Freedom – For Whom? To do What?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-11-10 · 2:03:03 · 15,819 words
hegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturereligion-theologyideologyecology-climategeopolitics-warcapitalismphilosophy-generalpsychoanalysis
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture whose central thread is a defence of Hegel's aesthetics against, and through, Robert Pippin's critique in 'After the Beautiful', arguing that Hegel's two blind spots (the structural instability of capitalist modernity and the possibility of abstract/reflexive art) can be overcome by being 'more Hegelian than Hegel'. Along the way he addresses the logic of catastrophe and denial (ecological crisis, the drift toward a new world war), the film 'The Rapture' as a vehicle for a materialist critique of religion, and Manet's paintings as exemplars of the dislocated gaze and the retroactive de-sublimation of classical nudes. The lecture closes with an extended treatment of the Hegelian aesthetics of ugliness, disgust, the sublime versus the colossal, and the argument that Auschwitz, unlike classical tragedy, admits only a 'terrible comedy' because it strips its victims of tragic dignity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's (and Dupuy's) diagnosis of the collective stance toward impending catastrophe: factual knowledge of the danger coexists with a psychic refusal to take it seriously, enabling continued inaction.
The process by which catastrophic situations (siege of Sarajevo, torture) rapidly become normalized as a 'new way of life', absorbed into everyday routine and even made the subject of jokes.
Lacanian concept invoked via Dupuy's analysis of Mutually Assured Destruction, the small remainder or excess that functions as the cause of desire and keeps the nuclear equilibrium from being purely rational.
Present implicitly in the discussion of the dislocated gaze in Manet and the monstrous 'stain' in Munch that cannot be reduced to representation or to mere materiality of paint.
Hegel's thesis that in modern bourgeois society art has ceased to be the 'supreme need of the spirit', we still enjoy it but no longer 'bend the knee' before it as a medium of absolute truth.
as “humanus”
Hegel's term for the prosaic subject matter of modern art: the small misunderstandings, personal tragedies, and comic confusions of ordinary life that replace the great historical conflicts staged by classical art.
as “reconciled world”
Hegel's vision of post-revolutionary bourgeois modernity as a world in which fundamental antagonisms are overcome, leaving only idiosyncratic private conflicts, a diagnosis Žižek finds ideologically complacent.
Žižek's term for the conceptual-art gesture that can only be made once (Duchamp's urinal, Malevich's black square): the point is made and cannot be repeated without becoming mere imitation.
as “Hegel was not Hegelian enough”
Žižek's signature reversal that Hegel's two blind spots (capitalist instability; abstract art) are correctable not by abandoning Hegel but by applying Hegel's own logic more rigorously against him.
Žižek's formulation that Marx's capital, money mediating itself with itself, is more Hegelian-idealist than Hegel's own economics because abstraction directly rules reality without material mediation.
Kandinsky's (and Hegel's) concept that abstract visual form, triangle, square, color, is already spiritualized prior to representation, rendering historical-ethical content without depicting it.
Lacanian concept used to analyse Manet's figures: their dislocated, outward-directed stares simultaneously include and exclude the viewer, staging the constitutive split of subjectivity.
Žižek's reading of Manet's characteristic figure-gaze as a staging of modern alienated subjectivity: the painted subject sees but does not look, simultaneously including and excluding the viewer.
Once Manet's Olympia is seen, all classical nude Venuses retroactively lose their innocent sublimation, a true revolution that rewrites the past rather than simply adding to it.
Hegel's metaphor for the work of art as a monster with eyes everywhere, gazing at us from all points, beauty then consists in gentrifying or repressing this monstrous gaze.
Implicit throughout the talk as the dialectical movement through which limitations are preserved-and-cancelled; here specifically in the passage from beauty through ugliness to comedy.
Žižek's inversion of the Catholic privatio boni doctrine applied to aesthetics: rather than ugliness being the absence of beauty, beauty is what you get when you subtract something from ugliness.
Kant's distinction between the excessively large that still produces sublime pleasure (colossal) and excess so extreme it collapses into purely destructive Genuss/enjoyment without sublimation.
as “surplus enjoyment / jouissance”
Referenced via Kant's Genuss as an excess of enjoyment that is destructive of culture and that attaches to the monstrous and disgusting, linked to das Ding.
Lacanian 'the Thing', invoked to explain Kant's concept of enjoyment (Genuss) as a destructive fascination with the monstrous that exceeds the economy of pleasure/unpleasure.
as “terrible comedy”
Žižek's category for events like Auschwitz that are so extreme they strip victims of tragic dignity, producing not tragedy (which preserves subjective greatness) but an obscene, formalized comedic register.
Stories he reaches for 2
God arrives and tells Job's three theological comforters they are wrong, Job's suffering has no meaning, then responds to Job's 'why?' with a speech about cosmic monstrousness, which Chesterton reads as divine self-indictment.
“The message of the book of Job is not only this critique of ideology moment... Each of the three theological friends come to convince Job that his suffering has some meaning.”
Dershowitz proposed state-regulated torture complete with prison doctors to certify how much a prisoner can withstand without permanent harm, Žižek uses this as the obscene endpoint of normalizing torture through liberal proceduralism.
“All prisons should have doctors where... you should be tortured and then doctor comes and examines you and decides how much torture will not hurt you... I find this obscene.”
Works invoked 21
Capital book
Marx's analysis of the passage from money to capital as the emergence of 'actual idealism', abstraction directly ruling reality, is central to Žižek's argument that Hegel wasn't idealist enough.
Vertigo film
Used as an example of a film whose continuation after an apparent ending transforms its meaning; also presupposed as one of the 'two mega Hitchcocks' the audience should know.
Implicitly present in the master-servant dialectic Žižek invokes when discussing Hegel's limited conception of social antagonism.
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel's text; Žižek cites its vision of post-revolutionary modernity as a 'reconciled' world in which fundamental antagonisms are overcome, which he argues Hegel was wrong about.
Psycho film
Like Vertigo, used to show how an earlier ending would produce a different coherent film; the structure of unexpected continuation is Žižek's entry point for thinking about Tolkin's film.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own 'Norman Bates book' (named for the Verso cover evoking Psycho); he mentions developing his arguments on religion, materialism, and Hegel there.
The Rapture film
Michael Tolkin's 1991 film is Žižek's central religious-philosophical example: it stages the literal reality of God and the apocalypse only for the protagonist to refuse divine love on ethical grounds.
Carmen opera
Bizet's opera; invoked as the target of an absurd political-correctness ban in Perth for 'promoting smoking' because its first act is set in a cigarette factory.
Black Square artwork
Malevich's founding gesture of abstract art; Žižek uses it as the paradigm of the hapax, a gesture that makes its point once and cannot be simply repeated, requiring the artist to find a way beyond it.
Hegel's aesthetics lectures; central theoretical source, cited for the concept of humanus, the thousand-eyed Argus, Greek statues without gaze, comedy as the art of reconciled modernity, and the end of art.
Aesthetic Theory book
Adorno's major aesthetics work; Žižek invokes its chapter on Rosenkranz and its more radical claim that beauty emerges only against the background of ugliness.
After the Beautiful book
Robert Pippin's book is the stated trigger and main interlocutor for the entire lecture; Žižek endorses its two criticisms of Hegel but criticizes Pippin for not connecting them and for remaining 'too idealist'.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère artwork
Manet painting analysed for its impossible mirror reflection and the barmaid's dislocated gaze, which Žižek reads as staging the constitutive split of modern subjective alienation-as-freedom.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe artwork
Manet painting discussed for its naked figure's dislocated gaze, the doubled light source, and the implied post-coital reading that Pippin notes; another example of Manet's staging of subjective dislocation.
Olympia artwork
Manet painting read as directly addressing the viewer as customer/voyeur and as retroactively de-sublimating all classical Venus nudes by making their sexuality undeniable.
The Scream artwork
Munch painting used to illustrate the 'stain', a materiality in the swirling lines of sky that is neither representational content nor bare pigment, pointing to something like the Real.
Karl Rosenkranz's systematic Hegelian taxonomy of ugliness; Žižek calls it 'incredible' though conceptually traditional; regrets it is not translated into English.
Kandinsky's theoretical text; Žižek dislikes Kandinsky's New Age mysticism but endorses the core insight that visual form is spiritualized prior to representation.
Interstellar film
Žižek dismisses it in passing, saying The Rapture is 'certainly better than Interstellar'.
The Player film
Robert Altman film whose script was written by Michael Tolkin; mentioned to contextualize Tolkin as a filmmaker known for Hollywood satire before The Rapture.
Zealot book
Reza Aslan's historical account of Jesus; Žižek read it 'with pleasure' but finds it exemplifies religion's death, treating Jesus as a 'great man' evades the only real question (was he God?) and reduces theology to positivist history.
People invoked 34
Michael Tolkin positive
Director/writer of The Rapture (1991); Žižek reads his film as achieving an authentic materialist-theological gesture, staging the literal reality of God's existence only for the protagonist to refuse to love him.
The Soviet submarine officer who refused the order to launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Žižek invokes him as an example of unexpected humanity surviving even in Stalinist bureaucracy.
Narendra Modi negative
Another example of the nationalism-capitalism fusion: Modi is a Hindu nationalist who simultaneously pursues radical global capitalist policies, openly welcoming cheap labour as India's competitive advantage.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my good friend' and 'really a bright guy'; Žižek draws on Dupuy's analysis of catastrophe-denial, retroactivity, Mutually Assured Destruction, and objet petit a to anchor the talk's political and ecological arguments.
Adam Kotsko positive
Described as 'a very nice friend from Chicago'; Žižek previews Kotsko's new book on 'creepiness' in TV heroes as the entry point for the next day's lecture on ugliness and God as the ultimate creepy figure.
Robert Pippin positive
Žižek uses Pippin's 'After the Beautiful' as his main interlocutor, endorsing Pippin's two criticisms of Hegel (failure to see modernity's instability; failure to grasp abstract art) while criticizing Pippin for not connecting the two and for remaining 'too idealist'.
Kazimir Malevich positive
Presented as an artist who genuinely moved beyond the hapax gesture, his late self-portrait, though apparently traditional, still encodes the Black Square, and whose return to figuration is not Stalinist regression.
Georg Lukács negative
Cited as the great Hungarian Marxist who defended socialist realism and criticized Kafka's abstraction, but who 'didn't see' why realist depiction of alienation is structurally inadequate, why you must go through 'fantastic phantasmagoria'.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for his chapter on Karl Rosenkranz in Aesthetic Theory and his more radical claim that beauty can emerge only against the background of ugliness.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the concepts of objet petit a, the gaze (Seminar XI), das Ding, and Genuss/jouissance; Žižek reads Manet's dislocated gaze through Lacan and connects Kant's Genuss to das Ding.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Žižek's example of liberal normalization of torture: Dershowitz proposed state-regulated torture with medical oversight, which Žižek finds 'obscene' and which he attacked publicly in the New York Times.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Invoked for his 'crazy' reading of God's speech to Job as divine self-indictment, God saying 'I screwed up the whole universe, not just you', which Žižek endorses as the correct materialist-theological reading.
Reza Aslan negative
Žižek read Aslan's 'Zealot' with pleasure but finds its historical-critical approach symptomatic of religion's death: ending 'Jesus deserves respect, he was a great man' misses the only real question, was he God or not?
Oliver Sacks negative
Žižek finds Sacks 'more pleasant than Damasio' but equally guilty of treating art as a cognitive/therapeutic datum rather than as a medium of truth.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek reports a private conversation in which Badiou argued the current global situation resembles pre-WWI great-power competition more than the Cold War; Žižek agrees with this analysis.
John Milbank positive
Žižek says he and Milbank 'don't agree', but Milbank was also shocked by the theologians' reluctance to state their actual beliefs at the theologico-political conference.
Friedrich Engels positive
Quoted on Napoleon: 'if not Napoleon, then another person had to appear', Žižek uses this as an example of a problematic counterfactual (too determinist) in the context of Dupuy's logic of retroactivity.
Nikita Khrushchev positive
Žižek is struck that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviet leadership debated the moral question of whether they had the right to risk humanity, while the American side focused solely on who would 'blink first'.
