cited for the elegant formulation that production is both one species of and the totality of the production-distribution-exchange-consumption cycle.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi's memoir of Auschwitz is cited as proof that authentic Holocaust representation requires comedy, certain scenes are unavoidably comic in their total despair.
Life is Beautiful film
Criticized for sliding from comic phallic vitality back into tragic sentimentality at the end, precisely the falsification that obscures the true horror of Auschwitz.
Lacan's seminar on ethics is discussed for its treatment of Kant with Sade, law and desire, and the key shift between its opening and closing positions, Lacan changes his stance without admitting it.
Écrits book
Contains Lacan's pathetic formula 'I, truth, speak' and the discussion of truth as catching up with you through the very form of error.
Contains Kant's definition of marriage as a contract for mutual use of sex organs, a scandalous formulation that Žižek loves and links to the Kant-Sade thesis.
The Order of Things book
Foucault's book is referenced for the Borges quote about the Chinese encyclopedia of dogs that opens it; Žižek approves of the English title over the French original.
The Death of Marat artwork
David's painting is argued to be the first truly modernist artwork, its large black upper void marks the birth of abstraction and foreshadows Malevich.
Ivan the Terrible film
Eisenstein's film is praised for staging the terrifying ambiguity of Stalinism from within, described as almost insanely brave; the undiscovered Part III is described as a mega-tragedy of film history.
Freiheitsschrift book
Schelling's essay, called by Heidegger the greatest text of German idealism, is cited for the insights that radical evil is more spiritual than good and that our deepest free decisions are unconscious yet fully our responsibility.
Home Alone film
Cited for its final act of comic undeadness, Joe Pesci's head burns but he reconstitutes, as an instance of Lacanian phallic vitality.
Juliette book
In book five, the Pope's long exposition uses exact Kantian terms to describe the Sadean system, key evidence for the Kant-Sade thesis.
One of two late Kant books Žižek says he increasingly admires, cited for the notion of radical (and diabolical) evil.
Referenced in the opening joke about Ben Affleck reading it before making love.
Described as slightly more serious than Seinfeld, Larry David's recurring trouble hints at something closer to a real conflict.
Platonov's novel is described as doing in literature what Malevich did in painting, staging a black void at the heart of Soviet construction, with the palace never being built.
Paradise Lost book
Milton's Satan saying 'Evil be thou my good' is cited as an early literary formulation of the structure of diabolical evil.
120 Days of Sodom book
Sade's most systematic work, used to show that Sadean sexuality becomes purely mechanical and apathetic, identical in structure to Kantian ethics.
I Love Lucy tv
Described as one of the great contributions of American TV to world culture, Lucy's direct-to-camera look enacts the Hegelian comic gap between actor and character.
Cited as one of two mega-tragedies of cinema history, a masterpiece destroyed by studio intervention while Welles was away.
Seinfeld tv
Proposed as the best description of what Hegel was predicting for post-tragic modern art: no world-historical conflicts, just trivial problems and comedies of daily life.
The other late Kant Žižek admires, reveals a Kant close to Pascal: 'fake it till you make it,' imitate morality in hope of becoming moral.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère artwork
Manet's painting, the barmaid who looks at you but doesn't see you, is used to stage Pippin's account of modern alienation and Žižek's supplementary point about modern freedom.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe artwork
Mentioned alongside Bar at the Folies-Bergère as a key Manet work analyzed by Pippin.
Diderot's obscene novel, mentioned as an example of Enlightenment materialism's vulgarity, a precursor to the kind of reductive naturalism Sade later transcended.
A Farewell to Arms book
An early Hemingway novel that partially succeeds at presenting personal misfortune as an allegory of deeper modern limitation, though Žižek doubts it really works.
Pippin's short book on Hegel and modern art, praised as 'quite wonderful' for showing how the shift from representational to abstract art can be formulated in Hegelian terms; criticized only for not seeing alienation also as freedom.
Called one of the worst novels of all time, pretentious allegory about a man and a fish that doesn't work.
Kandinsky's text is cited as illustrating the point that even basic tensions between colors and shapes in abstract art are spiritually mediated.
Where Lacan introduced the notion of point de capiton, later replaced by ego-ideal and then master signifier.
The Sun Also Rises book
Jake Barnes's impotence is analyzed as an attempt to allegorize a deeper modern impotence, partially successful but ultimately unconvincing.
To the Wonder film
Terrence Malick film mentioned in the opening joke, Ben Affleck reads Heidegger's Sein und Zeit just before making love to Olga Kurylenko.
People invoked 39
Primo Levi positive
If This Is a Man is re-read through Alenka Zupančič and cited as evidence that Auschwitz can only be staged as comedy, some scenes are unavoidably comic in their total despair.
Listed alongside Heidegger's other poetic subjects.
Roberto Benigni negative
Life is Beautiful is criticized for sliding from comic phallic vitality back into tragic sentimentality at the end, thus falsifying the structure of Auschwitz experience.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Referenced as having guided or prompted the re-reading of Primo Levi; mentioned earlier in connection with 'lying for Jesus' fundamentalism.
Marquis de Sade positive
Used to develop the Kant-Sade thesis: his apathetic mechanicality in Days of Sodom and the concept of second death are analyzed as revealing the Kantian structure of the evil act.
Robert Pippin positive
Praised for his short book on Hegel and modern art showing that abstract art and Manet's alienation can be read in Hegelian terms; criticized for not seeing the dislocated gaze as also expressing modern freedom, and for a slightly too pseudo-Marxist critical reading.
Kazimir Malevich positive
Described as Žižek's hero in abstract art; his black square is connected to David's black void in Death of Marat and to Andrei Platonov's literary equivalent.
Jacques Lacan positive
Extensively cited on: comedy as phallic affair, the unconscious as ultra-rational discourse of the Other, truth as mi-dire, ne pas céder sur son désir, Kant with Sade, jouissance, point de capiton, and the Écrits formula 'I, truth, speak.'
Louis Althusser positive
His concept of overdetermination is cited as extremely important but commonly misunderstood as mere complexity; Žižek refines it as a self-relational structure of double inscription.
Daniel Dennett negative
Mentioned alongside Damasio as a cognitive scientist who tries to engage with art but for whom it ultimately doesn't matter.
Friedrich Schiller positive
Called 'the father of fascism in aesthetics' but credited with writing a nice short poem that effectively satirizes Kant's exclusion of pleasure from moral action.
Ernest Hemingway negative
The Old Man and the Sea is called one of the worst novels ever, pretentious allegory that doesn't work; early novels A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises are slightly better but still only partially succeed at being post-tragic.
Orson Welles positive
The Magnificent Ambersons is cited as one of two mega-tragedies of cinema history, a masterpiece destroyed by studio cutting while Welles was sent to Brazil.
Oliver Sacks negative
Despite genuinely admiring art, his treatment of it is ultimately irrelevant to his scientific framework, another instance of the post-Hegelian irrelevance of art to modern scientific worldview.
Andrei Platonov positive
Described as a favorite writer; his Foundation Pit presents the literary equivalent of Malevich's black square, a void at the heart of Soviet construction.
António Damásio negative
Used as example of cognitive scientists who profess to appreciate art but for whom it is ultimately irrelevant, interrupts a scientific discussion to namedrop a pianist, then continues as if art has no bearing on his framework.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Praised for the alienation effect and the impossible Brechtian position of commenting on one's own action simultaneously, linked to Hegel's account of comedy.
Édouard Manet positive
His paintings, particularly the Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, are analyzed via Pippin as staging modern alienation and the dislocated gaze.
Kojin Karatani positive
Cited as 'my Japanese friend' who correctly points out that Marx underestimated the mega-importance of the shift from nomadic to settled urban societies.
T. J. Clark positive
Agreed with on the claim that the first truly modernist painting is David's Death of Marat, not Manet.
Referenced via the Borges quote at the opening of The Order of Things / Les Mots et les Choses; also the story of the book's title change is recounted.
Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels) is mentioned as an example of Enlightenment obscenity comparable to the vulgar materialism Sade began with.
Martin Heidegger negative
Criticized for wanting to restore reverence for art while in practice reducing every poem to a few lines that illustrate his own philosophy; his project of teaching us to 'learn to kneel again' before art doesn't really work.
Listed alongside Hölderlin and Rilke as poets Heidegger selectively mines for his philosophical machinery.
Hans Eysenck negative
A great positivist psychologist very critical of psychoanalysis; his argument that Freud's model dream refutes psychoanalysis is cited and then refuted by relocating the unconscious to the dreamwork.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Praised for the Freiheitsschrift as going further than Kant: evil is more spiritual than good, and our most radical free decisions are unconscious yet fully our own responsibility.
Wassily Kandinsky positive
His text On the Spiritual in Art is cited as illustrating the Hegelian point about abstract art: even elementary tensions between colors and forms are spiritually mediated.
Walter Benjamin positive
Briefly cited for the claim that capitalism is a new form of religion, supports Žižek's point that true capitalists are devoted fanatics, not mere egoists.
Mentioned as the poet Heidegger most frequently uses in his readings, reducing works to a few extractable lines.
John Milton positive
Satan's 'Evil be thou my good' in Paradise Lost is cited as an early formulation of diabolical evil, doing evil not for pathological reasons but as one's ethical goal.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Ivan the Terrible is praised for staging the terrifying ambiguity of Stalinism from within, described as almost insanely brave given the context.
Jacques-Louis David positive
Death of Marat is argued to be the first truly modernist painting, not Manet, because its large black void refuses narrative completion and anticipates Malevich.
Karl Marx positive
Credited for extending Hegel by grasping the Hegelian structure of capital (substance to subject); also criticized for underestimating the nomadic-to-city transition and for using Asiatic mode of production as a placeholder catch-all.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
His fictional Chinese encyclopedia of dogs, the final category being 'all dogs not in this classification', is used to illustrate the structural function of the placeholder for the void in any classification.
Paul the Apostle positive
The Paulinian sense of prohibition creating desire is cited as the initial but eventually rejected Lacanian account of law and desire in Seminar VII.
Sigmund Freud positive
Discussed via the Irma's injection dream and the dreamwork, Žižek defends Freud against Eysenck by relocating the unconscious from the latent thought to the translatory process of dreamwork itself.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central interlocutor throughout: Žižek defends Hegel's end-of-art thesis and his account of comedy/tragedy while arguing that Hegel's two key limitations are that he wasn't Hegelian enough regarding abstract art and modern antagonism.
Immanuel Kant positive
Central to the section on Kant with Sade: his definitions of moral act, pathological motivation, marriage, diabolical and radical evil are all analyzed; Žižek admires his late works (Anthropology, Religion within Limits of Reason Alone) and the scandalous marriage definition.
Not directly named but implicitly present in Heidegger discussion of kneeling before art.
What it argues
Hegel's end of art thesis and its two internal limitationstragedy versus comedy as historical forms (Auschwitz, Stalinism)abstract art and spiritual mediation of formMarx's Capital as extension of Hegelian idealismKant with Sade: radical evil and the apathetic actLacan on truth, the unconscious, and jouissanceideology speaks through form rather than explicit content
Dialectical moves 12
“The problem with Hegel is not that he went too far but that he was not Hegelian enough — that he missed the dialectical mediation of precisely those modern phenomena that most demanded it.”
Immanent critique: Hegel's limit is exceeded not by abandoning dialectics but by applying it more rigorously than he did.
“For Hegel modern art can only be comedy; but what he didn't see is that this comedy can be more desperate and terrifying than any tragedy.”
Comedy is not the lighter genre but the only form adequate to horrors that exceed tragic dignity.
“The true tragedy of Auschwitz is that it cannot be staged as a tragedy — precisely because the victims were deprived even of the minimal dignity required for heroic self-assumption.”
The horror of total terror is that it abolishes the very subject-position from which tragedy is possible.
“Capitalism is the most idealist order of social production imaginable — far from being crassly materialist, its real movement is dominated by the purely virtual self-reproduction of capital.”
The standard critique of capitalism as vulgar materialism is inverted: capital is spirit in Marx's own Hegelian account.
“Capitalism is not egoist enough — the true capitalist sacrifices personal happiness to the self-reproduction of capital.”
The moralistic critique demanding less egoism misidentifies capitalism: the capitalist is already beyond egoism, devoted fanatically to capital as an end in itself.
“Sade is already a Kantian — the structure of radical evil (apathetic act done purely for its own sake) is the same as the structure of the moral act.”
The most evil acts and the most moral acts share an identical formal structure, exposing a scandal at the heart of Kantian ethics.
“Diabolical evil — evil done purely for its own sake — is indistinguishable from Kant's own definition of the moral act, which is why Kant retreated to the softer radical evil.”
Kant's moral philosophy contains its own dialectical negation: pushed to its limit, it coincides with the most extreme evil.
“Radical evil is more spiritual than good — it is not a descent into matter but pure cold spirit manipulating material elements.”
Schelling's reversal: evil is not the failure of spirit but its most extreme expression.
“The unconscious is not more primitive or instinctual — it is ultra-rational, even more reflexive than conscious thought.”
The standard picture of the unconscious as a dark primordial reservoir is inverted: the unconscious is the most rational dimension of the subject.
“You have the freedom of choice only if you already made the radical choice — you have freedom but you can never find the moment to exercise it for the first time.”
Freedom is always-already used: we possess it structurally but are never at a point of unconstrained choosing.
“Truth is not only impossible to say fully — you also cannot escape it; it catches up with you through the very form of your evasion.”
Lacan's mi-dire is only half the story: truth is just as persistent as jouissance, and returns through slips, symptoms, and form.
“The dislocated gaze in Manet — looking at you but not seeing you — is not merely alienation but also the very figure of modern freedom.”
What Pippin reads as pure alienation is also the positive condition of subjects no longer fixed in a social hierarchy.
