Figures of Post-Humanity
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-11-07 · 1:54:00 · 14,585 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysissexuality-genderphilosophy-generalideologyecology-climatereligion-theologycinema-art-culturehistory
In this concluding session of a seminar, Žižek presents a taxonomy of four modes of encountering the absolute: ecstatic unity with ultimate substance (Upanishads/Spinoza/Buddhism), the eternity of pure fragile appearance (aestheticism), the transcendental horizon of collective historical praxis (Western Marxism/Foucault/Derrida), and radical negativity/self-destruction (Bataille/Sade). He then argues for a Hegelian–Lacanian alternative: the gap separating us from the absolute is immanent to the absolute itself, and sexuality, as fractured, traversed by impossibility, is our first genuine metaphysical experience of this gap. A Q&A follows on Lacan vs. Jung, sexual difference, androgyny/transgender, and ecological crisis.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “the eternity of pure appearance”
Žižek's second mode of the absolute: not another substance behind reality but the fragile moment of beauty itself, the absolute is the pure form of appearance, not what is hidden beneath it.
as “Unhintergehbar (that behind which you cannot step)”
The transcendental horizon, collective historical praxis, symbolic structure, or discourse, that cannot be stepped behind; the basic move of Western Marxism, Foucault, and Derrida.
Lukács's formula: even our most abstract conception of nature is always mediated by collective historical praxis, not encountered in raw independence.
The philosophical move of privileging a particular horizon (social praxis, symbolic structure, episteme) as the unchallengeable condition for all experience of reality.
as “transcendentalism without a transcendental subject”
Žižek credits Lévi-Strauss with defining anthropology as Kantian in form but without a subject, symbolic structure is Unhintergehbar yet no subjective agency underwrites it.
As opposed to abstract universality (all lives matter), concrete universality names the specific figure that schematizes the universal antagonism, e.g. Black lives as the field schematizing structural violence in the US today.
Žižek adapts Kant's transcendental schematism to ideology: a universal ideological category is made effective by being embodied in a particular concrete figure (e.g. the unemployed single mother, the Black body, the Jew).
Foucault's term for the discursive horizon of a historical epoch; Žižek uses it as the clearest example of the transcendental approach, questions can only be posed within an episteme, not behind it.
Derrida's formula for transcendentalism: collective experience / the horizon of meaning is always already presupposed in any claim about reality, including evolutionary biology.
as “radical crime”
Sade's dream of a crime that does not merely kill within the natural cycle but suspends or destroys the circular movement of nature/causality itself.
as “the second death”
Lacan's reading of Sade: not biological death (part of natural generation/corruption) but the interruption of that very circular rhythm itself; Žižek notes Lacan's reversal that second death comes before the first, as the condition of human desire.
For Žižek/Lacan, the symbolic order is structured by the death drive; human desire is free precisely because it is no longer caught in natural rhythm, sexuality is non-pathological at this level.
as “pathological (Kantian sense)”
For Kant (as Žižek explains), 'pathological' means conditioned by contingent empirical objects/causes, not morally sick; sexual desire is pathological because it is driven by empirical pleasure-objects.
Žižek invokes Poe's concept: humans do things not for any determinate reasons but just for the sake of it, which is the Kantian formula of free action.
Žižek's core move in this talk: rather than trying to reach the absolute by overcoming our separation from it, he proposes that the gap separating us from the absolute is inherent to the absolute itself.
as “desublimation”
The sudden collapse of the erotic elevation of the beloved into disgust or mere banality; the fragility of the sublime in sexuality.
as “objet petit a / the Thing”
In the erotic context Žižek uses Lacan's notion that the beloved is an ordinary object elevated to the level of das Ding (the absolute object), an identification always fragile.
Žižek follows Kant and Lacan: we experience the absolute only through our very failure to capture it; in sexuality, the beloved is an ordinary object elevated to the Thing, always fragile and liable to desublimation.
Alenka Zupančič's formula, endorsed by Žižek: duality arises not from an original androgynous unity that splits, but because the One fails in itself, oneness is always accompanied by a lack or surplus.
Žižek uses Marx's Asiatic mode as an example of a paradoxical universalizing exception: it is not a genuine positive category but an empty container for all societies that don't fit the main classification, an embodiment of a lack.
as “primordially repressed binary signifier”
Žižek's Lacanian point: in a symbolic couple (e.g. Tolstoy/Dostoevsky) one term lacks its own signifier and is repressed, causing a proliferation of multiplicity to fill the gap.
Žižek's compressed formula for sexual difference: femininity is not a supplementary substance added to the masculine but is the very surplus/excess that attests to the internal failure of the masculine principle.
Žižek's Hegelian–Lacanian principle: multiplicity (of states, genders, art-forms) exists not because the universal subdivides, but because the universal concept is internally contradictory and each species is an attempt to resolve that contradiction.
Žižek surveys four philosophical answers to how humans can access a point exempt from the flux of reality, ultimately arguing we encounter the absolute only through our failure or gap from it.
Implied in Žižek's remark that oil reserves are 'fossilized capital' in a non-metaphorical sense, reading pre-human geological strata through Marxist categories is not mere projection but captures an objective social form.
Stories he reaches for 8
Lacan's example: even if a jealous husband's suspicions about his wife's infidelity are all factually true, his jealousy is still pathological, because the real question is why his entire identity depends on jealousy. Žižek deploys this to explain the transcendental turn in ideology critique.
“even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is promiscuous, sleeping around, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological”
An anti-Soviet joke: a Komsomol member is having sex with Krupskaya (Lenin's wife); the painting is titled 'Lenin is in Warsaw.' The guide explains: Lenin is in Warsaw, that is why she can be doing this in Moscow. Žižek uses this to say his talk title Sex and the Absolute is 'Lenin in Warsaw', the absent title accounts for the presence of everything else.
“Lenin is in Warsaw, no, that's why she can be doing this in Moscow”
In his anthropology, Hegel argues that rational human mind appears structurally as a defense against madness; between animal and human there is a moment of madness (loss of roots in nature), and even if we are not empirically mad, the threat of madness must be present for civilization to function.
“even if all of us empirically do not have to be mad for a moment, but the threat of madness has to be there”
Our main energy source, oil and coal, is the residue of prehistoric mega-ecological catastrophes. We are literally being fed by past catastrophes, which undermines the idea of natural balance and supports reading pre-human geology through Marx.
“we are literally being fed the source of our energy are the past catastrophes”
Marx had five modes of production but added a sixth, Asiatic, to cover societies that didn't fit. Žižek reads this as a masculine totalizing move: the Asiatic mode is not a genuine positive category but an empty container embodying the exception that the classification cannot include.
“The true meaning of Asiatic mode of production is all those modes of production which don't fit my classification.”
Borges (cited by Foucault at the start of The Order of Things) proposes a Chinese encyclopedia classifying animals, the last category being 'all those not included in this classification.' Lévi-Strauss uses this to show that every symbolic system needs a paradoxical stand-in for its own excluded.
“the last item is all dogs who are not included in this classification”
Woody Allen's film parodies Tolstoy (War and Peace) but never names Dostoevsky, the repressed binary signifier. Yet Dostoevsky returns through all his novel titles embedded in dialogue ('that idiot… committed the crime and got the punishment… that Karamazov brother…'). Illustrates Lacanian primordial repression and how the repressed returns.
“"What happened with that idiot?" "Ah you mean the guy who committed the crime and got the punishment?" "Yeah that Karamazov brother, oh he became a gambler"”
Žižek argues 'All Lives Matter' is a false neutrality analogous to insisting on German suffering alongside Jewish suffering in 1935, because Black violence by authority is the schematizing figure that concretizes the universal antagonism of structural racism today.
“why not all lives matter? No, it's false… in the same way that in Germany in thirty-five if you were to say but why focus only on Jews”
Works invoked 25
Capital book
Žižek reads it as a transcendental work: Marx begins with the developed capitalist system, analyzes its forms, and only then examines the genesis (primordial accumulation).
Implied in Žižek's invocation of Hegel's formula 'conceive the absolute not only as substance but also as subject.'
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel's political philosophy; Žižek notes its final word is war, not the organic state described in the body of the text.
Antigone play
Žižek says 'I hate Antigone' and prefers Oedipus at Colonus.
Grundrisse book
Marx's famous passage that the concept of man gives the key to the concept of ape, cited as evidence of Marx's anti-teleological, structurally-first approach.
Implied in the discussion of the young Lukács and the transcendental dimension of Western Marxism ('nature is a historical category').
Tristan und Isolde opera
Cited as the paradigm case of deadly human passion that is neither natural animal drive nor simply cultural: the domain of night, all symbolic rules suspended.
Melancholia film
Von Trier's film where the Earth is destroyed; Žižek ironically calls it 'a very happy movie' to express ecological pessimism and anti-humanism.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič's book; Žižek reports having read the manuscript and debated with her; its core formula ('there is two because the one is not') is central to his argument on sexual difference.
Kant's work; Žižek cites the gallows thought experiment from it and the mathematical vs. dynamic sublime (with implicit sexual difference).
Oedipus at Colonus play
Žižek calls it the true Sophoclean masterpiece, preferring it over Antigone.
Disparities book
Žižek's own book; he mentions it contains Lacan's formulation on second death and the argument about the gap/disparity immanent to the absolute.
The Order of Things book
Foucault's book opens with the Borges Chinese encyclopedia quote, Žižek deploys this via Lévi-Strauss on paradoxical exception.
Kant avec Sade essay
Lacan's essay containing the gallows passage from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the argument that Sade must be read with Kant.
Love and Death film
Woody Allen parody of Tolstoy; Žižek credits it with one intelligent move, the primordial repression of Dostoevsky's name that returns through all his novel titles.
Bacchae play
Euripides; cited as an example of radical zero-point negativity (Dionysian ecstasy as contact with absolute negativity/destruction).
Kant's third Critique; cited for the dynamic and mathematical sublime with implicit sexual difference.
Garden of Forking Paths other
Borges story; referenced by a discussant to describe Žižek's lecturing style (Ts'ui Pên following every possible path).
War and Peace book
Tolstoy; the positive term in the binary whose absent counterpart (Dostoevsky) is primordially repressed in Woody Allen's Love and Death.
The Imp of the Perverse essay
Poe's short story/essay; Žižek reads it as a Kantian formula of free action: humans do things not for determinate reasons but for the sake of it.
Frank Ruda's book on the Pöbel in Hegel; Žižek recommends it as an example of the paradoxical universal exception within Hegelian political philosophy.
Romance Sentimentale film
Eisenstein's embarrassing short romantic kitsch film; Žižek uses it as the key example of exception-reveals-the-rule methodology.
Sex and the Absolute book
Žižek's forthcoming book; he promises to send a key chapter to the seminar participants and describes its central argument throughout this talk.
Timaeus book
Plato's late dialogue; cited to show late Plato knew reality is decay and degradation, supporting the reading of Ideas as pure form of appearance, not another substantial reality.
Un Chien Andalou film
Mentioned as being completed by Buñuel in the next room while Eisenstein shot Romance Sentimentale.
People invoked 44
Described as the one 'big Hegelian' today who genuinely operates on the logic that threats of war maintain internal civil ethical order, Žižek says he 'almost admires' the consistency while seeing it as intolerable.
Carl Linnaeus positive
His hierarchical image of nature as the mirror of early modern absolute monarchy is cited as the paradigm example of nature as historical category.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Her book What Is Sex? and formula 'there is two because the one is not' are central; Žižek reports having debated the manuscript with her and extends her position.
Marquis de Sade positive
Analyzed as moving beyond naive naturalism to the concept of radical crime (second death); Žižek uses him via Lacan's Kant avec Sade to link ethics and sexuality.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Defined his anthropology as 'transcendentalism without a transcendental subject'; also cited on every symbolic system needing a paradoxical exception-term (Borges dogs).
Jacques Derrida positive
His arche-transcendental project is the most radical form of transcendentalism; but Žižek notes he slips into naive realism when applying différance/trace to nature or confronting Chinese thought.
Lars von Trier positive
Melancholia described (ironically) as 'a very happy movie', deployed to express ecological pessimism.
Darwin's direct intellectual influence for natural selection / struggle for survival, cited as example of how science echoes its social moment.
Georg Lukács positive
Cited for the transcendental core of Western Marxism: nature is always a historical category, all experience is mediated through collective historical praxis.
Edgar Allan Poe positive
The Imp of the Perverse: humans act not for determinate reasons but for the sake of it, Žižek reads this as a Kantian formula of the free act.
Jacques Lacan positive
The main theoretical armature: second death comes before first; Kant avec Sade; jealous husband example; formulas of sexuation; sublime as ordinary object elevated to the Thing; death drive as condition of human desire.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited as a covert transcendentalist: his notion of structure as 'always already here' shows the circularity of structuralism when it tries to explain the genesis of structure.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Quoted near the end: great art watches reality with non-human eyes; Žižek endorses the post-human perspective here.
Frank Ruda positive
Žižek recommends Ruda's book on the Pöbel (rabble) in Hegel, which treats the rabble as the paradoxical universal exception within society.
Georges Bataille positive
Represents the fourth mode of the absolute: radical negativity, destruction, the experience of the sacred as identification with a force of destruction.
Woody Allen positive
Žižek says he doesn't like Allen too much but credits him with one genuinely intelligent move: the primordial repression of Dostoevsky's name in Love and Death.
Cited as an example of gender transition that Žižek argues remains within the coordinates of binary sexual difference (moving from one side to the other rather than questioning the difference itself).
Co-participant in the alien invasion anecdote with Reagan.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek credits Badiou with correctly reading Plato: Platonic Ideas refer not to another substantial reality but to the pure form of appearance itself.
Fredric Jameson positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Žižek criticizes one tendency in his work: the idea that only a mega-catastrophe can awaken people to ecological crisis.
Agatha Christie positive
A short story with Hercule Poirot is used to illustrate the absolute of fragile appearance (beauty as pure form).
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Listed under the first mode of the absolute (ecstatic unity with substance): his 'intellectual love of God' is this ecstatic unity with substance as ultimate reality.
T. S. Eliot positive
Žižek quotes his idea that a radically new work of art forces us to rewrite all the past, applied to capitalism's retroactive construction of natural history.
Carl Jung negative
Žižek opposes the Jungian notion of original androgynous/unified form that splits into man and woman; he prefers Lacanian incompleteness of the One over Jungian archetypes.
Michel Foucault positive
His episteme/discourse is the clearest example of the transcendental approach (Unhintergehbar); also linked to Hegel's theory of madness.
Co-director with Eisenstein of Romance Sentimentale.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as Žižek's 'right-wing friend'; cited approvingly for noting that on all three levels (surface, beneath, above) the earth is under threat.
Martin Heidegger positive
Mentioned as the endpoint of radical transcendentalism / historicism (Being as horizon); politically correct historians inspired by him relativize modern science against traditional wisdoms.
Euripides positive
The Bacchae cited as an example of radical zero-point negativity (Dionysian madness as contact with the absolute).
Mentioned as having been in the next room while Eisenstein shot Romance Sentimentale, finishing Un Chien Andalou.
Actor in the unnamed Italian erotic comedy used to illustrate Lacanian perversion (transgression requires an obstacle).
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for privileging art over philosophy as the site of identity of activity and passivity, and for the formulation 'higher identity of opposites.'
Jordan Peterson negative
A discussant suggests Peterson exemplifies failed masculinity trying to re-establish itself against gender multiplicity; Žižek agrees and says he accepts Peterson's critique of cultural Marxism but rejects his 'new age Jungianism' categorically.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Cited as the new realist whose challenge Žižek partially follows: the transcendental approach doesn't work all the way because at the ontic level we are just a species on a planet.
Sophocles positive
Called 'a great guy'; Žižek prefers Oedipus at Colonus over Antigone as the true masterpiece.
Jürgen Habermas positive
Mentioned as an honest thinker who openly admits agnosticism: we presuppose our ability to reason even while explaining it, so we cannot know ultimate reality; Žižek treats this as a genuine but unresolved position.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Used as the main example for the exception-reveals-the-rule argument: Romance Sentimentale is the exception that reveals sentimental elements in the revolutionary work; Žižek admires the formal procedures.
Plato positive
Reread against realist tradition: Platonic Ideas refer to the very form of appearance (pure appearance as absolute), not another more substantial reality behind phenomena.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the method of reading crisis as key to capitalism, for Grundrisse's point that the concept of man gives the key to the ape, for primordial accumulation as genesis examined after the structural analysis, and for modes of production / Asiatic exception.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Chinese encyclopedia classification (via Foucault) used to illustrate paradoxical totalizing exception; Garden of Forking Paths referenced by a discussant to describe Žižek's lecturing style.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked as sharing Marx's methodological insight: begin with deviation/pathology (dreams, slips) not the norm; also central to the argument that sexuality's fracturedness makes it our first metaphysical experience.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Pervasively cited: the absolute as subject not substance; species arise from failure of the universal; madness as structural condition; war as last word; Pöbel; sexuality as merely natural/cultural (criticized); reconciliation.
Immanuel Kant positive
Central to the whole lecture: transcendental approach, antinomies, the sublime, formulas of sexuation, the gallows thought experiment; Žižek argues Sade must be read with Kant.
Mentioned in the anecdote about Reagan and Gorbachev discussing alien invasion as a common enemy to end Cold War hostilities.
What it argues
four modes of contact with the absolutesexuality as fractured metaphysical experiencetranscendental vs. realist approaches to history and naturethe gap/disparity immanent to the absoluteKant, Sade, and the second deathsexual difference, androgyny, and the failure of the Oneideology critique: antisemitism and schematism of the particular
Dialectical moves 14
“The exception is not the deviation from the norm; the deviation is the key to understand how the entire system works.”
Freud's and Marx's shared method: pathology/crisis is the privileged access point to the functioning of the normal.
“Eisenstein's revolutionary formal procedures fit even better with romantic kitsch than with his revolutionary films—the exception reveals the truth of the rule.”
Reading a filmmaker's embarrassing minor work reveals sentimental elements latent in the 'serious' works.
“The absolute is not what we reach by overcoming our separation from it; rather, the gap separating us from the absolute is already immanent to the absolute itself.”
The Hegelian reversal of the question of transcendence: we are already in the absolute through our very alienation from it.
“God's 'why have you forsaken me' means your separation from God is a separation of God from itself—you identify with God at the very point of abandonment.”
Christian kenosis as a model for how the gap/disparity is immanent to the absolute.
“We can experience the absolute only through our very failure to experience it.”