António Damásio negative
Exemplifies the scientistic 'patronizing appreciation' of art: in a book on brain function Damasio boasts of having a great Portuguese pianist visit, using her as an empirical data point rather than engaging with art as truth.
Édouard Manet positive
Central artistic figure for the second half of the talk; Žižek reads Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and Olympia as staging the dislocated gaze, alienation-as-freedom, and retroactive de-sublimation of classical painting.
Edvard Munch positive
Used as a further example of modern painting that has a 'stain', a materiality that is neither representational content nor mere paint surface, illustrating the Real in art.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Žižek notes Netanyahu framed ISIS as secondary to the 'real' enemy Iran, an ideological move that serves Israeli strategic interests and illustrates the opacity of Middle Eastern alignments.
Present at a theologico-political conference Žižek attended; mentioned only in passing as one of the speakers.
Eric Santner positive
Described as 'my good friend'; invoked at the theology conference where Santner retreated to 'I am here as a literary analyst' when asked about genuine belief, Žižek uses this to illustrate the death of serious theology.
Referenced for the post-1981 coup strategy in Poland of flooding the market with drugs, pornography, and Oriental spiritualism to depoliticize youth, Žižek's anecdote about how communists managed dissent.
Viktor Orbán negative
Example of the fusion of violent nationalism and global capitalism: Orbán aligns with Putin and China while pursuing authoritarian nationalist politics, showing that illiberalism and capitalism are not contradictory.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Briefly invoked as a possible framework for describing the strange materiality-yet-not-materiality of the 'stain' in Munch's paintings.
Wassily Kandinsky positive
Žižek dislikes Kandinsky both as a painter ('too much of a New Ager') and as a theorist, but acknowledges that his essay 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' correctly saw that form itself can be spiritualized prior to representation.
Karl Rosenkranz positive
Hegel's pupil, author of Aesthetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetics of the Ugly), systematically cataloguing forms of ugliness; Žižek finds the work incredible though conceptually traditional.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek reads Obama's phrase 'that's how we roll' as a symptom of US imperial self-image at the moment of actual decline; the Obama presidency's claim to universal policeman role is read as tragic.
Vladimir Putin negative
Referenced as the central actor in the new great-power competition; Žižek notes that both Western and Russian sides accuse each other of pushing toward war, illustrating the mutual bad faith of geopolitical discourse.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek argues Marx's Capital shows Hegel was not idealist enough, capital is 'actual idealism'; he also invokes the Marxian tradition on ideology and class antagonism as what Hegel's reconciled modernity failed to see.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure throughout: Žižek defends Hegel's aesthetics against Pippin by arguing Hegel was 'not Hegelian enough', deploys Hegel's concepts of the thousand-eyed Argus, Geist, humanus, comedy, and the end of art as his primary theoretical framework.
Immanuel Kant positive
Invoked for the theory of the sublime, the distinction between colossal and monstrous, and, crucially, his use of Lust/Genuss to distinguish pleasure that serves culture from destructive enjoyment that attaches to the monstrous.
What it argues
Hegel's aesthetics and the end of artabstract/modern art and reflexivity (Manet, Munch, Malevich, Kandinsky)the logic of catastrophe-denial and naturalization of horrormaterialist critique of religion through 'The Rapture'beauty, ugliness, the sublime and the comic in Hegel and Kantcapital as self-mediating abstraction and Hegel's idealist blind spotAuschwitz as terrible comedy rather than tragedy
Dialectical moves 10
“Hegel was not Hegelian enough—to criticize Hegel one must be more Hegelian than Hegel himself.”
The standard critique of Hegel (that he missed modernity's instability and abstract art) is corrected not by abandoning but by radicalizing Hegel's own dialectical logic.
“Marx's achievement was not to materialize Hegel but to show Hegel he wasn't idealist enough: capital is actual idealism.”
The common reading of Marx as the materialist inversion of Hegel is reversed: Marx reveals that real abstraction (capital) is more thoroughly idealist than anything Hegel imagined.
“To be a real atheist it's not enough to say God doesn't exist; one must demonstrate that if God did exist it would be horrible.”
True materialism must undermine God from within rather than simply denying the divine, showing the horror latent in the theological concept itself.
“Beauty is the privation of the ugly—and goodness is the privation of evil.”
Inverting the classical privatio boni: the positive term (beauty, goodness) is secondary, derived by subtracting something from a more primordial negativity (ugliness, evil).
“The dislocated gaze in Manet is at once the basic form of alienation and the form of freedom—alienation and autonomy are the same thing.”
What appears as the figure's alienated detachment (she is not at home in her situation) is simultaneously the mark of modern autonomous subjectivity.
“The Taliban showed more respect for religion than the outraged West: taking the Bamiyan Buddhas as a sacred threat is truer religious seriousness than treating them as cultural heritage.”
Destroying the sacred as a genuine act of religious war concedes more reality to religion than the liberal culturalist defence, which has already secretly abandoned the truth-claim of faith.
“Auschwitz is not a tragedy but a comedy—not because it is funny but because it denies its victims even the dignity of the tragic position.”
Comedy here is the structural category of absolute subjective destitution, where the usual tragic dignity of the resistant subject is systematically destroyed.
“The sign of ethical progress is more dogmatism, not less: some prohibitions must become undebatable.”
Against liberal deliberation, Žižek argues that genuine ethical civilization is marked by questions one simply refuses to open to cost-benefit calculation.
“The moment it's outside, it's over: swallowing saliva is fine but drinking it from a glass is disgusting—the same substance becomes an object of horror when the inside/outside boundary is crossed.”
Illustrates the logic of disgust as violation of the limit between interior and exterior, relevant to the broader argument about how sublimation and its collapse work.
“Hegel's comedy is comedy of reconciliation; the 20th century produced a comedy of horror—things become comic precisely when they are too terrible to remain tragic.”
This extends and explodes Hegel's comic category: rather than comedy marking the irrelevance of conflict, it marks a horror so total it exceeds the tragic register.
Claims 20
reframes
Hegel was right that in modernity art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit, but he wasn't Hegelian enough to see that capitalism and abstract art already imply his own logic taken further.Hegel's aesthetics and the end of art
asserts
Sitcoms like Seinfeld are the art form Hegel implicitly predicted: they stage the prosaic, non-historical conflicts of modern life and in doing so function as perfect ideology of a 'reconciled world'.ideology of the sitcom
reframes
Marx's achievement was not to materialize Hegel's speculation but to show that Hegel was not idealist enough: capital is 'actual idealism', an abstract entity that directly rules reality.Marx's relation to Hegel / capital
asserts
We are approaching a new world war not through ideological Cold War logic but through the same late-19th-century scramble for economic spheres of influence, with US power declining and regional actors competing.geopolitics and the risk of a new world war
asserts
The collective attitude toward ecological catastrophe and war is one of knowing without believing—we produce the statistics and warnings but cannot take them as real, replicating the logic before World War I.ideology of catastrophe denial
asserts
Torturing someone should remain absolutely prohibited even if one cannot guarantee one would never do it, because the horror is not the act but the normalization of it into a legitimate topic of debate.torture and ethical dogmatism
asserts
A sign of genuine ethical progress is more dogmatism: certain prohibitions (torture, rape) must become undebatable rather than subject to cost-benefit deliberation.ethics and dogmatism vs. realism
reframes
To be a real materialist and atheist it is not enough to say God luckily doesn't exist; one must demonstrate from within that if God did exist it would be horrible.atheism and materialism
asserts
Christianity is unique among religions in confronting the horror of God directly—the Book of Job and the death of Christ both enact the 'ultimate fiasco of God'.Christianity and the problem of evil / theodicy
asserts
Modern religion is effectively dead: it survives either as cheap therapeutic ego-trip or as a positivist historical-critical science, but not as a genuine claim about divine truth.contemporary religion
asserts
Ruthless global capitalism and violent ethnic fundamentalism (Modi's India, Orbán's Hungary, Putin's Russia) are not contradictions but function together perfectly.capitalism and nationalism
asserts
Manet's paintings inaugurate a structural shift in modern art: through the dislocated gaze and impossible perspectives they stage alienation-as-freedom, the subject exiled from any fixed place.Manet and modern painting
asserts
Manet's Olympia retroactively de-sublimates all classical nude paintings: once seen, one can no longer look at Venus paintings in their former innocence.retroactivity and revolution in art
reframes
Beauty is not the positive pole against which ugliness is a mere privation; rather, beauty is what you obtain by subtracting something from ugliness.aesthetics of beauty and ugliness
asserts
Auschwitz was not a tragedy but a terrible comedy: the systematic deprivation of humanity was so total that it denied victims even the dignified tragic position, leaving only obscene formalized comedy.Auschwitz and tragic versus comic categories
reframes
Hegel's limit was that he could only imagine comedy as comedy of reconciliation; what the 20th century demonstrated is a comedy of absolute horror where things become comic precisely because they are too terrible to be tragic.Hegel's notion of comedy
reframes
Pippin is correct that Hegel failed to imagine the fundamental dissatisfaction of modernity and the possibility of abstract art, but Pippin himself is too idealist in not connecting these two limitations.Robert Pippin's reading of Hegel
reframes
The Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas showed more genuine respect for religion than the Western outrage, which treated the statues as monuments to human culture rather than as sacred threats.respect for religion and cultural heritage
asserts
In the Manet painting 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe' the background source of light is doubled and the perspectives are impossible, staging the same constitutive dislocation of the modern subject.Manet's spatial dislocation
asserts
Conceptual art has the structure of hapax—its gestures can only be made once; the real test for modern artists (Malevich is Žižek's example) is how to move beyond the founding gesture.conceptual art and the hapax problem
Quotes 15
“We bow the knee no longer. It's not no longer that absolute respect.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's end of art — art's loss of absolute authority in modernity
“Capital is actual idealism. It's an ideal entity, the real of an ideal entity structuring our reality.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as actual idealism — Marx out-Hegels Hegel
“Marx's achievement was not simply to materialize Hegel's speculation, but to show to Hegel that in the domain of political economy he wasn't idealist enough.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx radicalizing Hegel rather than inverting him
“To be an atheist it's not enough to say 'If God were to exist it would have been wonderful but unfortunately he doesn't.' No, one has to go to the end and say 'If God were to exist it would have been horrible.'”Slavoj Žižek · true atheism requires demonstrating the horror of God from within
“The sign of progress is more dogmatism in this sense: a sign of ethical progress is that some things, some prohibitions, simply should become something that you don't debate.”Slavoj Žižek · ethical dogmatism as civilizational progress
“The horror is not if we are doing it. I'm a realist, I know all governments are doing it. The horror is when you normalize it.”Slavoj Žižek · normalization of torture as the true horror
“Take a glass and spit your saliva into it and then try to drink it. I cannot. You see? The moment it's outside it's over.”Slavoj Žižek · disgust and the inside/outside boundary
“We live in a totally idealist world today.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary capitalism as realized idealism
“Beauty is the privation of the ugly... good is the privation of the evil.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of privatio boni — ugliness and evil are primary
“In tragedy you still retain a certain dignity as a subject. Tragedy means you screw me, I said no, kill me but I will... a certain greatness. But in Auschwitz was not a tragedy.”Slavoj Žižek · Auschwitz as terrible comedy not tragedy
“Today the opium of the people is opium, like, you don't need religion.”Slavoj Žižek · updating Marx's opium dictum for the era of actual drugs
“Hegel was the first, without knowing, theorist of Seinfeld or all these sitcoms.”Slavoj Žižek · sitcoms as the art form Hegel's aesthetics implicitly predicted
“Okay, you put it there and fuck you, you made your point. You know what I mean. Then you can—once you did, okay, it's over, you know. You cannot then next time put on a pillow or whatever.”Slavoj Žižek · the hapax problem of conceptual art
“The message of the death of Christ means precisely the ultimate fiasco of God. Like it's the message of the death of Christ is the death of this good God who you think is above us.”Slavoj Žižek · Christ's death as the death of God / ultimate divine fiasco
“They showed more respect for Buddhism because they took it as an actual religious threat... In a way they showed more respect to religion than we who were outraged by what they did.”Slavoj Žižek · Taliban destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas as perverse form of respect