Claims 24
asserts
The proper way to go beyond Hegel is not to find phenomena he couldn't grasp, but to show where Hegel was not Hegelian enough — where he missed the dialectical mediation of modern phenomena.the critique of Hegel / method of immanent critique
asserts
Hegel's thesis on the end of art — that art no longer gives access to the absolute — became even more true after his death, not less.Hegel's end of art thesis
asserts
Hegel missed abstract art because he wasn't idealist enough: he failed to see that even non-representational form is already spiritually mediated.Hegel's limitation re: abstract art
asserts
Hegel was the first theorist of the TV series — his post-tragic modern world of trivial accidents and comedies of daily life perfectly describes Seinfeld and telenovelas.Hegel and popular culture / TV
asserts
Modern traumas like Auschwitz can only be authentically staged as comedies, not tragedies, because tragedy requires a minimal dignity of heroic self-assumption that the terror systematically destroyed.comedy vs. tragedy / Holocaust representation
asserts
Stalinism was a comedy in the precise Hegelian sense — not because it was funny but because its terrifying logic could only be staged through comic form.Stalinism and the comic form
asserts
The Stalinist show trials structurally required the accused to play along and freely confess — this is the logic of comedy, not tragedy.Stalinist trials / ideology
asserts
Capitalism is the most idealist order of social production imaginable because its real movement is dominated by the virtual self-reproductive movement of capital.capitalism and Hegelian idealism
rejects
Moralistic criticism of capitalism — appealing for more care and less egoism — is wrong; capitalism is precisely not egoist enough, since true capitalists sacrifice personal happiness to the self-reproduction of capital.moralistic anti-capitalism
asserts
Marx's Capital extends Hegel precisely by grasping the Hegelian structure of capital as the passage from substance to subject.Marx / Hegel / Capital
reframes
Overdetermination is not merely complex mutual causation but a self-relational structure in which a particular element doubly inscribes itself as both species and the genus of the totality.Althusser's overdetermination
asserts
Marx's Asiatic mode of production is not a genuine positive category but a placeholder for all societies that do not fit his scheme — the suture of his typology.Marx's modes of production / Asiatic despotism
asserts
Sade was already a Kantian: the structure of the Sadean act — apathetic, done purely for its own sake, without pathological motivation — is identical to Kant's structure of the moral act.Kant / Sade / ethics
asserts
Kant's notion of diabolical evil — evil done purely for its own sake — is structurally indistinguishable from his definition of the moral act, which is why he quickly retreated to the softer notion of radical evil.Kant's ethics / radical vs. diabolical evil
asserts
Schelling goes further than Kant by showing that radical evil is more spiritual than good — it is pure spirit coldly manipulating material elements, not a descent into matter.Schelling on evil
asserts
Our most radical free decisions are not consciously made: they are always-already accomplished before we become aware of them, as in falling in love.freedom, decision, and unconscious
asserts
The unconscious is not primitive or instinctual but ultra-rational — even more reflexive than conscious thought — and is a matter of reason (Vernunft).the unconscious / Lacan vs. common misreading
reframes
Pippin's Hegelian reading of modern alienation in Manet is partially correct but fails to see that the dislocated gaze — looking at you but not seeing you — is also modern freedom.Pippin / Manet / modern alienation
asserts
Truth not only cannot be said fully (mi-dire) but also cannot be escaped — it catches up with you through the very form of your attempt to evade it.Lacan on truth
asserts
Stalinist architecture staged the truth that the official ideology denied: the lower floors crushed by gigantic statues figure citizens crushed by the ideal they were supposedly liberated by.ideology and Stalinist architecture / truth in form
asserts
Telling the lie too insistently — treating false elections as if they were real — can be more subversive than directly stating the truth.ideological critique / truth vs. lie
asserts
Obsessional neurotics lie through factual truth — what they say is accurate but deployed to falsify their subjective position — while hysterics tell the truth through the form of lying.neurosis / truth and lying / psychoanalysis
asserts
David's Death of Marat, not Manet, is the first truly modernist painting — its large black void refuses the consoling narrative supplement that socialist realism would have supplied.modernism in painting / David vs. Manet
asserts
The Irma's injection dream shows that the unconscious is not in the latent dream-thought but in the very process of translation — the dreamwork itself introduces the unconscious.Freud's dreamwork / unconscious
Quotes 19
“we may still find it attractive, fascinating, but our knees no longer go down.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's end of art — loss of absolute reverence
“the problem with Hegel, and I think the critique of Hegel should begin here, that he missed as it were the Hegelian aspect precisely of some modern phenomena.”Slavoj Žižek · immanent critique — Hegel not Hegelian enough
“when things are truly horrible you can only do it in a comedy. This is the deep necessity beneath the simple fact that all really authentic films about Holocaust tend to be comedies.”Slavoj Žižek · comedy as the only form adequate to absolute horror
“you give too much credit to the Nazis if you do this. You underestimate the level of terror there.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Holocaust tragedy — terror destroys tragic dignity
“That was comedy at its most horrible.”Slavoj Žižek · Primo Levi's selekcja as comedy
“capitalism if anything crazy as it may sound is precisely not egoist enough.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism exceeds egoism — devoted to self-reproduction of capital
“capitalism is the most in this sense the most idealist order of social production you can imagine.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as Hegelian idealism
“I, truth, speak.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's claim — truth speaks through the subject
“you have a certain freedom which is always already used. You know like you are free to choose but you are never given a moment where you really can choose.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom always already used — ideological paradox of free choice
“This is a pure document of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · Yugoslav officer ordering soldier to freely sign his oath
“ne pas céder sur son désir — do not compromise on your desire. That's precisely the psychoanalytic categorical imperative.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's categorical imperative
“maybe the only definition... of love is that you hate to hate someone. You still hate him or her but you hate yourself for hating.”Slavoj Žižek · meta-desire structure of love
“it's precisely through this translation that the unconscious inscribes itself.”Slavoj Žižek · dreamwork as the site of the unconscious, not the latent thought
“you always have to have a distance. That's what you find in Brecht.”Slavoj Žižek · Brechtian alienation effect as necessary theatrical principle
“we didn't tell the truth we just insisted too much on the lie.”Slavoj Žižek · subversion through literalizing ideology
“you become aware, and that's crucial temporality, temporality, that you already ARE in love.”Slavoj Žižek · radical free decisions are always-already accomplished
“the unconscious is ultra-rational. The unconscious is a matter of Vernunft, of reason.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's counter-intuitive claim about the unconscious
“evil is more spiritual than good.”Slavoj Žižek · Schelling on radical evil as pure spirit
“the discourse of error could bear witness to the truth against the apparent facts themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on truth speaking through error
Transcript 37 turns
unknown
In view something which in my world corresponds to that famous head of the horse in your bed from Godfather, the offer you
In view something which in my world corresponds to that famous head of the horse in your bed from Godfather, the offer you
Slavoj Žižek
cannot refuse. Namely, that in this last film To the Wonder that Ben Affleck just prior to making love to Olga Kurylenko, that French beauty, is reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. I immediately messaged him back, if this is the offer that—sorry, again someone will protest for political incorrectness—but if the price to sleep with her is reading Sein und Zeit, would you do it? You take the Fifth Amendment, no, you will not answer because. Okay. Sorry for this stupid remark. Let's do today, I will try to do some consistent serious talk again. What I on the last session, I will do what I was also promising from the beginning, a short condensed version of a line of thought that I had in the manuscript on Hegel, the end of art, where was Hegel wrong, can we outdo Hegel through Hegel himself? I think my opponent, opponent, okay in a Hegelian opponent, Robert Pippin, in his nonetheless interesting short book on Hegel and Art, where you know, he tries to do something quite wonderful, to show in Hegel’s—to demonstrate how the shift from this as we call it representational traditional to modern so-called abstract art can be perfectly formulated in Hegelian terms. In other words, that Hegel when he put propose the thesis on the end of art, first he—okay, let me nonetheless improvise a little bit on this because I will keep stick to my promise to you. Any big line of thought that I didn't succeed because I talk too much about other things to sell to you, to present to you here will be given to Ed or to some of your slaves here called research assistants, whatever, and further presented. Okay, so the idea is this one, very nice one, that the way to move further than Hegel is not in this postmodern whatever way, you know, there are phenomena that Hegel couldn't grasp and so on. A much nicer paradox is to demonstrate, and again Pippin does this quite nicely in that short book on Hegel and modern art, that there are phenomena where Hegel was not Hegelian enough precisely to grasp them. And I think the reason why for example with regard to so-called abstract art insofar as we take Hegel as an idealist, not idealist in this stupid sense, there are some ideas up there on some Platonic heaven, but idealist in a much more elementary sense that even our most elementary experience of reality, its materiality and so on is in some sense notionally or conceptually mediated. Now I will not go into this distinction, that’s why I used them interchangeably between notion and concept, but let's forget about this now. The point is thus that when Hegel for Hegel modernity means the end of art. Now before we condemn this as oh Hegel’s arrogant stupidity, Hegel uses this wonderful metaphor: we may still find it attractive, fascinating, but our knees no longer go down. You know, like what is missing for Hegel in modernity is that, let's call it naively, absolute respect for art. Art not just as an amusement or pleasant or even noble experience, but art as to put it in traditional terms, contact with access to the absolute, truth itself revealing itself there as it was. Let's leave aside if this was true, not so much in medieval times as in ancient Greece. You know this Hegel’s great scheme: ancient Greece, even their religion he calls it religion of art, that is to say their privileged of ancient Greeks contact with the absolute was not—was neither religion nor science or metaphysics pure thinking but art, artistic experience. And there is something to say for this, that even for the so-called ordinary people you know that the tragedies, public staging of tragedies was originally at least the sacred event where as it were community restated its bonds, its what it counted on. Although incidentally I cannot refrain from this dirty detail, you know that a Greek friend told me, and not Ed, your wife, not Liana, but another one, that if you look and people don't like to talk about it in detail about these great patriarch Greek theaters, in the first rows for the rich, you have a hole in the center of the seat, of the seat. In other words, so that you were not—it wasn't necessary for you if you had the need to go to the toilet, it was there. And I like this: so when they speak of catharsis, purifying yourself, you render it to the spiritual catharsis but... Okay, more seriously now. The simple thing for you to be to say Hegel is exaggerating and so on. No, I think it was even more true, it became even more true after Hegel’s death. And if you want really to see a clear example of what Hegel meant, namely this arrives in post-Hegelian let's call it naively scientific world-view where, okay, do this: take a look at those cognitive scientists for example who are precisely not too primitive but who try to—who emphasize that they have an authentic feeling of art and so on and so on. I know two, Damasio, you know the Portuguese guy who did all this stuff about what is the self, and maybe up to a point Daniel Dennett. But the problem is if you read it closely that with all their respect for this, you can see how it’s really irrelevant. They just want to display how cultured they are, it doesn't matter. The worst example is in one of Damasio’s books, he wants to make a case of how our ears function. And then of course he cannot abstain from saying, do you know maybe her name I always forget, Maria something, there is a very famous Portuguese piano player, a woman, and he said: a week ago the pianist visited me at my house and while she was playing some wonderful Schubert piano music I was thinking about... Fuck, it's totally irrelevant! It's just excessive boasting or even guys who really want to do something with art like Oliver Sacks—not sex, S-A-C-K-S you know he lived with his wife for half and so on. Even with him you can feel this that it's wonderful, he really admires it, but it's ultimately irrelevant. And even if they praise it as you know, like ennobling you, good moral influence, not even to mention sublime exalted feelings. Here Heidegger was right: the moment you think art in the terms of feelings, experiences and so on, you are lost. Precisely art is art as long as it aims at this as it were contact with the absolute. And here against even Heidegger who as Pippin put it nicely, want to teach us how to learn to bow down, to kneel again to the art, you can see how it doesn't really work. I don't have time to go into it, just you know what always shocked me when I read Heidegger's detailed interpretations of some poems, you know usually Hölderlin and then all these other guys Stefan George, Rilke and so on. Although he all the time wants to play the card of art displays its own truth and so on, but it's always nonetheless what he de facto does is reduce art to a messenger transmitter of some truth which can be much more betterly explained in his philosophy. This is why also if you notice this Heidegger whenever he reads other poems, poets and even more philosophers, I'm not aware of ever trying really to read penetrate the entire line of thought or even less line of a poem. It’s usually just a couple of lines where then he applies his machinery. So again in a way Hegel was right. Even if we admire art today and so on, are sincerely exalted, it's no longer the absolute contact with truth. But where is Hegel as it were too short? I think Pippin has a point here. Hegel is too short because for him he cannot imagine let's call it the non-representational art. Hegel is very careful in analyzing also the form. My God, that the ABC of dialectics, no, that form matters. Form is never just a neutral container of some truth. Truth has to be inscribed into the form itself. Even you find some hints in Hegel of how when you have let's say a certain content, narrative, even idea and artistic form, Hegel even goes so far as to hint that the truth is in that form itself. That you know form is authentic art is never just the staging presentation of idea, but usually form implicitly shows the limitation what's wrong in that idea itself. For example, the most beautiful example I can imagine now briefly is Hegel on Antigone. You know Hegel’s thesis that the Greek theater moved historically from tragedy to comedy. But Hegel does not take this just in this large historical sense that in late antiquity or in Rome the real thing was a comedy, tragedy was no longer possible. But he locates in a wonderful detail, in his reading of Antigone, he locates this shift from tragedy to comedy already into Sophocles's Antigone. You know where, maybe you know because I written briefly about it but in my next book I want to expand it because it’s really wonderful. You know when Antigone is excluded from public space, finds herself as a living dead, Antigone in her monologue does what? She compares herself to some mythic creatures and so on like oh I am like that I don't know goddess or figure of myth to suffer alone. And Hegel does something wonderful. He says—I don't say now viciously—Hegel into modern experience, that she is already doing her PR building her image. It is as if the only way to—it's no longer this pure unreflected suffering, but I suffer but let me think for posterity how would I present my suffering. You know, she is staging for posterity an image of herself to be effective. And Hegel wonderfully says this is the moment of comedy. You know, it's as if you have a tragic actor who cries there and then with a hint says did I do this well? Did it convince you? Should I do more? That Hegel had this wonderful idea which I think found its full realization only in—one of the great contributions of American TV to world culture—"I Love Lucy." Isn't it a specific—you even have a term for it, you know how like that precise moment of when she or someone else says something stupid or has a stupid experience, she breaks this elementary rule of realistic cinema or TV and with this strange look looks directly into the camera. Again you see this is the comic in comedy as Hegel puts it. The gap that separates a person from the actor is displaced into this person itself. In the sense that this—you know this is why and I agree here with Hegel implicitly, he doesn't say this of course, that every lover of theater should run as far away as possible from actors studio method, you know this total realistic go—no, you always have to have a distance. That's what you find in Brecht and I like so much, you know this impossible position of commenting on your—you know what’s a typical Brechtian scene: an actor enters the stage and says I am a capitalist, today you will see I will try to approach that worker and confuse him, corrupt him so that—you know that you at the same time you adopt the position of metalanguage. As if you do what you do but you add comment to it. And in this sense so many things probably to say time to develop, in this sense I claim even Stalinism was a comedy. Stalinist trials, be careful, I don't mean by this it was comedy where you laugh. Again as I already developed here I think the first time or when, when things are truly horrible you can only do it in a comedy. This is the deep necessity of beneath the simple fact that the all really authentic films about Holocaust tend to be comedies. There is something false in doing a Holocaust tragedy. Not because things were not serious there for the victims, but because they were too serious. You know why? What is a tragedy? I'm accused, I said no, never, I heroically shoot me. You know in in order to have a tragedy the victim is still needed to, how should I put it, keep intact his her space of dignity from where he or she can heroically assume his her tragic fate. My point is that imagine again in a film where let's say a Jewish torturer violates or rapes in Auschwitz a Jewish girl and she heroically says no you can do whatever you want with me but you will never break my spirit and all that bullshit and so on, no! You see you give too much credit to the Nazis if you do this. You underestimate the level of terror there. The terror, the true terror of terror as it were was that precisely you were deprived even of this minimal dignity. That's why again only a comedy works. Of course it's not a comedy where you laugh, you know. But you must move beyond tragedy. That's why incidentally I don't mention this many times for example I don't like—I didn't mean that one as a great film—"La vita bella." My God I forgot the guy’s... Sorry, Benigni, Roberto Benigni, yeah. You know why? Because at the end it gets too close to the tragic mood, it gets sentimental. You know you are not supposed to laugh at the very end. You remember when the father dies and so on. And I’m sorry but I hope at least I didn't mention this year this thing here to make another I like to test this experiment I will not bore you now let's say you all know the story of the film. Would you agree or not that there is a simple way to make the film really tragic, tragic not tragic even beyond? You know what happens here, all this idea his small son buys this story that this is not just a big competition to survive. Father presents to his son a story which would make it easier for his son to sustain, to endure Auschwitz, telling him it's just a big competition in the end you get the prize and so on. Now imagine just a slight change at the end. Just when they are taking father to be shot really, somehow he understands that the son also knew that. In the same way that father was pretending that this is just a big competition in order to make it easier to the son, the son played the same game with him. He knew it all the time but he just pretended to be a naive child who believes it in order to make it easier for his father. That would be a much more hopeless desperate solution. Why? Because there is another way of cheating there. It's not so much at the empirical level what they are doing there but you know as Lacan, Lacan usually says that comedy is a phallic affair, but what does he mean by this? He somewhere puts it in very simple terms that by phallic he means this unlimited vitality. You know it's like Tom and Jerry which is another story even pre-phallic, but whatever, the idea is this one: you know these adventure stories or heroes where no matter what in what dangers they are, in a comical way you know they will always survive, they will always find a way out. And precisely I think this is what he does, he Benigni transposes this into Auschwitz as if Roberto Benigni is this phallic figure of whatever trouble he is sometimes somehow he finds his way out, squeezing out in a comic way. I think the best answer to this would have been what I found years ago maybe you also find it today, it there was in ex-Yugoslavia the avant-garde some circle in Zagreb capital of Croatia of avant-garde how do you call it what is Disney doing? Cartoons then. And okay what they did is they took a standard Tom and Jerry cartoon, you know well, you know the basic mystery there: the undeadness of them. For example Jerry or Tom can be I don't know overrun by a bus, cut up in pieces, magically