The Kantian sublime: the inadequacy of our imagination negatively reveals the absolute rather than blocking access to it.
“Second death comes not after the first death but before it—while we are alive we already assume second death insofar as we are caught in the symbolic order.”
Lacan's reversal of Sade: the interruption of natural causality is not a future radical act but the permanent condition of human subjectivity.
“Sexuality is our first metaphysical experience not because it is our natural base but precisely because it is fractured, traversed by impossibility.”
The standard view treats sexuality as the natural foundation; Žižek inverts this: sexuality matters because it is already unnatural, shot through with the death drive.
“Antisemitism is absolutely false not because Jews are not really like that but because the true question is why the Nazi needs the figure of the Jew.”
The ideological lie is decided not at the empirical level but at the level of subjective reflexivity: what structural work does the scapegoat perform?
“The most efficient lie works precisely when it is partially true at the level of facts.”
Ideology is not defeated by fact-checking because its falsity operates at a structural level above the empirical.
“Nature is not a balanced circle that we evil humans disrupt; this notion of natural balance is precisely human projection at its purest.”
The standard ecological narrative reverses cause and effect: the 'undisturbed nature' we project onto the past is a fantasy.
“There is two because the one is not—not: we begin with androgynous unity and fall into two, but: we are androgynous because we fail to be a particular.”
Sexual difference: the origin is not unity but failure; androgyny is an effect of the impossibility of being fully one or the other.
“Woman is not more than man—woman is this more itself.”
Femininity is not a supplement that fills in what masculinity lacks; it is the very surplus/excess that testifies to the internal failure of the masculine universal.
“Far from being our natural base, sexuality is precisely what is fractured and traversed by impossibility—it is our first metaphysical, not biological, experience.”
Freud's focus on sexuality is justified not by naturalism but by sexuality's inherently non-natural, death-drive-structured character.
“A state ultimately cannot do what it is supposed to do—represent all citizens equally—and that is why we have multiple states, each an attempt to resolve the inherent contradiction.”
The multiplicity of political forms reflects an impossibility inscribed in the concept of the state, not a contingent historical variation.
Claims 25
asserts
The exception and deviation—not normal functioning—provide the key to understanding any system, whether Freudian psychology (dreams, slips) or Marxist economics (crisis).methodology of critique
asserts
Eisenstein's formal revolutionary procedures (wild montage, discontinuous music) fit the romantic kitsch of Romance Sentimentale at least as well as his revolutionary films, revealing a sentimental core beneath the revolutionary pose.Eisenstein / revolutionary form vs. content
asserts
There are four main modes of human contact with the absolute: (1) ecstatic unity with substance, (2) the eternity of fragile appearance, (3) the transcendental horizon of collective praxis, (4) radical negativity/destruction.the question of the absolute
asserts
The transcendental approach—that a historical horizon is always already presupposed—is the most radical form of deconstructionism and Western Marxism, not its opponent.deconstructionism and Western Marxism
asserts
Derrida's archi-trace slips from pure transcendentalism into a naive realism when applied to biology or non-European thought, revealing an unresolved tension.Derridean deconstruction
asserts
The transcendental approach is ultimately insufficient because it cannot answer where the transcendental horizon itself comes from without circular presupposition.limits of the transcendental approach
asserts
Antisemitism is absolutely false not because its empirical claims about Jews are all untrue, but because the true question is why the Nazi ideological edifice requires the figure of the Jew to hold together.antisemitism / ideology critique
asserts
To debate antisemitism or anti-immigrant rhetoric at the level of facts is to have already conceded the ground; one must perform the transcendental turn and ask what structural function the scapegoat figure serves.liberal left strategy toward racism
asserts
The slogan 'All Lives Matter' as a response to 'Black Lives Matter' is a false neutrality equivalent to saying in 1935 Germany that German suffering should be weighed against Jewish suffering.Black Lives Matter / racial ideology
asserts
The most efficient ideological lie works precisely when it is partially true at the level of facts.ideology and truth
reframes
Rather than seeking to reach the absolute by overcoming our gap from it, we should ask whether the gap separating us from the absolute is already immanent to the absolute itself.the question of the absolute
asserts
Our separation from God (Christ's 'Why have you forsaken me?') is not a separation from God but a separation of God from itself—and through this we are already in the absolute.Christianity / the absolute
asserts
We experience the Kantian sublime—the absolute—only through our failure to capture it, negatively, through the very inadequacy of our faculties.Kantian sublime and the absolute
asserts
Sexuality is our first metaphysical experience: not because it is our natural base but precisely because it is fractured, traversed by impossibility, and thus our encounter with the absolute in its negative form.sexuality and metaphysics
rejects
The Catholic prohibition of non-procreative sexuality is mistaken; animals have sex for procreation (mating season), while humans are unique in elevating the act to an absolute—though always in the fragile sense of missing it.Catholic sexual ethics
rejects
Hegel's treatment of sexuality as merely natural/biological, only humanized through cultural elevation, misses the excess of deadly passion that already disturbs nature before civilization arrives.Hegel's theory of sexuality
asserts
Sade's 'second death'—the radical crime that interrupts natural causality—maps structurally onto Kant's ethical act (pure autonomy ungrounded in natural cause), which is why Sade must be read with Kant.Sade / Kant / ethics and sexuality
asserts
Lacan's reversal of Sade: second death does not come after first death but before it—we already assume second death while alive insofar as we are caught in the symbolic order / death drive.death drive / symbolic order
asserts
Kant's limitation is that he excludes sexuality from the ethical/free domain; Lacan shows that a specific human perversion requires the threat (gallows) to generate passion—sexuality too can be non-pathological.Kant's ethics and sexuality
rejects
Nature is not a balanced circular system disturbed by human hubris; nature itself is catastrophic, contingent, and violent—this naive notion of natural balance is itself a human projection.ecological metaphysics / nature as balance
rejects
The idea that only a mega-ecological catastrophe will awaken humanity is politically dangerous, since the aftermath is equally likely to produce fascism as communism.catastrophism in ecological politics
reframes
Multiplicity of genders (LGBT+) arises not from an original dispersed multiplicity that binary oppression imposes form upon, but from the internal failure of the One/universal itself.sexual difference and gender multiplicity
reframes
Transgender in the radical sense is not merely switching from one pole of sexual difference to the other, but experiencing the antagonism of the difference itself without finding one's place in it.transgender identity
asserts
Oil reserves are fossilized capital in a non-metaphorical sense: pre-human geological processes can be retrospectively read through Marxist categories once capitalism exists.Marxism and ecology / natural history
asserts
Species of states, art-forms, and genders multiply not because a universal genus subdivides, but because the universal concept is internally contradictory and each particular is an attempt to resolve an inherent impossibility.Hegelian dialectics / universality and particularity
Quotes 18
“All his formal procedures are there, and you cannot avoid the impression they fit even better with this romantic kitsch than with all the revolutionary bullshit.”Slavoj Žižek · exception reveals the rule / form does not guarantee content
“There is more truth in the appearance than in what is hidden beneath appearance.”Slavoj Žižek · eternity of pure appearance / aestheticist absolute
“Nature is always a historical category.”Slavoj Žižek · transcendental approach / Western Marxism
“If you say Mother Earth, well this mother is a dirty bitch. You cannot rely on her.”Slavoj Žižek · nature is catastrophic not balanced
“The most efficient lie it is when it's at the level of facts partially true.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology and truth / antisemitism
“The true question is not is his wife really like that. The true question is why is his entire identity rooted in the jealousy?”Slavoj Žižek · transcendental turn in ideology critique
“Don't look at them immigrants, look at us.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology critique / transcendental reflexivity
“What if the gap that separates me from the absolute is already immanent inherent to the absolute itself?”Slavoj Žižek · gap / disparity immanent to the absolute
“We can experience the absolute only through our very failure to experience it.”Slavoj Žižek · Kantian sublime / negative access to the absolute
“Second death comes before the first death. While we are alive we already assume second death insofar as we are caught in the symbolic order.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian reversal of Sade's second death / death drive
“Freud focuses on sexuality not because sexuality is the natural base of our being, but precisely sexuality in the human sense—this sexuality as fractured, traversed by impossibility—is our first metaphysical experience.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as metaphysical experience / death drive
“I think it's exactly the opposite. Animals do it when there is a mating season for procreation. Women do this that they elevate an act which is in itself physically a rather ridiculous act of copulation, they elevate it to the absolute.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as elevation to the absolute / critique of Catholic sexual ethics
“Woman is not more than man. Woman is this more itself.”Slavoj Žižek · sexual difference / femininity as surplus
“There is two because the one is not.”Slavoj Žižek · Zupančič's formula for sexual difference
“We are literally being fed the source of our energy are the past catastrophes.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology / nature as catastrophic
“I'm ready to talk with fascists but not with new age people.”Slavoj Žižek · opposition to Jungianism / new age spirituality
“His idea of radical crime is to destroy, stop, undermine this circle circular movement itself. That's his idea of radical crime.”Slavoj Žižek · Sade's second death / radical crime
“Reconciliation with the fact that you cannot ever sublimate or whatever this threat.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian reconciliation as acceptance of irreducible negativity
Transcript 29 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I want to do something, just one thing to conclude, just to add something. I really advise you to see it. You know, remember on Monday I developed briefly this idea of universality, the truly universal dimension based in what appears in our immediate experience as an exception. And you must be aware, my God, this was said hundreds of times by me, by others, this is the same logic shared by Marx and Freud. Freud, one of his big insights is that it's not that we should begin with the normal, what appears as normal functioning of our brain, and then in the second round you explain pathologies, deviations as just precisely deviations, that deviation is the key to understand how our mind works. You must begin with dreams, slips of tongue, and so on and so forth, with deviations. They provide the key. Marx, it's a vague homology but it holds I think, Marx says the same thing when he emphasizes that crisis is the key to understand the functioning of capitalism. So you must begin with what appears a malfunctioning, a deviation, and then see how, again, only in this way can you understand the functioning of the entire system. And just to amuse you, please do it if you have time. I have no power, I will not control you and so on, but do it. One example is so wonderful. I just didn't want to complicate things with bringing a USB where then by definition always something goes wrong and so on, you know. I discovered it quite by chance. Do you know that, okay, where is, is the Russian lady who was sitting here?
I want to do something, just one thing to conclude, just to add something. I really advise you to see it. You know, remember on Monday I developed briefly this idea of universality, the truly universal dimension based in what appears in our immediate experience as an exception. And you must be aware, my God, this was said hundreds of times by me, by others, this is the same logic shared by Marx and Freud. Freud, one of his big insights is that it's not that we should begin with the normal, what appears as normal functioning of our brain, and then in the second round you explain pathologies, deviations as just precisely deviations, that deviation is the key to understand how our mind works. You must begin with dreams, slips of tongue, and so on and so forth, with deviations. They provide the key. Marx, it's a vague homology but it holds I think, Marx says the same thing when he emphasizes that crisis is the key to understand the functioning of capitalism. So you must begin with what appears a malfunctioning, a deviation, and then see how, again, only in this way can you understand the functioning of the entire system. And just to amuse you, please do it if you have time. I have no power, I will not control you and so on, but do it. One example is so wonderful. I just didn't want to complicate things with bringing a USB where then by definition always something goes wrong and so on, you know. I discovered it quite by chance. Do you know that, okay, where is, is the Russian lady who was sitting here?
unknown
No, she's not here today. She couldn't make
No, she's not here today. She couldn't make
Slavoj Žižek
it. Ah, so sad, because I wanted to appeal to her with her reference. She's moving this into the recording. Stupid, okay. No, sorry, what I wanted to say is that since she is very much in Russian tradition, you know, with Sergei Eisenstein, the great one, the one, we associate certain formal procedures, wild montage, discontinuity, I will not go into it all, which then Eisenstein tried to associate or present as the formal staging presentation of revolutionary dynamics. The idea is that his very formal procedure is revolutionary. Now I found the exception. Please look, it’s very easy. You get some ten versions on YouTube. You can download it legally, you don't break any law and so on. It's from You know, after fiasco there, let's be frank, of *The Old and the New*, *General Line*, Eisenstein moved to the West and was first a little bit in Germany, then in France, then he moved to the United States, he tried to do some things there, then he went to Mexico, you know the story. But what he did in France was something so embarrassing. Purely for reasons of money, he met, I don't know through whom, a rich Russian emigrant, rich, who wanted a movie, early sound movie, celebrating his mistress, a beautiful woman. So he hired Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov to do a short movie, anything. And it's a, like, the title is *Romance Sentimentale*, *Sentimental Romance*. It’s a minutes and a half piece. Pure, as pure as you can imagine, romantic kitsch. First you have wild nature standing in for passionate sex, night, then you see a woman behind the piano alone singing this type of romantic song, and then at the end passion returns, whatever. Pure romantic kitsch. But you know what's the shock? All his formal procedures are there, and you cannot avoid the impression they fit even better with this romantic kitsch than with all the revolutionary bullshit and so on. So I would do the same operation here. Why not take and, incidentally, Eisenstein was so embarrassed by this that later he denied that he didn’t have anything to do with it. He was proven wrong, he was lying, because in the same studio Louis Buñuel was finalizing his, which, what was that one with... *Un Chien
it. Ah, so sad, because I wanted to appeal to her with her reference. She's moving this into the recording. Stupid, okay. No, sorry, what I wanted to say is that since she is very much in Russian tradition, you know, with Sergei Eisenstein, the great one, the one, we associate certain formal procedures, wild montage, discontinuity, I will not go into it all, which then Eisenstein tried to associate or present as the formal staging presentation of revolutionary dynamics. The idea is that his very formal procedure is revolutionary. Now I found the exception. Please look, it’s very easy. You get some ten versions on YouTube. You can download it legally, you don't break any law and so on. It's from You know, after fiasco there, let's be frank, of *The Old and the New*, *General Line*, Eisenstein moved to the West and was first a little bit in Germany, then in France, then he moved to the United States, he tried to do some things there, then he went to Mexico, you know the story. But what he did in France was something so embarrassing. Purely for reasons of money, he met, I don't know through whom, a rich Russian emigrant, rich, who wanted a movie, early sound movie, celebrating his mistress, a beautiful woman. So he hired Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov to do a short movie, anything. And it's a, like, the title is *Romance Sentimentale*, *Sentimental Romance*. It’s a minutes and a half piece. Pure, as pure as you can imagine, romantic kitsch. First you have wild nature standing in for passionate sex, night, then you see a woman behind the piano alone singing this type of romantic song, and then at the end passion returns, whatever. Pure romantic kitsch. But you know what's the shock? All his formal procedures are there, and you cannot avoid the impression they fit even better with this romantic kitsch than with all the revolutionary bullshit and so on. So I would do the same operation here. Why not take and, incidentally, Eisenstein was so embarrassed by this that later he denied that he didn’t have anything to do with it. He was proven wrong, he was lying, because in the same studio Louis Buñuel was finalizing his, which, what was that one with... *Un Chien
unknown
Andalou*. *Un
Andalou*. *Un
Slavoj Žižek
Chien Andalou*, and he said, but wait a minute, he was in the next room doing this movie and so on. So what I, you know, you see my point. This is the exception. The same formal procedures, wild montage, cuts, discontinuous music and so on, but used for totally the most traditional ideology. So what if we do the same evil operation and from this standpoint of exception he was ashamed of it, read his other works and you do discover suspicious elements also in them. There is a lot of naive sentimentality in Eisenstein and so on and so forth. So do it, I guarantee you, you will be amused. Again, you just type it Eisenstein *Romance Sentimentale* and if you do it from YouTube through that converter you have it in less than one minute, whatever. Okay, this is just the introduction. Now, ah, now I stop and you... No, no, yes. You don't need an introduction. That's what my idea, I wanted to leave you the illusion that you will not have to do it. No, now I stop and please introduce me. My God, who are you? I
Chien Andalou*, and he said, but wait a minute, he was in the next room doing this movie and so on. So what I, you know, you see my point. This is the exception. The same formal procedures, wild montage, cuts, discontinuous music and so on, but used for totally the most traditional ideology. So what if we do the same evil operation and from this standpoint of exception he was ashamed of it, read his other works and you do discover suspicious elements also in them. There is a lot of naive sentimentality in Eisenstein and so on and so forth. So do it, I guarantee you, you will be amused. Again, you just type it Eisenstein *Romance Sentimentale* and if you do it from YouTube through that converter you have it in less than one minute, whatever. Okay, this is just the introduction. Now, ah, now I stop and you... No, no, yes. You don't need an introduction. That's what my idea, I wanted to leave you the illusion that you will not have to do it. No, now I stop and please introduce me. My God, who are you? I
unknown
don't know you. Esther introduced him on Monday, I introduced you yesterday again. You were
don't know you. Esther introduced him on Monday, I introduced you yesterday again. You were
Slavoj Žižek
not... And I am not worth to be introduced. And
not... And I am not worth to be introduced. And
unknown
what I, as I said yesterday, I cannot introduce you because we never know what you're going to talk about. So you might go into any forking path. I introduced him yesterday as Ts'ui Pên from Jorge's *Garden of Forking Paths* where he just follows every possible avenue without actually making a, yeah, a decision as to finish one point and he remembers another point and he goes on and that’s what we enjoy about it and
what I, as I said yesterday, I cannot introduce you because we never know what you're going to talk about. So you might go into any forking path. I introduced him yesterday as Ts'ui Pên from Jorge's *Garden of Forking Paths* where he just follows every possible avenue without actually making a, yeah, a decision as to finish one point and he remembers another point and he goes on and that’s what we enjoy about it and
Slavoj Žižek
you’ve done that already today. No, I must correct, I must correct you. I don't follow all possible paths. One of the myths about me in Slovenia is that just when I see a possible path to, to give an obscene twist to any line of thought, to say something obscene, dirty, you can be sure that I will take that path and that’s the only thing you can be sure of. All right, but anyway, now you’ve, you’ve got the license to take the obscene path. No, no, I will precisely, I want to disappoint you. Today I want to do, because you are here the last time, so even if I disappoint you, I don't care how many of you will come next time because there is no next time. No, of course not, my God. No, no, it will be, I don't know when, next year, but of this... Oh yeah, this is the end, no. So I will go a little bit more into, at least in
you’ve done that already today. No, I must correct, I must correct you. I don't follow all possible paths. One of the myths about me in Slovenia is that just when I see a possible path to, to give an obscene twist to any line of thought, to say something obscene, dirty, you can be sure that I will take that path and that’s the only thing you can be sure of. All right, but anyway, now you’ve, you’ve got the license to take the obscene path. No, no, I will precisely, I want to disappoint you. Today I want to do, because you are here the last time, so even if I disappoint you, I don't care how many of you will come next time because there is no next time. No, of course not, my God. No, no, it will be, I don't know when, next year, but of this... Oh yeah, this is the end, no. So I will go a little bit more into, at least in
unknown
the beginning, please allow me into serious philosophy. And please let me tell you again that with all the, you noticed this, no, that I offend, insult only friends. And all my friends know it, that this
the beginning, please allow me into serious philosophy. And please let me tell you again that with all the, you noticed this, no, that I offend, insult only friends. And all my friends know it, that this
Slavoj Žižek