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I must first as usual sincerely apologize because I decided to change the topic totally. I can't even say that it's really about the same thing because I simply want to present you what I am working on now, and I think it's better than what I planned to do then, the other stuff. What I want to talk to, I know that I always begin with I warn you, it's not the usual joke, it's more boring than you expect, but this time it will really be bad. But nonetheless, maybe acceptable to you because what I want to do today, don't be afraid of the abstract topic, I think I do a nice relevant line, it's simply a defense of Hegel a propos modern art. Because you know I'm like an automaton, this black box, you put something into it, you get out. What was put into me was the last book by Robert Pippin, the American Hegelian, after the beautiful "Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism". The thesis, sorry, does this, how should I do more, the thesis of this book, it's a very nice one. It is that Hegel's aesthetics simply relies on a too narrow notion of art, but too narrow not because of our later experience of modernity, which Hegel didn't conceptualize because there was no modern art the way we define it today at Hegel's time, but much more radically that Hegel, that measured by Hegel's own standards implied in Hegel's aesthetics, is already a notion of modern abstract art. That Hegel, in other words, wasn't Hegelian enough. And I think Pippin does it in a quite convincing way. And from that, I will of course be a little bit critical of Pippin and touch many other things. Tomorrow, connected with this because we will end up with the notion of comedy, horror, ugliness and so on. Tomorrow, so that I bribe you, sorry, nervous as usual, a little bit, a little bit. Incidentally, do you know this joke? I like it. When I make these tics of mine, here you can see what idiots psychiatrists are. It happened to me, I am not kidding, over times at least, that there was some idiot psychiatrist or psychoanalyst and he claimed, "Oh, it's clear, I am on cocaine" or whatever, you know. I mean I am the only guy in my generation, even although I am from a communist country because communists in my country were not stupid. When I was young, after '68, they did the same as in Poland, my friends told me. They more than tolerated, silently even allowed drugs because they knew better for students to drink, orgies and drugs than to do politics, you know. Ah no, this is very interesting. Friends from Poland told me that you remember, you don't remember you are too young, after the Jaruzelski military coup against Solidarność, all of a sudden the market was overflowed by drugs in Poland and pornography and Oriental spiritualism. You know, like anything to depoliticize the young. So I agree. I was recently at a theology conference, not here in London, another one where we had a nice rebuttal, somebody proposed it. You must know the joke of that thesis of Marx, you know, religion is the opium of the people. No, today the opium of the people is opium, like, you don't need religion no. What I want to say is that I was recently and I will talk about him tomorrow, if you want a good book, it's very inexpensive one, my good friend, I am proud to say this, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, like yesterday. The French rational choice theorist, theorist of catastrophes and so on. He is really a bright guy. He knows so much about all these paradoxes of retroactivity. I had a public debate in Portland, Oregon, which is maybe the most civilized place in the United States, I claim. It certainly has I think maybe the best bookstore in the world and believe me I know them, from Singapore to to to Tokyo and so on. It's called Powell's. It's just incredible because it's like a mega bookstore, many floors, but it still has the the atmosphere of that, how should I call it, small authentic, not Barnes and Noble big company. Okay, so what I want to say is that I proposed the title and he enthusiastically accepted it: "Is God dead, unconscious, evil or just plainly stupid?" And we were not just provoking, there were some theologians there who were delighted. So it wasn't offensive, but the title was problematic for some: Is God dead, unconscious, evil or just plainly stupid? And of course we arrived at the the last answer, no. That like if you think God screwed it up, how could he allow Auschwitz and so on, the answer is don't blame him, he was just confused. Okay, so that's what I want to talk about tomorrow. And I will show you, now let's pray all the evening to fate or God that it will work there, I always have have anxiety when you show something, a clip from a movie. If you don't have anything to do this evening, it's certainly better than *Interstellar*. You can get it everywhere for free on on YouTube or where, a very strange movie, the strangest movie I've seen recently. But it's from '82, an old one by someone called, sorry I didn't know him maybe you do, Michael Tolkin. It's a religious Christian movie, but it's absolutely breathtaking what happens in that movie. Maybe I should begin, then we go on with that movie so that I don't have to spend time introducing the movie tomorrow, so that I just begin with showing you the clip and then we go on. And that will be the whole point. Why, what this movie tells us in its ridicule. You can see there are still places there. I'm telling you this because then in my stupid wounded narcissism I just wait secretly when you will leave, you know, when you get bored, sorry. It's you know why it's such, you know that I like to play these games of how with a movie, where it could have ended. You know like how often you can make with, especially usually with good movies, this experiment: imagine ending ten minutes earlier or even in the middle of it and it makes a perfectly consistent story. And I think many great movies have precisely this structure. That naturally, if I may put it this way, by naturally I mean according to our naturalized conventions of course, it should have already ended and then surprisingly it goes on. If you allow me to, I am well known for this, for people attacking me as self-plagiarizing, you know. When I was accused of quoting, using old stuff for comments and they said self-plagiarizing is also plagiarizing, is also plagiarism. Now I like this, this means masturbation is also a form of rape or what? It's just self-rape or what? I mean, don't, I mean no. What I want to say is that in this film, yes, for example, I hope I can presuppose that you know the two mega Hitchcocks, *Vertigo* and *Psycho*. Did you notice that both have precisely this structure? Imagine *Vertigo* ending after Madeleine, later we know the false Madeleine, jumps down from the tower, so we think and Scottie is alone. It's a perfect one hour and five minutes, I think, dark romantic movie about how too passionate love kills, you know. The message is he, Scottie, is so violently in love, he pushes her to death. And then at that point, you know that inquiry where and so on is in the courtroom, at that point the movie could have ended, it would have been a perfectly consistent movie. Think, the same goes for *Psycho*, I claim. Imagine ending just a little bit before the shower murder. Like she takes the shower but without Norman Bates entering. It would be a perfect in the in those 19th century style of these moralistic short stories. It's a story of a young lady who succumbs to temptation, steals money, then stops in a motel, she encounters the madman, Norman Bates, and sees in him as it were her own future, my God, if I follow that path I will become like him and changes with my purified himself of of the ultimate temptation or destruction avoided. It would have been a perfectly consistent story. And the same is with this film, finally I'm coming to the point, Michael Tolkin. He was besides this film known mainly for writing, he wrote the script for Robert Altman's, if you know it, about Hollywood corruption, confusion, *The Player*, I think the film. It's a strange film. Mimi Rogers plays ordinary working girl in L.A. During the day she has these totally alienated jobs, just automatically answering this phone service to give some address, whatever, and during the night she is a swinging girl, orgies all the time and so on. Then as they say she starts to feel emptiness in herself, whatever, and encounters in this swinging orgy another guy who they both feel the same emptiness so they become fundamentalist Christians. They get married, they have a girl, and then we jump six years forward where they have a six years again daughter, happily married, and her husband is murdered in a quite nonsensical way. I mean just pure accident, some madman shoots him. And she is so broken down, how could this have happened, that she progresses even further into her religious delirium and thinks that she hears a voice telling her, "Go to some desert place near L.A. in to Arizona, I don't know where, and wait for God, wait for the rapture there." Sorry, I maybe I forgot even this, the title of the film is *The Rapture*. So wait for the rapture, God will come pick you up. And with her daughter she goes there and waits for it, and she waits, waits for a couple of months, nothing happens. Then her daughter tells her, "Why don't we simply kill ourselves and go, like you shoot me then you shoot yourself and we go directly to our dead father to rejoin him?" Okay, they go, after some deliberation I will not go into it, there are some minor subplots. She is also totally desperate, so she kills her daughter then in the last moment she stops, she doesn't kill herself because she knows that if she kills herself it's suicide, you cannot go to heaven, and totally desperate, it's not that she is a crazy criminal, she become she becomes aware of what she did, so she goes to the police and admits everything and she is in prison, totally broken down. At this point, that's my point, the film could have ended. As a kind of a critical portrayal of how far religious madness can bring you. Ah, now you are for the last minutes which are absolutely breathtaking. Because you think for a moment that it will be one of those, I love them, you know, those *Left Behind*, *Countdown Jerusalem*, those really crazy fundamentalist Christian films. Because what then happens in the prison while she is in the prison cell is that the end of the world and rapture it happens really. You know you are in a totally different, all of a sudden the prison bars start to fall away and some angel appears and says "Rejoin God, go!" And then she together with a sheriff friend, it's a secondary, because yes, her daughter immediately disappeared, is her daughter is raptured, I mean goes to God. So she with that a sheriff there, they drive a car and you see, shot deliberately in the most primitive way, the four riders of the apocalypse riding around them and so on. And this is already a wonderful trick. The message, I read an interview with the director, it's a, is God appears as a kind of a tricky guy who counted on, you know the trick was not the usual one: "Oh, we took his message too literally, there is no hell, hell is just a metaphor for hell in ourselves when we do something horrible." No, the message of God is "Haha, when I described that apocalypse you thought I was just kidding, that it was just a, no no no, you you read, I did it! I told you! You got the four riders, it's exactly as I described it, no." And then comes so you thought it would be this type of a almost undecidable, you don't know it's a comedy which so ridiculous or to be taken seriously in a fundamentalist way. But then with this sheriff they come to a place which is basically how do you call what's between heaven and hell, purgatory or what the middle okay. It's kind of a desert place not too attractive and far there you can see heaven. It looks like heaven, some wonderful place. And from there her daughter comes, already as an angel whatever, and tells her, "Come, me and my dad, your husband, we love you, we are waiting for you, just say, just tell just tell us, just say I love God. Just express your love for God and you will be immediately in heaven." And now comes the last twist of the movie which quite shocked me. It's I never expected after all this an authentic ethical act. Then she says, that's the last seconds sorry, then she says, "No, God was so evil, stupid, what he did to me, I cannot say that I love him." And you see the point. The point is that like there is God, you see everything, she said no. And the daughter tells her asks her, "But do you know what this means? Do you know how long you will stay here in purgatory?" She says, "Yes, I know, forever." End of the film. I mean, why what do I like about this? It's of course I read it as an atheist. But I think to be really a materialist, it's not enough to say there is no God or whatever, God is maybe a nice illusion, but one has to undermine it from within. You know, you know I will tomorrow I will refer to to this guy Dupuy and he has a complex theory on this conditional statements and so on which are I am now even doing a little bit of logic because of that which are a wonderful thing name, sorry not conditional, counterfactuals, you know. Because they are very complex. Look for example, to give you just a sense of it. If you say, if Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, then another person had to write it. This is true because Hamlet exists and if Shakespeare is not the author, then if we are not in a magic universe, somebody had but if you say if Shakespeare, how do you do this conditionals my English is not so good, had not written Hamlet, another one would have. Ah, this is very problematic. And you know in this way you can read even you can even see that how maybe the big problem of how to interpret Stalinism can be formulated in this way. For those who are still pro-communist, for okay for critics of Stalinism, they would have said the same thing as Engels, I think, not Marx, said about Napoleon. If not Napoleon, then another person had to appear like it was in the air the necessity to pass from from revolutionary republic to empire. If not Napoleon, another one. But this is again a problematic too determinist position. And so my point is this one, here we come to this counterfactuals that to be an atheist it's not enough to say "If God were to exist it would have been wonderful but unfortunately he doesn't." No, one has to go to the end in this counter and say "If God were to exist it would have been horrible." You should from within demonstrate the horror of it. And the paradox, and there were some priests important who agreed with me, is that Christianity is the only religion which confronts this. This that that's what happens in the book I develop this times in my books already that that's the whole point of the book of Job. You know I repeated this even here I think a couple of times, so the message of Book of Job, the greatest my God, the first book of Marxism if you want. Because the message of the book of Job is not only this critique of ideology moment, you know after things got screwed up three or four theologians friends appear and each of them gives some bullshit to Job, no. You were punished because you must be guilty even if you don't know or what. It's ideology. Each of the three theological friends come to convince Job that his suffering has some meaning. Then that's the great moment, Jehovah God comes and does something extremely surprising, almost at the level of *The Rapture* this movie, and says "No, all that the three theological friends are saying is bullshit, the only Job is right to complain, his suffering has no meaning." And then you know the story, then finally Job asks God, "But then why did you do this?" And then I mean all the meaningless suffering you imposed on me. And then comes that crazy speech where God says "Oh, were you there when I did all those monsters blah blah monsters when I created all the strange things?" And again this is usually read as as assertion of God's arrogance. Like "Who are you stupid limited men to ask me questions, you don't get it, I move at a totally different higher level." But you know the story I repeated it here, I follow here Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who reads in a crazy way this. He says that this God statement has to be read along the lines of "You complain, but look around, it's not only you, I screwed it up, the whole universe is like that, it's crazy" and so on. And again intelligent Christians, Christian theologians know that this that eh eh that Christ is the ultimate Job. The death of