in next scene they are again there. You know, and incidentally that’s why I although I hate the movies moderately like I hate them ideologically but in *Home Alone and you know the last quarter of an hour, I’m primitive, so you know well Joe Pesci he plays one of the—you know he puts his hand which is his head into the toilet, of course the small kid already put gasoline into the toilet, so his head explodes, he comes out he is just burned here and so on you know this undeadness. I think again that and Lacan in his reading of Kant with Sade points out how you find the same mystery in Sade, the victims in Sade, novels of Marquis de Sade are tortured endlessly but magically they not only survive but they usually the women even retain their their beauty to the end and so on and so on. So back to my point, comedy, tragedy. For Hegel also modern art can only be a comedy. And okay let's do it today I will tell you something more interesting in today’s... What I find so fascinating with Hegel is that, but again the limit of Hegel: for Hegel we live in a reconciled world. He doesn't mean by this everything is okay but simply what Fukuyama would have called post-historical world. We no longer live in an era where, and that's the proper stuff of tragedy for Hegel, where some kind of radical split, self-alienation, antagonism defines our predicament. I think the proof of this is precisely again Auschwitz, because as we all know the fundamental tragic move from Oedipus to what Hegel wants to say is that you as the hero, the tragic hero is exposed to some external calamity, but then the properly tragic moment is not simply the moment when he loses but when he has to assume, has to realize that he, he was somehow co-responsible for this loss. That in some sense he deserved it, like Oedipus, you know, he didn't know it but he did sleep with his mother, kill his father and so on and so on. So you have as Hegel would have put it this moment of recognition that in the substance, the other which ruined you, you have to discover yourself, that the external conflict is the conflict with yourself. Now precisely I claim this emphatically doesn't hold, doesn't help for Auschwitz. Because what would you say to the Jews that in being brutally destroyed by the Nazis you were effectively self-destroying yourself, your... No, it was really external in that case. You shouldn't again include it into this tragic, tragic self-relationship. So again Hegel knew this that we live in a post-tragic era. And he was well aware that today even if the stories are tragic they are ultimately comedies. Comedies in the sense that we can have terrible fate but in, to put it in very naive terms, in our individual fate our fiasco we no longer can say that some world-historical antagonism is being mirrored. You know like in Antigone for example it’s clear that what, it’s not just Antigone destroyed by Creon and then Creon destroying himself in a pure tragic way. This is another interesting story you know that Antigone is not at all in this strict sense a tragic figure, the only truly tragic figure is Creon who as it were at the end gets his message—no, I should say here gets his comeuppance or how would you say it, yes. But back to it, even if horrible things happen to you again you don't find the echo of this larger world-historical conflict. And okay what Hegel didn't do, this is his limitation, it's to see to discern the tragic potential, tragic, terrifying, horrible, antagonistic of our own post-tragic modern world. And this I was quite nicely surprised, Robert Pippin develops this in quite a wonderful way where when he points out how for Hegel our post-revolutionary universe, our, I mean his, is basically a non-antagonistic one. Misfortunes happen but not at that level, not world-historical misfortunes. It's just bad luck or whatever, from the world-historical perspective it's irrelevant. Now here things get really interesting because, and I will give you this text then through Ed and so on, that when you read Hegel's descriptions of what especially literature or theater can be today, I wonder if it will click, you recognize something the way it did at least to me. He says it's no longer world-historical tension, it's just our ordinary humanity in all its complications, luck here, bad luck there, all these ultimately non-important conflicts which can be personally tragic like for example, you know, even in Hemingway. I don't know why I never had a great tolerance for Hemingway. I think one of the worst novels of all times is "The Old Man and the Sea." Oh, total pretension you know as if—okay, trying to catch the fucking fish, so what? Already there I think that of course I’m not an idiot, the idea is that it’s an allegory of yeah yeah man’s struggle with the point of [unintelligible] but it doesn't work. Something didn't work for me there. Although Cubans are now slowly learning how to commercialize art, you know that they—I read somewhere they, I hope they fake it, some American agency advised them, they alleged, you know that that old man then returns to a boy, has a young boy. They discovered now an old guy who they claim is that original young boy. Oh, I love them, I love history so much. Sorry, but let's go on. So this is what—so even you see in his early novels of Hemingway it works better. What do I mean by this? Remember not so much "A Farewell to Arms" but also his two early novels: "A Farewell to Arms" of Hemingway and "The Sun Also Rises." In "The Sun Also Rises," sorry I'm a primitive guy, I translate it into cinema. Tyrone Power lives with Ava Gardner, but in World War I some grenade hit him there so he is impotent and so on and so on. Or similarly in "A Farewell to Arms," you know when the couple successfully escapes to Switzerland, she is dying of consumption and so on and so on. Here the writer still attempts to present this personal misfortune, let's say the hero of "The Sun Also Rises," his impotence, as an allegory of a deeper impotence, limitation of our times, although already there I doubt if it really works. But a post-tragic postmodern view would have been simply that precisely no, it was a stupid grenade, it just happened. In the same way that you can gain million on lottery you [unintelligible], there is no deeper resonance in it. It's just again these irrelevant comedies of daily life, one gets cancer, the other has an unfortunate love affair, a third guy gets or loses his job, all this stuff. What is Hegel describing here? I think Hegel was the first theorist of our TV series. Isn't this the best description you can imagine for example of *Seinfeld*? No world-historical conflicts, just this tiny problem, that tiny problem and so on and so on. So I think this would be nice if some of you with Ed want to do some seminar or whatever, like Hegel as a theoretician of telenovelas or whatever you know. Because again the point of all this *Seinfeld* or whatever with *Curb Your Enthusiasm*, I claim it’s already a tiny little bit more serious. It's almost, I wouldn't say a tragic conflict, but what Larry David is doing there you know the way he always gets into the same type of trouble, there is a hint there of some conflict. But returning to Hegel, so that's the first limitation of Hegel. He saw this our universe as universe of these ridiculous accidents and so on, but at the same time he was not able to see the potentially terrifying dimension like that you know a comedy which can be more desperate than tragedy and that’s why it has to remain a comedy. That’s why as I written already in my book, for example make, make the test yourself if you don't believe me. I reread recently again through Alenka Zupančič, Primo Levi's *If This Is a Man*. And sorry but some scenes there you cannot but take them as comical, precisely in their total despair. For example the famous scene of what they call *selekcja*, selection. You know that once every month or two months all the prisoners had to run in front of an SS doctor, and it was done expressway. You had to be naked, you run in front of the doctor and the doctor gave you like maximum one, one and a half seconds, just not even names, they called your number, hop, running and uh—and then of course, aha, it's really like God doing predestination, no? He put it your number into one of the two cartons: let him live to work or gas chamber there, no? But the way Levi describes how prisoners were preparing themselves for this exam, like the whole point was that the doctor should perceive you as relatively strong and healthy. So how to do this? They were using some red color or pinching themselves you know to appear not too pale, or doing trying to blow their stomach like no I'm not as stark as that. Admit it, there is something in the way—or this idea that it got often totally wrong, you know you run in front of the doctor, well prepared, doctor sneezed for a moment he didn't see you, but doctor was too lazy, never he said okay run again, no he just said okay let's put here or there this guy. This total ridicule of the situation. That was comedy at its most horrible. At the same time Hegel didn't see this and here, so this was the first limitation of Hegel. He didn't see the radical comic whatever you want alienation, antagonism in modern society. At the same time as I think that Hegel was not idealist enough in the sense that for example let's take abstract painting from a Hegelian, how could it appear to our Hegelian view? That abstract painting doesn't mean ideas are out, open yourself to the materiality. No, the point of abstract painting is that even if you drop representation, already the elementary forms are as it were mediated by spirit. There is a spiritual content in them. For example if you read, I don't appreciate him too much, my hero is Malevich, but nonetheless the great text on the, what is it, on the *Spiritual in Art* by Kandinsky, that's whole point of him. That already in these most basic tensions between colors, elementary forms and so on, they are already to put it in Hegelian terms spiritually mediated. Yes? Now are you saying in the way that Hegel himself sees the limit of dialectics and is kind of a proto-poststructuralist Deleuzian? I would say the limit of dialectics, I was even talkatively naively say more the limits of *his* dialectics. Because I think that you can precisely see that he—if by dialectics we mean mediation, notional mediation, that Hegel didn't see dialectical mediation when it already was at the level of pure non-representational form. So that was the first thing. The second thing, he didn't see alienation or antagonism whatever in our societies. And now that would have been the big question that we should address and that I think Pippin does not explicitly address it although he comes very close to it: how or rather why are the two connected? Why is it that the alienation or whatever, let's put it in very elementary term, what do we experience as being fundamentally wrong in our modern lives? Why is it that—and this is a historical fact—that to really at an appropriate artistic way to stage grasp this, you cannot any longer do it in the traditional representational way? Why? This would be, you know how Hegel’s, Hegel's first limitation is connected with the second limitation: his failure to grasp the antagonistic. And Pippin does here a wonderful work by focusing on Ed, Claude Monet, his famous paintings, you know, not *Splendor in the Grass*, that's the kitsch movie that my generation liked when we were young, but *Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe* (Lunch on the Grass) and all those where he points out very nicely this paradoxes of Manet, the first great modernist, although this is a lesson to be debated. I here agree with T.J. Clark that the first truly modernist painting is David, you know, "The Death of Marat." You maybe know, you know after in French Revolution after Marat was killed, you must know, he paint he was practically a state artist, no, on orders from Robespierre and so on, he did the painting which is absolutely extraordinary. Not because what is there but because what isn't there. Just check it on the web. On the lower half of the painting you see Marat dead in a bathtub. No, he wasn't a lazy guy, he had some skin disease, he had to spend most of the time within hot water in a bathtub. And then all the upper half of the painting, even more, is just black. Is just black surface. Okay you can maybe narratively justify that it was simply the black wall, but it certainly functions in a very strange way. What this total—you know why because what I try to prove is that this is why Jacobins since this was the official as it were party painting, but not yet totalitarians. Would you agree or not? Let me just nonetheless show it to you. So okay that's the painting, here you have the bath, Marat dead, of course just signing or finishing some stupid declaration for freedom. And all this is just blackness. Now in a communist or socialist realist painting, you can imagine what would have to be done. As in some how do you call that, that cloud in comics and so on, here it would have been a kind of a cloud to fill this blackness where you know something like the dying Marat is imagining the future happy French people singing or whatever, you know. But he precisely didn't do this, it's blackness. The void remains. You can see that that Malevich for his famous black square, white or whatever, knew what he was doing, you know. Because you know who did in literature what Malevich did with that painting? My favorite one, I think I mentioned him to you, writer Andrei Platonov, who in his *The Foundation Pit* precisely presents just this black void. They are building a foundation for some super palace of the workers, of course the palace is never brought—okay, so let's go then back. What you find in Manet, in his famous paintings, for example that lady who sells drinks behind a bar in *Folies-Bergère*, whatever. Another famous one, it's one thing which is crucial. First the lady looks or the typical Manet individual painted looks directly at you, but at the same time it has this famous distracted view as if her mind is somewhere else. You know, so it's this paradox that at the same time you are directly addressed, the person is looking at you, let me put it this way: looking at you but not seeing you. This confused position. And in a very nice way, Pippin presents this as the fundamental alienation, we lost our bearings, our precise position in society. And Pippin is here I think even too too pseudo-Marxist critical because what he doesn't see is that this gaze, dislocated gaze, you know, subject is perplexed, doesn't know where he or she is, looks at you but doesn't see you. This is also if you turn it around this is also freedom, modern freedom. It's precisely this that we do
cannot refuse. Namely, that in this last film To the Wonder that Ben Affleck just prior to making love to Olga Kurylenko, that French beauty, is reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. I immediately messaged him back, if this is the offer that—sorry, again someone will protest for political incorrectness—but if the price to sleep with her is reading Sein und Zeit, would you do it? You take the Fifth Amendment, no, you will not answer because. Okay. Sorry for this stupid remark. Let's do today, I will try to do some consistent serious talk again. What I on the last session, I will do what I was also promising from the beginning, a short condensed version of a line of thought that I had in the manuscript on Hegel, the end of art, where was Hegel wrong, can we outdo Hegel through Hegel himself? I think my opponent, opponent, okay in a Hegelian opponent, Robert Pippin, in his nonetheless interesting short book on Hegel and Art, where you know, he tries to do something quite wonderful, to show in Hegel’s—to demonstrate how the shift from this as we call it representational traditional to modern so-called abstract art can be perfectly formulated in Hegelian terms. In other words, that Hegel when he put propose the thesis on the end of art, first he—okay, let me nonetheless improvise a little bit on this because I will keep stick to my promise to you. Any big line of thought that I didn't succeed because I talk too much about other things to sell to you, to present to you here will be given to Ed or to some of your slaves here called research assistants, whatever, and further presented. Okay, so the idea is this one, very nice one, that the way to move further than Hegel is not in this postmodern whatever way, you know, there are phenomena that Hegel couldn't grasp and so on. A much nicer paradox is to demonstrate, and again Pippin does this quite nicely in that short book on Hegel and modern art, that there are phenomena where Hegel was not Hegelian enough precisely to grasp them. And I think the reason why for example with regard to so-called abstract art insofar as we take Hegel as an idealist, not idealist in this stupid sense, there are some ideas up there on some Platonic heaven, but idealist in a much more elementary sense that even our most elementary experience of reality, its materiality and so on is in some sense notionally or conceptually mediated. Now I will not go into this distinction, that’s why I used them interchangeably between notion and concept, but let's forget about this now. The point is thus that when Hegel for Hegel modernity means the end of art. Now before we condemn this as oh Hegel’s arrogant stupidity, Hegel uses this wonderful metaphor: we may still find it attractive, fascinating, but our knees no longer go down. You know, like what is missing for Hegel in modernity is that, let's call it naively, absolute respect for art. Art not just as an amusement or pleasant or even noble experience, but art as to put it in traditional terms, contact with access to the absolute, truth itself revealing itself there as it was. Let's leave aside if this was true, not so much in medieval times as in ancient Greece. You know this Hegel’s great scheme: ancient Greece, even their religion he calls it religion of art, that is to say their privileged of ancient Greeks contact with the absolute was not—was neither religion nor science or metaphysics pure thinking but art, artistic experience. And there is something to say for this, that even for the so-called ordinary people you know that the tragedies, public staging of tragedies was originally at least the sacred event where as it were community restated its bonds, its what it counted on. Although incidentally I cannot refrain from this dirty detail, you know that a Greek friend told me, and not Ed, your wife, not Liana, but another one, that if you look and people don't like to talk about it in detail about these great patriarch Greek theaters, in the first rows for the rich, you have a hole in the center of the seat, of the seat. In other words, so that you were not—it wasn't necessary for you if you had the need to go to the toilet, it was there. And I like this: so when they speak of catharsis, purifying yourself, you render it to the spiritual catharsis but... Okay, more seriously now. The simple thing for you to be to say Hegel is exaggerating and so on. No, I think it was even more true, it became even more true after Hegel’s death. And if you want really to see a clear example of what Hegel meant, namely this arrives in post-Hegelian let's call it naively scientific world-view where, okay, do this: take a look at those cognitive scientists for example who are precisely not too primitive but who try to—who emphasize that they have an authentic feeling of art and so on and so on. I know two, Damasio, you know the Portuguese guy who did all this stuff about what is the self, and maybe up to a point Daniel Dennett. But the problem is if you read it closely that with all their respect for this, you can see how it’s really irrelevant. They just want to display how cultured they are, it doesn't matter. The worst example is in one of Damasio’s books, he wants to make a case of how our ears function. And then of course he cannot abstain from saying, do you know maybe her name I always forget, Maria something, there is a very famous Portuguese piano player, a woman, and he said: a week ago the pianist visited me at my house and while she was playing some wonderful Schubert piano music I was thinking about... Fuck, it's totally irrelevant! It's just excessive boasting or even guys who really want to do something with art like Oliver Sacks—not sex, S-A-C-K-S you know he lived with his wife for half and so on. Even with him you can feel this that it's wonderful, he really admires it, but it's ultimately irrelevant. And even if they praise it as you know, like ennobling you, good moral influence, not even to mention sublime exalted feelings. Here Heidegger was right: the moment you think art in the terms of feelings, experiences and so on, you are lost. Precisely art is art as long as it aims at this as it were contact with the absolute. And here against even Heidegger who as Pippin put it nicely, want to teach us how to learn to bow down, to kneel again to the art, you can see how it doesn't really work. I don't have time to go into it, just you know what always shocked me when I read Heidegger's detailed interpretations of some poems, you know usually Hölderlin and then all these other guys Stefan George, Rilke and so on. Although he all the time wants to play the card of art displays its own truth and so on, but it's always nonetheless what he de facto does is reduce art to a messenger transmitter of some truth which can be much more betterly explained in his philosophy. This is why also if you notice this Heidegger whenever he reads other poems, poets and even more philosophers, I'm not aware of ever trying really to read penetrate the entire line of thought or even less line of a poem. It’s usually just a couple of lines where then he applies his machinery. So again in a way Hegel was right. Even if we admire art today and so on, are sincerely exalted, it's no longer the absolute contact with truth. But where is Hegel as it were too short? I think Pippin has a point here. Hegel is too short because for him he cannot imagine let's call it the non-representational art. Hegel is very careful in analyzing also the form. My God, that the ABC of dialectics, no, that form matters. Form is never just a neutral container of some truth. Truth has to be inscribed into the form itself. Even you find some hints in Hegel of how when you have let's say a certain content, narrative, even idea and artistic form, Hegel even goes so far as to hint that the truth is in that form itself. That you know form is authentic art is never just the staging presentation of idea, but usually form implicitly shows the limitation what's wrong in that idea itself. For example, the most beautiful example I can imagine now briefly is Hegel on Antigone. You know Hegel’s thesis that the Greek theater moved historically from tragedy to comedy. But Hegel does not take this just in this large historical sense that in late antiquity or in Rome the real thing was a comedy, tragedy was no longer possible. But he locates in a wonderful detail, in his reading of Antigone, he locates this shift from tragedy to comedy already into Sophocles's Antigone. You know where, maybe you know because I written briefly about it but in my next book I want to expand it because it’s really wonderful. You know when Antigone is excluded from public space, finds herself as a living dead, Antigone in her monologue does what? She compares herself to some