is my way to show real friendship. Why? Because it's so elementary, I don't get it how people don't get it. The meaning of this is, I hope you will accept it, you see we are such friends, we trust each other so much that we can afford even talking like that. For me, politeness is always a fear, I don't trust you, I don't know, and but, to avoid a misunderstanding, I am not saying that it works with everyone. We should just talk dirty and so on. With some people in some situations it works, with others it doesn't work, but it, I had quite some triumphs along this path. Before I go, one more. I think I already even used this story here about my experience in Argentina where I spoke there, this was such a surprise how I dragged somebody into obscene stuff. An old, very distinguished professor, you know, grey hair, he irradiated distinction, respect. And precisely to shock him, I went into, you know, this double meaning, I know you know the joke of the verb *coger*, not in Spain but in Argentina. Because the standard Argentinian joke is that in Spain it's just to grab, to search, in Argentina it's the f-word. So the standard joke is, and from him I got then the full story, the standard joke is that a stupid Spaniard comes to Argentina and asks "*¿Dónde puedo coger un taxi?*" Where can I grab a cab? And of course, Argentinians start to laugh. And this guy, I first thought I went too far, it was sublime experience of the divine because he, I thought he would be mad at me. You know, this really distinguished old person looked at me, then he started to laugh slowly and said, the our answer is, maybe you can try into exhaust fume, it's difficult but... You know, this was, I felt so good, this very distinguished old guy, he played my game, I broke him, you know. Okay, now really let's go on. So the same with you, which was that, I, I... No, don't, don't. No, nothing dirty. I will not ask like "*¿Dónde puedo coger María?*" or what. Don't be afraid. No, what I really want to say is take her seriously. You did a book, you did a reader and so on, no, your stuff I'm talking... Uh-huh. Which is worth reading, effectively. She is in the stuff. You know how I know, because with some of my talks you said that was really good. But I read it correctly, you know, like the subtle message was not like the last time when it was not, you know. And this is what I like, this also the opposite, the insults in the form of kindness, you know. The most bitchy, and women know this better than men, that the really bitchy insult is you just praise but then automatically in the background is the question, oh, so the other time I was not good at what. Let's go on now finally. You excuse me if I go really into metaphysics now. From this I will approach *Sex and the Absolute*. The project, that's why I'm postponing with this stupid introduction, because the project is really naive. I think we should risk things, to ask the most traditional naive questions, metaphysical even. And I want to approach and even risk an answer which will be mediated by sex to this most traditional theological or philosophical question. Again, with all naivety this implies, is there for us humans caught and embedded in a contingent historical reality, is there any possible contact with the absolute? Whatever we mean by this, and mostly we mean simply a point somehow exempted from the permanent flux of reality. You know, all reality is moving, corruption, destruction, generation of new, but is there a point of absolute? I claim that we have four, I am thinking now again tired of all these transcendental deconstructionist things, I want to approach it in an absolutely naive way. But at the same time highly theoretical and close to your experience. I think there are, as far as I could have seen it, maybe you can correct me, four main ways to do it. First, there are many traditional answers which rely on this our elevation nonetheless in certain privileged ecstatic moment to exempt ourselves from the flux of reality and get in touch with the absolute. The first model of this would have been in ancient Hindu *Upanishad* as the unity of Brahman, the supreme and sole ultimate reality, and Atman, the soul within each human being. So the idea is that when our soul purifies itself of all accidental non-spiritual content, it experiences ecstatically its identity with the absolute foundation of all reality. And this experience is usually again described in terms of some higher identity of the opposites as Schelling, the German idealist, put it. It’s you are neither active nor passive. Even for Schelling the model of this is artistic creation, which in contrast to human activity, that was Schelling's problem, and he is unique, Schelling, in privileging art over philosophy. He says philosophy as articulate rational thinking is still a form of activity trying to penetrate its passive object. And the opposite experience of, of perceiving beauty or whatever, on there we are passive. Is there an absolute identity of passivity and activity? And for him it is artistic creativity, where of course in some sense the actor, agent, writer, composer is active, but at the same time it's not that you as a self are active. It's something acts through you. You know, to use these kitschy words which even Lacan sometimes uses, something in me more than myself is acting through me and so on. So we have different versions, but this would be of it, and we have then of course the Buddhist version which is the most radical when you get over your false identity of yourself, you become, it's a beautiful precise description, your thoughts become thoughts without a thinker, an agent. You become just an open space for thoughts, your mind becomes like an empty screen, you become, become one with whatever we call it, Sunyata, the void and so on and so forth. So this is the first answer. It has its, it has its authenticity. I don't make fun of it. I'm just describing, giving you a classification. Then the second position, which is more paradoxical in a way, I think I already mentioned it, the first, didn't I on the first day here, which means Monday, mention the example making fun of myself, losing a friend of Billy Bathgate? You know, two novels and the real one is just a virtual point of reference between the two. What logic do we have here? Not only in art but mostly in art you find an opposite, exactly opposite notion of the absolute. Not absolute as the ultimate foundation in the sense of, you know, you lose all, you get rid of all empirical reality and so on, just the real substance behind. Which is why incidentally in this first line I should also have mentioned Spinoza of course. What Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God is precisely this ecstatic unity with substance as the only ultimate reality. The second position would have been that of course reality the way we know it, it's all permanent flux, degradation, everything returns to dust, but the only absolute eternity that we can experience is the eternity of the pure appearance itself. I will quote you one example which I quote in one of my books already so I'm sorry if you know it. In one of Agatha Christie's short stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as a beauty he met on a transatlantic voyage years ago. She merely put on a wig and obfuscated her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, sadly remarks how if a beautiful woman can make herself appear ugly then the same can also be done in the opposite direction. What then remains in men's infatuation beyond deception? Thus this insight into the unreliability of the beauty of the beloved woman not announce the end of love? Poirot answers, "No my friend, it announces the beginning of wisdom." Such a skepticism, such an awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, I will now not touch the point why this male chauvinist perspective, just I think more in formal terms, misses the point I think, which is that, again I'm sorry for male chauvinist twist it can be all reformulated, that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which temporarily appears. No matter how fragile and deceptive this beauty is at the level of substantial reality, what transpires through it is the moment of beauty as an absolute. There is more truth in the appearance than in what is hidden beneath appearance. And I think Alain Badiou knows this, that's also how we should read Plato. Not in the substantial way that there is reality but beneath this reality there is another more substantial reality. No, when Plato talks about eternal ideas, he precisely talks about the very form of appearance. Plato knew this, later realist readers missed it. Idea means the pure form of how things appear to us. At least the late Plato, he knows very well that ultimately our reality is one of decay, degradation and so on, in *Timaeus* and the last text he makes this very clear. So again, you know again imagine man, work of art, whatever, it's all fragile, but when you are entranced by it, when you have this experience, my God, briefly I feel intensely the beauty of it. It can be a woman's or a man's body, it can be whatever. This fragile appearance is absolute. Of course it's an absolute which is totally rooted in concrete experience, like you disturb the experience a little bit there is no absolute, just vulgar reality, but experience is here. And this is, this would be the aestheticist view, that this is the encounter of the absolute. It doesn't matter if it's historically conditioned, of course it is and so on, but in that ecstatic moment you encounter something which is in the air, more than reality. And again it's pure appearance, it's not another substantial reality. This would be then the opposite view, this fragility of the absolute. Now let's go on. The third form of the absolute is I call it the transcendental absolute. And I would include here Western Marxism. What do I mean by transcendental absolute? I mean this: the entire philosophy, modern usually, privileges one specific experience claiming that not that it's absolute, but that in our human space we cannot move behind or beyond it. Germans have a beautiful term, *Unhintergehbar*. You cannot go step behind it. And here we get for example in a very simple way the distinction, the gap that forever separates so-called Western Marxism from the Stalinist dialectical materialism. Stalinist dialectical materialism is traditional ontology. Dialectical materialism is supposed to deploy the laws rules the train entire material reality, and since we are just a tiny species on our planet and so on, then concretely our historical experience, historical materialism, becomes just a specific sphere of reality. This is traditional realism. The whole, not whole whole, but the basic first philosophical gesture of Western Marxism is to say no. In our, this may be in some naturalist sense clear, of course even the most radical Western Marxist like the young Lukács and so on did not think that we humans created nature. They were aware we emerged on this stupid planet blah blah blah. And they were as pessimist as I am. For me, getting old and bitter, did you see Lars von Trier's, what's that one where the earth explodes, *Melancholia*? I think this is a very happy movie, good things happens at the end, but that's another story. What I want to say is that as Lukács points out the fact is, and this is the transcendental dimension at its purest, the fact is that all our experience, even experience of reality like fossils independent of us blah blah blah, is mediated through not through our thinking, Lukács is a Marxist materialist, through our collective historical praxis. As Lukács puts it in classic terms, nature is always a historical category. And this is for me the transcendental approach. Although you in principle admit we are just part of tiny reality blah blah, but nonetheless in our practical experience, the way we experience reality, no matter how abstract this reality is, imagine now they are discovering water on Mars, maybe this means there is life there, whatever, is always mediated by our praxis. And the classical example here, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, I also repeat it because it's the most simple one, would have been for example literally the concept of nature. The first great biologist Linnaeus, I think he was Danish but I'm not sure, Belgian, Danish or Belgian, Danish, yeah, his image of nature as hierarchic system clearly mirrors the absolute monarchy of early modernity. With Darwin, you know that this is an empirical fact, that Darwin was directly influenced by Malthus in his notion of natural evolution and struggle for survival. Now be careful here, neither me nor the young Lukács would claim oh there is no truth then in Darwinism. No, just it doesn't say they are not true, it says nonetheless that their appearance, the appearance of Darwinism, was clearly located, echoed, was part of the experience of reality rooted in early wild capitalism. And then it goes on. Isn't it clear how today's predominant in cognitive sciences and so on image of nature as DNA and so on, system of information and so on, is again clearly conditioned by new digital media, by this new approach which sees exchange of informations and so on in genes or whatever. So again, that's the point, that you cannot abstract from concrete historical experience. And what I'm saying, now you will say this is subjectivism. No, it's not, because what I'm saying here is something much more precise, it's that there can be this transcendental logic in the sense of a particular sphere which overdetermines our experience of reality as such. It can even be thought without subject. In very precise terms, Claude Lévi-Strauss defined very precisely his anthropology as transcendentalism without a transcendental subject, without subject. He is Kantian but without the subject. Kantian in the sense that for him symbolic structure is again, to use the German term, *Unhintergehbar*. You cannot step behind it. You're always caught in it. And it can be easily shown that there is a point in it. Even if we talk about nature. Nature is everything, but we always conceive it in opposition to culture. We cannot think nature without this implicit negation. This is why this would also be another wonderful approach how I claim to struggle with or to even confront properly ecological problems. We, I often repeat this point, I'm sorry if you know it, we have to get rid of this idea of nature as natural. Our spontaneous notion of the natural is something which moves in circle, repeats itself again and again. Nature is a certain basic rhythm. Sun goes down, next morning sun goes up, epochs, winter, summer and so on, this natural balanced rhythm. And then within this natural balanced rhythm, man appears as humanity, appears as an unnatural hubris distortion. We disturbed the rhythm. I think we have to totally abandon this perspective. First, there is absolutely no base to conceive nature as some kind of a balanced circular movement which then we evil humans disrupt, destroy. This notion of nature is precisely human projection at its purest. Again, sorry to repeat myself, my old example, just think about what is our main source of energy: oil, oil and and coal and so on. But can you just imagine what kind of mega ecological catastrophes must have happened in human prehistory, pre-human history of our earth, to have all these results? I mean, we are literally being fed the source of our energy are the past catastrophes. So it's totally wrong and and Darwin, this is another more subversive thing of Darwin, he saw this how every balance, every balance of nature, natural balance is contingent, temporary and so on and so forth. It's not that we humans are hubris, nature is even more crazy than we are. Again, my old joke, if you say Mother Earth, well this mother is a dirty bitch. You cannot rely on her. And that's very important to take into account in confronting ecology today. I think we should drop all those the metaphorics of we disturb natural balance, we should return to it and so on and so forth. We are permanently under threat. Peter Sloterdijk, my right-wing friend, put it nicely that on all three levels, surface of the earth, beneath and above, there are threats. Above, who knows, you know a relatively small in celestial terms asteroid can screw things up totally. Beneath, who knows, a strong volcanic explosion, it can be a relatively small one but you remember the big one which was a shock in late 19th century, that close to Indonesia or where, that small island, Krakatoa. Just one island blown up. But you know that for two years afterwards there was hunger in Europe because of the clouds and so on. We are so fragile and of course the earth itself, storms and all that and so on. So we have to get a sense of this utter utter fragility of even the natural of even the natural balance. So back to my historical materialist or whatever Marxist point and so on and so forth. What does the transcendental approach mean? It in what sense it is absolute? That's the beauty of historical materialist approach. I will give you an old example but that I often use just to make this clear. Historicity does not mean there are no absolute truth, everything is relative, who knows there can be another perspective on it. No. There is an access to absolute, absolute in the sense of unconditional, totally reliable, but not in the sense of eternal outside our scope. Simply you can arrive at this truth at the level of reflexive self-relation. What do I mean by this? Oh sorry again my old example. Sorry if I repeat myself. Let us take antisemitism. I like it because it's ideology at its purest. You know my sympathy for Palestinians but nonetheless I like this example because it's pure. I claim that when, sorry repeating my old joke, if you debate let's say with an antisemitic German, usually I locate this debate '35 Germany. I'm the bad guy not you, you are the good guy, I'm antisemitic. And you say, you criticize me. And I say let's compare, let's turn to the facts. The moment you do this you have sold your soul to the devil. Because the if we turn to the facts, the truth would have been somewhere in between. I can say, okay, we maybe exaggerate a little bit, but look at the statistics: of lawyers in Germany are Jews. This is true. of journalists are Jews. It's true. Many Jews were rich, exploited ordinary Germans. It's true. And then I you can say oh but some of the Jews are poor. I say okay, but there is a problem. We can we can debate endlessly. But I think I think that first that the problem here is na- is not to approach it at this level because again you know my old joke here, the Lacan that I always quote, the my inspiration is here Lacan who wrote somewhere already in his early years I think that even if a jealous husband if a husband is pathologically jealous of his wife, and even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is promiscuous, sleeping around, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. Why? Because the true question is not is his wife really like that. The true question is why is his entire identity rooted in the jealousy? Why does he need jealousy? So again, I'm not saying Jews are really like that. I'm saying it's ultimately indifferent, although we should analyze it I but the basic question is why does a Nazi need the figure of the Jew without which his entire ideological edifice falls apart. And here we discover the fundamental lie, which is immanently a lie to cover up social antagonisms and so on. So you see what I'm saying, independently of all research into data and so on, antisemitism is a lie. It's absolutely wrong. You cannot because the level at which its truth or its false nature is decided it is at this subjectively reflected level. It's not Jews are not really like that. Up to a point they are. All people are a little bit of this empirically, a little bit of that. But nonetheless the way the Nazi universe is structured, antisemitism functions as a lie. And now we come to the tricky nature of it and we can debate this later. It functions as a lie and the most efficient lie it is when it's at the level of facts partially true. And there we can debate it here. But that's where I'm afraid of how liberal left in Europe is dealing with immigrants. You know, if there is some crime committed by them don't talk about it and so on and so forth. No, it’s horrible. In this way you abandon the field and give the argument to the right-wingers. Our true question should not be should not be is it true or not. Of course immigrants commit crimes but we commit even more crimes and so on. The point is not this. The point is why this totally irrational fear a couple of thousand of immigrants will threaten our identity and so on and so forth. Don't look at them immigrants, look at us. And this is absolutely true. So my point is even if many data quoted by alt-right about immigrant crimes and so on, even there of course things are more complex. Like in my own country, Slovenia, they now the latest right-wing rumor against immigrants is that they are involved in suspicious activities in some cultural center on Metelkova Street, which is close to their home, building allocated to them, that they are selling drugs and or some I don't know what. But you know, even at the level of facts it gets more complex because probably they are doing it, but why? Imagine their situation. They were put in that home with a little bit of money just to survive without any care of what will they do in their life. They are desperate because they have families back at home and okay it's not nice but fuck it they try to survive to earn some money to send it back home and so on. They don't have any chance to get involved in some job because you know these are the tricks of enlightened Europe. They only get help as homeless immigrants if they don't have a job. You know, these are the usual dirty tricks and so on. So what I'm saying is that yes we should also honestly analyze things at this level. But again the basic point again is this transcendental turn. In the sense of don't forget about your own perspective. Like things can be judged absolutely at this level. Antisemitism in the thirties or for example black racism today. Did I mention Black Lives Matter on Monday? I think I did. Yes, I mean why it is you see here we get to analyze concrete universality. You know this standard right liberal argument why Black Lives Matter, why not all lives matter? No, it's false. You know why? It's false in the same way that for example in Germany in thirty-five if you were to say but why focus only on Jews, why don't mention also how Germans suffer and so on? No. The precisely because they were central ideological construct of the Nazi ideology, hatred of the Jews was I'm almost tempted to use here this wonderful Kant's notion of transcendental schematism. In the sense that when you have a universal category to for this category to be ideologically effective it is always schematized, by this I mean embodied in a certain concrete specific category. The example that I use in my old books is, I'm unfortunately old enough, before Tony Blair there was John Major, the Prime Minister last conservative before New Labour. And it's incredible how when they already at that point, okay already Thatcher already did it, when they started the attack on welfare state they schematized it through the figure of of unemployed single mother. This was it. And it's incredible how somehow I almost admire them, they somehow related all the social evils to that figure. We don't have enough budget? Oh because we have to support single mothers. We have youth delinquency? Of course because single mothers can, it was absolutely incredible how everything was symbolized, made that, you see, this is what Kant means by schematism. And in a similar way today I claim, at least in the United States, violence against blacks even if all that right-wingers are saying probably is at some level true, like you know the usual right-wing argument is, but wait a minute, more black people kill other black people than white policemen and so on. This can all be quantitatively true. But nonetheless in today's ideological situation with alt-right alt-right and so on and so forth, this specific violence of authority against blacks is the field which schematizes the entire situation. Which is why again, to say in an apparently innocent common sense way why only black lives, all lives matter, it's already to cut off the edge. It's already, it's a false neutrality. And politically a very difficult, very difficult false neutrality. Okay, so I hope I made not in a not in a too confused way this situation clear. Next point you will say but what I'm dreaming about the transcendental situation, this is way behind us. No, as I already developed years ago so I hope I'm not selling you the old stuff, I think that what we usually called as deconstructionism or this historicist cultural relativism is absolutely the most radical form of transcendental approach. Why? Because for them the, again this German term *Unhintergehbar*, that horizon behind which you cannot step is concrete symbolic historical experience. Let me take you an example, you all know it, Michel Foucault. For him the ultimate point of our experience is what he calls episteme or discourse structure whatever, the this, so what do I mean by this? Let us say, repeat myself I know, if you were to ask a Foucauldian, do I have free will or not? He would simply reject this question as such because he would have said, wait a minute, which is the horizon of meaning, symbolic space within which you can even raise this question? And he would have probably said it's only the modernity. And he will be incidentally right. In medieval times and so on freedom, individual freedom and social law were not opposed in the way in which in modernity we oppose them. So or if you were to ask a Foucauldian do we have an immortal soul? He would have said wait a minute, you by raising this question you already