Christ means precisely the ultimate fiasco of God. Like it's the message of the death of Christ is the death of this good God who you think is above us and so on and so on. So okay, let's what I want to say is that this is what I want to do tomorrow, to go into the problem of theology in the sense of what can why a materialist have to why do we even if we are materialists, why do we have to go through theological experience even to be really effectively materialists? But that's for tomorrow. Today let me after this crazy introduction, okay, another point I cannot resist this introduction. I don't have time to talk this time about politics but President Obama used a word used a term recently in one of the interviews which shocked me because of the associations that it generates. He gave some I would say two weeks ago a very strange interview where he was asked about why United States intervening now in Syria and so on and his point was not that United States are imposing themselves as universal global policemen, but that simply that's how things are, the world, other countries are addressing United States as that. And he said, "When there is an earthquake there, when there is a tsunami in Philippines and so on," you know, maybe you read it on that fragment, it was like they don't call Moscow or Beijing, they call Washington. You know, we are those who are addressed and that's how the world and he uses the verb "that's how we roll." Now my immediate association was you know that United problem when those passengers in the kidnapped plane, heroically I must admit it, attacked the kidnappers. You know what were their just this is recorded the last words was one of them said "let's roll." You know, okay, that's how they roll and they roll in this sense also. Because I I really think and I am I had a conversation I report to you with my and this time I will not criticize him in any way recently with Alain Badiou and he developed something which really did strike me. You know it's almost fashionable today to say we are approaching a new world war. But I think that maybe we are, you know in what sense? I see this statement by Obama as a very tragic one because effectively we are already in a multi-centric world. And United States for them to cling to this role of universal policeman, it means that although they think they are asserting still their pre-eminence, they are more and more doing the dirty job for others. You know this, for example, do you know this latest scandal when Obama wrote a relatively friendly letter to Khamenei of Iran offering them cooperation? Iran arrogantly rejected it. But nonetheless Iran is well aware that United States are basically by fighting ISIS helping Iran to maintain its hegemony over Iraq and so on and so on. Why? Because I think here I agree with Badiou. His idea was that these new tensions, this is no longer Cold War in the sense of different world views. We are effectively unfortunately approaching vaguely, I know it's a simplistic comparison, but nonetheless, the the situation towards the end of the 19th century. We have one predominant power which is losing its grip on it. At that point it was you, I mean the British Empire, now it's United States. We have other countries who want to who want their part of it. At that point it was literal colonization, today it's economic influence, Russia, China and so on. And then we have colonial struggles. At that point it was Balkan, Bosnia, now maybe Arab countries or whatever. So I really think that it's potentially an extremely dangerous situation, even if I don't believe maybe I'm too optimist even an all-out atomic war. But many things can happen, I claim. Because I agree with Badiou that it's really and people say colonialism is over. No, it's not, economic colonialism spheres influence. It's really exactly the same problem, to carve out spheres of economic influence and so on and so on and and again, now you will say but we are all aware of it. Ah, this is what makes me afraid. It was, if you know a little bit of history, the last decades before World War I, it was exactly the same. And it's a nice example of what my other friend whom I mentioned Dupuy is writing a lot about this: how we know it but we don't really believe it. I think that although we hear everywhere these warnings, you know and you always attribute them to others, that's typical how the West is saying, "My God what Putin is doing he's pushing us towards a new Cold War maybe a new World War." My God three days ago I read, it was reported Putin gave an interview when he said exactly the same thing but just turned it around: "We want peace but the West is pushing towards..." you know always the other is guilty. But what I want to say is that this is the danger I see. You see now all this warning against World War, it's strictly based on this logic: we we know it but we don't believe it. We think that I think there is some subtle superstitious game at work in it. As if if we talk a lot about it maybe it will not happen, you know. Fuck it, it will happen, it can happen. It was exactly the same again with the First World War. You know my God just the basic Leninist experience. You know the story the story of how repeatedly in the Second International social democratic at every meeting they had, they solemnly swore we will not, they saw the war coming, we will not vote for war credits, we will not do it and as you probably know the moment the war did erupt all social democratic parties everywhere with two notable exceptions, Serb social democrats and Bolsheviks, they all immediately voted for war credits. So why am I mentioning this? Because Dupuy describes very nice this attitude towards a catastrophe of how you see and he claims today with ecological catastrophe, with new war threats it's exactly the same. We see it coming, but we don't really take it seriously, which is why we are playing these stupid games even with ecology. You know, Dupuy is right. Of course we should do this, we should make estimates like how much in global warming temperature will go up, but we should never forget that all this scientific bullshit covers up superstitious game like you know when they say more than two degrees Celsius if it raises up global warming temperature it's a catastrophe. But this is an imaginary, you know this is an arbitrary number. Maybe the catastrophe will be here if it raises only one percent, maybe it can raise five percent nothing will happen. I mean we are not what I want to say is that all this notions of the threshold, you know how much can we still pollute how much, it's not that I am more pessimist, I'm just saying that we really don't know. That all this rational play with "it's such a possibility so we can afford to risk so much and so on", all I'm saying is that this is bullshit. I mean it's not bullshit, we have to do it, but basically we are playing games, these numbers don't really mean. It's not that okay over two degrees Celsius is a catastrophe, so let's keep it to and everything will be okay, we are safe. What I want to say then Dupuy goes on and says that the mystery is not only how we play this game of it can happen, or we know it can happen but we don't believe it that it really can happen, but how once it does happen, after the first shock it immediately gets naturalized, it becomes a new way of life. And I can tell you this from my own, not my but of my friends' painful experience in Sarajevo. Even when the siege began in what was it '91, '92, I think, of Sarajevo, I had friends there, nobody, first nobody thought it can happen, although all the signs were there. Like I remember one Sarajevo journal even published through some guy in the headquarters of Yugoslav Army who was shocked when he saw the documents, gave them to a Sarajevo newspaper, the exact blueprints, plans for where to put guns of Yugoslav Army on the hills around Sarajevo. Everything was known, but people didn't believe it can really happen. And I'm not here playing to be very clear any anti-Serb game. You remember how I mentioned before the honor of Serb social democracy which was the only one together with Bolsheviks voting against war credits. So that's not my point, my point is just this logic of how all the signs were there but nobody was ready to took them seriously. Even when conflicts began, I know I had some friends there with small children who told me, "Listen this can last maximum two weeks." It was very fashionable for of course families who were able to afford it to quickly, because at the beginning the situation was confused, it was still able to leave Sarajevo with a car, they simply sent their children to the Dalmatian coast to Croatia like stay there for two weeks and then come back. Nobody even dreamt that it will last three four years or how much it did. But here is the point made by Dupuy. Immediately afterwards, once the siege were here was there, it became a way of life. It was immediately naturalized. People got used to it, they even you know how you know that they got used to it because jokes started to circulate making fun of all the like even with the most painful situations, for example, jokes about how you have to dodge to avoid snipers and so on and all that all that. And even some vulgar jokes like I always say like it works only Serbo-Croat where "skinuo on me skinuo" it means he took off my clothes, but it also can mean somebody shot me like skinuo me snajper, it means a sniper hit me, no. And the joke is that a guy goes to work in Sarajevo under siege, comes home and sees his wife naked with another man in the bed and she says "skinuo me snajper", you know, like skinuo the same verb like took off my clothes or shot at me and so on. So this is this is where I am a pessimist. I'm a pessimist not in the sense horrible things will happen, but how quickly we will get used to them. Because again that's why I'm almost becoming a paranoiac pessimist. You see what it already happened with torture. We silently accepted it as a and I was so shocked even now in Portland, not Dupuy he is a great guy here, but how how many even so-called progressive academics all of a sudden said "but let's be realist, sometimes you have to torture" and so on and so on. I'm not taking even a position here, I'm just stating how some something which years ago was simply unthinkable, you know to say "let's torture" or even that's my point I already made it here, or even to say "let's debate it." It would have been the same obscenity as to say "let's debate if rape is admissible or not." You know and then you can have arguments for and against and so on, but there is something admittedly obscene in this. You precisely shouldn't even debate this. I think, I already used this phrase here and I like to repeat it, I think that the sign of progress is more dogmatism in this sense. More dogmatism in the sense that a sign of ethical progress is that some things, some prohibitions, simply should become something that you don't debate. We shouldn't debate "Oh, but are there exceptional cases?" and then you can go into this totally ridiculous scenario, you know. What if a woman is really an easy woman and what if the guy is desperate, he was doing great thing, can he rape her a little bit and so on, all those stupidities. No, this has to become unacceptable. And here I claim it's better to be hypocritical than realist. Again I repeat my old point to provoke you if you want to debate later which I made here also years ago already. I can imagine torturing someone vaguely, I'm not sure. Okay, I will be honest and put it in a different way. What I can imagine a situation in which I cannot guarantee to you that I will not torture. For example, this ridiculous cheap melodrama stuff. I have a nice daughter six, seven years old. Some evil pedophiles got her. I got in my hands, I mean I arrested him, one of them. I know absolutely that he knows where my daughter is. It's ridiculous, I know, but I cannot guarantee you that I would not torture him to tell me where my daughter is. It's ridiculous, I know, but what I want to tell you is that nonetheless I want torture to be prohibited. Because even if we realistically accept that some time out of pure despair you do it, you should be aware and that's the whole distinction between here I'm quite naive between civilization and barbarism. You should be fully aware that you are doing something terrible, ultimately inadmissible. The horror is not if we are doing it. I'm a realist, I know all governments are doing it. The horror is when you normalize it. You know this is why I once he attacked me back in New York Times I got in conflict with that guy Alan Dershowitz who elaborated this notion of state regulated torture and even said that then all prisons should have doctors where let's say let's say any I don't want to point at any of you then I will be accused, you should be tortured and then doctor comes and examines you and decides how much torture will not hurt you and so I found this I find this obscene. I think if you torture, I'm not saying you should but if you, it should at least be some totally desperate act. You know the moment you are and again at this level I think that's the problem with me, this I think that the most perverse effect would have been an open debate about torture where opponents of torture would win. Because even if they win and we reasonably establish there should be no torture, in a deeper sense we've already lost because we accepted it as a topic of the debate and we shouldn't. We should be dogmatic here. So okay, I just wanted to maybe I will write something again, I don't know, because so many strange you know once after a long time I agreed with the cover of *Time* magazine. There was an issue about two months ago on gay homosexuality, gay issues and they made an observation which is true and worries me very much of how in the let's call it naively liberal part of the world, Western, more and more gay rights, but how this is accompanied by the opposite, how in many not only third world countries it's more and more anti-gay. You know this division is dangerous and things are happening. Like I have friends in Singapore who told me you know what is going on now now, okay now now, in the last month in Singapore. They are silently burning books from public libraries. No censorship, and books which paint in a positive way lesbianism or or abortion or divorce, whatever. The excuse is we are not prohibiting anything, we just try to keep calm not to arouse annoy people. You know, it's done in a very soft gentle way but slowly slowly they are doing it. So what I see is this extremes, on the other hand, in the politically correct sphere crazy things are happening. Like, no I wasn't here recently I didn't yet use at least this one I didn't, do you know it's not a joke? It was reported in the media, I didn't believe it, I thought it some joke so I called my friends to Australia. They confirmed it to me. Was it also maybe there was some note in your news about two months ago, Perth, you know Perth, West Australian city, they have an opera. That opera, it's not a joke, prohibited a staging of *Carmen*, Bizet. No, not because of sex, *Carmen*, because the first act takes place in a cigarette factory. And they claim this can be read as a propaganda for smoking. So they permanently withdraw the opera from, I found this so ridiculous, and I don't smoke. Ridiculous because even if you take it at this own level, I mean that place is not portrayed, the factory, as an attractive place, you know, it doesn't work that way at all. But I really think that we are approaching dangerous times if you ask me. Maybe even more than the Cold War. And here I return to my friend Dupuy who deployed in a wonderful way the logic of how that MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, how