mythic creatures and so on like oh I am like that I don't know goddess or figure of myth to suffer alone. And Hegel does something wonderful. He says—I don't say now viciously—Hegel into modern experience, that she is already doing her PR building her image. It is as if the only way to—it's no longer this pure unreflected suffering, but I suffer but let me think for posterity how would I present my suffering. You know, she is staging for posterity an image of herself to be effective. And Hegel wonderfully says this is the moment of comedy. You know, it's as if you have a tragic actor who cries there and then with a hint says did I do this well? Did it convince you? Should I do more? That Hegel had this wonderful idea which I think found its full realization only in—one of the great contributions of American TV to world culture—"I Love Lucy." Isn't it a specific—you even have a term for it, you know how like that precise moment of when she or someone else says something stupid or has a stupid experience, she breaks this elementary rule of realistic cinema or TV and with this strange look looks directly into the camera. Again you see this is the comic in comedy as Hegel puts it. The gap that separates a person from the actor is displaced into this person itself. In the sense that this—you know this is why and I agree here with Hegel implicitly, he doesn't say this of course, that every lover of theater should run as far away as possible from actors studio method, you know this total realistic go—no, you always have to have a distance. That's what you find in Brecht and I like so much, you know this impossible position of commenting on your—you know what’s a typical Brechtian scene: an actor enters the stage and says I am a capitalist, today you will see I will try to approach that worker and confuse him, corrupt him so that—you know that you at the same time you adopt the position of metalanguage. As if you do what you do but you add comment to it. And in this sense so many things probably to say time to develop, in this sense I claim even Stalinism was a comedy. Stalinist trials, be careful, I don't mean by this it was comedy where you laugh. Again as I already developed here I think the first time or when, when things are truly horrible you can only do it in a comedy. This is the deep necessity of beneath the simple fact that the all really authentic films about Holocaust tend to be comedies. There is something false in doing a Holocaust tragedy. Not because things were not serious there for the victims, but because they were too serious. You know why? What is a tragedy? I'm accused, I said no, never, I heroically shoot me. You know in in order to have a tragedy the victim is still needed to, how should I put it, keep intact his her space of dignity from where he or she can heroically assume his her tragic fate. My point is that imagine again in a film where let's say a Jewish torturer violates or rapes in Auschwitz a Jewish girl and she heroically says no you can do whatever you want with me but you will never break my spirit and all that bullshit and so on, no! You see you give too much credit to the Nazis if you do this. You underestimate the level of terror there. The terror, the true terror of terror as it were was that precisely you were deprived even of this minimal dignity. That's why again only a comedy works. Of course it's not a comedy where you laugh, you know. But you must move beyond tragedy. That's why incidentally I don't mention this many times for example I don't like—I didn't mean that one as a great film—"La vita bella." My God I forgot the guy’s... Sorry, Benigni, Roberto Benigni, yeah. You know why? Because at the end it gets too close to the tragic mood, it gets sentimental. You know you are not supposed to laugh at the very end. You remember when the father dies and so on. And I’m sorry but I hope at least I didn't mention this year this thing here to make another I like to test this experiment I will not bore you now let's say you all know the story of the film. Would you agree or not that there is a simple way to make the film really tragic, tragic not tragic even beyond? You know what happens here, all this idea his small son buys this story that this is not just a big competition to survive. Father presents to his son a story which would make it easier for his son to sustain, to endure Auschwitz, telling him it's just a big competition in the end you get the prize and so on. Now imagine just a slight change at the end. Just when they are taking father to be shot really, somehow he understands that the son also knew that. In the same way that father was pretending that this is just a big competition in order to make it easier to the son, the son played the same game with him. He knew it all the time but he just pretended to be a naive child who believes it in order to make it easier for his father. That would be a much more hopeless desperate solution. Why? Because there is another way of cheating there. It's not so much at the empirical level what they are doing there but you know as Lacan, Lacan usually says that comedy is a phallic affair, but what does he mean by this? He somewhere puts it in very simple terms that by phallic he means this unlimited vitality. You know it's like Tom and Jerry which is another story even pre-phallic, but whatever, the idea is this one: you know these adventure stories or heroes where no matter what in what dangers they are, in a comical way you know they will always survive, they will always find a way out. And precisely I think this is what he does, he Benigni transposes this into Auschwitz as if Roberto Benigni is this phallic figure of whatever trouble he is sometimes somehow he finds his way out, squeezing out in a comic way. I think the best answer to this would have been what I found years ago maybe you also find it today, it there was in ex-Yugoslavia the avant-garde some circle in Zagreb capital of Croatia of avant-garde how do you call it what is Disney doing? Cartoons then. And okay what they did is they took a standard Tom and Jerry cartoon, you know well, you know the basic mystery there: the undeadness of them. For example Jerry or Tom can be I don't know overrun by a bus, cut up in pieces, magically in next scene they are again there. You know, and incidentally that’s why I although I hate the movies moderately like I hate them ideologically but in *Home Alone and you know the last quarter of an hour, I’m primitive, so you know well Joe Pesci he plays one of the—you know he puts his hand which is his head into the toilet, of course the small kid already put gasoline into the toilet, so his head explodes, he comes out he is just burned here and so on you know this undeadness. I think again that and Lacan in his reading of Kant with Sade points out how you find the same mystery in Sade, the victims in Sade, novels of Marquis de Sade are tortured endlessly but magically they not only survive but they usually the women even retain their their beauty to the end and so on and so on. So back to my point, comedy, tragedy. For Hegel also modern art can only be a comedy. And okay let's do it today I will tell you something more interesting in today’s... What I find so fascinating with Hegel is that, but again the limit of Hegel: for Hegel we live in a reconciled world. He doesn't mean by this everything is okay but simply what Fukuyama would have called post-historical world. We no longer live in an era where, and that's the proper stuff of tragedy for Hegel, where some kind of radical split, self-alienation, antagonism defines our predicament. I think the proof of this is precisely again Auschwitz, because as we all know the fundamental tragic move from Oedipus to what Hegel wants to say is that you as the hero, the tragic hero is exposed to some external calamity, but then the properly tragic moment is not simply the moment when he loses but when he has to assume, has to realize that he, he was somehow co-responsible for this loss. That in some sense he deserved it, like Oedipus, you know, he didn't know it but he did sleep with his mother, kill his father and so on and so on. So you have as Hegel would have put it this moment of recognition that in the substance, the other which ruined you, you have to discover yourself, that the external conflict is the conflict with yourself. Now precisely I claim this emphatically doesn't hold, doesn't help for Auschwitz. Because what would you say to the Jews that in being brutally destroyed by the Nazis you were effectively self-destroying yourself, your... No, it was really external in that case. You shouldn't again include it into this tragic, tragic self-relationship. So again Hegel knew this that we live in a post-tragic era. And he was well aware that today even if the stories are tragic they are ultimately comedies. Comedies in the sense that we can have terrible fate but in, to put it in very naive terms, in our individual fate our fiasco we no longer can say that some world-historical antagonism is being mirrored. You know like in Antigone for example it’s clear that what, it’s not just Antigone destroyed by Creon and then Creon destroying himself in a pure tragic way. This is another interesting story you know that Antigone is not at all in this strict sense a tragic figure, the only truly tragic figure is Creon who as it were at the end gets his message—no, I should say here gets his comeuppance or how would you say it, yes. But back to it, even if horrible things happen to you again you don't find the echo of this larger world-historical conflict. And okay what Hegel didn't do, this is his limitation, it's to see to discern the tragic potential, tragic, terrifying, horrible, antagonistic of our own post-tragic modern world. And this I was quite nicely surprised, Robert Pippin develops this in quite a wonderful way where when he points out how for Hegel our post-revolutionary universe, our, I mean his, is basically a non-antagonistic one. Misfortunes happen but not at that level, not world-historical misfortunes. It's just bad luck or whatever, from the world-historical perspective it's irrelevant. Now here things get really interesting because, and I will give you this text then through Ed and so on, that when you read Hegel's descriptions of what especially literature or theater can be today, I wonder if it will click, you recognize something the way it did at least to me. He says it's no longer world-historical tension, it's just our ordinary humanity in all its complications, luck here, bad luck there, all these ultimately non-important conflicts which can be personally tragic like for example, you know, even in Hemingway. I don't know why I never had a great tolerance for Hemingway. I think one of the worst novels of all times is "The Old Man and the Sea." Oh, total pretension you know as if—okay, trying to catch the fucking fish, so what? Already there I think that of course I’m not an idiot, the idea is that it’s an allegory of yeah yeah man’s struggle with the point of [unintelligible] but it doesn't work. Something didn't work for me there. Although Cubans are now slowly learning how to commercialize art, you know that they—I read somewhere they, I hope they fake it, some American agency advised them, they alleged, you know that that old man then returns to a boy, has a young boy. They discovered now an old guy who they claim is that original young boy. Oh, I love them, I love history so much. Sorry, but let's go on. So this is what—so even you see in his early novels of Hemingway it works better. What do I mean by this? Remember not so much "A Farewell to Arms" but also his two early novels: "A Farewell to Arms" of Hemingway and "The Sun Also Rises." In "The Sun Also Rises," sorry I'm a primitive guy, I translate it into cinema. Tyrone Power lives with Ava Gardner, but in World War I some grenade hit him there so he is impotent and so on and so on. Or similarly in "A Farewell to Arms," you know when the couple successfully escapes to Switzerland, she is dying of consumption and so on and so on. Here the writer still attempts to present this personal misfortune, let's say the hero of "The Sun Also Rises," his impotence, as an allegory of a deeper impotence, limitation of our times, although already there I doubt if it really works. But a post-tragic postmodern view would have been simply that precisely no, it was a stupid grenade, it just happened. In the same way that you can gain million on lottery you [unintelligible], there is no deeper resonance in it. It's just again these irrelevant comedies of daily life, one gets cancer, the other has an unfortunate love affair, a third guy gets or loses his job, all this stuff. What is Hegel describing here? I think Hegel was the first theorist of our TV series. Isn't this the best description you can imagine for example of *Seinfeld*? No world-historical conflicts, just this tiny problem, that tiny problem and so on and so on. So I think this would be nice if some of you with Ed want to do some seminar or whatever, like Hegel as a theoretician of telenovelas or whatever you know. Because again the point of all this *Seinfeld* or whatever with *Curb Your Enthusiasm*, I claim it’s already a tiny little bit more serious. It's almost, I wouldn't say a tragic conflict, but what Larry David is doing there you know the way he always gets into the same type of trouble, there is a hint there of some conflict. But returning to Hegel, so that's the first limitation of Hegel. He saw this our universe as universe of these ridiculous accidents and so on, but at the same time he was not able to see the potentially terrifying dimension like that you know a comedy which can be more desperate than tragedy and that’s why it has to remain a comedy. That’s why as I written already in my book, for example make, make the test yourself if you don't believe me. I reread recently again through Alenka Zupančič, Primo Levi's *If This Is a Man*. And sorry but some scenes there you cannot but take them as comical, precisely in their total despair. For example the famous scene of what they call *selekcja*, selection. You know that once every month or two months all the prisoners had to run in front of an SS doctor, and it was done expressway. You had to be naked, you run in front of the doctor and the doctor gave you like maximum one, one and a half seconds, just not even names, they called your number, hop, running and uh—and then of course, aha, it's really like God doing predestination, no? He put it your number into one of the two cartons: let him live to work or gas chamber there, no? But the way Levi describes how prisoners were preparing themselves for this exam, like the whole point was that the doctor should perceive you as relatively strong and healthy. So how to do this? They were using some red color or pinching themselves you know to appear not too pale, or doing trying to blow their stomach like no I'm not as stark as that. Admit it, there is something in the way—or this idea that it got often totally wrong, you know you run in front of the doctor, well prepared, doctor sneezed for a moment he didn't see you, but doctor was too lazy, never he said okay run again, no he just said okay let's put here or there this guy. This total ridicule of the situation. That was comedy at its most horrible. At the same time Hegel didn't see this and here, so this was the first limitation of Hegel. He didn't see the radical comic whatever you want alienation, antagonism in modern society. At the same time as I think that Hegel was not idealist enough in the sense that for example let's take abstract painting from a Hegelian, how could it appear to our Hegelian view? That abstract painting doesn't mean ideas are out, open yourself to the materiality. No, the point of abstract painting is that even if you drop representation, already the elementary forms are as it were mediated by spirit. There is a spiritual content in them. For example if you read, I don't appreciate him too much, my hero is Malevich, but nonetheless the great text on the, what is it, on the *Spiritual in Art* by Kandinsky, that's whole point of him. That already in these most basic tensions between colors, elementary forms and so on, they are already to put it in Hegelian terms spiritually mediated. Yes? Now are you saying in the way that Hegel himself sees the limit of dialectics and is kind of a proto-poststructuralist Deleuzian? I would say the limit of dialectics, I was even talkatively naively say more the limits of *his* dialectics. Because I think that you can precisely see that he—if by dialectics we mean mediation, notional mediation, that Hegel didn't see dialectical mediation when it already was at the level of pure non-representational form. So that was the first thing. The second thing, he didn't see alienation or antagonism whatever in our societies. And now that would have been the big question that we should address and that I think Pippin does not explicitly address it although he comes very close to it: how or rather why are the two connected? Why is it that the alienation or whatever, let's put it in very elementary term, what do we experience as being fundamentally wrong in our modern lives? Why is it that—and this is a historical fact—that to really at an appropriate artistic way to stage grasp this, you cannot any longer do it in the traditional representational way? Why? This would be, you know how Hegel’s, Hegel's first limitation is connected with the second limitation: his failure to grasp the antagonistic. And Pippin does here a wonderful work by focusing on Ed, Claude Monet, his famous paintings, you know, not *Splendor in the Grass*, that's the kitsch movie that my generation liked when we were young, but *Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe* (Lunch on the Grass) and all those where he points out very nicely this paradoxes of Manet, the first great modernist, although this is a lesson to be debated. I here agree with T.J. Clark that the first truly modernist painting is David, you know, "The Death of Marat." You maybe know, you know after in French Revolution after Marat was killed, you must know, he paint he was practically a state artist, no, on orders from Robespierre and so on, he did the painting which is absolutely extraordinary. Not because what is there but because what isn't there. Just check it on the web. On the lower half of the painting you see Marat dead in a bathtub. No, he wasn't a lazy guy, he had some skin disease, he had to spend most of the time within hot water in a bathtub. And then all the upper half of the painting, even more, is just black. Is just black surface. Okay you can maybe narratively justify that it was simply the black wall, but it certainly functions in a very strange way. What this total—you know why because what I try to prove is that this is why Jacobins since this was the official as it were party painting, but not yet totalitarians. Would you agree or not? Let me just nonetheless show it to you. So okay that's the painting, here you have the bath, Marat dead, of course just signing or finishing some stupid declaration for freedom. And all this is just blackness. Now in a communist or socialist realist painting, you can imagine what would have to be done. As in some how do you call that, that cloud in comics and so on, here it would have been a kind of a cloud to fill this blackness where you know something like the dying Marat is imagining the future happy French people singing or whatever, you know. But he precisely didn't do this, it's blackness. The void remains. You can see that that Malevich for his famous black square, white or whatever, knew what he was doing, you know. Because you know who did in literature what Malevich did with that painting? My favorite one, I think I mentioned him to you, writer Andrei Platonov, who in his *The Foundation Pit* precisely presents just this black void. They are building a foundation for some super palace of the workers, of course the palace is never brought—okay, so let's go then back. What you find in Manet, in his famous paintings, for example that lady who sells drinks behind a bar in *Folies-Bergère*, whatever. Another famous one, it's one thing which is crucial. First the lady looks or the typical Manet individual painted looks directly at you, but at the same time it has this famous distracted view as if her mind is somewhere else. You know, so it's this paradox that at the same time you are directly addressed, the person is looking at you, let me put it this way: looking at you but not seeing you. This confused position. And in a very nice way, Pippin presents this as the fundamental alienation, we lost our bearings, our precise position in society. And Pippin is here I think even too too pseudo-Marxist critical because what he doesn't see is that this gaze, dislocated gaze, you know, subject is perplexed, doesn't know where he or she is, looks at you but doesn't see you. This is also if you turn it around this is also freedom, modern freedom. It's precisely this that we do
unknown
not have a fixed place within social order and so on and so on. So that's okay and again going going back to Hegel, so there is a type of subjectivity here in modern painting which maybe was inaccessible,
not have a fixed place within social order and so on and so on. So that's okay and again going going back to Hegel, so there is a type of subjectivity here in modern painting which maybe was inaccessible,
Slavoj Žižek
Hegel didn't have approach to it. Why not? Now comes a wonderful thing where I think one should supplement Pippin. That exactly the same thing as with so-called abstract art, namely that Hegel missed it because in a way he wasn't idealist, idealist
Hegel didn't have approach to it. Why not? Now comes a wonderful thing where I think one should supplement Pippin. That exactly the same thing as with so-called abstract art, namely that Hegel missed it because in a way he wasn't idealist, idealist
unknown
enough, he didn't see
enough, he didn't see
Slavoj Žižek
let's call it the spiritual mediation of even the most elementary experience of colors, shapes and so on. That's one point. The other point, and that's why I think with all criticism that I have of him, Marx did something great in his *Capital* still. You know what Marx did there there is what: when Hegel dealt with social production and so on, he did say some intelligent things, of course he was reading Adam Smith, invisible hand of market all that. But Hegel’s global representation of social production was still basically that of pre-capitalist how do you call artisan, artisanal logic, you know: there is a market I work you work, but this monstrosity in conceptual terms of capital where it’s not just I work you work we exchange objects, but there is an abstract self-reproductive movement of capital which runs it all. And which, this movement of capital, its self-reproduction is purely virtual, immaterial. Capitalism, and Marx knew this, is the most in this sense the most idealist order of social production you can imagine. Because real movement, what I am doing what you are doing, is dominated by this, you know, speculative movement capital and so on which is purely virtual, which is why incidentally another conclusion to draw from here: I totally disagree with moralistic criticism of capitalism. Oh, people think just about their profit or whatever, what we have at the end of this, we need more care of the others. No, capitalism if anything crazy as it may sound is precisely not egoist enough. In what sense?