presuppose or rely on a certain space of symbolic oppositions meaning and so on, soul, mortality, immortality, which are not self-evident. So for Foucault you cannot step behind this horizon. When you establish the episteme of a certain epoch, that's it. And now if you go to the end in this direction and Foucault does, you arrive at Heidegger of course. For whom and many politically correct cultural historians then go to the end in this direction when they claim for example why should we privileged modern science over traditional wisdoms? They simply move in different epistemes, they don't rely on the same notion of truth. And in some sense they are right. Science is never works like oh I look around I forget all the prejudices I just observe. No, silence come with a whole bag of implicit presuppositions that objective reality is out there meaningless subordinated only to natural laws and so on and so forth. This was the greatest break of modernity to approach nature as meaningless in itself. For medieval times nature was meaningful in itself. So what I'm saying is that in this sense this deconstructionist historicism, there are no et- always include the horizon from which you approach it, then Derrida would have added to it of course this horizon is always contradictory inconsistent within itself and so on, this is for me the most radical level of transcendental approach where again you reject direct confrontation with reality. I see this, what is this? You always ask yes but how do I see it? When I question it do I not already imply a certain perspective on it and so on. Sorry. And to go a step further here even with Heidegger, even with Derridean deconstruction, now I don't know how much you know Derrida he is a little bit out of fashion now but he gets caught in the same problem. Transcendentalism doesn't cover it all. You know where you can read this. On the one hand Derrida even described his procedure as arche-transcendental. He wants to bring the transcendental approach to the end. At the same time he sometimes for necessary reasons, I don't have today to type to go with into detail, but he comes dangerously close to some kind of a nonetheless new form of realism. Look at the notion of trace or archi-archetrace in his work. On the one hand it's pure transcendentalism in the sense that he said in whatever we claim there is already a trace of our horizon relativizing it in a historicist way. But in some comments on biological works he all of a sudden starts to talk about the function of différance and trace in nature itself. You know, if you see this slip of from this internal transcendental self-questioning to some kind of, let's call it naive realism, reality itself independently of us is structured as différance as trace. This is why Derrida often gets embarrassed when he asks sometimes he does honestly a simple question. When he talks about, in the early traditional Derrida, metaphysics of presence. Is this European metaphysics of presence or is it universal, can we step out of it? For example when he approaches the problem of Chinese thought. Is it that all we can say, the traditional Derrida's line is that this inside outside game, we are caught in metaphysics of presence, we can just do cuts, break it up, but we cannot ever step outside. Because the very idea of stepping outside is the ultimate metaphysical illusion. Okay, but nonetheless what does this mean? For example when we Europeans confront the Chinese thought, that we are that are we allowed to say this is also metaphysics of presence, is it totally different, can we get it? And again at this point things get complicated. But what I find especially interesting again is this idea of transcendental horizon in in traditional Marxism. You see where they always say the ultimate horizon of our experience is social practice. Every even our most abstract cognition is rooted in collective practice. We cannot step out of it. I think what we, and here I follow Quentin Meillassoux and other new realists or not to the end, what I I think that the transcendental approach doesn't work all the way. Because in some sense they have to admit that at least at the ontic level, level of simple empirical reality, we are a miserable species which emerged on the planet Earth and so on and so forth. Now how to bring these two together? This general evolutionary view: there is a history of nature, Big Bang blah blah blah and then gradually we emerged on a stupid small planet. And there is this transcendental approach: all that we know is conditioned by our social practice. And the ultimate solution of a transcendental Marxist is therefore necessarily a kind of radical agnosticism. We cannot know it. The idea is that all that we know about reality is nonetheless relative in the sense of already over-determined conditioned by our collective experience. So we cannot think outside our collective experience, which means that the only absolute that we have is the horizon of our collective experience. It's not absolute in the sense of absolute spirit origin God-like. It's absolute in the simple sense that we cannot step step outside it. But nonetheless the naive question remains here. So we are not able to answer the question where does this transcendental horizon itself come from? Because the transcendentalist would have said, in such a procedure, the transcendental horizon is always already presupposed. Every answer will be conditioned by our collective experience and so on and so forth. And this is the edge where I think today's thought is moving. In very general terms we have deconstructionism, other forms of transcendentalism, you can play this endless games of Derrida called this "always already". In what you are saying, even if you are talking about Big Bang, human collective experience is always already presupposed. So you cannot step behind it, but nonetheless we necessarily talk as if we can. When we do evolutionary biology and so on. Of course the empirical dream here is to say but why can't we simply do it? Evolutionary biology biology can explain how through all evolutionary tricks and so on how gradually out of some apes blah blah I don't know the story we humans emerged and so on. So but transcendentalists point out that this never works fully. You always have a certain circularity. You already presuppose what you want to explain and you know who is here a transcendentalist although he attacks transcendentalist like crazy, Louis Althusser even. When he talks in his early work already for Marx and *Reading Capital* about a structure, he emphasizes that structure is always already here. You cannot step out. You cannot ever evolutionary explain a structure. Every such explanation already presupposes a structure. You presuppose what you want to explain. And you find this even in Marx incidentally, when he says in his famous passage from *Grundrisse* I think forward, introduction so-called, sorry, that the the concept of man is the condition for the concept of gives a key to the concept of ape. So Marx's approach is not we can gradually explain the higher level from lower levels, gradual evolution. No, his point is that precisely because there is no teleology, nothing was predetermined, man might have not emerged. You need first structural order to search for its origins. And if you think I'm dreaming here, think about the paradox of *Capital*. It's a transcendental work. Transcendental in the sense that as Marx emphasizes, his starting point is the developed capitalist system. He analyzes its form in detail and only then in the last chapter of *Capital* on on so-called primordial accumulation, so-called, Marx says you can look into its genesis. So again, even structuralist, even Althusser, Althusser in a most interesting way because this is the big problem, the question prohibited by structuralism. You have chaos, then all of a sudden a structure is here. But every approach every way to articulate the genesis of structure already presupposes the structure. So are we then caught in this duality? That and this is where for example even honest thinker like Habermas remain. His basic move Habermas's problem is how to prevent total scientific objectivization of our lives. And his answer is basically a transcendental one, infinitely repeated. He said no matter how much we analyze human evolution in biological cognitive terms, we while we are doing it, we always already presuppose our ability to reason, argumentation and so on and so forth. We already presuppose the tools which we are using. So consequently Habermas openly says I'm an agnostic. I don't know what's the ultimate nature of our reality because I admit we are caught in the circle. And what I'm trying to do not yet successfully in my last books and so on latest and in the one that I'm finishing now is precisely somehow to break out. To find a way out of this transcendental circle being caught in a circle where a structure is always already here without falling back into naive realism, into oh I will tell you a general story of a reality and so on and so forth. But before we go into this I would like to I would like to conclude this part with the fourth position which may appear Lacanian but I think it's not. Is the position of some let's call them brutal materialists, from Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille. This is another contact with the absolute. It's the absolute of absolute negativity and radical destruction. Bataille is looking in what he looks searches for as experience of the sacred and so on the identification with some radical negativity in the sense of force of destruction and so on and only in this utter radical point of blindness, madness, it's proper madness, only at this point can we touch the absolute. And then the idea is of course for example my favorite I hate Antigone, my favorite one of my favorite no seriously speaking about Sophocles' great guy but *Oedipus at Colonus* is the true masterpiece, not *Antigone*. And of the other Euripides, how to translate this, the crazy girls dancing... *Bacchae*. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This you know this idea of radical zero point that this is our contact with the absolute. In this way we can reread, sorry for repeating some old points, we should and can reread even Marquis de Sade. Again sorry for repeating old point but for him you know first Sade was Marquis de Sade a naive realist, sorry, naive naturalist. His idea was a very simple one. We humans distort nature. Nature is not just construction, collaboration, work, nature is only destruction, killing, suffering. So to be fully natural, to assume our nature let's also do the horrible things, to put it very simply. But then at a certain point as Lacan emphasizes de Sade saw something in a very intelligent way. He saw that in this way we still remain slave of nature, we are not truly free masters of ourselves. We just try to obey nature. So now comes de Sade's true metaphysical idea, which is the dream of a radical crime which does not just fit perfectly the natural rhythm of generation and corruption, but which cuts short this rhythm itself. His definition of radical crime is not you kill some humans or animals, in this way you are still caught in the eternal circle of natural generation corruption. His idea of a radical crime is to destroy, stop, undermine this circle circular movement itself. That's his idea of radical crime. To cut short, suspend the very circle of natural causality. And here comes, it's more complex but basically Lacan's genius I claim. Because Lacan claims that what Sade didn't do, he was still too empirical, is that Sade calls this radical negativity the second death, not just the death of which is part of the eternal circle of life and death, but the death in the sense of the interruption of this eternal circle itself. So according to Lacan, it's a beautiful simple formulation, I quote it I think in my *The Disparities* book, Lacan says what Sade didn't see is that second death doesn't come after the first death. Like we just are born and die but then oh radical act we come. No, that second death comes before the first death. While we are alive we already assume second death insofar as we are caught in the symbolic order which is the order of death drive and so on and so forth. And for Lacan this second death is simply the condition of human desire. Human desire is precisely free in the sense that it's no longer caught into the natural rhythm. So and here comes second move by Kant for Lacan to establish that if we read the Sade in this way second death that in this sense Sade has to be read with Immanuel Kant. Because isn't it a beautiful provocative thought: what Sade describes as this horrible crime, second death, the interruption of the natural rhythm itself, he describes it almost in precisely the same terms as Kant describes an ethical act. For Kant, ethical act is an act which begins by itself autonomously, it cannot any longer be grounded in natural causality. For Kant, if you do something even if appears as good but as long as it is grounded in natural causality in the sense that you do it for some empirical profit causes, even if these profits or causes are very high. Like this would have been a Kantian example. Let's say I see a child there drowning, okay, I jump into the water and save him or her. But Kant would have asked, did you have a secret narcissistic calculation there? Did you notice that some people are watching you up there and you wanted to appear here or whatever? The moment any such consideration enters, it's not an ethical act. It might be beautiful and so on, but as Kantians we should say even if there was nobody there but you just imagined the respect for you that this would have aroused impossible witnesses, it's already in Kantian sense pathological. Now the distinction between Kant and sorry between Kant and Sade and the limit of Sade, sorry of Kant, for Lacan is that for Sade for Kant, sorry, our sexuality cannot reach this level. Our sexuality is totally empirically predetermined. You do it for lust, for pleasure and so on, you cannot do it as a free act. And I'm sorry to quote it again to you but it's here you have maybe the most famous passage of in Lacan's *Kant avec Sade*, where sorry a passage from Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* where he says: suppose that someone says that his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passions if in front of the house where he has this opportunity a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer may be. This is for Kant the the proof that our sexual passion is empirical, pathological, not in ordinary sense, pathological means for Kant conditioned by contingent empirical objects. But as Lacan points out, but not only true passion does meet this criteria. But a specific human perversion is that precisely in order to have a passion you need the threat of some gallows waiting for you. You know, there is I often quoted it an old Italian erotic comedy, I forgot the title, where Marcello Mastroianni is in love with a woman and he wants to seduce her to transgress, to do it as a sin. Then the woman laughs at him and says it they were supposed to marry and the woman and he wants to sleep with her the night before so that at least there is some transgression. Then the woman I think it was Virna Lisi, this is years old, just when they were supposed to go bed in a sinful way the night before wedding, the woman tells him look everything is okay, I spoke with a priest, we can do it. And everything is ruined, so in the last shot of the film we see him walking on that narrow porch outside on windows so that at least in this way he risks his life and does something aggressive, you know. So again for for Lacan the Sade sexual this Sadean second crime sexual p- is a proof that sexuality also not only can be non-pathological but in its basic structure of death drive is non-pathological. Our human sexuality is precisely free in the sense that if nothing else in the sense of this doing it just for the sake of it. Did you read it's a wonderful shot short story of Edgar Allan Poe *The Imp of the Perverse*, where he says that precisely what specifies us human being is that you do something, Poe uses Kantian terms, not for any determinate reasons but just for the sake of it, which is precisely Kantian formula of free act. Okay but let's go on. In what sense do we have a limitation here? Not limitation but what's the limitation of this view? It's very nice view and we can effectively show in Hegel how Hegel does all the time flirt with this idea. Not only in sexuality typically Hegel misses it. For Hegel unfortunately sexuality is just pathological biological sex and the only human dimension of sexuality that Hegel sees is through its culturalization. Instead of hitting your if you are a nice lady in and if I were to be younger, instead of hitting your head with a stone and then bam bam, I write you poems all the bullshit I buy you present, like the idea is that the same natural substance as in animals is just elevated into a cultural form. But what in a very strange that he doesn't do it, what Hegel doesn't take into account is that it's not as simple as that. The moment we are in human dimension, yes we have cultivated forms, poetry, rituals, but what they try to control is not natural sex but a strange excess of a deadly passion which already disturbs nature. Think about pure passion in the form of *Tristan and Isolde*. Their passion is clearly out of the social order. They talk about the the domain of night where all symbolic rules disappear, this deadly passion, but this is not nature. This is a passion so the theory here is that between natural and human there is a moment of negativity, a deadly passion, and we can arrive at human culture only through this passage. So that sexual customs are an attempt to cultivate, to gentrify, not nature but precisely this excess of wild human freedom. Okay you find this dimension also in Kant, I will not lose time here, I only want to draw attention to a fact which I developed in my last books of how Hegel has two other beautiful examples of this, which are of course both problematic. One Hegel at his Foucauldian best is at the beginning of his so-called anthropology he develops a unique totally Michel Foucault following Foucauldian theory of madness, where he says that our human mind with its discursive abilities, reasoning, appears structurally as a defense against madness. That you don't have animal human, in between is a moment of madness, when we lose our roots in nature and so on and so forth. And then Hegel says in a wonderful way that even if all of us empirically do not have to be mad for a moment, but the threat of madness has to be there because only against the threat of madness can we account for our civilized rational order. And at the very end of his history a philosophy of history, people don't know this, the same role is played by war. No, Hegel's last word is not that beautiful, okay beautiful not for us, organic almost fascist state described in his *Philosophy of Right*, his last word is war. He says that, and he gives a very good reason which I think is our big problem today how to overcome it, he says that basically all our ethics is grounded in the threat of war. In what sense? We are citizens here of this city-state me of my city-state whatever. And we are allowed to pursue our ordinary goals, welfare whatever, but the moment of truth comes and the highest ethical act for us is are you ready in a war to sacrifice your life. There you are reduced to your pure ethical substance, there things are for the real. Now Hegel is well aware that that's why for him it's a very sad conclusion, I hope he was wrong, that this is why Hegel was opposed to Kant's idea of eternal peace. He says that precisely if you take this eternal threat of war, you never know when there may be war, you will be called to do your duty. This is the precisely what in relation to other countries or states is crime, Hegel admits it. Between states we have brutal relations of nature, we can have peace treaties but they are always fragile, ultimately there is always by definition a threat of war. But Hegel knows that this external threat of war is in a way an immanent condition of civil order in our state. The ultimate foundation again of our civil order is the ultimate ethical test is your readiness to sacrifice your life in war and so on. Now the problem today of course is that there is one big Hegelian in this sense who works like this, it's Kim Jong-un. I almost admire them, you know I will bomb Guam or what did he threaten to bomb and so on. I think that precisely this is what we cannot afford. There is one interesting way out here, I doubt if it works, when they were negotiating end of Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev, I remember as very strange report in the newspaper that at one of their final talks they came to the idea that but maybe if we are invaded by aliens our wars will be over, we will have an external enemy. But you see it's the same logic, we need an enemy. So it's sorry. So again but nonetheless let me slowly conclude at this level we have some kind of a fourth position. The absolute is this terrifying zero level, self-destructive, prospect of madness, war, sexual madness, passion and so on. Again the whole work of civilization is to control it, but civilization can function only against this background and the threat is always here. I think that this was the original even Hegel's position. This is clearly again apropos madness, apropos war, he is a pessimist here. His idea is not at the end we have a great peace. No no, madness is, when Hegel talks about reconciliation he really means reconciliation with this terrifying fact, reconciliation with the fact that you cannot ever sublimate or whatever this threat. So this would be the fourth level of contact with the absolute. Now if you allow me a little bit of time and then because I will do what I promised you, again I'm betraying you, that's my nature, you know I think that the subtitle of my talk could be Lenin in, you know my eternal joke I'm sorry to mention it, Lenin in Warsaw. You know a young Komsomol guy screwing that's an old anti-Soviet joke Soviet joke that I like, if you don't know it there is a big painting exhibition in Moscow and visitors are shocked to see on the painting you see Nadezhda Krupskaya in bed Lenin's wife being fucked by a young Komsomol member passionately and then the title of the painting is *Lenin is in Warsaw*. And then the perplexed visitor asks but why this title, where is Lenin? And the guide calmly answers where Lenin is in Warsaw, no, that's why she can be doing this in Moscow no. So maybe in this sense you can say you know like like Lenin in Warsaw is my *Sex and the Absolute*, you know it's out there as a title that's why I will not talk about it you know. But seriously, so if I will not be able to do it today but I will nonetheless give you a hint what I nonetheless if I can as always rely on you so again you have the data for MI6 or whatever you have for most of them. I will send you today a text and you forward it to them. The text with exactly this title, which is chapter of my forthcoming book. I only ask you kindly don't put it on the web because then the publisher can prosecute you, once I was already in big trouble. So what's my idea here? Two points. My idea is that what if we approach, I will just give you two hints, one hint, what if we approach the question of the absolute in the opposite way? Not the question how we can break out of our historical limitation and reach the absolute as the fragile beautiful appearance, as the ultimate foundation of reality, as the force of destruction, whatever, but this truly Hegelian question which I quote to justify the title of my previous book *Disparity*, what if we are approaching this in the wrong way? What if the gap, I would like to begin with the very gap that separates us from the absolute? Because the whole problem of how to reach absolute means that absolute is as a distance. And to put it very short shortly, my solution is don't try to reach the absolute directly, but ask yourself the question what if the gap that separates me from the absolute is already immanent inherent to the absolute itself? What if in my very separation from the absolute I am precisely in the absolute because this separation characterizes the absolute itself? That's you may know how me in my atheist way I read Christianity. You know that God's famous "*Eli Eli lama sabachthani*", God why, father why have you forsaken me. This is how in Christianity you identify with God. You identify with Christ at the very point when he feels abandoned by God. Which means your separation from God is a separation of God from itself, which is I am already in. And I go very quickly here. This brings us this form of separation to Kantian notion of the sublime. I will not go into this parallel. It's explained in all my last books between Kant's antinomies, you will get this in the manuscript more in detail, Kant's antinomies and Lacan's formulas of sexuation. But let's limit ourselves to the sublime. The sublime, Kantian