wonderfully it worked and he spontaneously we agreed he rediscovered there the Lacanian notion of objet petit a. He said he has this in his books in what how Mutually Assured Destruction, you know what it was, it was like no atomic war because if one side attacks then the other side will for sure be able to strike back and we are all dead. So precisely because both sides have full atomic capacities to destroy the other the opposite side, so this very equilibrium guarantees that there will be no war. But but he says something wonderful. He says no, if the situation were to be clear like that it would be still rational to hit. Why? Let's say I am one side, you are the other side. I would be tempted to bomb you because I would reason like this: I bomb you and I almost destroy you and then you would be in a tough position. Your choice would have been should I strike back? But that probably would have meant the end of civilization. Or do I not strike back and have the sympathy of the entire world, you know, I am the victim and okay my country has great loss, suffered great losses but at least I saved the human race. And it's quite rational to think that most of the world leaders would have probably chosen except some crazy American militarists. No, I am serious here. I'm sorry if I make another detour, but these are serious things. You know I have no illusion about Soviet Union and so on, but something did strike me. I've written about this in one of my earlier books deeply. I read now that they made them available, it's very instructive to read secret notes, now they some of them were rendered public about what happened within in the American headquarters, Army President Kennedy and Khrushchev, Soviet Army headquarters, during the Cuban missile crisis, no. I mean not that I was turned pro-Soviet, but what did strike me is that the American problem was almost exclusively who will blink the first, you know, let's just remain tough and so on, let's not lose nerve. While it's quite touching with all the Stalinist terror and so on. Khrushchev and his all those disgusting fat old Politburo guys, their problem was, "My God we are playing with the fate of humanity, do we have the right to do this?" and so on and so on. The Soviet side was the only one where the debates were touch this fundamental issue. Even I think today they celebrated him now again. You know that and it looks you never know that it is a true story, namely that he's called Arkhipov or what, that one Soviet submarine commander comes closest to saving the world. Because you know a Soviet submarine was there around Cuba and an American military boat above was doing some aggressive move towards it and there already was a command to rocket it, which would have triggered at least a mega war. And you know the Soviets as all of them, American also, you don't just press the button. You have all these rules that all three in a submarine, all the three commander and two main officers have to agree and then each of them has to put in his own code. And two agreed, one didn't. He as we put it bombastically, he saved the world. But again, it's typically it was the Soviet one. So what I'm saying is how complex the situation is. I'm absolutely shocked Soviet Union terror and so on, but you see how a certain, if you want, level of humanity surprisingly survived there, even at the top of the most corrupted nomenklatura and so on and so on. You know, so again, okay surprise surprise, now I will really stop this introduction. But I just wanted to to to to warn you. I really think again that we are approaching you know another sign that we are approaching dangerous times is don't take me for a fool, I am not an idiot who thinks you know like United States themselves organized and then you know all the stuff, you know that that and all the Jews were informed the previous day not to show up there. No, I am not a total paranoiac. But I don't know what to tell you but with ISIS now, the ISIS you know that state whatever, I have some marginal doubts what is going on there. First, and the source here are not some anti-semites, it's my Israeli friends who are not even very pro-Palestinian. They sent me a message telling me you know when ISIS occupied one of the cities there in Iraq or what, they did their brutal things, the usual ones, killing them, enslaving women, and they got some Israelis and they they immediately set them free. Then second thing you can check it on the web, when that guy Baghdadi or whatever, fuck him, the the boss of ISIS, was asked what to do how to what to do in Gaza, this was month ago when Gaza was still, you know what he said? He said, "Forget Israel, this will come at the end, now the main point is to fight our enemies within our world, it's to destroy Hamas." I mean on the and also you should see how ISIS perfect served a perfect function to allow the Western military establishment to reinvent itself. You know, to new investments, blah blah all that. I mean things are so unclear there. You can see in such a perfect way the rise of ISIS plays a certain role. First it fits perfectly, I am not I am not blaming them here, but I understand them strategically for the Israelis, what better thing there is than Arabs fighting each other like crazy and so on, you know. It fits them, it fits the military establishment and so on and so on. Especially those, you remember how did you see how Netanyahu, how Netanyahu reacted to ISIS? His message is not pro-ISIS, but something like "don't take ISIS too seriously, the big enemy is still Iran" and so on. You know it's all like there is something really obscure what is. I am not ready, able to make clear lines of separation. Okay, many leftists attacked me for at the beginning for taking pro-Ukrainian side at that first conflict. My answer is of course I am well aware I have connections there of all the neo-Nazis and so on in Ukraine. But you know what's the problem? It's hypocritical to say okay Russians have a point here because what about all the neo-fascists in Russia who are not even marginalized but fully part of the Putin camp? I mean it's and the key guy is here I almost like him that Orbán, the Hungarian government right wing, they went so far now, they pursue that path. Orbán is now openly taking sides with Putin and China claiming that you know Hungarians this is not for us, Western democracy, liberalism is a danger and so on and so on. So what's the point here? My point is that what I'm always repeating, that effectively a new form of global capitalism is emerging where economic global capitalism fits, functions perfectly with narrow violent nationalism. In India it's the same, how's it called that guy Modi or whatever. Yeah, within okay, he is a Hinduist nationalist, but at the same time he is much more than before radical global capitalist. He said openly, I was shocked, shocked at that he openly said it, that how he sees India's chance in the fact that China is getting a little bit too overdeveloped and will have to raise the price of their working force, so it's a chance here for India, all those cheap assembly stores, millions of underpaid workers, that's that's. So you see, you see the paradox. Ruthless global capitalism and violent ethnic fundamentalism. No contradiction here, they function together in a perfect way. Okay, after all this my God maybe maybe what do you think it's time that we begin? Let's do it. According to Hegel, I am talking about Hegel aesthetics, Hegel's diagnosis, you all know this, with the rise of modernity and here by modernity I mean socio-economic modernity, bourgeois society, post-medieval society, a quote from Hegel: "The form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit." You know that when it really matters the ultimate truth about our predicament, it's no longer in art that it is articulated. Now Hegel was well aware that technically even a more perfect art than ever can be created in our times. We enjoy it immensely, whatever you want, but as Hegel puts it nicely: we bow the knee no longer. It's not no longer that absolute respect. And I think if you ask me that Hegel was right more than he thought. Because later in the 19th century when with this new technological scientific civilization, and it's not science in Hegel's sense but the positivist science technology and so on, this became what's our attitude towards art today? We enjoy it, we even say it's wisdom, it's calm, you know. Even when we show respect for it, here Hegel was right, it's already a patronizing respect. Like the most disgusting slight symptom of this that I really like is many cognitivists like to boast discreetly that they are not just stupid scientists, they really appreciate art, but the way they do it is so terribly patronizing. For example, Damasio, maybe already used this example here, I hate this so much, it's so humiliating and patronizing. There is, I'm sorry it's not racism it's just senility, there is a great Portuguese pianist, a lady Maria something. Okay she is great and famous and Damasio in his one of his books about how our brain work, he wants to make a point of how hearing functions, no. And instead of simply making the point he cannot resist the temptation of boasting like "yesterday Maria blah blah visited us and she played the piece by Beethoven and I enjoyed it so much but then what happened when the sounds", you know like it's all about how your ears function, but he had to add this ornament to boast. That's their attitude. They can sincerely praise art, religious meditation, like there are scientists today who love as you probably know maybe even better than me Buddhist meditation because they prove scientifically that it really works and so on. But it's but it's but it's deprived of its substance. It's no longer what authentic art or religion was to be, what aesthetically we should call a contact with the absolute. I mean we can also understand this in a non-idealist way. It simply means it really matters, that art can is not just an kind of a aesthetic supplement or something that calms you down, that makes you function better. It's not a subjective experience. In art you formulate, you experience what it really matters, the truth of your life as it were. In this sense absolute. Yes, another example of this although he is more pleasant than Damasio would be Oliver Sacks. You know his Musicology, he obviously likes art and all this. But again, it's not a medium of truth art. Now and again I think that so Hegel was simply in this sense right. We today we believe in science, we look for the ultimate answers there. And I claim that this is implicitly admitted not only by artists but even by many religious people. If you look at it closely, when they try to find a space for religion also, what depresses me is how they do it. It's already in this let's call it therapeutic way. "Art can science is cold cannot satisfy you to retain your balance, the meaning of life you need a deeper mystical experience" blah blah. But this is horrible. They themselves are already treating religion implicitly as another way to facilitate your ego trip, you know. My God if you are seriously religious, it's not about how I feel, it's about God, it's about the truth of it. This is why were you here at that conference no it was in another room the theology with Rowan Williams and so on. Were some of you there? The Actuality of the Theologico-Political. There was a terrifying moment there. I'm sorry if I repeat myself. At the beginning, I don't know who, three of them were up on the podium and I asked them a simple question: "We are at a theologico-political conference, you talk about God. How do you mean it? Is just a metaphor, is just how religion maybe can serve our progressive struggle or do you really believe it? Where do you stand?" It was incredible. They basically behaved as if I asked them in what position did you fuck yesterday evening or what? As if you know it was literally as if I asked them some dirty private secret you know and how can you I remember my good friend Eric Santner, he was just the the last one to answer, he said "I am here as a literary analyst, I just analyze the text there it has." I mean and to avoid a misunderstanding I am an atheist. But here I had a sympathy with my friend, we don't agree don't be afraid, John Milbank, who was also shocked later we talked about how my God you know and this is so sad this is where religion is dead today I claim. That you have two types you have either this is predominant form of religion there are very few who are still doing serious theology either you have this cheap preaching, you know, popularizing it which is really a big ego trip, or you have science. Science in the sense of you know all those boring books which are so irrelevant, they are worse than the most vulgar atheism. Those what was the real Chris, you know that I read it with pleasure but fuck it that Aslan *Zealot*, you know. Like you know this endless stories, they always make the same point: St. Paul is to blame for everything, Jesus was not that, the original Jesus was some I don't know good revolutionary whatever. This historical point but so what's the point? Where do you you see what I mean? The moment you approach it like this it's already a positivist problem. The question but where do you stand with regard to it? Of course Aslan finishes his book with this in this way he says "Nonetheless Jesus deserves respect, he was a great man." Fuck it, was he God or not? What do I care if he was a great man? I mean you see these are the signs of this is why I wrote in one of my earlier books do you remember you are probably most of you too young when was this '90s or when it I totally get confused when Taliban were in power in Afghanistan. You remember they shot those Bamiyan gigantic Buddha statues. In a way they showed more respect for Buddhism because they took it as an actual religious threat. It was a sacred war. In a way they showed more respect to religion than we who were outraged by what they did. Because our outrage was not "Oh my God they are ruining God!" No, it was "What a great monument to the culture of humanity!" The moment you talk about religion in this way it's over, religion is dead. Now be careful, I am not saying we should return to religion to authenticity of the sacred. I not only think that that we cannot, I think that when we do it's usually something fundamentalist terrible and so on. So I developed this in a I think it's my this I call my Norman Bates book. You know why absolute recoil? Because you know they did the way Verso did it and this time I like them the cover: it's as if it is I am Norman Bates and enter the shower. You know how it's the cover, the letters carved by no? I am Norman Bates now. That identity, but what I'm saying is that you see I just wanted to improvise here in what sense Hegel was right, religion no longer has this substantial truth. Which is why I claim all these attempts to as they call it "reenchant the world", to return magic to the world, so that to paraphrase Hegel we would be able to to to bend the knee again, show humility in front of the greatness of art of nature whatever. They are they are a fake, they are an aesthetic game I claim. So in this sense Hegel was right. How then are we to advocate against Hegel and his diagnostic of the end of art, but in the spirit of Hegel the continuing relevance of art? Hegel was right, but nonetheless in what sense was Hegel right? That's what I want briefly to develop. In what sense precisely remaining within Hegel's horizon we can fight against Hegel with Hegel himself? Where was Hegel too short? Here I will give you now some quotes from this Robert Pippin's book "After the Beautiful" where he says that Hegel had a double limitation. Now I will try to prove later why still we can remain Hegelians and