let's call it the spiritual mediation of even the most elementary experience of colors, shapes and so on. That's one point. The other point, and that's why I think with all criticism that I have of him, Marx did something great in his *Capital* still. You know what Marx did there there is what: when Hegel dealt with social production and so on, he did say some intelligent things, of course he was reading Adam Smith, invisible hand of market all that. But Hegel’s global representation of social production was still basically that of pre-capitalist how do you call artisan, artisanal logic, you know: there is a market I work you work, but this monstrosity in conceptual terms of capital where it’s not just I work you work we exchange objects, but there is an abstract self-reproductive movement of capital which runs it all. And which, this movement of capital, its self-reproduction is purely virtual, immaterial. Capitalism, and Marx knew this, is the most in this sense the most idealist order of social production you can imagine. Because real movement, what I am doing what you are doing, is dominated by this, you know, speculative movement capital and so on which is purely virtual, which is why incidentally another conclusion to draw from here: I totally disagree with moralistic criticism of capitalism. Oh, people think just about their profit or whatever, what we have at the end of this, we need more care of the others. No, capitalism if anything crazy as it may sound is precisely not egoist enough. In what sense?
unknown
My God, Walter Benjamin knew this when he said capitalism is that new
My God, Walter Benjamin knew this when he said capitalism is that new
Slavoj Žižek
form of religion. A true capitalist works day and night, is ready even to lose to risk his personal happiness and so on, workaholic just that the capital is reproducing itself. So to be good ecologists we don't need to appeal to some higher, higher higher notion of take care of the community, no, but just to your elementary egoism. Do you want your children to survive or whatever you know, how that you should do it. So okay, let me go on. The it's interesting here books are written by now already in the 50s and later of how the conceptual structure of capital of Marx is basically the structure of Hegelian idealist logic. For example, when Marx describes the passage from money to capital, it's precisely the passage from substance to subject. Substance is for Hegel this flat universality, subject is substance which actively reproduces itself. So and it's true as Marx put it capital is money which self-reproduces itself through through through productive investment blah blah blah. So what I'm trying to say here is simply this, that Hegel precisely wasn't Hegelian enough here. What Marx did and of course things are in reality much more complex because then the question is precisely: is it just that we simply should extend Hegel or does this extension in this case unearthing the Hegelian nature of modern art or of capitalism, or does this compel us to do something nonetheless undermine the Hegelian system the way we have it? But nonetheless you see the nice paradox here: how the problem with Hegel, and I think the critique of Hegel should begin here, that he missed as it were the Hegelian aspect precisely of some modern phenomena. That's his limitation. Yeah? So in this way are we talking about like structural dialectic or structural causality that is being missed and the missing of it? You can say yes, structural. Okay, you know when you say structural dialectics my association is then Louis Althusser, overdetermination and so on. Okay again, we don't have time to go into it now, but although I think that the notion of overdetermination is an extremely important one, nonetheless one should be extremely precise here. You know it's the same problem as the one with another notion which was totally misunderstood in cinema studies and elsewhere, the notion of sutur, suture, you know. As to overdetermination, listen, people usually just fuck off, okay see you later, no I knew that he has to leave after—that overdetermination, yes you know people just take it like the situation is complex, everything is determined by everything else, we never get simple causality and so on and so on. No, it's not just that. This is still what Hegel would have called Wechselwirkung. Overdetermination is something much more refined. It's that it's not simply that the totality is never the simple causal totality where one principle runs it all, but that basically everything influences retroactively everything else. No, it has a certain structure of self-relation. For example, Marx has formulated this nicely when he in introduction to Grundrisse manuscript said that the four, this cycle of production, distribution, exchange and consumption whatever in the end, that these are four elements but they are all elements of the productive process. You see, so that production is at the same time one of its species and the totality of species. This is so that overdetermination means that I am doubly inscribed, that me as a particular element overdetermine my own universality. Or as Marx put it in another way that among in every properly dialectical process when you have many species or kinds of a some totality there is always one species which is not simply a particular species but which as it were embodies directly the genus, the universality as such. This here we approach the difficult Hegelian topic of concrete of concrete universality. For example, Marx's the elementary example of Marx, he says that for example that in every era a certain field of production overdetermines the totality. For example, for Marx in traditional society it's more or less agriculture. And for Marx precisely in modern societies, industrial capitalism, it's industrial production. What does Marx mean with this? Not the simple fact that more people are employed in production, but in the sense that even even the spheres of production which are not directly those of industrial factory production are more and more structured like as the factory production. Now things here go even further, we don't have time to go into this today, namely in the direction of how for Marx, and this is the basic Hegelian rule: in every totality, for this totality to totalize itself, sorry for this tautology, you need an element which presents what is excluded by this totality, you need the point of suture precisely. And I've repeated it many times, maybe I should repeat it now clearly. For example, and this will be a critique of Marx, you know Marx distinguishes basically five or six modes of production: primitive mode of production, so-called Asian mode, Asiatic despotism, antique slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever it will come haha socialism, communism today. It's clear where is the limitation here. It was shown wonderfully by some critical Marxists that what Marx calls Asiatic mode of production is really—it appears to be one positive mode among others, but it's really a name for all that that doesn't fit Marx's general category of modes of production. In other words, the original series was simply primitive societies, and I agree also with those critics who in a very nice way like Kōjin Karatani, my Japanese friend, point out how Marx he mentions it briefly somewhere but he totally underestimated, Engels even more, the the mega-importance of this big shift from nomadic societies to permanent when they start build cities and so on, which all happens in so-called primitive societies, you know. Okay, but my point is this one, how did Marx, in a caricatural way of course, effectively proceed? He effectively had this series as I mentioned: primitive societies, slave societies, ancient societies, feudalism, capitalism, communism or so-to-that. Then he noticed that there are some weird societies which somehow do not fit any of these categories. And they are from all around, like they are ancient Inca, pre-colonial, ancient Egypt elements there, then ancient China and so on. And he proposed the term Asiatic mode of production whose actual content is just all all societies which do not fit my my skin. You know it's a little bit like that famous quote from Borges, I think, quote that you find at the very beginning of Michel Foucault’s *The Order of Things*, *Les Mots et les Choses*. And first I wanted to make fun of you stupid Americans and Englishmen that why did you change the title but then I totally changed my position, you were right because I learned in a book on Foucault that originally the name was *L'Ordre des choses* (The Order of Things) and that lately
form of religion. A true capitalist works day and night, is ready even to lose to risk his personal happiness and so on, workaholic just that the capital is reproducing itself. So to be good ecologists we don't need to appeal to some higher, higher higher notion of take care of the community, no, but just to your elementary egoism. Do you want your children to survive or whatever you know, how that you should do it. So okay, let me go on. The it's interesting here books are written by now already in the 50s and later of how the conceptual structure of capital of Marx is basically the structure of Hegelian idealist logic. For example, when Marx describes the passage from money to capital, it's precisely the passage from substance to subject. Substance is for Hegel this flat universality, subject is substance which actively reproduces itself. So and it's true as Marx put it capital is money which self-reproduces itself through through through productive investment blah blah blah. So what I'm trying to say here is simply this, that Hegel precisely wasn't Hegelian enough here. What Marx did and of course things are in reality much more complex because then the question is precisely: is it just that we simply should extend Hegel or does this extension in this case unearthing the Hegelian nature of modern art or of capitalism, or does this compel us to do something nonetheless undermine the Hegelian system the way we have it? But nonetheless you see the nice paradox here: how the problem with Hegel, and I think the critique of Hegel should begin here, that he missed as it were the Hegelian aspect precisely of some modern phenomena. That's his limitation. Yeah? So in this way are we talking about like structural dialectic or structural causality that is being missed and the missing of it? You can say yes, structural. Okay, you know when you say structural dialectics my association is then Louis Althusser, overdetermination and so on. Okay again, we don't have time to go into it now, but although I think that the notion of overdetermination is an extremely important one, nonetheless one should be extremely precise here. You know it's the same problem as the one with another notion which was totally misunderstood in cinema studies and elsewhere, the notion of sutur, suture, you know. As to overdetermination, listen, people usually just fuck off, okay see you later, no I knew that he has to leave after—that overdetermination, yes you know people just take it like the situation is complex, everything is determined by everything else, we never get simple causality and so on and so on. No, it's not just that. This is still what Hegel would have called Wechselwirkung. Overdetermination is something much more refined. It's that it's not simply that the totality is never the simple causal totality where one principle runs it all, but that basically everything influences retroactively everything else. No, it has a certain structure of self-relation. For example, Marx has formulated this nicely when he in introduction to Grundrisse manuscript said that the four, this cycle of production, distribution, exchange and consumption whatever in the end, that these are four elements but they are all elements of the productive process. You see, so that production is at the same time one of its species and the totality of species. This is so that overdetermination means that I am doubly inscribed, that me as a particular element overdetermine my own universality. Or as Marx put it in another way that among in every properly dialectical process when you have many species or kinds of a some totality there is always one species which is not simply a particular species but which as it were embodies directly the genus, the universality as such. This here we approach the difficult Hegelian topic of concrete of concrete universality. For example, Marx's the elementary example of Marx, he says that for example that in every era a certain field of production overdetermines the totality. For example, for Marx in traditional society it's more or less agriculture. And for Marx precisely in modern societies, industrial capitalism, it's industrial production. What does Marx mean with this? Not the simple fact that more people are employed in production, but in the sense that even even the spheres of production which are not directly those of industrial factory production are more and more structured like as the factory production. Now things here go even further, we don't have time to go into this today, namely in the direction of how for Marx, and this is the basic Hegelian rule: in every totality, for this totality to totalize itself, sorry for this tautology, you need an element which presents what is excluded by this totality, you need the point of suture precisely. And I've repeated it many times, maybe I should repeat it now clearly. For example, and this will be a critique of Marx, you know Marx distinguishes basically five or six modes of production: primitive mode of production, so-called Asian mode, Asiatic despotism, antique slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever it will come haha socialism, communism today. It's clear where is the limitation here. It was shown wonderfully by some critical Marxists that what Marx calls Asiatic mode of production is really—it appears to be one positive mode among others, but it's really a name for all that that doesn't fit Marx's general category of modes of production. In other words, the original series was simply primitive societies, and I agree also with those critics who in a very nice way like Kōjin Karatani, my Japanese friend, point out how Marx he mentions it briefly somewhere but he totally underestimated, Engels even more, the the mega-importance of this big shift from nomadic societies to permanent when they start build cities and so on, which all happens in so-called primitive societies, you know. Okay, but my point is this one, how did Marx, in a caricatural way of course, effectively proceed? He effectively had this series as I mentioned: primitive societies, slave societies, ancient societies, feudalism, capitalism, communism or so-to-that. Then he noticed that there are some weird societies which somehow do not fit any of these categories. And they are from all around, like they are ancient Inca, pre-colonial, ancient Egypt elements there, then ancient China and so on. And he proposed the term Asiatic mode of production whose actual content is just all all societies which do not fit my my skin. You know it's a little bit like that famous quote from Borges, I think, quote that you find at the very beginning of Michel Foucault’s *The Order of Things*, *Les Mots et les Choses*. And first I wanted to make fun of you stupid Americans and Englishmen that why did you change the title but then I totally changed my position, you were right because I learned in a book on Foucault that originally the name was *L'Ordre des choses* (The Order of Things) and that lately
unknown
he found it not poetic enough and
he found it not poetic enough and
Slavoj Žižek
here changed what for *Les Mots et les Choses*. But what I am going to say this: you look there Borges says that of course it's a joke that he found some ancient list of all dogs in Chinese Empire, which are this, that kind, the dogs who belong to the Emperor, dogs who are stray dogs, lost totally. You and then at the end, "all dogs as a category," all dogs who are not included in this classification. But the whole point of Hegel and Marx was aware of it is that you need such a, the structuralist term would have been in French *le tenant-lieu du vide*, the placeholder, the element whose function is just to hold the place of the void. You need it. Point de capiton? Sorry, point de capiton? Yes and no, ha, we
here changed what for *Les Mots et les Choses*. But what I am going to say this: you look there Borges says that of course it's a joke that he found some ancient list of all dogs in Chinese Empire, which are this, that kind, the dogs who belong to the Emperor, dogs who are stray dogs, lost totally. You and then at the end, "all dogs as a category," all dogs who are not included in this classification. But the whole point of Hegel and Marx was aware of it is that you need such a, the structuralist term would have been in French *le tenant-lieu du vide*, the placeholder, the element whose function is just to hold the place of the void. You need it. Point de capiton? Sorry, point de capiton? Yes and no, ha, we
unknown
don't have time here things get so complicated you know because Lacan was precisely in those years he proposed the notion of point de
don't have time here things get so complicated you know because Lacan was precisely in those years he proposed the notion of point de
Slavoj Žižek
capiton in of course in Seminar III on Psychosis. Then he used it for some time and gently replaced it first with, not ideal ego but ego-ideal symbolic point then with of course at the end you get master signifier. No? But again it gets very complex because again if you read Lacan, you know what's the problem with him? I always like this, he cheats all the time. He even within the same seminar, that’s why Lacan is difficult to read, he changes his position but as it were never admits it. Especially dangerous are moments when he says: "Okay, now new year begins, I will just briefly recapitulate what I did the last year." At that point you can be sure he radically changes his position. You know, for example in one of his most famous seminars, Seminar VII translated for long time *The Ethics of Psychoanalysis*, there Lacan developed his notion of Kant with Sade. And also of this relationship between law and desire. And at the very end of the seminar he says: "Okay, now I will return to what I said at the beginning." Fucking no, he totally changes crucially. Because at the beginning it's clear that he thinks the interconnection between law and desire in the simple Paulinian—I'm referring to Saint Paul—sense of prohibition itself creates the desire to transgress. Something is prohibited so I want it. But at the end he does something totally different: he elevates desire itself into the supreme law as it were. It's something again it's something totally different. For example, Antigone for Lacan, her desire is her law, her law—okay her maxim—brother should be buried and so on and so on. You know so it's a different point. And this is how we arrive at his motto of psychoanalysis: *ne pas céder sur son désir*, do not compromise on your desire. That's precisely the psychoanalytic how should I call it categorical imperative. And that's where he sees the connection between Kantian ethics and Sade. The point is not that Kant is a sadist. I mean, you can argue this that you know this Kant's absolute insistence on follow the follow the law whatever it means blah blah blah, that you know just think about for example a severe teacher who compels you, bombards you with with horrible demands but at the same time sadistically enjoys your failure, no? So Lacan’s point is not that Kant is a sadist but a much more difficult subtle one: that Marquis de Sade was already a Kantian. In what sense? First it's one evidence: if you read Marquis de Sade as his most systematic, like Days in Sodom, it's totally, it's totally something mechanical, it's beyond pleasures. It becomes the more you read it, the more it becomes a kind of a totally mechanical machinery. You know like it's cases like figurations of an orgy. And okay at the beginning it's still some kind of a narrative, but somewhere after I think it's just like, I improvise, take a dog, two women, a cow and a worm and you put them in this position. Then next one: take two dogs, two women and one man... You know it you lose... So as Lacan noticed intelligently insofar as for Kant the basic point is that the proper ethics should be without pathos, you shouldn't enjoy, you know, but it should be purely cold mechanical, as Kant put it you should do it for the sake of duty. Even if you do the right thing but you find some satisfaction in doing it, it's not an ethical act. And then Friedrich Schiller, whom I don't like very much, he was the father of fascism in aesthetics, but he wrote nonetheless a nice short poem making fun of Kant where