sublime of course not the usual, is the idea that we can experience the absolute only through our very failure to experience it. We try to do something, we fail it, but precisely in this failure the negative image of absolute shines through. Like that's Kantian idea for example of the dynamic absolute, storm, horrible thing, something which and Kant's idea is even the strongest storm cannot capture the strength of the moral law in myself. So precisely through being exposed to a natural disaster, negatively I experience the spiritual dimension, but only negatively, in the failure itself. And now you will say but what has this to do with sexuality, ha ha ha. You can say but this has nothing this is just Kant. Sorry not in as name you know. You see this is why people accuse me, like you as normal people would have said why did I even think about it, why didn't I, yeah that's why, fuck it, I was created like that ask God. No seriously now. You know that Kant sexualizes sublime. You know where? In his wonderful early writing, which is later taken over in his *Critique of Judgment*, on the sentiment of beautiful and sublime. Where Kant in a male chauvinist way I reject that identifies beautiful with feminine and sublime with masculine. I claim he was wrong here and even didn't know because later he developed in a wonderful way in *Critique of Pure Reason* and later in *Critique of Judgment* two modes of the sublime: mathematical and dynamic sublime and there is implicitly the sexual difference. So where is it? You remember I told you on the first day this dirty example of how of how you get this sudden desublimation, like you are with your sexual partner all of a sudden disgust enters and so on. This brings us to Lacan's definition of the sublime where the sublime is as Lacan sorry puts it is an ordinary object, thing, elevated to the level of the thing, the absolute object. But this identification of the two is always fragile. When you are in erotic trance the beloved is an ordinary man, woman elevated to the level of the thing, but this can all of a sudden desublimate itself. You just get and what I would have said is that this very gap is the only way that in sexuality we experience the absolute. Not in the vulgar New Age way oh my God I screwed your brains now it was absolute pleasure. No it's never that. But it's simply and that's the beauty of sexuality that you always miss it, the ultimate experience, but through this missing it it's there. It's there as a negative as a negative echo. That's why I claim I don't have time to develop it it will be in the chapter that I will send you, that's why I think that Catholic Church is so opposed to just sexuality which does not serve, I never got it, I always repeat this point can you answer me? I had debates with priests with bishops in Germany with these... Why do they say how can they say that sexuality without procreation is animal? I'm sorry, I think it's exactly the opposite. Animals do it when there is a mating season for procreation. Women do this that they elevate an act which is in itself physically a rather ridiculous act of copulation, they elevate it to the absolute. But always in this fragile sense that you get it you don't get it and so on. This is why Freud focuses on sexuality. Not because sexuality is the natural base of our being, but precisely sexuality in the human sense, this sexuality as fractured, traversed by impossibility, is the our first metaphysical experience. Okay I propose I'm so sorry I know I disappointed you but fuck it that's life. I will I promise after I return to my hotel I will immediately send it to you and you will all get again the key chapter of my new book where I try to go because I also to give you kind of to maybe insight your desire for something more attractive because the problem is here then if this perspective of post-humanity. Let's say our reproduction will be purely done in laboratories and so on and sexuality just pleasure principle and so on and we are directly linked to computers we lose our distance towards reality. What will happen with our being human? Will our desire survive? Yes, no, in no in what form and so on and so forth. I am not a cultural pessimist here again, but I just don't know. So I propose that now we do a little bit of democratic debate. If you... By the way that was really good this year. My God, why do you hate me so much? Preposterous and you left us on a cliff. Ah, you mean that yesterday and the day before yesterday it was pure shit no? Okay I got it. Okay um there’s a yeah we’ve got two there’s a question at the back. Give this microphone or you can come down or shout or whatever, yeah. I’d like to just engage with the question that was asked in the last lecture about the difference between Lacan and Jung. Yeah. Because I’ve been reading a lot of Alenka Zupančič’s *What Is Sex?* Yeah. And the formula she proposes is that there is two because the one is not. Yeah. So the not-one is presupposed as like absolute reality, like absolute negativity. And then I was also reading in Plato in the *Symposium* that there’s man and woman but originally there’s an androgynous form. Yeah. Like a unified androgynous form. And then I was talking to some men about how they experience their sexuality now and they were both sort of trying to get away from their status as a man towards a more androgynous form. And I was just I was just wondering if you’re going against the Jungian like essence of man and woman as the substantial self, and there’s like this absolute negativity of the not-one, how do we understand androgyny in the current sexual landscape as like a useful concept? Sorry, yes I I hope so. No but first the formula the formula is there is two because the one is not. Yeah but then she goes on, I know my God I read the manuscript we debated with her, but then at the end there are not even two you know that it gets even more complex. Because in what sense are there two? Her first point is that there are not even two that woman doesn't exist. There is only man and then you go to this that even man doesn't exist. Her point is this one, if I get it correctly, first that some Deleuzians or LGBT+ people would like to begin with some original multiplicity. Their view to which me and Alenka are both totally opposed is that original is neither one nor two, they're both bad metaphysical binary monotheist but some kind of original dispersed multiplicity, and then as a force of social oppression the binary form is imposed, you have to choose being one or two and so on. Now let me give you I hope you will swallow it a very abstract theoretical answer to this one. Alenka Zupančič's point is that one is not one in the sense that it in itself failed, which means always accompanied by a lack and or surplus. And as I already improvised on the first day I think feminine subjectivity enters here. It's a very nice Hegelian feminist view when Hegel says the point is you know his most famous passage to conceive the absolute not only as substance but also as subject. Her point would have been to conceive the absolute not only as masculine but also as feminine. In the sense that femininity is not a another substance supplementing man. We have man masculine principle but we also get no, masculine principle is in itself failed substance. And in this failure subjectivity enters. Now I will answer your crucial question. I will repeat maybe already did it here even, a wonderful joke from... okay I'll put it like this. So how do we get from multiplicity to one or two or whatever? The traditional answer, Lacanian it may appear, is the one that I already improvised here many times that whenever you have a series of particular entities you have to include one which embodies its exception. You know the examples I even used here I think maybe not on Monday but certainly ten times before. I didn't correct me. Did I talk about, I'm so ashamed to on this Monday did I talk here about Asiatic mode of production? Ha ha no. You know what's the idea? The idea is this: in Marx we have late Marx five six modes of production. Pre-class societies so-called primitive, wrongly called of course, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will come communism or nothing or... Now then Marx added Asiatic mode of production. But it's clear where is the problem here. It doesn't really work. Marx originally had five modes of production. Then he noticed that some of societies, ancient China, ancient India, ancient Egypt, Inca and other South American empires that they don't fit any of these and he proposed another mode of production which is really an empty container. The true meaning of Asiatic mode of production is all those modes of production which don’t which don't fit my classification. You know, it appears to be a positive term, but it’s just the embodiment of a lack. And so this would be the classical masculine form of totalization. You know it’s the old joke you know if we go to Borges that story quoted by Foucault at the beginning of *The Order of Things*, you know when Borges proposes the Chinese classification of dogs where the last item is all dogs who are not included in this classification. For Lévi-Strauss developed this, that every symbolic system because it tries to be universal but at the same time it has to exclude some, it cannot be universal, has to include this type of paradoxical entity which appears to be one of the terms but but precisely is a stand-in for the excluded. And of course the same role would have been for example in Hegel, that’s why read Frank Ruda's book of *Pöbel*, *Rebel*. Rebel is in Hegel precisely this, a special stand within society which includes all those who are not integrated into society, who do not... but then there is so this is how one arises through this reflexive move, the one of exception out of multitude. But there is another version which I much prefer. It's much closer to what Lacan describes as feminine, that you have, this is what Alenka describes with Lacan's terms the repression of the binary signifier. We have the couple one other, masculine feminine, but the other one doesn't have a signifier and at that element to fill in this lack multiplicity enters. The example I'm sorry to repeat myself endlessly that I like here is Woody Allen's early movie *Love and Death*, a parody on Tolstoy *War and Peace* and it's all about Tolstoy. Now which is the binary signifier to Tolstoy? Dostoevsky, no, for us. And you ask yourself where is Dostoevsky here? And he does, I don't like Woody Allen too much but here he does something very intelligent. The repressed returns in just one dialogue among two actors there where the name Dostoevsky is not pronounced, it remains primordially repressed, but in an ingenious way, I love it. All the great Dostoevsky novel titles are included. "What happened with that idiot?" "Ah you mean the guy who committed the crime and got the punishment?" "Yeah yeah that Karamazov brother, oh he became a gambler" and so on. No, this is the model. The multiplicity comes to fill in not only multiplicity, even I would say that would be the ultimate Hegelian Lacanian dialectic. It's not just that we have a basic opposition like yin yang and then it's subdivided into species. No, we get species because of the failure of the first big opposition. That's why again we can read in this way LGBT+. Either LGBT Q whatever multiplicity and then a plus, and this plus woman is this plus as such. This is why I would have said that's the formula that came to me, woman is not more than man. Woman is this more itself. Or another way you reminded me of this that Alenka puts it no that that's why we should not from Lacanian standpoint identify gender and sex. Gender with the classification of you are a butch you are a this tri-gen- gender, what is missing in gender classification is precisely the tension that defines sexuality as such. So again the idea is that we have a strange situation where gender and its species are on the same level. We have a gender which is deprived of its counterpart and then we g- why, it’s a very philosophical question. Why does a gender have species or genus universal? The idea is because it's failed in itself.
is my way to show real friendship. Why? Because it's so elementary, I don't get it how people don't get it. The meaning of this is, I hope you will accept it, you see we are such friends, we trust each other so much that we can afford even talking like that. For me, politeness is always a fear, I don't trust you, I don't know, and but, to avoid a misunderstanding, I am not saying that it works with everyone. We should just talk dirty and so on. With some people in some situations it works, with others it doesn't work, but it, I had quite some triumphs along this path. Before I go, one more. I think I already even used this story here about my experience in Argentina where I spoke there, this was such a surprise how I dragged somebody into obscene stuff. An old, very distinguished professor, you know, grey hair, he irradiated distinction, respect. And precisely to shock him, I went into, you know, this double meaning, I know you know the joke of the verb *coger*, not in Spain but in Argentina. Because the standard Argentinian joke is that in Spain it's just to grab, to search, in Argentina it's the f-word. So the standard joke is, and from him I got then the full story, the standard joke is that a stupid Spaniard comes to Argentina and asks "*¿Dónde puedo coger un taxi?*" Where can I grab a cab? And of course, Argentinians start to laugh. And this guy, I first thought I went too far, it was sublime experience of the divine because he, I thought he would be mad at me. You know, this really distinguished old person looked at me, then he started to laugh slowly and said, the our answer is, maybe you can try into exhaust fume, it's difficult but... You know, this was, I felt so good, this very distinguished old guy, he played my game, I broke him, you know. Okay, now really let's go on. So the same with you, which was that, I, I... No, don't, don't. No, nothing dirty. I will not ask like "*¿Dónde puedo coger María?*" or what. Don't be afraid. No, what I really want to say is take her seriously. You did a book, you did a reader and so on, no, your stuff I'm talking... Uh-huh. Which is worth reading, effectively. She is in the stuff. You know how I know, because with some of my talks you said that was really good. But I read it correctly, you know, like the subtle message was not like the last time when it was not, you know. And this is what I like, this also the opposite, the insults in the form of kindness, you know. The most bitchy, and women know this better than men, that the really bitchy insult is you just praise but then automatically in the background is the question, oh, so the other time I was not good at what. Let's go on now finally. You excuse me if I go really into metaphysics now. From this I will approach *Sex and the Absolute*. The project, that's why I'm postponing with this stupid introduction, because the project is really naive. I think we should risk things, to ask the most traditional naive questions, metaphysical even. And I want to approach and even risk an answer which will be mediated by sex to this most traditional theological or philosophical question. Again, with all naivety this implies, is there for us humans caught and embedded in a contingent historical reality, is there any possible contact with the absolute? Whatever we mean by this, and mostly we mean simply a point somehow exempted from the permanent flux of reality. You know, all reality is moving, corruption, destruction, generation of new, but is there a point of absolute? I claim that we have four, I am thinking now again tired of all these transcendental deconstructionist things, I want to approach it in an absolutely naive way. But at the same time highly theoretical and close to your experience. I think there are, as far as I could have seen it, maybe you can correct me, four main ways to do it. First, there are many traditional answers which rely on this our elevation nonetheless in certain privileged ecstatic moment to exempt ourselves from the flux of reality and get in touch with the absolute. The first model of this would have been in ancient Hindu *Upanishad* as the unity of Brahman, the supreme and sole ultimate reality, and Atman, the soul within each human being. So the idea is that when our soul purifies itself of all accidental non-spiritual content, it experiences ecstatically its identity with the absolute foundation of all reality. And this experience is usually again described in terms of some higher identity of the opposites as Schelling, the German idealist, put it. It’s you are neither active nor passive. Even for Schelling the model of this is artistic creation, which in contrast to human activity, that was Schelling's problem, and he is unique, Schelling, in privileging art over philosophy. He says philosophy as articulate rational thinking is still a form of activity trying to penetrate its passive object. And the opposite experience of, of perceiving beauty or whatever, on there we are passive. Is there an absolute identity of passivity and activity? And for him it is artistic creativity, where of course in some sense the actor, agent, writer, composer is active, but at the same time it's not that you as a self are active. It's something acts through you. You know, to use these kitschy words which even Lacan sometimes uses, something in me more than myself is acting through me and so on. So we have different versions, but this would be of it, and we have then of course the Buddhist version which is the most radical when you get over your false identity of yourself, you become, it's a beautiful precise description, your thoughts become thoughts without a thinker, an agent. You become just an open space for thoughts, your mind becomes like an empty screen, you become, become one with whatever we call it, Sunyata, the void and so on and so forth. So this is the first answer. It has its, it has its authenticity. I don't make fun of it. I'm just describing, giving you a classification. Then the second position, which is more paradoxical in a way, I think I already mentioned it, the first, didn't I on the first day here, which means Monday, mention the example making fun of myself, losing a friend of Billy Bathgate? You know, two novels and the real one is just a virtual point of reference between the two. What logic do we have here? Not only in art but mostly in art you find an opposite, exactly opposite notion of the absolute. Not absolute as the ultimate foundation in the sense of, you know, you lose all, you get rid of all empirical reality and so on, just the real substance behind. Which is why incidentally in this first line I should also have mentioned Spinoza of course. What Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God is precisely this ecstatic unity with substance as the only ultimate reality. The second position would have been that of course reality the way we know it, it's all permanent flux, degradation, everything returns to dust, but the only absolute eternity that we can experience is the eternity of the pure appearance itself. I will quote you one example which I quote in one of my books already so I'm sorry if you know it. In one of Agatha Christie's short stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as a beauty he met on a transatlantic voyage years ago. She merely put on a wig and obfuscated her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, sadly remarks how if a beautiful woman can make herself appear ugly then the same can also be done in the opposite direction. What then remains in men's infatuation beyond deception? Thus this insight into the unreliability of the beauty of the beloved woman not announce the end of love? Poirot answers, "No my friend, it announces the beginning of wisdom." Such a skepticism, such an awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, I will now not touch the point why this male chauvinist perspective, just I think more in formal terms, misses the point I think, which is that, again I'm sorry for male chauvinist twist it can be all reformulated, that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which temporarily appears. No matter how fragile and deceptive this beauty is at the level of substantial reality, what transpires through it is the moment of beauty as an absolute. There is more truth in the appearance than in what is hidden beneath appearance. And I think Alain Badiou knows this, that's also how we should read Plato. Not in the substantial way that there is reality but beneath this reality there is another more substantial reality. No, when Plato talks about eternal ideas, he precisely talks about the very form of appearance. Plato knew this, later realist readers missed it. Idea means the pure form of how things appear to us. At least the late Plato, he knows very well that ultimately our reality is one of decay, degradation and so on, in *Timaeus* and the last text he makes this very clear. So again, you know again imagine man, work of art, whatever, it's all fragile, but when you are entranced by it, when you have this experience, my God, briefly I feel intensely the beauty of it. It can be a woman's or a man's body, it can be whatever. This fragile appearance is absolute. Of course it's an absolute which is totally rooted in concrete experience, like you disturb the experience a little bit there is no absolute, just vulgar reality, but experience is here. And this is, this would be the aestheticist view, that this is the encounter of the absolute. It doesn't matter if it's historically conditioned, of course it is and so on, but in that ecstatic moment you encounter something which is in the air, more than reality. And again it's pure appearance, it's not another substantial reality. This would be then the opposite view, this fragility of the absolute. Now let's go on. The third form of the absolute is I call it the transcendental absolute. And I would include here Western Marxism. What do I mean by transcendental absolute? I mean this: the entire philosophy, modern usually, privileges one specific experience claiming that not that it's absolute, but that in our human space we cannot move behind or beyond it. Germans have a beautiful term, *Unhintergehbar*. You cannot go step behind it. And here we get for example in a very simple way the distinction, the gap that forever separates so-called Western Marxism from the Stalinist dialectical materialism. Stalinist dialectical materialism is traditional ontology. Dialectical materialism is supposed to deploy the laws rules the train entire material reality, and since we are just a tiny species on our planet and so on, then concretely our historical experience, historical materialism, becomes just a specific sphere of reality. This is traditional realism. The whole, not whole whole, but the basic first philosophical gesture of Western Marxism is to say no. In our, this may be in some naturalist sense clear, of course even the most radical Western Marxist like the young Lukács and so on did not think that we humans created nature. They were aware we emerged on this stupid planet blah blah blah. And they were as pessimist as I am. For me, getting old and bitter, did you see Lars von Trier's, what's that one where the earth explodes, *Melancholia*? I think this is a very happy movie, good things happens at the end, but that's another story. What I want to say is that as Lukács points out the fact is, and this is the transcendental dimension at its purest, the fact is that all our experience, even experience of reality like fossils independent of us blah blah blah, is mediated through not through our thinking, Lukács is a Marxist materialist, through our collective historical praxis. As Lukács puts it in classic terms, nature is always a historical category. And this is for me the transcendental approach. Although you in principle admit we are just part of tiny reality blah blah, but nonetheless in our practical experience, the way we experience reality, no matter how abstract this reality is, imagine now they are discovering water on Mars, maybe this means there is life there, whatever, is always mediated by our praxis. And the classical example here, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, I also repeat it because it's the most simple one, would have been for example literally the concept of nature. The first great biologist Linnaeus, I think he was Danish but I'm not sure, Belgian, Danish or Belgian, Danish, yeah, his image of nature as hierarchic system clearly mirrors the absolute monarchy of early modernity. With Darwin, you know that this is an empirical fact, that Darwin was directly influenced by Malthus in his notion of natural evolution and struggle for survival. Now be careful here, neither me nor the young Lukács would claim oh there is no truth then in Darwinism. No, just it doesn't say they are not true, it says nonetheless that their appearance, the appearance of Darwinism, was clearly located, echoed, was part of the experience of reality rooted in early wild capitalism. And then it goes on. Isn't it clear how today's