criticize Hegel through Hegel himself. Here Pippin is right, these are simple statements but I think they are correct. First, there was a blind spot in Hegel's treatment of modernity. You know Hegel's vision at the end of his eh eh philosophy of right, that he speaks about the modern post-revolutionary revolutionary French Revolution modernity against the remains of the more traditional world. But for Hegel in a post-revolutionary world we no longer have these fights. This world is basically reconciled with itself. Here since probably I talked too much and I will not have time to to return to it, I will just give you an idea. Towards the end of his Lectures of Aesthetics Hegel does ask a question: what kind of art can we still imagine in this world in which art no longer has this substantial, you know for Hegel really big art stages renders the big historical conflict, the big antagonism of an epoch. *Antigone*, whatever, struggle modernity tradition, there art must recapture a big historical tension. Today we no longer for Hegel we no longer have such tensions. So Hegel gives a precise answer in his aesthetics. He says that the topic of the new art is something he called with a strange word, of course I know what it means but strange what he means by it, *humanus*, which he simply means all the ridiculous particularities of our ordinary lives: our stupid misunderstandings, struggles, small personal tragedies, comic confusions, all this what we say ordinary life. It has no big historical relevance, but this is what our ordinary non-historical prosaic life is about. And Hegel says since it's not a great historical tragedy, it's a comedy. Not comedy necessarily in the sense that you laugh, but comedy in the sense that it's from the standpoint of the absolute irrelevant. You know like you can have there a madman, a serial killer, blah blah. Now if you want to make this would be the Hegelian standpoint an authentic tragedy out of it, you would have some how to historically mediate serial killing, you know, to show how I don't know how a serial killer somehow brings out in a of course crazily radicalized version some fundamental attitude which is immanent to bourgeois subjectivity let us say. I am not claiming this totally seriously, but it must be something like this to make it relevant. If a serial killer is just a private pathology even if he does all the horrors that he does, these are just ridiculous idiosyncrasies. It doesn't have relevance. So that's Hegel's view. That we live in a prosaic modern world. Conflicts are just these ridiculous particular idiosyncrasies. And it's a comedy again because it does not reflect, render, express an absolute historical tension. I it came to me I wonder if you would agree that I claim only today we found a form of art, Hegel was ahead of his time, which perfectly fits what Hegel was after. Today's sitcoms. Are they not exactly like this? Think about I don't know *Seinfeld* or all of this, even not just the stupid comedies with canned laughter but these endless sitcoms where you know the conflicts are irrelevant, small jealousies, troubles at your job, love quarrels and so on with a comical flair, even from time to time tragic, but nothing world historical happens. So that would be a nice thesis to develop that Hegel was the first, without knowing, theorist of *Seinfeld* or all these sitcoms and so on. But and this is why incidentally I think that they are a perfect form of ideology today these sitcoms. Their message is precisely this: we live in a reconciled world. All that happens, all that happens within our world there is always an evil other Muslim or whatever outside, all that happens is are these idiosyncratic conflict. Again there can be horrible, someone can kidnap you and slowly torture you to death whatever, but you see my point, it doesn't have historical relevance. Was Hegel right or not? Unfortunately not I claim. In what sense again back to Pippin. Pippin claims that Hegel, I quote, there is Hegel's quote, "failure to anticipate the dissatisfactions that his prosaic world would generate." Or "Hegel's failure to appreciate that there might be a basic form of disunity or alienation that his project could not account for, for which there was no overcoming yet on the horizon." So this is the first point, that in other words and Pippin is here almost a Marxist. Although Hegel wrote about excessive wealth and all that how bourgeois society necessarily generates excessive wealth and on the other hand those Pöbel, rebel, those excluded and so on, but this is marginalized. Hegel did not admit that in the prosaic modern world that he describes as our contemporary world, that there can be some fundamental however you call it dissatisfaction precisely in Hegelian sense of obstacles to actualize your human dignity, equality, recognition potentials. And as Pippin points it out, when of course Hegel has all this point about how the progress of modern society is universal freedom, it's to overcome master-servant relations, but for him the only relations of social antagonism and hierarchy that Hegel was able to perceive, Hegel was not yet fully a thinker of capitalism where these precisely pre-modern hierarchical relations of domination. What Hegel couldn't imagine is precisely what Marx did, a society which is legally fully eh eh egalitarian, we are all the same blah blah we have all the freedoms, but nonetheless there is class antagonism. So that's what Hegel wasn't able to see. And at the same time there is another limit of Hegel. His notion Hegel's notion of art remains the let's call it naive realist notion. To cut a long story short, for Hegel art is still a realist staging of something eh eh mimetic representation or subjective expression. The notion of modern art was unthinkable for Hegel. So-called abstract art. Hegel knew well, Hegel did in a way foretold foretell sorry so-called conceptual art because Hegel says that in our age, I quote Hegel, "art invites us to intellectual consideration." By this he meant that art lost its innocence, that intellectual consideration is part of it. But I think Hegel wasn't able to go to the end here and in imagine a form of art which remains authentic art although it's problematic this today but nonetheless as art includes explicitly the moment of reflexivity, intellectual consideration and so on and so on. And it's true with modernism proper art did lose its innocence, you know. I mean it's ridiculous today to claim, you know romantics were the last to be able to say "When I write or paint, I don't know what's happening, some higher force is talking creating through me" blah blah. You are a fake. But where was Hegel right? Okay also what Hegel this would have been unthinkable for him did not imagine is that the other part of this reflexivization of art, and this is typical for modernism where you know practically every modernist at the same time had some kind of at least of theory about what he is doing. And even if in his practice he violated his theory, nonetheless this violation implied the theory. Or as some of my friends claimed, art historians they are writing a book some my Slovene friends, one can even say that with some modernist orientations like fut some futurism and so on, their manifestos theoretical are the only interesting part, you know, who cares about the bullshit they were doing their manifesto is even in a way the only work of art that they did. In what sense? In the sense of what Hegel didn't foresee is that this reflexivization of art also implies the opposite, that thinking philosophy itself starts to imitate art with Nietzsche and so on. Philosophy itself becomes an aesthetic of writing and so on and so on. But where was Hegel right here? Isn't there a problem with conceptual art, which is the ultimate example of art which includes reflexivity? That as a rule, usually, it has the structure of what we call hapax, only one example. You know what I mean, to put it very simply, for someone like Duchamp: okay, you have that that pissoir, how do you call it in English, urinary, whatever, yeah. Okay you put it there and fuck you, you made your point. You know what I mean. Then you can, you know, once you did, okay, it's over, you know. You cannot then next time put on I don't know put on I don't know some cooking utensil next time you put on a pillow or whatever. Once you make your point. It's the same with Malevich whom I really appreciate. Okay he did his black square on white surface. So fuck off! Yes, you made your point. You know what I mean. The problem is how you go on. And this is for me the big problem. Although of course with Duchamp you can complicate things. And here I always like to annoy my friends, you know. Maybe you know the story I used it in some of my books. Imagine that you are at an exhibition and you have that stupid pissoir or what? Yeah, eh then and they explain to you "Yeah, you know this is not really a pissoir, this is up there a work of art, you know like put into the" the point is obvious that it's the position, place that makes a work of art not its attributes. Now imagine a vulgar guy like me walking up there and urinating into it. Now an idiot would tell me "Idiot, you totally miss the point! This is not a real urin- urinal it's a piece of art." Eh, fuck you, I have an answer: "But I also became in this way part of that eh world of art, you know, why shouldn't then also my urinating be world of art, work of art and so on and so on." So again, there is a deadlock here and what I nonetheless appreciate so much in all really great modern artists is that they were able to move as it were beyond hapax, you know. Malevich didn't just go on doing these stupid squares. Although for some time he was, I think he even did something like white square on white background or whatever. Okay but once he did this and it's totally wrong to see his modest return to more realist painting as they usually dismiss it as a compromise with Stalinist realism. No, it's there still. You know this famous late self-portrait from early '30s, I think close to his death of Malevich, where you see him and he makes this gesture with hand square, like the square is still here, you know. The the big test is how to return to even more apparently traditional art, but in such a way that it's not just a regressive return, that the outcome is there. Okay, now one thing that back to Pippin. One thing that Pippin doesn't do and I was very surprised and here I will at least do what I wanted to do, I will show you some of those the best known I will not do anything great paintings by Manet to make the simple point of art and modernity. Eh eh we have these two limitations of Hegel: on the one hand we have a fundamental dissatisfaction with modernity which is not just individual idiosyncrasy, like there is something structurally wrong with our world, there is a fundamental alienation, displacement, whatever, and on the other hand, art moved to an abstract level in the sense of that it doesn't simply rely on a reality out there that you depict, render inner or outer reality but in a way reflexively the form itself becomes problematic. Eh, now I will improvise a little bit so that from the later part namely eh what I find so weird with Pippin is that he doesn't ask the obvious question: how are these two connected? That is to say if, and that's the implicit lesson of Hegel, art is only possible in non-reconciled society, in a society where there is a fundamental tension and where this tension cannot be fully intellectually grasped, so you render it in art. What then happens with in modernity, what kind of a tension it is that you cannot render it adequately in the traditional realist way? Why is it that to put it in very naive terms, why is it that to articulate what is wrong in our world you need to undermine the very coordinates of our sense of reality as it were? You have to move to abstraction, you have to doubt about reality itself all that stuff and so on and so on. Why can't you depict what is wrong with our world in standard realist way? And this is where of course although I appreciate him, he's not such a total idiot as people the great Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, who at least towards the end remained for not socialist but critical realism. What he didn't see nonetheless, Lukács, when he criticized Kafka for abstraction and so on was that like why didn't Kafka realistically depict the alienation of our society? Why do you have to go through all that fantastic phantasmagoria crazy world? Why can't you simply do a realist novel? That's the big question. And now I will make my first point how on both these counts, the two limitations of Hegel, what I find so attractive, here Pippin is convincing, but I developed it is that on both counts, Hegel it's not that something new appeared Hegel was not able to grasp it, Hegel was not Hegelian enough. We I already written about it a lot about capitalism. What when he speaks about market, Hegel we all know he did read Adam Smith "invisible hand" all that bullshit, but eh Hegel's notion of capit of modern market society was and I use on purpose this word he was too much of a vulgar materialist, he wasn't idealist enough. Hegel still thought market: each of us just work and simply it's coordinated contingently through the market. What Hegel was not able to imagine is capital as such where abstraction rules directly. You know that's the point of Marx. When Marx describes in *Capital* the passage from money to capital, he says with capital money becomes its own pseudo-autonomous subject. Money capital is money which mediates itself with itself, circulates, and we actual people are just so abstraction directly rules. It's a totally Hegelian notion and Marx consistently uses Hegelian terms. Capital is actual idealism. It's an ideal entity, the real of an ideal entity structuring our reality. Hegel remained too much of a vulgar realist here and eh sorry materialist even. Then the same goes for we know this. So paradoxically again Marx's achievement was not simply to materialize Hegel's speculation, but to show to Hegel that in the domain of political economy he wasn't idealist enough. He wasn't able to imagine and today it's getting even more crazy with all those speculations on futures and so on where everything happens in some totally abstract level and our real lives are dominated by that. We live in a totally idealist world today. The same goes for art. What what is the big lesson for example of modern painting? Just read although I don't like him too much eh neither as a painter Kandinsky nor as a theorist, he is too much of a New Ager. But something he saw clearly, that there is he is idealist in a good Hegelian sense. You know his famous text eh concerning the spiritual, about the spiritual *das Geistige* the spiritual dimension of art. His point is that eh in standard notion of painting, what you see is an expression of some spiritual content, but mediated by what is represented there. You paint a church, of course even if it's done in a non-realist way, it's through this representation that spiritual content enters. But what the basic breakthrough of Kandinsky is that eh there is a spirit again that it is that already visual form before representative level as it were. Already at the purely former level is spiritualized. That you can render a spiritual conflict, ethical, world historical even at the pure level of form: triangle, square, colors and so on. So you see and this point Pippin demonstrates nicely how Hegel was not idealist enough here. He didn't see that the form itself is already spiritualized, not in any mystical sense, but in the sense that there is a certain spiritual content, spiritual struggle. By spiritual we shouldn't think about spirits, but precisely and Pippin points out