he describes a good woman who does something nice to her to foreign children but then she complains: "But what can I do? I like helping people and I no longer count as moral, moral" and so on, you know. So again the point is that many readers notice this: that sexuality in Sade is totally apathetic. It's a kind of a really shades or shades of grey, you know. It's a kind of a totally—and then you have another element which is so important where Kant really—sorry, Sade really becomes a Kantian. You know Sade, it's a question to what extent but there is a certain development in Sade, to what extent you can really project it but there it is a kind of a shift in Sade from simple vulgar mechanical so-called materialism to something much more uncannily radical. Sade began with this brutal naturalism: he said torturing, killing is natural, nature is doing it. So if we want to be a harmonious part of nature, we should not just procreate and so on but also kill, torture, whatever. That, okay, but this is still at the level of La Mettrie, Holbach and all those all those guys where incidentally you do find incredible obscenities if you—for example just read, my God I don't think in our politically correct times it will be soon prohibited to read *Les Bijoux indiscrets* (The Indiscreet Jewels) I think, "Pearls which talk." It’s of course vagina and it's a whole treatise taken very seriously where he claims that, I think I already mentioned this here, that every woman talks with two voices: one voice is of her brains where she lies all the time you cannot rely on her, hysterical cheating, and with her vagina which of course always tells the truth, which is always the same: I want sex, I want sex, I want sex. It you find such vulgarities there already. But back to Sade, so we have this brutal materialist Sade: we should do like nature, we are part nature is, its this primitive Aristotelian image nature as a network of generation and corruption: things rise, things disintegrate, new things arise and we should simply be part of this cycle. But then something extremely interesting occurred to Sade, that to be part of this circular self-reproductive movement of nature, you are still enslaved to nature, you are not truly free. And then came the idea to Sade of what he calls second death, that a true crime is not just a crime which is part of this circular movement of nature: I kill you another child is born, but the radical crime should aim at to at interrupting this very cycle. You know, you are not part of natural circular movement, you want to stop it. And what is so shocking, read it closely, is that when in, I think in the book five of *Juliette* where the Pope gives a long explanation of the Sadean system, when he describes this it's shocking to what extent he uses the exact terms that Kant uses for an ethical act. That it shouldn't be done for any pleasure and especially, you know for Kant ethical act is a free act. Why? Because it's no longer part of what Kant calls pathological motivations. For Kant pathological means motivated by empirical factual reasons. For example if you do something for a certain empirical cause, to gain, even to appear honest to others, whatever, even if it's very sublime, it's pathological. A free act is done just for the sake of it. And so Sade defines in the very same terms the act of radical evil: that you just do it for the sake of it. Not for... And now comes the true art of reading Kant. If you read Kant through this insight you discover wonders. You do not discover only the obvious links or hints which point at Sade. For example you know in *The Metaphysics of Morals*, not *The Metaphysics of Ethics* but *Metaphysics of Customs* rather than morality, when Kant, you must know this, defines marriage he provides a definition which was the shock to everyone, Hegel included. I love it. He says: "Marriage is a contract between two—" maybe the nice girl there has the right to leave exactly at this moment when I enter the prohibited topic. Obviously yes. This is his definition of marriage is "the contract between two adults about mutual use of their sex organs for the purpose of pleasure." Nothing about sacred union, children or whatever you know. So now you think Kant is joking there. Look at the next page, my favorite in all Kant, where Kant asks if a man runs away from his wife does she have the right to bring him back by police? Kant says yes, but not for any spiritual reason, because according to marriage contract she—he ran away with a part of his body which was contractually linked to to her. It's his penis you know! That's why, it's not some noble marriage, no, you ran away with a part which belongs to me which is legally contractually ceded to my use. So Kant was a strange guy here whatever, you know. But let's go on. One of the, I more and more admire two late books by Kant. One is of course his *Anthropology* where you discover a Kant which is uncannily close to Pascal. Not the Kant of this inner ethics but precisely the Kant of explain, "fake it till you make it." You know Kant says if you are immoral act as if, imitate, that there is hope that you will fall into your own trap and really become moral. But the other Kant, *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone*, where Kant briefly entertains the notion of radical evil. No, that's the whole point. First he plays with the notion of what he calls diabolical evil and then he abandons it and quickly changes to radical evil. But you know why? Because he notices implicitly that what he calls diabolical evil is indistinguishable from his definition of moral act, of the good, why? It is evil and it plays plays a crucial role in even it begins even with John Milton, you know when Satan in Milton says, says "Evil be thou my good." That is to say that you posit evil as your ethical goal. But why is this radical evil? Because you don't do it for any pathological reasons. Kant plays with the idea of doing being evil not because you want to profit money, fame, women, sex, power over others but just for the sake of it. If you have small children, I have a naive theory that from my experience at least they come close to radical evil between five and six in those years you know. When they are small they still do it because they want it, they want your coffee toy, they grab it. After six-seven they already also become egoistic again. But there is a period somewhere there when they just for the sake of it, they just like to—like my small son when he was five, we had an old grandma who was barely walking and he pushed her down the stairs. And he didn't want, quite in a Kantian way, he didn't want to apologize. He said: "No, I did it. Why? Because I wanted to do it." Absolutely insisted on. No. So you you see my point. Kant is afraid then to admit this: that if you define moral act as a non-pathological act, as act of following a universal rule maxim which you do just for the sake of it, then what about radical evil? And again he then for totally mysterious reason all of a sudden claims that no we cannot, it's not possible with us humans, it would have been too much and he replaces, sorry, the notion of diabolical evil with the notion of radical evil which is much softer. It simply means that it’s inscribed into our human nature a propensity towards evil that we cannot ever get rid of. But you see he meant something much more much more precise. Here I think Schelling and Hegel go much further. For example Schelling already has in his—you should read this Heidegger claims this is the greatest text of all German idealism—Schelling's *Freiheitsschrift*, his *Treatise on Human Freedom* and some other related things and so on, where Schelling has a wonderful insight of how evil at its most elementary is not succumbing to material temptation, that as he puts it evil is more spiritual than good. Radical evil is precisely pure spirit brutally manipulating all material elements and so on and so on. The evil has this pure pale spiritual coldness and so on and so on. Schelling also develops an idea which is I think extremely important, this idea which which you already find in Kant of how even if our of how we are responsible for our character as it were. We do something which may appear that we do it because of our nature, but we are nonetheless even if we were predestined to do it from the very beginning, we nonetheless have to we are nonetheless fully responsible for it. Because and here we find an almost Freudian wonderful idea that our decisions, free decisions, are not necessarily conscious decisions. That the most radical free decisions we are never aware of them. All of a sudden they are already here. And I will give you another example which is for me an evil fact, but the greatest: falling in love. Don't, didn't you notice this? You never can say now I'm falling in love. Love should be a free act, you cannot be ordered to fall in love. But at the same time you are never in the position to say: "Okay, how should I, to whom should I fall in love? Let me look around. A lady there, sorry, Manet showing. A lady there, a lady there, okay." And then you compose what, a list you know: "I like her legs, her gaze, I like her hair, her I don't know eyes, and then I compare it, op-op, this one has more points." No, you never do this. Isn't it that you are not in love, maybe it's even hatred, and all of a sudden you become aware, and that's crucial temporality, temporality, that you already ARE in love. And maybe this is the wonderful suspicion of Schelling, maybe our ultimate free decisions are all are all like this. Did I use this year here because I have another ultimate example of this, the example of the military conscript in Yugoslavia. You were here all the time, do you remember it, a letter and so on? No. Oh, then I will tell it with pleasure. It's a wonderful crazy example, didn't I use it here are you sure? It's the story interrupted me at any moment, it's the story about a friend of mine who was at the time when I did it later he served in ex-Yugoslavia. And what he did was this. You know first you are two weeks doing military service then you confront then you have this ritual: all new soldiers are gathered there and they all have to repeat the usual bullshit you know: "I swear that I will give even my life everything for the freedom of my—" whatever, and then you become fully a soldier. Okay, this friend of mine did this. After this each soldier use must then sign his name into some big book that is official. When he approached the officer who had this book, this friend of mine, and he wasn't laughing because I had the document I will tell you immediately which document this is, he approached them and said the officer and said: "Is this oath that I took here and now I have to sign it, is it obligatory or not?" The officer told him: "No, of course it's not obligatory, then it's meaningless, it must be your free decision." Then my friend soldier said: "Okay then I don't do it. Then I don't sign." Then the officer started to shout at him, "Are you crazy? You will be arrested!" and so on. And then now comes the beauty. They debated it for some minutes and you know what happened at the end? This officer was really stupid because he did something that should be impossible. He gave to this soldier a paper where he, officer, orders him to freely sign it. This is a pure document of ideology. And let me be very clear, I'm not saying here that this is a totalitarian mechanism. No, no, no, there were other much worse totalitarian mechanisms in ex-Yugoslavia and so on. This is I think something which always defines our belonging to a certain community. You have a choice but this choice is this: you have a certain freedom which is always already used. You know like you are free to choose but you are never given a moment where you really can choose. Like you have a freedom of choice only if you already make the radical choice. And it's interesting how even when this was years ago Yugoslavia was here relatively liberal when people when communists granted total freedom of divorce. And some conservatives provided the best argument that I've heard against divorce. It repeats this paradox: it says "Of course you have the freedom to divorce, but once you get married you abandon, you know you forsake, you already used this freedom." It’s a wonderful paradox. You have it but never now, you always already used it. So again what I'm trying to tell you here is something much more complex than just a joke is that far from being simple funny excesses these paradoxes signal again something which again defines our very basic fact of belonging to a certain community. Yes? Would that be a unconscious, the unconscious that it’s—I am afraid to use these words here because you know the problem is what is really unconscious. It’s clear I agree here with Lacan that unconscious it's a much more it's not simply there is something deep in me or whatever beyond. My God what is unconscious. And I I know now that I use this example here namely the example of perversion. Unconscious is not that secret content that you are not aware of. Perverts absolutely enact shamelessly the dirtiest fantasies but as Freud puts it it’s the most difficult case to penetrate the unconscious are the perverts. Precisely because, you know this is also the basic lesson of psychoanalysis, this is why Freud abandoned hypnosis and all that. Because the point is not just to tell you whatever the vulgarity is you know to tell you haha you want to kill your father sleep with your mother. It doesn't work. Something else has to be done. Okay we can generally say what has to be done is that you don't just rationally agree but you really subjectively assume it, but it’s I claim even it's even more complex. So again look there is a wonderful argument of Eysenck, Hans Eysenck, he is dead was a great positivist psychologist very critical of psychoanalysis. And he discovered something wonderful, he thought this is the devastating blow to against psychoanalysis. He says Freud claims that our desires the desires articulated in dreams are generally of sexual nature and unconscious. And then he says: but let's look at a dream which should be considered paradigmatic, typical because Freud refers to this dream at the very beginning of his interpretation of dreams as the model dream. Dream that he uses to introduce it. It's of course the dream about Irma's injection. And Eysenck quite correctly notices that the desire articulated in this dream, the desire of Freud to get rid of his failure in treatment of one of her patients Irma, that this desire is absolutely not unconscious. My God this bothered him day and night he felt responsible for it! And it's definitely at least on the surface not sexual. You know so what is it? Did Freud not know what he was doing? Aha, here things get more complicated because the Freudian where do you find in a dream the unconscious? Things get here wonderfully complex. It's not simply that you have the text of the dream, textual explicit texture, the shitty story whatever, and then the so-called dream thought, the message of the dream. The paradox is much nicer for Freud. You have a certain daily concern which is the thought of the dream, in this case I screwed it up it's horrible my treatment of Irma. Then in a ciphered way you translate your unconscious whatever translate this into the texture of the dream, no? What Freud calls *Traumarbeit*, the translation of the dream thought into the texture, explicit texture of the dream. But it's precisely through this translation that the unconscious inscribes itself. You know, like for example let me take a simple example. You like in Freud, Freud wanted to get rid of it and his responsibility and he translated it into this dream image. But what he discovers there Freud—no sorry—but what you find in the dream texture is so full of obscene associations you see what that there the true unconscious penetrates. What does this mean? Let me give you another so the paradox is that the very process of covering up of ciphering the message, the very process of obfuscating the thought of the dream brings in the unconscious. Here thing here things get then wonderfully complicated and so on and so on. So again Lacan was fighting all the time with this like where is effectively the unconscious no? Is definitely not some kind of a primordial instinctual universe where whatever. Lacan insists to the end that the unconscious is ultra-rational. The unconscious is a matter of *Vernunft*, of reason. That's why Kant's—one of not Kant Lacan of course—one of Lacan’s great texts says precisely *La raison d'en Freud*, the reason in Freud, Freudian unconscious, *la raison* in the sense that again it's not a naive and so on it's not that unconscious is more primitive. It's even in a way more reflexive, more rational, in the sense that you see this is there is another crucial definition to debate here: between unconscious, sorry, the definition between desiring something and desiring to desiring it. We can you know the best definition of femme fatale in film noir you know the old is that you hate yourself for desiring her, hate to love. Like she is there it attracts you you know she will be a catastrophe, you love her but you hate to love her but you cannot help it. Then we have the nice opposite: love to hate. Isn't this the whole point of great bad guys in films? You hate them but my God you love to hate! And then there are other possibilities to the end. Maybe the only definition—I don't believe in direct innocent love—maybe the best definition of love is that you hate to hate someone. You still hate him or her but you hate yourself for hating, maybe that's as close as we can come to love. And the opposite, if you love to love someone—if somebody tells you I love to love you, run away! That's hatred and so on. So you see the unconscious is