predominant in cognitive sciences and so on image of nature as DNA and so on, system of information and so on, is again clearly conditioned by new digital media, by this new approach which sees exchange of informations and so on in genes or whatever. So again, that's the point, that you cannot abstract from concrete historical experience. And what I'm saying, now you will say this is subjectivism. No, it's not, because what I'm saying here is something much more precise, it's that there can be this transcendental logic in the sense of a particular sphere which overdetermines our experience of reality as such. It can even be thought without subject. In very precise terms, Claude Lévi-Strauss defined very precisely his anthropology as transcendentalism without a transcendental subject, without subject. He is Kantian but without the subject. Kantian in the sense that for him symbolic structure is again, to use the German term, *Unhintergehbar*. You cannot step behind it. You're always caught in it. And it can be easily shown that there is a point in it. Even if we talk about nature. Nature is everything, but we always conceive it in opposition to culture. We cannot think nature without this implicit negation. This is why this would also be another wonderful approach how I claim to struggle with or to even confront properly ecological problems. We, I often repeat this point, I'm sorry if you know it, we have to get rid of this idea of nature as natural. Our spontaneous notion of the natural is something which moves in circle, repeats itself again and again. Nature is a certain basic rhythm. Sun goes down, next morning sun goes up, epochs, winter, summer and so on, this natural balanced rhythm. And then within this natural balanced rhythm, man appears as humanity, appears as an unnatural hubris distortion. We disturbed the rhythm. I think we have to totally abandon this perspective. First, there is absolutely no base to conceive nature as some kind of a balanced circular movement which then we evil humans disrupt, destroy. This notion of nature is precisely human projection at its purest. Again, sorry to repeat myself, my old example, just think about what is our main source of energy: oil, oil and and coal and so on. But can you just imagine what kind of mega ecological catastrophes must have happened in human prehistory, pre-human history of our earth, to have all these results? I mean, we are literally being fed the source of our energy are the past catastrophes. So it's totally wrong and and Darwin, this is another more subversive thing of Darwin, he saw this how every balance, every balance of nature, natural balance is contingent, temporary and so on and so forth. It's not that we humans are hubris, nature is even more crazy than we are. Again, my old joke, if you say Mother Earth, well this mother is a dirty bitch. You cannot rely on her. And that's very important to take into account in confronting ecology today. I think we should drop all those the metaphorics of we disturb natural balance, we should return to it and so on and so forth. We are permanently under threat. Peter Sloterdijk, my right-wing friend, put it nicely that on all three levels, surface of the earth, beneath and above, there are threats. Above, who knows, you know a relatively small in celestial terms asteroid can screw things up totally. Beneath, who knows, a strong volcanic explosion, it can be a relatively small one but you remember the big one which was a shock in late 19th century, that close to Indonesia or where, that small island, Krakatoa. Just one island blown up. But you know that for two years afterwards there was hunger in Europe because of the clouds and so on. We are so fragile and of course the earth itself, storms and all that and so on. So we have to get a sense of this utter utter fragility of even the natural of even the natural balance. So back to my historical materialist or whatever Marxist point and so on and so forth. What does the transcendental approach mean? It in what sense it is absolute? That's the beauty of historical materialist approach. I will give you an old example but that I often use just to make this clear. Historicity does not mean there are no absolute truth, everything is relative, who knows there can be another perspective on it. No. There is an access to absolute, absolute in the sense of unconditional, totally reliable, but not in the sense of eternal outside our scope. Simply you can arrive at this truth at the level of reflexive self-relation. What do I mean by this? Oh sorry again my old example. Sorry if I repeat myself. Let us take antisemitism. I like it because it's ideology at its purest. You know my sympathy for Palestinians but nonetheless I like this example because it's pure. I claim that when, sorry repeating my old joke, if you debate let's say with an antisemitic German, usually I locate this debate '35 Germany. I'm the bad guy not you, you are the good guy, I'm antisemitic. And you say, you criticize me. And I say let's compare, let's turn to the facts. The moment you do this you have sold your soul to the devil. Because the if we turn to the facts, the truth would have been somewhere in between. I can say, okay, we maybe exaggerate a little bit, but look at the statistics: of lawyers in Germany are Jews. This is true. of journalists are Jews. It's true. Many Jews were rich, exploited ordinary Germans. It's true. And then I you can say oh but some of the Jews are poor. I say okay, but there is a problem. We can we can debate endlessly. But I think I think that first that the problem here is na- is not to approach it at this level because again you know my old joke here, the Lacan that I always quote, the my inspiration is here Lacan who wrote somewhere already in his early years I think that even if a jealous husband if a husband is pathologically jealous of his wife, and even if all his suspicions are true, the wife is promiscuous, sleeping around, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. Why? Because the true question is not is his wife really like that. The true question is why is his entire identity rooted in the jealousy? Why does he need jealousy? So again, I'm not saying Jews are really like that. I'm saying it's ultimately indifferent, although we should analyze it I but the basic question is why does a Nazi need the figure of the Jew without which his entire ideological edifice falls apart. And here we discover the fundamental lie, which is immanently a lie to cover up social antagonisms and so on. So you see what I'm saying, independently of all research into data and so on, antisemitism is a lie. It's absolutely wrong. You cannot because the level at which its truth or its false nature is decided it is at this subjectively reflected level. It's not Jews are not really like that. Up to a point they are. All people are a little bit of this empirically, a little bit of that. But nonetheless the way the Nazi universe is structured, antisemitism functions as a lie. And now we come to the tricky nature of it and we can debate this later. It functions as a lie and the most efficient lie it is when it's at the level of facts partially true. And there we can debate it here. But that's where I'm afraid of how liberal left in Europe is dealing with immigrants. You know, if there is some crime committed by them don't talk about it and so on and so forth. No, it’s horrible. In this way you abandon the field and give the argument to the right-wingers. Our true question should not be should not be is it true or not. Of course immigrants commit crimes but we commit even more crimes and so on. The point is not this. The point is why this totally irrational fear a couple of thousand of immigrants will threaten our identity and so on and so forth. Don't look at them immigrants, look at us. And this is absolutely true. So my point is even if many data quoted by alt-right about immigrant crimes and so on, even there of course things are more complex. Like in my own country, Slovenia, they now the latest right-wing rumor against immigrants is that they are involved in suspicious activities in some cultural center on Metelkova Street, which is close to their home, building allocated to them, that they are selling drugs and or some I don't know what. But you know, even at the level of facts it gets more complex because probably they are doing it, but why? Imagine their situation. They were put in that home with a little bit of money just to survive without any care of what will they do in their life. They are desperate because they have families back at home and okay it's not nice but fuck it they try to survive to earn some money to send it back home and so on. They don't have any chance to get involved in some job because you know these are the tricks of enlightened Europe. They only get help as homeless immigrants if they don't have a job. You know, these are the usual dirty tricks and so on. So what I'm saying is that yes we should also honestly analyze things at this level. But again the basic point again is this transcendental turn. In the sense of don't forget about your own perspective. Like things can be judged absolutely at this level. Antisemitism in the thirties or for example black racism today. Did I mention Black Lives Matter on Monday? I think I did. Yes, I mean why it is you see here we get to analyze concrete universality. You know this standard right liberal argument why Black Lives Matter, why not all lives matter? No, it's false. You know why? It's false in the same way that for example in Germany in thirty-five if you were to say but why focus only on Jews, why don't mention also how Germans suffer and so on? No. The precisely because they were central ideological construct of the Nazi ideology, hatred of the Jews was I'm almost tempted to use here this wonderful Kant's notion of transcendental schematism. In the sense that when you have a universal category to for this category to be ideologically effective it is always schematized, by this I mean embodied in a certain concrete specific category. The example that I use in my old books is, I'm unfortunately old enough, before Tony Blair there was John Major, the Prime Minister last conservative before New Labour. And it's incredible how when they already at that point, okay already Thatcher already did it, when they started the attack on welfare state they schematized it through the figure of of unemployed single mother. This was it. And it's incredible how somehow I almost admire them, they somehow related all the social evils to that figure. We don't have enough budget? Oh because we have to support single mothers. We have youth delinquency? Of course because single mothers can, it was absolutely incredible how everything was symbolized, made that, you see, this is what Kant means by schematism. And in a similar way today I claim, at least in the United States, violence against blacks even if all that right-wingers are saying probably is at some level true, like you know the usual right-wing argument is, but wait a minute, more black people kill other black people than white policemen and so on. This can all be quantitatively true. But nonetheless in today's ideological situation with alt-right alt-right and so on and so forth, this specific violence of authority against blacks is the field which schematizes the entire situation. Which is why again, to say in an apparently innocent common sense way why only black lives, all lives matter, it's already to cut off the edge. It's already, it's a false neutrality. And politically a very difficult, very difficult false neutrality. Okay, so I hope I made not in a not in a too confused way this situation clear. Next point you will say but what I'm dreaming about the transcendental situation, this is way behind us. No, as I already developed years ago so I hope I'm not selling you the old stuff, I think that what we usually called as deconstructionism or this historicist cultural relativism is absolutely the most radical form of transcendental approach. Why? Because for them the, again this German term *Unhintergehbar*, that horizon behind which you cannot step is concrete symbolic historical experience. Let me take you an example, you all know it, Michel Foucault. For him the ultimate point of our experience is what he calls episteme or discourse structure whatever, the this, so what do I mean by this? Let us say, repeat myself I know, if you were to ask a Foucauldian, do I have free will or not? He would simply reject this question as such because he would have said, wait a minute, which is the horizon of meaning, symbolic space within which you can even raise this question? And he would have probably said it's only the modernity. And he will be incidentally right. In medieval times and so on freedom, individual freedom and social law were not opposed in the way in which in modernity we oppose them. So or if you were to ask a Foucauldian do we have an immortal soul? He would have said wait a minute, you by raising this question you already presuppose or rely on a certain space of symbolic oppositions meaning and so on, soul, mortality, immortality, which are not self-evident. So for Foucault you cannot step behind this horizon. When you establish the episteme of a certain epoch, that's it. And now if you go to the end in this direction and Foucault does, you arrive at Heidegger of course. For whom and many politically correct cultural historians then go to the end in this direction when they claim for example why should we privileged modern science over traditional wisdoms? They simply move in different epistemes, they don't rely on the same notion of truth. And in some sense they are right. Science is never works like oh I look around I forget all the prejudices I just observe. No, silence come with a whole bag of implicit presuppositions that objective reality is out there meaningless subordinated only to natural laws and so on and so forth. This was the greatest break of modernity to approach nature as meaningless in itself. For medieval times nature was meaningful in itself. So what I'm saying is that in this sense this deconstructionist historicism, there are no et- always include the horizon from which you approach it, then Derrida would have added to it of course this horizon is always contradictory inconsistent within itself and so on, this is for me the most radical level of transcendental approach where again you reject direct confrontation with reality. I see this, what is this? You always ask yes but how do I see it? When I question it do I not already imply a certain perspective on it and so on. Sorry. And to go a step further here even with Heidegger, even with Derridean deconstruction, now I don't know how much you know Derrida he is a little bit out of fashion now but he gets caught in the same problem. Transcendentalism doesn't cover it all. You know where you can read this. On the one hand Derrida even described his procedure as arche-transcendental. He wants to bring the transcendental approach to the end. At the same time he sometimes for necessary reasons, I don't have today to type to go with into detail, but he comes dangerously close to some kind of a nonetheless new form of realism. Look at the notion of trace or archi-archetrace in his work. On the one hand it's pure transcendentalism in the sense that he said in whatever we claim there is already a trace of our horizon relativizing it in a historicist way. But in some comments on biological works he all of a sudden starts to talk about the function of différance and trace in nature itself. You know, if you see this slip of from this internal transcendental self-questioning to some kind of, let's call it naive realism, reality itself independently of us is structured as différance as trace. This is why Derrida often gets embarrassed when he asks sometimes he does honestly a simple question. When he talks about, in the early traditional Derrida, metaphysics of presence. Is this European metaphysics of presence or is it universal, can we step out of it? For example when he approaches the problem of Chinese thought. Is it that all we can say, the traditional Derrida's line is that this inside outside game, we are caught in metaphysics of presence, we can just do cuts, break it up, but we cannot ever step outside. Because the very idea of stepping outside is the ultimate metaphysical illusion. Okay, but nonetheless what does this mean? For example when we Europeans confront the Chinese thought, that we are that are we allowed to say this is also metaphysics of presence, is it totally different, can we get it? And again at this point things get complicated. But what I find especially interesting again is this idea of transcendental horizon in in traditional Marxism. You see where they always say the ultimate horizon of our experience is social practice. Every even our most abstract cognition is rooted in collective practice. We cannot step out of it. I think what we, and here I follow Quentin Meillassoux and other new realists or not to the end, what I I think that the transcendental approach doesn't work all the way. Because in some sense they have to admit that at least at the ontic level, level of simple empirical reality, we are a miserable species which emerged on the planet Earth and so on and so forth. Now how to bring these two together? This general evolutionary view: there is a history of nature, Big Bang blah blah blah and then gradually we emerged on a stupid small planet. And there is this transcendental approach: all that we know is conditioned by our social practice. And the ultimate solution of a transcendental Marxist is therefore necessarily a kind of radical agnosticism. We cannot know it. The idea is that all that we know about reality is nonetheless relative in the sense of already over-determined conditioned by our collective experience. So we cannot think outside our collective experience, which means that the only absolute that we have is the horizon of our collective experience. It's not absolute in the sense of absolute spirit origin God-like. It's absolute in the simple sense that we cannot step step outside it. But nonetheless the naive question remains here. So we are not able to answer the question where does this transcendental horizon itself come from? Because the transcendentalist would have said, in such a procedure, the transcendental horizon is always already presupposed. Every answer will be conditioned by our collective experience and so on and so forth. And this is the edge where I think today's thought is moving. In very general terms we have deconstructionism, other forms of transcendentalism, you can play this endless games of Derrida called this "always already". In what you are saying, even if you are talking about Big Bang, human collective experience is always already presupposed. So you cannot step behind it, but nonetheless we necessarily talk as if we can. When we do evolutionary biology and so on. Of course the empirical dream here is to say but why can't we simply do it? Evolutionary biology biology can explain how through all evolutionary tricks and so on how gradually out of some apes blah blah I don't know the story we humans emerged and so on. So but transcendentalists point out that this never works fully. You always have a certain circularity. You already presuppose what you want to explain and you know who is here a transcendentalist although he attacks transcendentalist like crazy, Louis Althusser even. When he talks in his early work already for Marx and *Reading Capital* about a structure, he emphasizes that structure is always already here. You cannot step out. You cannot ever evolutionary explain a structure. Every such explanation already presupposes a structure. You presuppose what you want to explain. And you find this even in Marx incidentally, when he says in his famous passage from *Grundrisse* I think forward, introduction so-called, sorry, that the the concept of man is the condition for the concept of gives a key to the concept of ape. So Marx's approach is not we can gradually explain the higher level from lower levels, gradual evolution. No, his point is that precisely because there is no teleology, nothing was predetermined, man might have not emerged. You need first structural order to search for its origins. And if you think I'm dreaming here, think about the paradox of *Capital*. It's a transcendental work. Transcendental in the sense that as Marx emphasizes, his starting point is the developed capitalist system. He analyzes its form in detail and only then in the last chapter of *Capital* on on so-called primordial accumulation, so-called, Marx says you can look into its genesis. So again, even structuralist, even Althusser, Althusser in a most interesting way because this is the big problem, the question prohibited by structuralism. You have chaos, then all of a sudden a structure is here. But every approach every way to articulate the genesis of structure already presupposes the structure. So are we then caught in this duality? That and this is where for example even honest thinker like Habermas remain. His basic move Habermas's problem is how to prevent total scientific objectivization of our lives. And his answer is basically a transcendental one, infinitely repeated. He said no matter how much we analyze human evolution in biological cognitive terms, we while we are doing it, we always already presuppose our ability to reason, argumentation and so on and so forth. We already presuppose the tools which we are using. So consequently Habermas openly says I'm an agnostic. I don't know what's the ultimate nature of our reality because I admit we are caught in the circle. And what I'm trying to do not yet successfully in my last books and so on latest and in the one that I'm finishing now is precisely somehow to break out. To find a way out of this transcendental circle being caught in a circle where a structure is always already here without falling back into naive realism, into oh I will tell you a general story of a reality and so on and so forth. But before we go into this I would like to I would like to conclude this part with the fourth position which may appear Lacanian but I think it's not. Is the position of some let's call them brutal materialists, from Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille. This is another contact with the absolute. It's the absolute of absolute negativity and radical destruction. Bataille is looking in what he looks searches for as experience of the sacred and so on the identification with some radical negativity in the sense of force of destruction and so on and only in this utter radical point of blindness, madness, it's proper madness, only at this point can we touch the absolute. And then the idea is of course for example my favorite I hate Antigone, my favorite one of my favorite no seriously speaking about Sophocles' great guy but *Oedipus at Colonus* is the true masterpiece, not *Antigone*. And of the other Euripides, how to translate this, the crazy girls dancing... *Bacchae*. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This you know this idea of radical zero point that this is our contact with the absolute. In this way we can reread, sorry for repeating some old points, we should and can reread even Marquis de Sade. Again sorry for repeating old point but for him you know first Sade was Marquis de Sade a naive realist, sorry, naive naturalist. His idea was a very simple one. We humans distort nature. Nature is not just construction, collaboration, work, nature is only destruction, killing, suffering. So to be fully natural, to assume our nature let's also do the horrible things, to put it very simply. But then at a certain point as Lacan emphasizes de Sade saw something in a very intelligent way. He saw that in this way we still remain slave of nature, we are not truly free masters of ourselves. We just try to obey nature. So now comes de Sade's true metaphysical idea, which is the dream of a radical crime which does not just fit perfectly the natural rhythm of generation and corruption, but which cuts short this rhythm itself. His definition of radical crime is not you kill some humans or animals, in this way you are still caught in the eternal circle of natural generation corruption. His idea of a radical crime is to destroy, stop, undermine this circle circular movement itself. That's his idea of radical crime. To cut short, suspend the very circle of natural causality. And here comes, it's more complex but basically Lacan's genius I claim. Because Lacan claims that what Sade didn't do, he was still too empirical, is that Sade calls this radical negativity the second death, not just the death of which is part of the eternal circle of life and death, but the death in the sense of the interruption of this eternal circle itself. So according to Lacan, it's a beautiful simple formulation, I quote it I think in my *The Disparities* book, Lacan says what Sade didn't see is that second death doesn't come after the first death. Like we just are born and die but then oh radical act we come. No, that second death comes before the first death. While we are alive we already assume second death insofar as we are caught in the symbolic order which is the order of death drive and so on and so forth. And for Lacan this second death is simply the condition of human desire. Human desire is precisely free in the sense that it's no longer caught into the natural rhythm. So and here comes second move by Kant for Lacan to establish that if we read the Sade in this way second death that in this sense Sade has to be read with Immanuel Kant. Because isn't it a beautiful provocative thought: what Sade describes as this horrible crime, second death, the interruption of the natural rhythm itself, he describes it almost in precisely the same terms as Kant describes an ethical act. For Kant, ethical act is an act which begins by itself autonomously, it cannot any longer be grounded in natural causality. For Kant, if you do something even if appears as good but as long as it is grounded in natural causality in the sense that you do it for some empirical profit causes, even if these profits or causes are very high. Like this would have been a Kantian example. Let's say I see a child there drowning, okay, I jump into the water and save him or her. But Kant would have asked, did you have a secret narcissistic calculation there? Did you notice that some people are watching you up there and you wanted to appear here or whatever? The moment any such consideration enters, it's not an ethical act. It might be beautiful and so on, but as Kantians we should say even if there was nobody there but you just imagined the respect for you that this would have aroused impossible witnesses, it's already in Kantian sense pathological. Now the distinction between Kant and sorry between Kant and Sade and the limit of Sade, sorry of Kant, for Lacan is that for Sade for Kant, sorry, our sexuality cannot reach this level. Our sexuality is totally empirically predetermined. You do it for lust, for pleasure and so on, you cannot do it as a free act. And I'm sorry to quote it again to you but it's here you have maybe the most famous passage of in Lacan's *Kant avec Sade*, where sorry a passage from Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* where he says: suppose that someone says that his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passions if in front of the house where he has this opportunity a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer may be. This is for Kant the the proof that our sexual passion is empirical, pathological, not in ordinary sense, pathological means for Kant conditioned by contingent empirical objects. But as Lacan points out, but not only true passion does meet this criteria. But a specific human perversion is that precisely in order to have a passion you need the threat of some gallows waiting for you. You know, there is I often quoted it an old Italian erotic comedy, I forgot the title, where Marcello Mastroianni is in love with a woman and he wants to seduce her to transgress, to do it as a sin. Then the woman laughs at him and says it they were supposed to marry and the woman and he wants to sleep with her the night before so that at least there is some transgression. Then the woman I think it was Virna Lisi, this is years old, just when they were supposed to go bed in a sinful way the night before wedding, the woman tells him look everything is okay, I spoke with a priest, we can do it. And everything is ruined, so in the last shot of the film we see him walking on that narrow porch outside on windows so that at least in this way he risks his life and does something aggressive, you know. So again for for Lacan the Sade sexual this Sadean second crime sexual p- is a proof that sexuality also not only can be non-pathological but in its basic structure of death drive is non-pathological. Our human sexuality is precisely free in the sense that if nothing else in the sense of this doing it just for the sake of it. Did you read it's a wonderful shot short story of Edgar Allan Poe *The Imp of the Perverse*, where he says that precisely what specifies us human being is that you do something, Poe uses Kantian terms, not for any determinate reasons but just for the sake of it, which is precisely Kantian formula of free act. Okay but let's go on. In what sense do we have a limitation here? Not limitation but what's the limitation of this view? It's very nice view and we can effectively show in Hegel how Hegel does all the time flirt with this idea. Not only in sexuality typically Hegel misses it. For Hegel unfortunately sexuality is just pathological biological sex and the only human dimension of sexuality that Hegel sees is through its culturalization. Instead of hitting your if you are a nice lady in and if I were to be younger, instead of hitting your head with a stone and then bam bam, I write you poems all the bullshit I buy you present, like the idea is that the same natural substance as in animals is just elevated into a cultural form. But what in a very strange that he doesn't do it, what Hegel doesn't take into account is that it's not as simple as that. The moment we are in human dimension, yes we have cultivated forms, poetry, rituals, but what they try to control is not natural sex but a strange excess of a deadly passion which already disturbs nature. Think about pure passion in the form of *Tristan and Isolde*. Their passion is clearly out of the social order. They talk about the the domain of night where all symbolic rules disappear, this deadly passion, but this is not nature. This is a passion so the theory here is that between natural and human there is a moment of negativity, a deadly passion, and we can arrive at human culture only through this passage. So that sexual customs are an attempt to cultivate, to gentrify, not nature but precisely this excess of wild human freedom. Okay you find this dimension also in Kant, I will not lose time here, I only want to draw attention to a fact which I developed in my last books of how Hegel has two other beautiful examples of this, which are of course both problematic. One Hegel at his Foucauldian best is at the beginning of his so-called anthropology he develops a unique totally Michel Foucault following Foucauldian theory of madness, where he says that our human mind with its discursive abilities, reasoning, appears structurally as a defense against madness. That you don't have animal human, in between is a moment of madness, when we lose our roots in nature and so on and so forth. And then Hegel says in a wonderful way that even if all of us empirically do not have to be mad for a moment, but the threat of madness has to be there because only against the threat of madness can we account for our civilized rational order. And at the very end of his history a philosophy of history, people don't know this, the same role is played by war. No, Hegel's last word is not that beautiful, okay beautiful not for us, organic almost fascist state described in his *Philosophy of Right*, his last word is war. He says that, and he gives a very good reason which I think is our big problem today how to overcome it, he says that basically all our ethics is grounded in the threat of war. In what sense? We are citizens here of this city-state me of my city-state whatever. And we are allowed to pursue our ordinary goals, welfare whatever, but the moment of truth comes and the highest ethical act for us is are you ready in a war to sacrifice your life. There you are reduced to your pure ethical substance, there things are for the real. Now Hegel is well aware that that's why for him it's a very sad conclusion, I hope he was wrong, that this is why Hegel was opposed to Kant's idea of eternal peace. He says that precisely if you take this eternal threat of war, you never know when there may be war, you will be called to do your duty. This is the precisely what in relation to other countries or states is crime, Hegel admits it. Between states we have brutal relations of nature, we can have peace treaties but they are always fragile, ultimately there is always by definition a threat of war. But Hegel knows that this external threat of war is in a way an immanent condition of civil order in our state. The ultimate foundation again of our civil order is the ultimate ethical test is your readiness to sacrifice your life in war and so on. Now the problem today of course is that there is one big Hegelian in this sense who works like this, it's Kim Jong-un. I almost admire them, you know I will bomb Guam or what did he threaten to bomb and so on. I think that precisely this is what we cannot afford. There is one interesting way out here, I doubt if it works, when they were negotiating end of Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev, I remember as very strange report in the newspaper that at one of their final talks they came to the idea that but maybe if we are invaded by aliens our wars will be over, we will have an external enemy. But you see it's the same logic, we need an enemy. So it's sorry. So again but nonetheless let me slowly conclude at this level we have some kind of a fourth position. The absolute is this terrifying zero level, self-destructive, prospect of madness, war, sexual madness, passion and so on. Again the whole work of civilization is to control it, but civilization can function only against this background and the threat is always here. I think that this was the original even Hegel's position. This is clearly again apropos madness, apropos war, he is a pessimist here. His idea is not at the end we have a great peace. No no, madness is, when Hegel talks about reconciliation he really means reconciliation with this terrifying fact, reconciliation with the fact that you cannot ever sublimate or whatever this threat. So this would be the fourth level of contact with the absolute. Now if you allow me a little bit of time and then because I will do what I promised you, again I'm betraying you, that's my nature, you know I think that the subtitle of my talk could be Lenin in, you know my eternal joke I'm sorry to mention it, Lenin in Warsaw. You know a young Komsomol guy screwing that's an old anti-Soviet joke Soviet joke that I like, if you don't know it there is a big painting exhibition in Moscow and visitors are shocked to see on the painting you see Nadezhda Krupskaya in bed Lenin's wife being fucked by a young Komsomol member passionately and then the title of the painting is *Lenin is in Warsaw*. And then the perplexed visitor asks but why this title, where is Lenin? And the guide calmly answers where Lenin is in Warsaw, no, that's why she can be doing this in Moscow no. So maybe in this sense you can say you know like like Lenin in Warsaw is my *Sex and the Absolute*, you know it's out there as a title that's why I will not talk about it you know. But seriously, so if I will not be able to do it today but I will nonetheless give you a hint what I nonetheless if I can as always rely on you so again you have the data for MI6 or whatever you have for most of them. I will send you today a text and you forward it to them. The text with exactly this title, which is chapter of my forthcoming book. I only ask you kindly don't put it on the web because then the publisher can prosecute you, once I was already in big trouble. So what's my idea here? Two points. My idea is that what if we approach, I will just give you two hints, one hint, what if we approach the question of the absolute in the opposite way? Not the question how we can break out of our historical limitation and reach the absolute as the fragile beautiful appearance, as the ultimate foundation of reality, as the force of destruction, whatever, but this truly Hegelian question which I quote to justify the title of my previous book *Disparity*, what if we are approaching this in the wrong way? What if the gap, I would like to begin with the very gap that separates us from the absolute? Because the whole problem of how to reach absolute means that absolute is as a distance. And to put it very short shortly, my solution is don't try to reach the absolute directly, but ask yourself the question what if the gap that separates me from the absolute is already immanent inherent to the absolute itself? What if in my very separation from the absolute I am precisely in the absolute because this separation characterizes the absolute itself? That's you may know how me in my atheist way I read Christianity. You know that God's famous "*Eli Eli lama sabachthani*", God why, father why have you forsaken me. This is how in Christianity you identify with God. You identify with Christ at the very point when he feels abandoned by God. Which means your separation from God is a separation of God from itself, which is I am already in. And I go very quickly here. This brings us this form of separation to Kantian notion of the sublime. I will not go into this parallel. It's explained in all my last books between Kant's antinomies, you will get this in the manuscript more in detail, Kant's antinomies and Lacan's formulas of sexuation. But let's limit ourselves to the sublime. The sublime, Kantian sublime of course not the usual, is the idea that we can experience the absolute only through our very failure to experience it. We try to do something, we fail it, but precisely in this failure the negative image of absolute shines through. Like that's Kantian idea for example of the dynamic absolute, storm, horrible thing, something which and Kant's idea is even the strongest storm cannot capture the strength of the moral law in myself. So precisely through being exposed to a natural disaster, negatively I experience the spiritual dimension, but only negatively, in the failure itself. And now you will say but what has this to do with sexuality, ha ha ha. You can say but this has nothing this is just Kant. Sorry not in as name you know. You see this is why people accuse me, like you as normal people would have said why did I even think about it, why didn't I, yeah that's why, fuck it, I was created like that ask God. No seriously now. You know that Kant sexualizes sublime. You know where? In his wonderful early writing, which is later taken over in his *Critique of Judgment*, on the sentiment of beautiful and sublime. Where Kant in a male chauvinist way I reject that identifies beautiful with feminine and sublime with masculine. I claim he was wrong here and even didn't know because later he developed in a wonderful way in *Critique of Pure Reason* and later in *Critique of Judgment* two modes of the sublime: mathematical and dynamic sublime and there is implicitly the sexual difference. So where is it? You remember I told you on the first day this dirty example of how of how you get this sudden desublimation, like you are with your sexual partner all of a sudden disgust enters and so on. This brings us to Lacan's definition of the sublime where the sublime is as Lacan sorry puts it is an ordinary object, thing, elevated to the level of the thing, the absolute object. But this identification of the two is always fragile. When you are in erotic trance the beloved is an ordinary man, woman elevated to the level of the thing, but this can all of a sudden desublimate itself. You just get and what I would have said is that this very gap is the only way that in sexuality we experience the absolute. Not in the vulgar New Age way oh my God I screwed your brains now it was absolute pleasure. No it's never that. But it's simply and that's the beauty of sexuality that you always miss it, the ultimate experience, but through this missing it it's there. It's there as a negative as a negative echo. That's why I claim I don't have time to develop it it will be in the chapter that I will send you, that's why I think that Catholic Church is so opposed to just sexuality which does not serve, I never got it, I always repeat this point can you answer me? I had debates with priests with bishops in Germany with these... Why do they say how can they say that sexuality without procreation is animal? I'm sorry, I think it's exactly the opposite. Animals do it when there is a mating season for procreation. Women do this that they elevate an act which is in itself physically a rather ridiculous act of copulation, they elevate it to the absolute. But always in this fragile sense that you get it you don't get it and so on. This is why Freud focuses on sexuality. Not because sexuality is the natural base of our being, but precisely sexuality in the human sense, this sexuality as fractured, traversed by impossibility, is the our first metaphysical experience. Okay I propose I'm so sorry I know I disappointed you but fuck it that's life. I will I promise after I return to my hotel I will immediately send it to you and you will all get again the key chapter of my new book where I try to go because I also to give you kind of to maybe insight your desire for something more attractive because the problem is here then if this perspective of post-humanity. Let's say our reproduction will be purely done in laboratories and so on and sexuality just pleasure principle and so on and we are directly linked to computers we lose our distance towards reality. What will happen with our being human? Will our desire survive? Yes, no, in no in what form and so on and so forth. I am not a cultural pessimist here again, but I just don't know. So I propose that now we do a little bit of democratic debate. If you... By the way that was really good this year. My God, why do you hate me so much? Preposterous and you left us on a cliff. Ah, you mean that yesterday and the day before yesterday it was pure shit no? Okay I got it. Okay um there’s a yeah we’ve got two there’s a question at the back. Give this microphone or you can come down or shout or whatever, yeah. I’d like to just engage with the question that was asked in the last lecture about the difference between Lacan and Jung. Yeah. Because I’ve been reading a lot of Alenka Zupančič’s *What Is Sex?* Yeah. And the formula she proposes is that there is two because the one is not. Yeah. So the not-one is presupposed as like absolute reality, like absolute negativity. And then I was also reading in Plato in the *Symposium* that there’s man and woman but originally there’s an androgynous form. Yeah. Like a unified androgynous form. And then I was talking to some men about how they experience their sexuality now and they were both sort of trying to get away from their status as a man towards a more androgynous form. And I was just I was just wondering if you’re going against the Jungian like essence of man and woman as the substantial self, and there’s like this absolute negativity of the not-one, how do we understand androgyny in the current sexual landscape as like a useful concept? Sorry, yes I I hope so. No but first the formula the formula is there is two because the one is not. Yeah but then she goes on, I know my God I read the manuscript we debated with her, but then at the end there are not even two you know that it gets even more complex. Because in what sense are there two? Her first point is that there are not even two that woman doesn't exist. There is only man and then you go to this that even man doesn't exist. Her point is this one, if I get it correctly, first that some Deleuzians or LGBT+ people would like to begin with some original multiplicity. Their view to which me and Alenka are both totally opposed is that original is neither one nor two, they're both bad metaphysical binary monotheist but some kind of original dispersed multiplicity, and then as a force of social oppression the binary form is imposed, you have to choose being one or two and so on. Now let me give you I hope you will swallow it a very abstract theoretical answer to this one. Alenka Zupančič's point is that one is not one in the sense that it in itself failed, which means always accompanied by a lack and or surplus. And as I already improvised on the first day I think feminine subjectivity enters here. It's a very nice Hegelian feminist view when Hegel says the point is you know his most famous passage to conceive the absolute not only as substance but also as subject. Her point would have been to conceive the absolute not only as masculine but also as feminine. In the sense that femininity is not a another substance supplementing man. We have man masculine principle but we also get no, masculine principle is in itself failed substance. And in this failure subjectivity enters. Now I will answer your crucial question. I will repeat maybe already did it here even, a wonderful joke from... okay I'll put it like this. So how do we get from multiplicity to one or two or whatever? The traditional answer, Lacanian it may appear, is the one that I already improvised here many times that whenever you have a series of particular entities you have to include one which embodies its exception. You know the examples I even used here I think maybe not on Monday but certainly ten times before. I didn't correct me. Did I talk about, I'm so ashamed to on this Monday did I talk here about Asiatic mode of production? Ha ha no. You know what's the idea? The idea is this: in Marx we have late Marx five six modes of production. Pre-class societies so-called primitive, wrongly called of course, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will come communism or nothing or... Now then Marx added Asiatic mode of production. But it's clear where is the problem here. It doesn't really work. Marx originally had five modes of production. Then he noticed that some of societies, ancient China, ancient India, ancient Egypt, Inca and other South American empires that they don't fit any of these and he proposed another mode of production which is really an empty container. The true meaning of Asiatic mode of production is all those modes of production which don’t which don't fit my classification. You know, it appears to be a positive term, but it’s just the embodiment of a lack. And so this would be the classical masculine form of totalization. You know it’s the old joke you know if we go to Borges that story quoted by Foucault at the beginning of *The Order of Things*, you know when Borges proposes the Chinese classification of dogs where the last item is all dogs who are not included in this classification. For Lévi-Strauss developed this, that every symbolic system because it tries to be universal but at the same time it has to exclude some, it cannot be universal, has to include this type of paradoxical entity which appears to be one of the terms but but precisely is a stand-in for the excluded. And of course the same role would have been for example in Hegel, that’s why read Frank Ruda's book of *Pöbel*, *Rebel*. Rebel is in Hegel precisely this, a special stand within society which includes all those who are not integrated into society, who do not... but then there is so this is how one arises through this reflexive move, the one of exception out of multitude. But there is another version which I much prefer. It's much closer to what Lacan describes as feminine, that you have, this is what Alenka describes with Lacan's terms the repression of the binary signifier. We have the couple one other, masculine feminine, but the other one doesn't have a signifier and at that element to fill in this lack multiplicity enters. The example I'm sorry to repeat myself endlessly that I like here is Woody Allen's early movie *Love and Death*, a parody on Tolstoy *War and Peace* and it's all about Tolstoy. Now which is the binary signifier to Tolstoy? Dostoevsky, no, for us. And you ask yourself where is Dostoevsky here? And he does, I don't like Woody Allen too much but here he does something very intelligent. The repressed returns in just one dialogue among two actors there where the name Dostoevsky is not pronounced, it remains primordially repressed, but in an ingenious way, I love it. All the great Dostoevsky novel titles are included. "What happened with that idiot?" "Ah you mean the guy who committed the crime and got the punishment?" "Yeah yeah that Karamazov brother, oh he became a gambler" and so on. No, this is the model. The multiplicity comes to fill in not only multiplicity, even I would say that would be the ultimate Hegelian Lacanian dialectic. It's not just that we have a basic opposition like yin yang and then it's subdivided into species. No, we get species because of the failure of the first big opposition. That's why again we can read in this way LGBT+. Either LGBT Q whatever multiplicity and then a plus, and this plus woman is this plus as such. This is why I would have said that's the formula that came to me, woman is not more than man. Woman is this more itself. Or another way you reminded me of this that Alenka puts it no that that's why we should not from Lacanian standpoint identify gender and sex. Gender with the classification of you are a butch you are a this tri-gen- gender, what is missing in gender classification is precisely the tension that defines sexuality as such. So again the idea is that we have a strange situation where gender and its species are on the same level. We have a gender which is deprived of its counterpart and then we g- why, it’s a very philosophical question. Why does a gender have species or genus universal? The idea is because it's failed in itself.