this nicely spiritual in the Hegelian sense of *Geist*, collective identity, public space of recognition, that you don't you don't have to mediate it through representation. You see? and this is where Pippin again shows nicely how if the progress of history in dialectic means that more and more spirit mediates immediate materiality, then modern art is more Hegelian idealist, abstract art, because it as it were lowers the level of spiritualization. It's already prior to representation. So again these two limitations of Hegel that he didn't see the fundamental instability of the modern world, okay, now how do we see this? Now I will try to do a little bit of Manet and please take this I am not faking here, I am I wouldn't say bluffing but like what I will tell you is very elementary, it's the ABC what the connection I want to make eh eh obvious one but very elementary because Pippin also I hope this still works yes I will see wait a minute okay fuck it that it also cannot see okay let me first show Manet this eh eh almost let's do it best okay why this girl behind a bar or whatever what is so what strikes you? As Pippin points out two things and it all concerns in a very Lacanian way of course the gaze. First you have the gaze of the bar girl which is the typical Manet gaze of let's call it seeing eh looking by some people sorry people usually call it as seeing but not looking. You have this typical Manet distracted gaze which works in a disturbing way because it is as if she is aware of you looking of her but at the same time you are irrelevant. So you are at the same time excessively included, the picture looks at you, but nonetheless excluded and eh this dislocation is even more clearly rendered by another feature: you see the lady's reflection in the mirror there. But it's a confusion of perspective because if you are where you are, you cannot see it like that in the mirror. It is as if you the viewer are directly addressed but the point you don't have a fixed point. And eh Pippin's idea is that this let's call it subjective dislocation not only of the painted girl who again like okay you can say she is just tired after whole night work whatever, but nonetheless it's as if like why am I here, it's some kind of a fundamental dislocation. And what is so nice and I think Pippin is not aware enough is that the ambiguity of this dislocation. On the one hand it's the basic form of alienation, like she is almost in a textbook way alienated like what am I doing here? But at the same time this alienation this alienation is freedom. It's you are autonomous you cannot be identified to a certain fixed place and so on and so on. Okay let's not lose time let's go on, his breakfast or dinner or whatever I don't care in the grass. Now this is another mystery. You have of course especially with the naked lady here the same dislocated gaze. Then another, okay I will not go into it because of course I'm a psychoanalyst guy so I immediately did a primitive not even Lacanian but analysis. Pippin himself draws attention to the fact that the lady who is not totally naked washing herself in the background, he claims and I checked with some other art historians that this is usually eh read as post-coital washing. Okay so I ask you a simple question: who fucked her? There are two men and two no did the one who talks here or the guy behind there and many things can be developed by that? The other mystery is the double source of light and so on. It's the same dislocation. Let's drop that and let's go to his eh maybe most famous painting *Olympia* too. You see you have the same dislocated gaze. Eh there are two mysteries here. One is the source of light. The big rule of classical painting was you should have it clearly indicated, it's the sun or whatever, the source of light within the space of the painting. Here it's as if we the viewers are the source of light. It's we and it's even an extra strong life. Of course this is a prostitute, a black eh servant bringing her flowers from some customer, maybe from us and so on. So one point is this simple we are directly put into we I I I felt when you look at this painting you cannot but feel like a customer in those famous Amsterdam red light district, you know, watching them. Although incidentally the last time I was in Amsterdam I loved the experience in Red Light District. You know why? Because it's in a very Hegelian way at three-four level mediated experience. You have girls who are usually I was told Filipino girls, no longer Dutch girls, within the that frame of the window. They are watched by prospective customers who are usually some eh some some some some Arab-African eh immigrant workers. Both of them are watched by usually Japanese tourists taking photo of them and then local Dutch people are just with a amused detached amusement observing the entire scene. But what I want to say is what Pippin develops there is another feature here in a nice way is that although this is clearly the portrait of a prostitute with all the vulgarity with all the signs of flesh and so on even subtle signs of the nastiness fil- filth and so on, it's clearly a copy an imitation of those classical paintings of nudes like Angres did his *Venus* in exactly the same position, the hand covering the pubic area and so on and so on. But what's interesting is that the you know till Manet it was still possible to do naked painting in a totally sublimated however you put it innocent way. Here the effect is retroactive in the sense that not only do we pass from those saintly or whatever naked desexualized bodies to a clearly sexualized body, but I claim the effect is retroactive in the sense once you see this you cannot look at the same in the same way to all those *Venus* paintings and so on and so on. It's ruined. And this brings us again to my friend with whom I began Dupuy, to that problem of retroactivity. It's that you see this is how it works a true revolution. It's not up till now it was like this, from now on it's like that. It's when something new emerges retroactively we lost you know it's not that once we see this we cannot return to to early modern all those naked painting and see them in their innocence. No, retroactively they lose their innocence. It's lost. So eh again the main point here, there are other points how he plays with frame and so on but the idea is again that the subjects in these paintings are even if they are eh commodified like here object, again crucial is that dislocated gaze. And then I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this. Hegel is here incredible. Hegel claims that gaze is the window to the soul, no? There you feel subjectivity. But Hegel does something, ah sorry let me finish this line of thought. I claim that nonetheless there is some type that what Pippin that Pippin is too nonetheless too idealist. He speaks a lot about abstraction as abstraction as eh spiritualization of form itself like all those early modernist abstract paintings, but I claim that something more happens with modern art. It's not only that the form itself is not just material form gets abstracted, because this is usually what they say about Manet, that reflexively it includes references to the painting itself. How often he reproduces within the painting the form of the frame and all that and eh imitates the texture of the materiality of the painting. But I think there is something more going on here. Here is my first guy eh Edvard Munch of course. Look, this is you can read it as a realist painting, a melancholic idiot close to the coast whatever. Then you have the materiality of painting, but the way I read it, we know what these objects are supposed to be, it's water up there, up on the left side beneath are some stones and so on, but don't you feel here and even more will it work no sorry yes somehow okay I'm ashamed to point show this one it's *The Scream* of course and every self-respecting intellectual has to have some items at home, you know that you can buy them, these commercially commercialized items like I have it such a big one you blow it with this ah this figure as a doll at home, as a plastic doll. Then I have even a pillow with this figure on it and then the trick is you don't know when you lie on it and then in the middle of the night wah it starts to scream. That's what I call respect for modern art. But what I want to say something else. Again realistically we know behind it's a stream, grass, field, sky. But don't you feel a certain weight, materiality? For example, those lines in the sky or water, it's as if it functions as a kind of a stain which is too strong. You don't experience it as the materiality of the sky. But it's also not the immediate materiality of the painting. It's very strange for me this phenomenon of what maybe with Schelling we could call okay I did it correctly okay now let's go eh briefly on here. Ah, so again a quote from Pippin I jump. What vouchers for Manet's painting is the definite birth of an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world. The viewer is commanded to position himself as an autonomous subject lacking the possible means to identify himself or to project himself into the artwork he confronts and so on and so on. I said or the gaze is directed outside the frame addressing us viewers but we are treated as if invisible or indifferent, occupying no important presence and so on and so on. Then okay we have that *Olympia* stuff, this brutal realization and again back to gaze. What Hegel develops in a in a beautiful way is how he says the eye is the organ which points indicates the inside of a body. And Hegel is incredibly modern here. He says that the symbol of art is therefore, he evokes a a Greek mythological entity, a thousand-eyed Argus, a monster you know his his whole body there are eyes everywhere. And he says that the work of art is something like that, looking at us from all points, not only from the eye. But and then he uses even a stranger metaphor, he says that this thousand-eyed work of art is essentially a question, an address to a responsive breast, a call to the mind and the spirit. What's so strange is that one would have expected in standard subject-object division that you know the world the work of art is the breast and we subjects are feeding from no, it's a pretty horrible metaphor, the idea is that we the viewers are reduced to a breast and the gaze which emanates from the painting is sucking us. But the miracle of Hegel is this one. First and Hegel is aware if art is fundamentally this thousand-eyed monster, but this is precisely a monstrosity. I mean this is can you imagine this monster eyes everywhere? So Hegel already had the had this incredible insight which we can read through Lacan when he says in Seminar XI of how a work of art acquires its beauty through deposing, gentrifying the gaze. Which is why for Hegel in a beautiful passage in his aesthetics, he claims how this is why Greek art, and as you probably know Greek art it was for Hegel the art in historical sense, only in Greek art was the supreme form of the expression of the absolute, of the spirit. In medieval times it was religion, in modern time is science, thinking. But and that's a beautiful point of Hegel. He claims that precisely because of this the Greek statues have eyes but don't have a gaze. You know it's kind of a flat and in a way true but nonetheless Hegel sees that for this Greek art to have this effect of desubjectivization, the Greek art as it were has to the gaze has to be there but it has to be eh repressed forever. And even further and then with romanticism the gaze returns and so on and so on. A further thing that Hegel does is to to emphasize how all art is art is not simply beautiful but its beauty its a way to cover up, to contain, to mask the horror of the gaze, this thousand-eyed Argus which is ugliness. Which is why I claim and there is a wonderful book I'm so sad that it's not translated into English, a pupil of Hegel called eh Karl Rosenkranz. It translated this book from German I think only in French, maybe some other language but from what I know maybe I am wrong not in English. He published in a book called *Aesthetik des Hässlichen*, *Hässlichen*, Aesthetics of the Ugly, where in a very boring systematic Hegelian way he develops all forms of ugliness, like this eh ugliness in the sense of ridiculous excess, ugliness in the sense of distortion, disfigurement and so on, disgust and so on. It's it's eh it's an incredible work. Although it remains conceptually traditional, the guy just wants to show how the beautiful needs to be mediated by the ugliness and of course Adorno had a whole chapter on it in his Aesthetic Theory where of course he is more radical. He claims that beauty can emerge only against the background of the ugly and of course the big problem is here double. One is in what precise sense then is ugliness necessary as the background of the beautiful and how can we in a work of art overcome it? Rosenkranz's solution is eh comedy. First you begin with beauty, this beauty is distorted then once you acquire a distance of comedy of a distance towards it and see the ugly in its ridiculous character you enter the comedy. Another way would have been and it's interesting that Hegel neither Hegel nor Rosenkranz follow this path, another way would have been eh the sublime. In the sense of you know in Kant you know his theory of the sublime. Something monstrous, excessive, but in a negative way it points out the beauty or the beauty okay it's precisely not beautiful but the spiritual like Kant what's Kant's theory of the why is for example wild nature sublime? Because it can be earthquake monstrosity and so on but in a negative way you become aware however no matter how wild nature is it cannot shake our moral law in us, our spiritual dimension, in this negative way it evokes it. So again it can be either ridiculous or sublime the way to overcome ugliness. And ridiculous and sublime can easily pass into one another. Isn't it that if you try to be sublime in a too brutal direct way it can turn ridiculous, or the other way around? Someone can be ridiculous but in such a touching way that it becomes sublime. You know who was a great master here I claim? Late Charlie Chaplin talking movies. It's clear example of ridiculous this helpless old clown all of a sudden turning into sublime. Then the point is this one. But if ugliness becomes really really ugly, yeah the first theological point here and Adorno knew this well, you know the standard theological theory about eh evil? This is the standard official Catholic position that evil doesn't have any positivity, evil is just the absence of goodness, evil is privation of good, and in the same way can we say in the same way then that ugliness is just the privation of beauty? I claim and Adorno points in this way that we should rather say the opposite. What if beauty is the privation of the ugly? You take away something from the ugly you get beauty and I am tempted to go to the end what is even goodness, good is the privation of the evil. You erase a little bit of the evil it becomes good. But I want to make this point. And here it's incredible. The I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this but namely this. Now you will say "Okay, we have this monstrosity of the ugliness. But how can we be sure that it will be that it will turn around into sublime or comical? What if it's simply too strong and it remains monstrous?" Even Kant allows for this option. When Kant says that sublime only works a monstrous phenomenon engenders sublime effect if we are safe from a safe position, like storm is sublime if you observe it through a window, no not if you are in the middle there directly threatened. And then Kant does something incredible and I'm sorry I talk so much so fuck it with this I will