capiton in of course in Seminar III on Psychosis. Then he used it for some time and gently replaced it first with, not ideal ego but ego-ideal symbolic point then with of course at the end you get master signifier. No? But again it gets very complex because again if you read Lacan, you know what's the problem with him? I always like this, he cheats all the time. He even within the same seminar, that’s why Lacan is difficult to read, he changes his position but as it were never admits it. Especially dangerous are moments when he says: "Okay, now new year begins, I will just briefly recapitulate what I did the last year." At that point you can be sure he radically changes his position. You know, for example in one of his most famous seminars, Seminar VII translated for long time *The Ethics of Psychoanalysis*, there Lacan developed his notion of Kant with Sade. And also of this relationship between law and desire. And at the very end of the seminar he says: "Okay, now I will return to what I said at the beginning." Fucking no, he totally changes crucially. Because at the beginning it's clear that he thinks the interconnection between law and desire in the simple Paulinian—I'm referring to Saint Paul—sense of prohibition itself creates the desire to transgress. Something is prohibited so I want it. But at the end he does something totally different: he elevates desire itself into the supreme law as it were. It's something again it's something totally different. For example, Antigone for Lacan, her desire is her law, her law—okay her maxim—brother should be buried and so on and so on. You know so it's a different point. And this is how we arrive at his motto of psychoanalysis: *ne pas céder sur son désir*, do not compromise on your desire. That's precisely the psychoanalytic how should I call it categorical imperative. And that's where he sees the connection between Kantian ethics and Sade. The point is not that Kant is a sadist. I mean, you can argue this that you know this Kant's absolute insistence on follow the follow the law whatever it means blah blah blah, that you know just think about for example a severe teacher who compels you, bombards you with with horrible demands but at the same time sadistically enjoys your failure, no? So Lacan’s point is not that Kant is a sadist but a much more difficult subtle one: that Marquis de Sade was already a Kantian. In what sense? First it's one evidence: if you read Marquis de Sade as his most systematic, like Days in Sodom, it's totally, it's totally something mechanical, it's beyond pleasures. It becomes the more you read it, the more it becomes a kind of a totally mechanical machinery. You know like it's cases like figurations of an orgy. And okay at the beginning it's still some kind of a narrative, but somewhere after I think it's just like, I improvise, take a dog, two women, a cow and a worm and you put them in this position. Then next one: take two dogs, two women and one man... You know it you lose... So as Lacan noticed intelligently insofar as for Kant the basic point is that the proper ethics should be without pathos, you shouldn't enjoy, you know, but it should be purely cold mechanical, as Kant put it you should do it for the sake of duty. Even if you do the right thing but you find some satisfaction in doing it, it's not an ethical act. And then Friedrich Schiller, whom I don't like very much, he was the father of fascism in aesthetics, but he wrote nonetheless a nice short poem making fun of Kant where he describes a good woman who does something nice to her to foreign children but then she complains: "But what can I do? I like helping people and I no longer count as moral, moral" and so on, you know. So again the point is that many readers notice this: that sexuality in Sade is totally apathetic. It's a kind of a really shades or shades of grey, you know. It's a kind of a totally—and then you have another element which is so important where Kant really—sorry, Sade really becomes a Kantian. You know Sade, it's a question to what extent but there is a certain development in Sade, to what extent you can really project it but there it is a kind of a shift in Sade from simple vulgar mechanical so-called materialism to something much more uncannily radical. Sade began with this brutal naturalism: he said torturing, killing is natural, nature is doing it. So if we want to be a harmonious part of nature, we should not just procreate and so on but also kill, torture, whatever. That, okay, but this is still at the level of La Mettrie, Holbach and all those all those guys where incidentally you do find incredible obscenities if you—for example just read, my God I don't think in our politically correct times it will be soon prohibited to read *Les Bijoux indiscrets* (The Indiscreet Jewels) I think, "Pearls which talk." It’s of course vagina and it's a whole treatise taken very seriously where he claims that, I think I already mentioned this here, that every woman talks with two voices: one voice is of her brains where she lies all the time you cannot rely on her, hysterical cheating, and with her vagina which of course always tells the truth, which is always the same: I want sex, I want sex, I want sex. It you find such vulgarities there already. But back to Sade, so we have this brutal materialist Sade: we should do like nature, we are part nature is, its this primitive Aristotelian image nature as a network of generation and corruption: things rise, things disintegrate, new things arise and we should simply be part of this cycle. But then something extremely interesting occurred to Sade, that to be part of this circular self-reproductive movement of nature, you are still enslaved to nature, you are not truly free. And then came the idea to Sade of what he calls second death, that a true crime is not just a crime which is part of this circular movement of nature: I kill you another child is born, but the radical crime should aim at to at interrupting this very cycle. You know, you are not part of natural circular movement, you want to stop it. And what is so shocking, read it closely, is that when in, I think in the book five of *Juliette* where the Pope gives a long explanation of the Sadean system, when he describes this it's shocking to what extent he uses the exact terms that Kant uses for an ethical act. That it shouldn't be done for any pleasure and especially, you know for Kant ethical act is a free act. Why? Because it's no longer part of what Kant calls pathological motivations. For Kant pathological means motivated by empirical factual reasons. For example if you do something for a certain empirical cause, to gain, even to appear honest to others, whatever, even if it's very sublime, it's pathological. A free act is done just for the sake of it. And so Sade defines in the very same terms the act of radical evil: that you just do it for the sake of it. Not for... And now comes the true art of reading Kant. If you read Kant through this insight you discover wonders. You do not discover only the obvious links or hints which point at Sade. For example you know in *The Metaphysics of Morals*, not *The Metaphysics of Ethics* but *Metaphysics of Customs* rather than morality, when Kant, you must know this, defines marriage he provides a definition which was the shock to everyone, Hegel included. I love it. He says: "Marriage is a contract between two—" maybe the nice girl there has the right to leave exactly at this moment when I enter the prohibited topic. Obviously yes. This is his definition of marriage is "the contract between two adults about mutual use of their sex organs for the purpose of pleasure." Nothing about sacred union, children or whatever you know. So now you think Kant is joking there. Look at the next page, my favorite in all Kant, where Kant asks if a man runs away from his wife does she have the right to bring him back by police? Kant says yes, but not for any spiritual reason, because according to marriage contract she—he ran away with a part of his body which was contractually linked to to her. It's his penis you know! That's why, it's not some noble marriage, no, you ran away with a part which belongs to me which is legally contractually ceded to my use. So Kant was a strange guy here whatever, you know. But let's go on. One of the, I more and more admire two late books by Kant. One is of course his *Anthropology* where you discover a Kant which is uncannily close to Pascal. Not the Kant of this inner ethics but precisely the Kant of explain, "fake it till you make it." You know Kant says if you are immoral act as if, imitate, that there is hope that you will fall into your own trap and really become moral. But the other Kant, *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone*, where Kant briefly entertains the notion of radical evil. No, that's the whole point. First he plays with the notion of what he calls diabolical evil and then he abandons it and quickly changes to radical evil. But you know why? Because he notices implicitly that what he calls diabolical evil is indistinguishable from his definition of moral act, of the good, why? It is evil and it plays plays a crucial role in even it begins even with John Milton, you know when Satan in Milton says, says "Evil be thou my good." That is to say that you posit evil as your ethical goal. But why is this radical evil? Because you don't do it for any pathological reasons. Kant plays with the idea of doing being evil not because you want to profit money, fame, women, sex, power over others but just for the sake of it. If you have small children, I have a naive theory that from my experience at least they come close to radical evil between five and six in those years you know. When they are small they still do it because they want it, they want your coffee toy, they grab it. After six-seven they already also become egoistic again. But there is a period somewhere there when they just for the sake of it, they just like to—like my small son when he was five, we had an old grandma who was barely walking and he pushed her down the stairs. And he didn't want, quite in a Kantian way, he didn't want to apologize. He said: "No, I did it. Why? Because I wanted to do it." Absolutely insisted on. No. So you you see my point. Kant is afraid then to admit this: that if you define moral act as a non-pathological act, as act of following a universal rule maxim which you do just for the sake of it, then what about radical evil? And again he then for totally mysterious reason all of a sudden claims that no we cannot, it's not possible with us humans, it would have been too much and he replaces, sorry, the notion of diabolical evil with the notion of radical evil which is much softer. It simply means that it’s inscribed into our human nature a propensity towards evil that we cannot ever get rid of. But you see he meant something much more much more precise. Here I think Schelling and Hegel go much further. For example Schelling already has in his—you should read this Heidegger claims this is the greatest text of all German idealism—Schelling's *Freiheitsschrift*, his *Treatise on Human Freedom* and some other related things and so on, where Schelling has a wonderful insight of how evil at its most elementary is not succumbing to material temptation, that as he puts it evil is more spiritual than good. Radical evil is precisely pure spirit brutally manipulating all material elements and so on and so on. The evil has this pure pale spiritual coldness and so on and so on. Schelling also develops an idea which is I think extremely important, this idea which which you already find in Kant of how even if our of how we are responsible for our character as it were. We do something which may appear that we do it because of our nature, but we are nonetheless even if we were predestined to do it from the very beginning, we nonetheless have to we are nonetheless fully responsible for it. Because and here we find an almost Freudian wonderful idea that our decisions, free decisions, are not necessarily conscious decisions. That the most radical free decisions we are never aware of them. All of a sudden they are already here. And I will give you another example which is for me an evil fact, but the greatest: falling in love. Don't, didn't you notice this? You never can say now I'm falling in love. Love should be a free act, you cannot be ordered to fall in love. But at the same time you are never in the position to say: "Okay, how should I, to whom should I fall in love? Let me look around. A lady there, sorry, Manet showing. A lady there, a lady there, okay." And then you compose what, a list you know: "I like her legs, her gaze, I like her hair, her I don't know eyes, and then I compare it, op-op, this one has more points." No, you never do this. Isn't it that you are not in love, maybe it's even hatred, and all of a sudden you become aware, and that's crucial temporality, temporality, that you already ARE in love. And maybe this is the wonderful suspicion of Schelling, maybe our ultimate free decisions are all are all like this. Did I use this year here because I have another ultimate example of this, the example of the military conscript in Yugoslavia. You were here all the time, do you remember it, a letter and so on? No. Oh, then I will tell it with pleasure. It's a wonderful crazy example, didn't I use it here are you sure? It's the story interrupted me at any moment, it's the story about a friend of mine who was at the time when I did it later he served in ex-Yugoslavia. And what he did was this. You know first you are two weeks doing military service then you confront then you have this ritual: all new soldiers are gathered there and they all have to repeat the usual bullshit you know: "I swear that I will give even my life everything for the freedom of my—" whatever, and then you become fully a soldier. Okay, this friend of mine did this. After this each soldier use must then sign his name into some big book that is official. When he approached the officer who had this book, this friend of mine, and he wasn't laughing because I had the document I will tell you immediately which document this is, he approached them and said the officer and said: "Is this oath that I took here and now I have to sign it, is it obligatory or not?" The officer told him: "No, of course it's not obligatory, then it's meaningless, it must be your free decision." Then my friend soldier said: "Okay then I don't do it. Then I don't sign." Then the officer started to shout at him, "Are you crazy? You will be arrested!" and so on. And then now comes the beauty. They debated it for some minutes and you know what happened at the end? This officer was really stupid because he did something that should be impossible. He gave to this soldier a paper where he, officer, orders him to freely sign it. This is a pure document of ideology. And let me be very clear, I'm not saying here that this is a totalitarian mechanism. No, no, no, there were other much worse totalitarian mechanisms in ex-Yugoslavia and so on. This is I think something which always defines our belonging to a certain community. You have a choice but this choice is this: you have a certain freedom which is always already used. You know like you are free to choose but you are never given a moment where you really can choose. Like you have a freedom of choice only if you already make the radical choice. And it's interesting how even when this was years ago Yugoslavia was here relatively liberal when people when communists granted total freedom of divorce. And some conservatives provided the best argument that I've heard against divorce. It repeats this paradox: it says "Of course you have the freedom to divorce, but once you get married you abandon, you know you forsake, you already used this freedom." It’s a wonderful paradox. You have it but never now, you always already used it. So again what I'm trying to tell you here is something much more complex than just a joke is that far from being simple funny excesses these paradoxes signal again something which again defines our very basic fact of belonging to a certain community. Yes? Would that be a unconscious, the unconscious that it’s—I am afraid to use these words here because you know the problem is what is really unconscious. It’s clear I agree here with Lacan that unconscious it's a much more it's not simply there is something deep in me or whatever beyond. My God what is unconscious. And I I know now that I use this example here namely the example of perversion. Unconscious is not that secret content that you are not aware of. Perverts absolutely enact shamelessly the dirtiest fantasies but as Freud puts it it’s the most difficult case to penetrate the unconscious are the perverts. Precisely because, you know this is also the basic lesson of psychoanalysis, this is why Freud abandoned hypnosis and all that. Because the point is not just to tell you whatever the vulgarity is you know to tell you haha you want to kill your father sleep with your mother. It doesn't work. Something else has to be done. Okay we can generally say what has to be done is that you don't just rationally agree but you really subjectively assume it, but it’s I claim even it's even more complex. So again look there is a wonderful argument of Eysenck, Hans Eysenck, he is dead was a great positivist psychologist very critical of psychoanalysis. And he discovered something wonderful, he thought this is the devastating blow to against psychoanalysis. He says Freud claims that our desires the desires articulated in dreams are generally of sexual nature and unconscious. And then he says: but let's look at a dream which should be considered paradigmatic, typical because Freud refers to this dream at the very beginning of his interpretation of dreams as the model dream. Dream that he uses to introduce it. It's of course the dream about Irma's injection. And Eysenck quite correctly notices that the desire articulated in this dream, the desire of Freud to get rid of his failure in treatment of one of her patients Irma, that this desire is absolutely not unconscious. My God this bothered him day and night he felt responsible for it! And it's definitely at least on the surface not sexual. You know so what is it? Did Freud not know what he was doing? Aha, here things get more complicated because the Freudian where do you find in a dream the unconscious? Things get here wonderfully complex. It's not simply that you have the text of the dream, textual explicit texture, the shitty story whatever, and then the so-called dream thought, the message of the dream. The paradox is much nicer for Freud. You have a certain daily concern which is the thought of the dream, in this case I screwed it up it's horrible my treatment of Irma. Then in a ciphered way you translate your unconscious whatever translate this into the texture of the dream, no? What Freud calls *Traumarbeit*, the translation of the dream thought into the texture, explicit texture of the dream. But it's precisely through this translation that the unconscious inscribes itself. You know, like for example let me take a simple example. You like in Freud, Freud wanted to get rid of it and his responsibility and he translated it into this dream image. But what he discovers there Freud—no sorry—but what you find in the dream texture is so full of obscene associations you see what that there the true unconscious penetrates. What does this mean? Let me give you another so the paradox is that the very process of covering up of ciphering the message, the very process of obfuscating the thought of the dream brings in the unconscious. Here thing here things get then wonderfully complicated and so on and so on. So again Lacan was fighting all the time with this like where is effectively the unconscious no? Is definitely not some kind of a primordial instinctual universe where whatever. Lacan insists to the end that the unconscious is ultra-rational. The unconscious is a matter of *Vernunft*, of reason. That's why Kant's—one of not Kant Lacan of course—one of Lacan’s great texts says precisely *La raison d'en Freud*, the reason in Freud, Freudian unconscious, *la raison* in the sense that again it's not a naive and so on it's not that unconscious is more primitive. It's even in a way more reflexive, more rational, in the sense that you see this is there is another crucial definition to debate here: between unconscious, sorry, the definition between desiring something and desiring to desiring it. We can you know the best definition of femme fatale in film noir you know the old is that you hate yourself for desiring her, hate to love. Like she is there it attracts you you know she will be a catastrophe, you love her but you hate to love her but you cannot help it. Then we have the nice opposite: love to hate. Isn't this the whole point of great bad guys in films? You hate them but my God you love to hate! And then there are other possibilities to the end. Maybe the only definition—I don't believe in direct innocent love—maybe the best definition of love is that you hate to hate someone. You still hate him or her but you hate yourself for hating, maybe that's as close as we can come to love. And the opposite, if you love to love someone—if somebody tells you I love to love you, run away! That's hatred and so on. So you see the unconscious is
unknown
precisely this higher
precisely this higher
Slavoj Žižek
dimension. I love you, what I’m not conscious of is that I hate or don't love to love you and so on. It's
dimension. I love you, what I’m not conscious of is that I hate or don't love to love you and so on. It's
unknown
more... This is
more... This is
Slavoj Žižek
my problem with Robert Pippin who in another of his books when he attacks psychoanalysis as steam being too reified, as if there is out there the unconscious as some substantial psychic content which determines our reflexive freedom. No, unconscious is not more immediate rational, unconscious is even more is even more reflected in this way. You know and that’s the entire problem of how to read Lacan to Freud, Freud or Freud to true Lacan. Maybe I should conclude with this. For example for Lacan the most elementary definition of the
my problem with Robert Pippin who in another of his books when he attacks psychoanalysis as steam being too reified, as if there is out there the unconscious as some substantial psychic content which determines our reflexive freedom. No, unconscious is not more immediate rational, unconscious is even more is even more reflected in this way. You know and that’s the entire problem of how to read Lacan to Freud, Freud or Freud to true Lacan. Maybe I should conclude with this. For example for Lacan the most elementary definition of the
unknown
unconscious is is something like you
unconscious is is something like you
Slavoj Žižek
know the discourse of the other. Yeah, okay but what did he mean by this? It’s not simply it’s not me it’s the other who is talking through me. No Lacan is totally opposed to this this easy excuse you know like I don't know I do something horrible
know the discourse of the other. Yeah, okay but what did he mean by this? It’s not simply it’s not me it’s the other who is talking through me. No Lacan is totally opposed to this this easy excuse you know like I don't know I do something horrible
unknown
to you and then I tell you sorry
to you and then I tell you sorry
Slavoj Žižek
it wasn't me it was the other who, you know. I mean even when I was young I always like jokes about psychiatrists you know. Like one was that you go to a psychiatrist and he diagnose you have a double self you know. And then at the end when you have to pay him he said "Okay I will pay you half the other self will pay you" all this. And the deepest one, I use it in my early books, deeply Jewish you know the thing about the crocodile and the guy. Okay, a guy has a phobia of crocodiles, he thinks that there is a crocodile beneath his bed, no? And goes to the psychiatrist, psychiatrist they analyze it blah