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It's a
It's a
Slavoj Žižek
very speculative
very speculative
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Hegelian thought. It's not just that a universality has species. Why does it have species? Because it's failed in itself as universality. Now you will say I'm dreaming it's bullshit. I will give you a simple example which I hope I will convince even two examples. If you read Hegel's political philosophy he speaks among other things of different types of states, different species of state: antique slave state, medieval state, whatever, democracy and so on. But why do we have multiple states? Because there is an antagonism and Hegel is quite aware of it, an impossibility inscribed into the very notion of state. Later articulated by Marx: state wants to be universal representative of its citizen but always has to exclude some and so on, this contradiction in state. And we have multiple states precisely as attempts to resolve this contradiction inscribed into the universal notion itself. It's the same with the work of art. We don't have art as such and then different forms of art or epochs of art. All history of art for Hegel is struggling with the same problem and failing again and again. So what is Hegel's solution? It's very
Hegelian thought. It's not just that a universality has species. Why does it have species? Because it's failed in itself as universality. Now you will say I'm dreaming it's bullshit. I will give you a simple example which I hope I will convince even two examples. If you read Hegel's political philosophy he speaks among other things of different types of states, different species of state: antique slave state, medieval state, whatever, democracy and so on. But why do we have multiple states? Because there is an antagonism and Hegel is quite aware of it, an impossibility inscribed into the very notion of state. Later articulated by Marx: state wants to be universal representative of its citizen but always has to exclude some and so on, this contradiction in state. And we have multiple states precisely as attempts to resolve this contradiction inscribed into the universal notion itself. It's the same with the work of art. We don't have art as such and then different forms of art or epochs of art. All history of art for Hegel is struggling with the same problem and failing again and again. So what is Hegel's solution? It's very
Slavoj Žižek
simple
simple
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effective one.
effective one.
Slavoj Žižek
At the end we do get an ideal state which fits its notion, but it's no longer a state. For Hegel it's concretely a religious community which should exclude all... then of course for Hegel later even this doesn't work, it's philosophy and so on. But you see the point how we have multiplicity, in this case of states, precisely because there is an incompleteness, a contradiction in the very notion of state. A state for principled reasons cannot do what it is supposed to do, be an organic frame equally adequately treating all its inhabitants citizens and so on and so forth. And this is the way I this is the way I I tend again I tend to pursue. I'm sorry I got a little bit confused but fuck it. I just wanted to say with your point that you’re basically saying that, and this was my interpretation of their response was when they were saying they wanted to be more androgynous I interpreted it as being that they failed at the end and that they were struggling with the end so they wanted to be androgynous. Oh this is a beautiful formula. Yeah yeah this is a very beautiful reading. I may if you can somehow send me your name I you know how I will I like to cheat. I will I took this idea I will take this idea from you. No I will not do it but I'm dreaming about doing this then just adding a footnote, after I wrote these lines I I I saw that a friend of mine already had a similar idea, you know. This is the dirtiest academic game of recognizing your debt, but because this is a very beautiful formula. But you know what this means? It's wrong, I will now read you more literally than you said, maybe you already thought about it. The point is not that we are man or women because we cannot be androgynous. This is too Jungian. We would like to be the original Platonic unity, we cannot. No, we want to be man we cannot be we are androgynous and so on. In this sense only, but I don't like the term androgynous, I would prefer transgender, but not in the usual sense of transgender like I think this term is used in a too common way today. Because you know for example in what sense, I never got it, are people who turn like Bradley Manning Chelsea Manning from man to women or other way around. I can I ask you something very naive? But they strictly for me remain within the coordinates of sexual difference in the most traditional sense. It's just sorry guys I don't want to be here I want to be on the other side. I mean you change position but the opposition remains. I think this is not enough. This is why I never saw in what sense gay people or lesbians are transgender. They fully rely on sexual difference. Their point is just if I am a gay man I don't want to screw women I want to do it with men. But sorry you still exclude half of humanity you are still within this scope. For radical transgender, it's for me something much more radical where it's not just I'm by mistake here I want to be there, but I question the entire established form of difference as such. Not in the simple sense of negating it but in a much more radical sense of it is here but I don't find my place in it. It's you experience its antagonism as such. So again your formula is here very nice. You know why I like it and then I let you to reply again because I like this idea that it's not that there is an original organic form and then we fall into particularities. The original organic form, what appears as androgynous all, emerges because of our failure to be a particular. This is a beautiful formula. But you wanted to... I’m saying exactly what you’re saying. Isn’t that exactly how we should be trans- articulating the absolute as this zero level work of civilization to control this negative background? Yeah. Isn’t that exactly how we should be interpreting Jordan Peterson? Like he be more precise. He his very existence is coming in this trying to re-establish failed masculinity. Yeah yeah you you and he’s against this this multiplicity of of gender and stuff like this but exactly how you’re articulating transgender is perhaps a way to articulate a way out of that tension. No I agree here with you although I must say something very naive. As I already said and I was attacked for it that his madness of cultural Marxism, I buy all that. But his new age Jungianism I will never... like I’m ready to talk with fascists but not with new age people. Sorry I’m getting a little bit tired. Can’t we say fuck you we love you but and then see you again. Okay one question more. Okay one question more. Ah yeah. This gentleman had a question. This actually goes back so I don’t know if this is that interesting so I’ll just put it as an as an observation which was the conversation you had about the nature of nature which kind of interests me. Yeah yeah. And there’s this wonderful um Banksy um piece of graffiti I remember. Yeah yeah yeah. Which shows a supermarket trolley in the middle of a an ocean with the goldfish then in the middle of that trolley and then a shark circling the goldfish which is obviously been placed in the middle of it. But the thing that particularly interest me about that is the area you talked about with the human and the pre-human is that the issue that there is environmentally now is this release if you like of pre-human capital and by that I mean in the way that capital in Marx crystallizes labor, pre-human carbon forms in the form of oil and everything else just really just crystallizes sunlight crystallizes pre-human existence and it's the very very rapid release of that that is the issue that you know that that we face today. And the issue that you know where we go with that I don't know I mean Lovelock at the end of his Gaia type theory brought us to the conclusion that fuck it we can do nothing more about it because we’re human. That’s what humans do. So do we care about it? Well do we care about it because we’re human and you’ve got this circularity of reasoning going on there. No no but it would be nice to pursue this path because although this may appear anachronism, but I think sometimes to read it anachronistically like something that was obviously there without humanity to read it as fossilized capital and so on, that's the proper historical approach. This is how I apply to Marx, you know when TS Eliot, your great conservative, I always quote him that famous sentence you know how a really radically new work of art doesn't just introduce something new it forces us to rewrite,
At the end we do get an ideal state which fits its notion, but it's no longer a state. For Hegel it's concretely a religious community which should exclude all... then of course for Hegel later even this doesn't work, it's philosophy and so on. But you see the point how we have multiplicity, in this case of states, precisely because there is an incompleteness, a contradiction in the very notion of state. A state for principled reasons cannot do what it is supposed to do, be an organic frame equally adequately treating all its inhabitants citizens and so on and so forth. And this is the way I this is the way I I tend again I tend to pursue. I'm sorry I got a little bit confused but fuck it. I just wanted to say with your point that you’re basically saying that, and this was my interpretation of their response was when they were saying they wanted to be more androgynous I interpreted it as being that they failed at the end and that they were struggling with the end so they wanted to be androgynous. Oh this is a beautiful formula. Yeah yeah this is a very beautiful reading. I may if you can somehow send me your name I you know how I will I like to cheat. I will I took this idea I will take this idea from you. No I will not do it but I'm dreaming about doing this then just adding a footnote, after I wrote these lines I I I saw that a friend of mine already had a similar idea, you know. This is the dirtiest academic game of recognizing your debt, but because this is a very beautiful formula. But you know what this means? It's wrong, I will now read you more literally than you said, maybe you already thought about it. The point is not that we are man or women because we cannot be androgynous. This is too Jungian. We would like to be the original Platonic unity, we cannot. No, we want to be man we cannot be we are androgynous and so on. In this sense only, but I don't like the term androgynous, I would prefer transgender, but not in the usual sense of transgender like I think this term is used in a too common way today. Because you know for example in what sense, I never got it, are people who turn like Bradley Manning Chelsea Manning from man to women or other way around. I can I ask you something very naive? But they strictly for me remain within the coordinates of sexual difference in the most traditional sense. It's just sorry guys I don't want to be here I want to be on the other side. I mean you change position but the opposition remains. I think this is not enough. This is why I never saw in what sense gay people or lesbians are transgender. They fully rely on sexual difference. Their point is just if I am a gay man I don't want to screw women I want to do it with men. But sorry you still exclude half of humanity you are still within this scope. For radical transgender, it's for me something much more radical where it's not just I'm by mistake here I want to be there, but I question the entire established form of difference as such. Not in the simple sense of negating it but in a much more radical sense of it is here but I don't find my place in it. It's you experience its antagonism as such. So again your formula is here very nice. You know why I like it and then I let you to reply again because I like this idea that it's not that there is an original organic form and then we fall into particularities. The original organic form, what appears as androgynous all, emerges because of our failure to be a particular. This is a beautiful formula. But you wanted to... I’m saying exactly what you’re saying. Isn’t that exactly how we should be trans- articulating the absolute as this zero level work of civilization to control this negative background? Yeah. Isn’t that exactly how we should be interpreting Jordan Peterson? Like he be more precise. He his very existence is coming in this trying to re-establish failed masculinity. Yeah yeah you you and he’s against this this multiplicity of of gender and stuff like this but exactly how you’re articulating transgender is perhaps a way to articulate a way out of that tension. No I agree here with you although I must say something very naive. As I already said and I was attacked for it that his madness of cultural Marxism, I buy all that. But his new age Jungianism I will never... like I’m ready to talk with fascists but not with new age people. Sorry I’m getting a little bit tired. Can’t we say fuck you we love you but and then see you again. Okay one question more. Okay one question more. Ah yeah. This gentleman had a question. This actually goes back so I don’t know if this is that interesting so I’ll just put it as an as an observation which was the conversation you had about the nature of nature which kind of interests me. Yeah yeah. And there’s this wonderful um Banksy um piece of graffiti I remember. Yeah yeah yeah. Which shows a supermarket trolley in the middle of a an ocean with the goldfish then in the middle of that trolley and then a shark circling the goldfish which is obviously been placed in the middle of it. But the thing that particularly interest me about that is the area you talked about with the human and the pre-human is that the issue that there is environmentally now is this release if you like of pre-human capital and by that I mean in the way that capital in Marx crystallizes labor, pre-human carbon forms in the form of oil and everything else just really just crystallizes sunlight crystallizes pre-human existence and it's the very very rapid release of that that is the issue that you know that that we face today. And the issue that you know where we go with that I don't know I mean Lovelock at the end of his Gaia type theory brought us to the conclusion that fuck it we can do nothing more about it because we’re human. That’s what humans do. So do we care about it? Well do we care about it because we’re human and you’ve got this circularity of reasoning going on there. No no but it would be nice to pursue this path because although this may appear anachronism, but I think sometimes to read it anachronistically like something that was obviously there without humanity to read it as fossilized capital and so on, that's the proper historical approach. This is how I apply to Marx, you know when TS Eliot, your great conservative, I always quote him that famous sentence you know how a really radically new work of art doesn't just introduce something new it forces us to rewrite,
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to change the entire past. That's what capitalism
to change the entire past. That's what capitalism
Slavoj Žižek
does. You cannot
does. You cannot
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say
say
Slavoj Žižek
we are just projecting, no in some sense today oil reserves are fossilized capital that and again it's not just our false impression metaphor or whatever you know. And I I you know what I try to avoid here? The conclusion of some of my friends also along the lines of terrorism where they claim and even in Fredric Jameson my good friend I noticed this, the idea that people are so blind today and so on that only a mega ecological catastrophe with millions death can awaken us. I find this logic a little bit too suspicious because first how are they so sure that if a mega catastrophe happens a chain explosion of nuclear electricity plants whatever and millions die, well I'm not so sure that a new communism would emerge. Why not even new fascism emerges or whatever? I mean I quite like the the you know the Žižek-Peterson view on the thing well and I think Peterson-Rogan I don’t completely agree because he kind of has a bet each way on there's dialectical and there's the non-dialectical and he and he has both both concepts. But his ideas around entropy coming into a closed system which we have... Yeah. You have no choice unless we’re going to say Elon Musk is going to achieve and get everyone to Mars which I doubt and you know you can't deal with that fundamental increase in entropy and and that’s what determines
we are just projecting, no in some sense today oil reserves are fossilized capital that and again it's not just our false impression metaphor or whatever you know. And I I you know what I try to avoid here? The conclusion of some of my friends also along the lines of terrorism where they claim and even in Fredric Jameson my good friend I noticed this, the idea that people are so blind today and so on that only a mega ecological catastrophe with millions death can awaken us. I find this logic a little bit too suspicious because first how are they so sure that if a mega catastrophe happens a chain explosion of nuclear electricity plants whatever and millions die, well I'm not so sure that a new communism would emerge. Why not even new fascism emerges or whatever? I mean I quite like the the you know the Žižek-Peterson view on the thing well and I think Peterson-Rogan I don’t completely agree because he kind of has a bet each way on there's dialectical and there's the non-dialectical and he and he has both both concepts. But his ideas around entropy coming into a closed system which we have... Yeah. You have no choice unless we’re going to say Elon Musk is going to achieve and get everyone to Mars which I doubt and you know you can't deal with that fundamental increase in entropy and and that’s what determines
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the system at the end of the day and it has nothing to do with people or non-people it’s just the physical reality. Yeah yeah yeah here yes here I what I like in what you are saying
the system at the end of the day and it has nothing to do with people or non-people it’s just the physical reality. Yeah yeah yeah here yes here I what I like in what you are saying
Slavoj Žižek
is that for a long time as I already said I thought that all this idea of post-human is just a publicity joke. No we have really to begin to think in these terms. Deleuze, I often quote him, said that already the true art watches
is that for a long time as I already said I thought that all this idea of post-human is just a publicity joke. No we have really to begin to think in these terms. Deleuze, I often quote him, said that already the true art watches
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reality
reality
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we have to learn to watch reality with non-human eyes. That's already what great art is doing I think. Great art is not this oh my God the discover a warm human being in everything. No thanks, we have enough of warm human beings. They screwed it up everything possible. I'm sorry I have to drop that. You will get the text. Yes, yeah he's been working overtime three days in a row surplus labor surplus value represent German for us. Thank you very much. No I wasn't working. I
we have to learn to watch reality with non-human eyes. That's already what great art is doing I think. Great art is not this oh my God the discover a warm human being in everything. No thanks, we have enough of warm human beings. They screwed it up everything possible. I'm sorry I have to drop that. You will get the text. Yes, yeah he's been working overtime three days in a row surplus labor surplus value represent German for us. Thank you very much. No I wasn't working. I
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wasn't working for three days I was mostly sleeping. I was doing the usual thing
wasn't working for three days I was mostly sleeping. I was doing the usual thing
Slavoj Žižek
improvising on the basis of a manuscript. You know I'm always selling here manuscript. I'm not crazy enough to work for you you know I just test the manuscript. Thanks very much hope to see you my plan is now to drop by the next short seminar end of April
improvising on the basis of a manuscript. You know I'm always selling here manuscript. I'm not crazy enough to work for you you know I just test the manuscript. Thanks very much hope to see you my plan is now to drop by the next short seminar end of April
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beginning of May and then if they will find time and then the summer no
beginning of May and then if they will find time and then the summer no
Slavoj Žižek
probably the last week of July when you will get some really new stuff. Thank you I appreciate it thanks.
probably the last week of July when you will get some really new stuff. Thank you I appreciate it thanks.