it wasn't me it was the other who, you know. I mean even when I was young I always like jokes about psychiatrists you know. Like one was that you go to a psychiatrist and he diagnose you have a double self you know. And then at the end when you have to pay him he said "Okay I will pay you half the other self will pay you" all this. And the deepest one, I use it in my early books, deeply Jewish you know the thing about the crocodile and the guy. Okay, a guy has a phobia of crocodiles, he thinks that there is a crocodile beneath his bed, no? And goes to the psychiatrist, psychiatrist they analyze it blah
unknown
blah blah and finally psychoanalyst convinces the guy that there is that this was his fantasy
blah blah and finally psychoanalyst convinces the guy that there is that this was his fantasy
Slavoj Žižek
there is no crocodile beneath his bed. So okay he is pure, the psychoanalyst no longer sees the guy. But a couple of months later the psychoanalyst meets on the street a good friend of this guy and asks him: "My God I haven't seen him for months, what happened to that guy?" You imagine what his friend answers: "Ah he is the one who was eaten by the crocodile beneath his bed." I mean there is a big message in it about the efficiency of symptoms and so on and so on. So what I want to say is this: the first difference is this is the beautiful difference between in the notion of truth, the difference between "what I'm saying is true" and "the truth speaks." "What I'm saying is true" refers to the let's call it naively objective content of my speech. If you say what I'm saying is true, it simply means a predicate, true is a predicate here, it means I don't know we are in Princeton, oh you look around, yes what I'm saying is true. But if you say that the truth speaks through me it's something different but radically ambiguous. That is to say on the one hand it can mean the symbolic authority, like the judge can a judge can say "truth in the sense of social order legality speaks through me." So even if I am bullshitting nonetheless truth speaks through me. You know where you find this a nice example? In Russian they have *istina* and *pravda*. *Istina* is more, maybe I'm wrong if you know, factual truth. *Pravda* is the deeper truth. No wonder that the main Soviet daily was not *Istina* but it was *Pravda*. *Istina* is scientific and *Pravda* is political and in a way... Yes and scientific but it's a strange science you know because it’s this type of science. For example, there are workers striking striking and police beat them savagely and arrested them. And I want to publish this in a newspaper. And they will tell you it may be *istina* but in present political constellation it would serve the enemy. So in a deeper sense, you know, it's not true. So we have in this sense truth which more refers to some authentic subjective position we have this opposition. But Lacan is aiming at something slightly different here I claim. It's not in this sense that we have the truth is this higher authority. And even even with American Christians fundamentalists you have this. Alenka Zupančič I wonder if she mentioned this here, she found some fundamentalist sites where they claim that a true Christian is ready to l—they call it "lying for Jesus." For example they claim, and this is where they use it in Slovenia even it happens, fundamentalists were engaged in of course against abortion and they referred to some alleged medical research which demonstrates how it can have for the woman herself bad medical consequences and so on and so on. And when they were caught lying referring to those researches didn't really say this, they use this "lying for Jesus" argument. Like okay maybe factually it was wrong but it served a higher a true cause. We prevented another genocide. You know this beautiful logic of fundamentalists where they claim our big sin was killing six million Jews but what about the hundreds of millions of children killed in abortion, that's the true Holocaust, what about this and so on. So again to present this... So but for Lacan Lacan also uses this term pathetically in his *Écrits* where he says well-known quote: "Men listen, I am telling you the secret, I, truth, speak." And then he goes on: "The discourse of error could bear witness to the truth against the apparent facts themselves. Whether you flee me in deceit or think you can catch me in error, I will catch up with you in the mistake from which you cannot escape." What Lacan put it is pretty elementary what he wants to say here that sometimes in what is at the level of facts not true can be true but not in this manipulative way you know we deny gulag to save the idea of communism but in a much more beautiful and tricky way that it's precisely into what is an empirical lie that the truth about you your subjective stance where is your desire like inscribed. Like let me take a simple example they are too simple things are much more elaborate but the most stupid example you know where this typical slip of tongue mentioned even by Freud: I am supposed to moderate some boring debate and instead of saying at the beginning I thereby open the debate I say I thereby close the debate. Okay I was wrong but fuck it you learned a lot from this mistake of mine what is—and that was Freud's point that obsessional neurotics their specialty is to lie in the guise of factual truth in the sense of what is factually true. You know for example an obsessional neurotic usually what he says is factually true but the truth is used to for a lie, for a lie in your subjective attitude, while hysterics are more or less the opposite. Even when they lie through the very form of lie truth
there is no crocodile beneath his bed. So okay he is pure, the psychoanalyst no longer sees the guy. But a couple of months later the psychoanalyst meets on the street a good friend of this guy and asks him: "My God I haven't seen him for months, what happened to that guy?" You imagine what his friend answers: "Ah he is the one who was eaten by the crocodile beneath his bed." I mean there is a big message in it about the efficiency of symptoms and so on and so on. So what I want to say is this: the first difference is this is the beautiful difference between in the notion of truth, the difference between "what I'm saying is true" and "the truth speaks." "What I'm saying is true" refers to the let's call it naively objective content of my speech. If you say what I'm saying is true, it simply means a predicate, true is a predicate here, it means I don't know we are in Princeton, oh you look around, yes what I'm saying is true. But if you say that the truth speaks through me it's something different but radically ambiguous. That is to say on the one hand it can mean the symbolic authority, like the judge can a judge can say "truth in the sense of social order legality speaks through me." So even if I am bullshitting nonetheless truth speaks through me. You know where you find this a nice example? In Russian they have *istina* and *pravda*. *Istina* is more, maybe I'm wrong if you know, factual truth. *Pravda* is the deeper truth. No wonder that the main Soviet daily was not *Istina* but it was *Pravda*. *Istina* is scientific and *Pravda* is political and in a way... Yes and scientific but it's a strange science you know because it’s this type of science. For example, there are workers striking striking and police beat them savagely and arrested them. And I want to publish this in a newspaper. And they will tell you it may be *istina* but in present political constellation it would serve the enemy. So in a deeper sense, you know, it's not true. So we have in this sense truth which more refers to some authentic subjective position we have this opposition. But Lacan is aiming at something slightly different here I claim. It's not in this sense that we have the truth is this higher authority. And even even with American Christians fundamentalists you have this. Alenka Zupančič I wonder if she mentioned this here, she found some fundamentalist sites where they claim that a true Christian is ready to l—they call it "lying for Jesus." For example they claim, and this is where they use it in Slovenia even it happens, fundamentalists were engaged in of course against abortion and they referred to some alleged medical research which demonstrates how it can have for the woman herself bad medical consequences and so on and so on. And when they were caught lying referring to those researches didn't really say this, they use this "lying for Jesus" argument. Like okay maybe factually it was wrong but it served a higher a true cause. We prevented another genocide. You know this beautiful logic of fundamentalists where they claim our big sin was killing six million Jews but what about the hundreds of millions of children killed in abortion, that's the true Holocaust, what about this and so on. So again to present this... So but for Lacan Lacan also uses this term pathetically in his *Écrits* where he says well-known quote: "Men listen, I am telling you the secret, I, truth, speak." And then he goes on: "The discourse of error could bear witness to the truth against the apparent facts themselves. Whether you flee me in deceit or think you can catch me in error, I will catch up with you in the mistake from which you cannot escape." What Lacan put it is pretty elementary what he wants to say here that sometimes in what is at the level of facts not true can be true but not in this manipulative way you know we deny gulag to save the idea of communism but in a much more beautiful and tricky way that it's precisely into what is an empirical lie that the truth about you your subjective stance where is your desire like inscribed. Like let me take a simple example they are too simple things are much more elaborate but the most stupid example you know where this typical slip of tongue mentioned even by Freud: I am supposed to moderate some boring debate and instead of saying at the beginning I thereby open the debate I say I thereby close the debate. Okay I was wrong but fuck it you learned a lot from this mistake of mine what is—and that was Freud's point that obsessional neurotics their specialty is to lie in the guise of factual truth in the sense of what is factually true. You know for example an obsessional neurotic usually what he says is factually true but the truth is used to for a lie, for a lie in your subjective attitude, while hysterics are more or less the opposite. Even when they lie through the very form of lie truth
unknown
returns. So Lacan’s position is here wonderfully
returns. So Lacan’s position is here wonderfully
Slavoj Žižek
dialectical in the same way I already developed this here I think, in the same way that *jouissance*, full enjoyment, it's not only impossible, that would be this negative theological Lacan the worst, but at the same time you cannot reach it but you cannot escape it no because no matter how you want to escape it it catches up with you. I I think already mentioned even here the
dialectical in the same way I already developed this here I think, in the same way that *jouissance*, full enjoyment, it's not only impossible, that would be this negative theological Lacan the worst, but at the same time you cannot reach it but you cannot escape it no because no matter how you want to escape it it catches up with you. I I think already mentioned even here the
unknown
ridiculous example like you
ridiculous example like you
Slavoj Žižek
are traumatized by sex you are in puberty don't know how so you escape into mathematics or physics and then what happens there? You get a task: how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other? Haha you are there! You know like it returns you know you cannot escape it sticks to you. But the same goes for Lacan for truth. Like you think the problem is not just people usually quote just that Lacan the postmodern Lacan, "la vérité on ne peut que la mi-dire," you can just half-say it, you
are traumatized by sex you are in puberty don't know how so you escape into mathematics or physics and then what happens there? You get a task: how much energy is released when two bodies hit each other? Haha you are there! You know like it returns you know you cannot escape it sticks to you. But the same goes for Lacan for truth. Like you think the problem is not just people usually quote just that Lacan the postmodern Lacan, "la vérité on ne peut que la mi-dire," you can just half-say it, you
unknown
cannot say
cannot say
Slavoj Žižek
the whole truth. No but there is another side which is you but you also cannot escape the truth. And to conclude I will give you a wonderful example from I use this example from so-called totalitarian ideologies. The it always fascinated me, the practice of architecture
the whole truth. No but there is another side which is you but you also cannot escape the truth. And to conclude I will give you a wonderful example from I use this example from so-called totalitarian ideologies. The it always fascinated me, the practice of architecture
unknown
under Stalinism.
under Stalinism.
Slavoj Žižek
You know officially this was a highly developed society, freedom and so on but the truth was out there staged in architecture.
You know officially this was a highly developed society, freedom and so on but the truth was out there staged in architecture.
unknown
First if you look at the typical
First if you look at the typical
Slavoj Žižek
palace it was done like this that more and more the lower floors where people actually were were weighed down by some gigantic statues and so on. I mean if you were just to say this message loudly, we allegedly dedicate ourselves to the big new ideal of a new man but effectively we are more and more crushed by this ideal, if you say this well people would be asking who saw you the last alive or you will be getting postcards from Gulag, "the weather is nice." But you know but you were even forced to stage this truth out there in in architecture. No wonder that you know like this is why I still like Sergei Eisenstein's *Ivan the Terrible*. It's ambiguous but it is as if he staged there the whole terrifying ambiguity of the of the Stalinist regime and so on and so on. He must really have been crazy to do that film because you find it now they discovered the complete scenario also for Part III, Part III. You know there are two, maybe there are others, two that I know of absolute mega, I hope people will have heart attack, no. Sorry bad joke, I thought you have—I always live in fear or you know I and when my friends do a gesture like this I will tell them: "Drop dead and then I promise you we will so sincerely mourn you and so on." That's okay, let me go on. There are two mega-tragedies in history of cinema. Of course Orson Welles *The Magnificent Ambersons*, read at the scenario, and you know what's the tragedy there? It was done, finished, hours then they sent Orson Welles to Brazil to do some stupid pro-war documentary and they cut it short to minutes by even cutting some by even adding some stuff so they cut even more. Okay I’m not going into it and the second mega-tragedy is I think that Eisenstein wasn't able to finish his *Ivan the Terrible*, no? It's really it has how should I put it it's in a way more horrifying than explicit critique of Stalinism because we all know this you know the art is not just to tell the factual truth but as it were to undermine the truth from within. I know we have only two days to go now so just my last example, maybe you know it I'm sorry. When I was half-dissident not really you know it years ago I was in my 20s, I was part of a small student newspaper like half-dissident it was still tolerated. There were elections in ex-Yugoslavia, communists always won. Okay it was not as bad as in Soviet Union where communists always got or percent, with us communists were satisfied with like percent but they always so we said what should we do? Shall we publish an issue denouncing these as false elections? No everyone knew this. We did something much more naive. We didn't tell the truth we just insisted too much on the lie. The lie was that these are free elections. So the idea was let us treat them as if they are free elections. So we printed an extraordinary issue of the journal where we in—it was big title "Latest news: it looks that communists will remain in power, will win!" You know and we got then so furiously they immediately asked us to come to Central Committee. Okay this wasn't true Stalinism so we didn't drink, but a guy there was shouting at us: "Boys why are you doing it?" And we just asked him: "What are you approaching us with? We just treat this as a really free elections, what did we do wrong?" And it was so tragic because the guy couldn't say publicly "You fuckingly know that they weren't free." So we just said "Don't mess with me, don't fuck me, you know very well what I mean." And we said: "But please tell us what?" You see my point about telling the truth? This we didn't say openly the truth, these
palace it was done like this that more and more the lower floors where people actually were were weighed down by some gigantic statues and so on. I mean if you were just to say this message loudly, we allegedly dedicate ourselves to the big new ideal of a new man but effectively we are more and more crushed by this ideal, if you say this well people would be asking who saw you the last alive or you will be getting postcards from Gulag, "the weather is nice." But you know but you were even forced to stage this truth out there in in architecture. No wonder that you know like this is why I still like Sergei Eisenstein's *Ivan the Terrible*. It's ambiguous but it is as if he staged there the whole terrifying ambiguity of the of the Stalinist regime and so on and so on. He must really have been crazy to do that film because you find it now they discovered the complete scenario also for Part III, Part III. You know there are two, maybe there are others, two that I know of absolute mega, I hope people will have heart attack, no. Sorry bad joke, I thought you have—I always live in fear or you know I and when my friends do a gesture like this I will tell them: "Drop dead and then I promise you we will so sincerely mourn you and so on." That's okay, let me go on. There are two mega-tragedies in history of cinema. Of course Orson Welles *The Magnificent Ambersons*, read at the scenario, and you know what's the tragedy there? It was done, finished, hours then they sent Orson Welles to Brazil to do some stupid pro-war documentary and they cut it short to minutes by even cutting some by even adding some stuff so they cut even more. Okay I’m not going into it and the second mega-tragedy is I think that Eisenstein wasn't able to finish his *Ivan the Terrible*, no? It's really it has how should I put it it's in a way more horrifying than explicit critique of Stalinism because we all know this you know the art is not just to tell the factual truth but as it were to undermine the truth from within. I know we have only two days to go now so just my last example, maybe you know it I'm sorry. When I was half-dissident not really you know it years ago I was in my 20s, I was part of a small student newspaper like half-dissident it was still tolerated. There were elections in ex-Yugoslavia, communists always won. Okay it was not as bad as in Soviet Union where communists always got or percent, with us communists were satisfied with like percent but they always so we said what should we do? Shall we publish an issue denouncing these as false elections? No everyone knew this. We did something much more naive. We didn't tell the truth we just insisted too much on the lie. The lie was that these are free elections. So the idea was let us treat them as if they are free elections. So we printed an extraordinary issue of the journal where we in—it was big title "Latest news: it looks that communists will remain in power, will win!" You know and we got then so furiously they immediately asked us to come to Central Committee. Okay this wasn't true Stalinism so we didn't drink, but a guy there was shouting at us: "Boys why are you doing it?" And we just asked him: "What are you approaching us with? We just treat this as a really free elections, what did we do wrong?" And it was so tragic because the guy couldn't say publicly "You fuckingly know that they weren't free." So we just said "Don't mess with me, don't fuck me, you know very well what I mean." And we said: "But please tell us what?" You see my point about telling the truth? This we didn't say openly the truth, these
unknown
are
are
Slavoj Žižek
not free elections, but this was a much more efficient way to do it. So, fuck
not free elections, but this was a much more efficient way to do it. So, fuck
unknown
you,
you,
Slavoj Žižek
see you
see you
unknown
tomorrow.
tomorrow.