end but we go on tomorrow. It's eh eh Kant distinguishes here colossal from the monstrous. Colossal is this too great monstrous which still engenders the effect of sublime, but if monstrous gets too monstrous, then we just get some total terror total unpleasure. And it's incredible what Kant does here. He directly, I couldn't believe it so maybe Lacan was not totally idiot, he directly uses the couple *Lust* pleasure and enjoyment *Genuss*. He said that when things are moderately monstrous they can still work in the economy of pleasure unpleasure. It's eh *Unlust* non-pleasure which nonetheless engenders sublime pleasure and so on. But he says when monstrous gets too monstrous, it's not pleasure but my God it's ah you see Kant says *wo in diesem Erfahrung von Lust die Lust zugleich Kultur ist*, where pleasure is at the same time culture, but he says eh that eh with when things are just monstrous, we get enjoyment *Genuss* destructive of culture. What bothered Kant was why enjoyment why monstrosity fascinates us? And he uses for this weird attraction, you know something is disgusting but you cannot stop looking at it, no sublime effect, just here enters enjoyment *Genuss*. My God this is Lacan *das Ding* and so on, eh every everything is here in a way. Eh and then okay we could go on from here in what way the disgusting dimension functions, disgust as as we know disgust always enters when the the skin, the limit between inside and outside is violated. You probably know this example I used it often but let me repeat it: like make a simple experiment. Without any problem you always swallow your saliva, no? No problem. Okay do it, I tried it, it work. It's disgusting, I couldn't do it. Take a glass and spit your saliva into it and then try to drink it. I cannot. You see? The moment it's outside it's over, although my God seconds before you were without any problem swallowing it. So eh with all that stuff eh disgust and so on, I would like to pursue, sorry if it was a little bit confused, but tomorrow we will go on from here just some finishing thoughts of Hegel. That Hegel's my thesis will be that the limitation of Hegel was that what he also and maybe this is much more serious than what Pippin delineates. What brought us 20th century with its horrors was a why does Hegel automatically think that comedy is comedy of reconciliation, no conflict? What we experienced in 20th century is a comedy which is when things get so terrible that they are no longer be tragic they get comic. Which is why you know my old point like why are all good films about Holocaust comical? Comedies and so on. Because in tragedy you still retain a certain dignity as a subject. Tragedy means you screw me, I said no, kill me but I will you know a certain greatness. But in with this is why Auschwitz was not a tragedy. If you say in Auschwitz Jews were in a tragic position it's an obscenity. You concede too much to the Nazis. The deprivation of humanity was so horrible there that the victim was not able to maintain a tragic a tragic position. Eh this is why as I used it quite often, you have scenes in Auschwitz which are in a weird obscene way comical. Like eh all those games of formalized gestures, in a way it's a terrifying comedy and this I claim Hegel was not able to see. That there is also for Hegel evil was tragedy. Tragedy in the sense that what's the basic feature of tragedy is that you think an external enemy counterforce is attacking you, but the tragic point is that when you see your co-responsibility that in fighting your opponent you are fighting yourself. You are always in a you know like Oedipus, you know. He discovers how he is involved in it and so on and so on. But already in this sense Auschwitz is not a tragedy. To read Auschwitz as a tragedy would have meant to say the Jews who experienced how when they are tortured and destroyed by the Nazis they are really torturing themselves is ultimately their responsibility. No, precisely this is an obscenity to say this. Tragedy is sorry it becomes comic in this weird way precisely when you see the total contingency of it. I am tortured it has no meaning no point and so on and so on. So again from this to to give you a little bit of forelust fore-pleasure of forthcoming attraction. What I will do tomorrow to begin with before we go to theology but it's all connected is my friend Adam Kotsko, a very nice from Chicago eh he was here for that theologico-political conference eh he just finished a wonderful new book on creepiness, creepy heroes, you know that all the TV heroes in that we have they are creepy. How can it be that almost the main form of sitcom of heroes are creepy guys? And to develop all these models of ugliness, how they function and so on and from here we will then go to the ultimate creepy guy, God, and so on. You know so and then we will return maybe to politics a little bit. So eh now you have minus two minutes to ask questions but because it's minus two minutes you have no chance to ask questions so please because I really feel bad, the usual rule tomorrow, but remember tomorrow it's at two PM. Don't ask me why. I am here like a Jew in Auschwitz, you know, tragic I didn't do it I didn't do it, just fate but eh so again if you want but don't really do it I will show you the last ten minutes watch that crazy watch that crazy movie again it's better than *Interstellar* probably not eh okay so thanks very much and tomorrow we go on thanks. [Applause]
I must first as usual sincerely apologize because I decided to change the topic totally. I can't even say that it's really about the same thing because I simply want to present you what I am working on now, and I think it's better than what I planned to do then, the other stuff. What I want to talk to, I know that I always begin with I warn you, it's not the usual joke, it's more boring than you expect, but this time it will really be bad. But nonetheless, maybe acceptable to you because what I want to do today, don't be afraid of the abstract topic, I think I do a nice relevant line, it's simply a defense of Hegel a propos modern art. Because you know I'm like an automaton, this black box, you put something into it, you get out. What was put into me was the last book by Robert Pippin, the American Hegelian, after the beautiful "Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism". The thesis, sorry, does this, how should I do more, the thesis of this book, it's a very nice one. It is that Hegel's aesthetics simply relies on a too narrow notion of art, but too narrow not because of our later experience of modernity, which Hegel didn't conceptualize because there was no modern art the way we define it today at Hegel's time, but much more radically that Hegel, that measured by Hegel's own standards implied in Hegel's aesthetics, is already a notion of modern abstract art. That Hegel, in other words, wasn't Hegelian enough. And I think Pippin does it in a quite convincing way. And from that, I will of course be a little bit critical of Pippin and touch many other things. Tomorrow, connected with this because we will end up with the notion of comedy, horror, ugliness and so on. Tomorrow, so that I bribe you, sorry, nervous as usual, a little bit, a little bit. Incidentally, do you know this joke? I like it. When I make these tics of mine, here you can see what idiots psychiatrists are. It happened to me, I am not kidding, over times at least, that there was some idiot psychiatrist or psychoanalyst and he claimed, "Oh, it's clear, I am on cocaine" or whatever, you know. I mean I am the only guy in my generation, even although I am from a communist country because communists in my country were not stupid. When I was young, after '68, they did the same as in Poland, my friends told me. They more than tolerated, silently even allowed drugs because they knew better for students to drink, orgies and drugs than to do politics, you know. Ah no, this is very interesting. Friends from Poland told me that you remember, you don't remember you are too young, after the Jaruzelski military coup against Solidarność, all of a sudden the market was overflowed by drugs in Poland and pornography and Oriental spiritualism. You know, like anything to depoliticize the young. So I agree. I was recently at a theology conference, not here in London, another one where we had a nice rebuttal, somebody proposed it. You must know the joke of that thesis of Marx, you know, religion is the opium of the people. No, today the opium of the people is opium, like, you don't need religion no. What I want to say is that I was recently and I will talk about him tomorrow, if you want a good book, it's very inexpensive one, my good friend, I am proud to say this, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, like yesterday. The French rational choice theorist, theorist of catastrophes and so on. He is really a bright guy. He knows so much about all these paradoxes of retroactivity. I had a public debate in Portland, Oregon, which is maybe the most civilized place in the United States, I claim. It certainly has I think maybe the best bookstore in the world and believe me I know them, from Singapore to to to Tokyo and so on. It's called Powell's. It's just incredible because it's like a mega bookstore, many floors, but it still has the the atmosphere of that, how should I call it, small authentic, not Barnes and Noble big company. Okay, so what I want to say is that I proposed the title and he enthusiastically accepted it: "Is God dead, unconscious, evil or just plainly stupid?" And we were not just provoking, there were some theologians there who were delighted. So it wasn't offensive, but the title was problematic for some: Is God dead, unconscious, evil or just plainly stupid? And of course we arrived at the the last answer, no. That like if you think God screwed it up, how could he allow Auschwitz and so on, the answer is don't blame him, he was just confused. Okay, so that's what I want to talk about tomorrow. And I will show you, now let's pray all the evening to fate or God that it will work there, I always have have anxiety when you show something, a clip from a movie. If you don't have anything to do this evening, it's certainly better than *Interstellar*. You can get it everywhere for free on on YouTube or where, a very strange movie, the strangest movie I've seen recently. But it's from '82, an old one by someone called, sorry I didn't know him maybe you do, Michael Tolkin. It's a religious Christian movie, but it's absolutely breathtaking what happens in that movie. Maybe I should begin, then we go on with that movie so that I don't have to spend time introducing the movie tomorrow, so that I just begin with showing you the clip and then we go on. And that will be the whole point. Why, what this movie tells us in its ridicule. You can see there are still places there. I'm telling you this because then in my stupid wounded narcissism I just wait secretly when you will leave, you know, when you get bored, sorry. It's you know why it's such, you know that I like to play these games of how with a movie, where it could have ended. You know like how often you can make with, especially usually with good movies, this experiment: imagine ending ten minutes earlier or even in the middle of it and it makes a perfectly consistent story. And I think many great movies have precisely this structure. That naturally, if I may put it this way, by naturally I mean according to our naturalized conventions of course, it should have already ended and then surprisingly it goes on. If you allow me to, I am well known for this, for people attacking me as self-plagiarizing, you know. When I was accused of quoting, using old stuff for comments and they said self-plagiarizing is also plagiarizing, is also plagiarism. Now I like this, this means masturbation is also a form of rape or what? It's just self-rape or what? I mean, don't, I mean no. What I want to say is that in this film, yes, for example, I hope I can presuppose that you know the two mega Hitchcocks, *Vertigo* and *Psycho*. Did you notice that both have precisely this structure? Imagine *Vertigo* ending after Madeleine, later we know the false Madeleine, jumps down from the tower, so we think and Scottie is alone. It's a perfect one hour and five minutes, I think, dark romantic movie about how too passionate love kills, you know. The message is he, Scottie, is so violently in love, he pushes her to death. And then at that point, you know that inquiry where and so on is in the courtroom, at that point the movie could have ended, it would have been a perfectly consistent movie. Think, the same goes for *Psycho*, I claim. Imagine ending just a little bit before the shower murder. Like she takes the shower but without Norman Bates entering. It would be a perfect in the in those 19th century style of these moralistic short stories. It's a story of a young lady who succumbs to temptation, steals money, then stops in a motel, she encounters the madman, Norman Bates, and sees in him as it were her own future, my God, if I follow that path I will become like him and changes with my purified himself of of the ultimate temptation or destruction avoided. It would have been a perfectly consistent story. And the same is with this film, finally I'm coming to the point, Michael Tolkin. He was besides this film known mainly for writing, he wrote the script for Robert Altman's, if you know it, about Hollywood corruption, confusion, *The Player*, I think the film. It's a strange film. Mimi Rogers plays ordinary working girl in L.A. During the day she has these totally alienated jobs, just automatically answering this phone service to give some address, whatever, and during the night she is a swinging girl, orgies all the time and so on. Then as they say she starts to feel emptiness in herself, whatever, and encounters in this swinging orgy another guy who they both feel the same emptiness so they become fundamentalist Christians. They get married, they have a girl, and then we jump six years forward where they have a six years again daughter, happily married, and her husband is murdered in a quite nonsensical way. I mean just pure accident, some madman shoots him. And she is so broken down, how could this have happened, that she progresses even further into her religious delirium and thinks that she hears a voice telling her, "Go to some desert place near L.A. in to Arizona, I don't know where, and wait for God, wait for the rapture there." Sorry, I maybe I forgot even this, the title of the film is *The Rapture*. So wait for the rapture, God will come pick you up. And with her daughter she goes there and waits for it, and she waits, waits for a couple of months, nothing happens. Then her daughter tells her, "Why don't we simply kill ourselves and go, like you shoot me then you shoot yourself and we go directly to our dead father to rejoin him?" Okay, they go, after some deliberation I will not go into it, there are some minor subplots. She is also totally desperate, so she kills her daughter then in the last moment she stops, she doesn't kill herself because she knows that if she kills herself it's suicide, you cannot go to heaven, and totally desperate, it's not that she is a crazy criminal, she become she becomes aware of what she did, so she goes to the police and admits everything and she is in prison, totally broken down. At this point, that's my point, the film could have ended. As a kind of a critical portrayal of how far religious madness can bring you. Ah, now you are for the last minutes which are absolutely breathtaking. Because you think for a moment that it will be one of those, I love them, you know, those *Left Behind*, *Countdown Jerusalem*, those really crazy fundamentalist Christian films. Because what then happens in the prison while she is in the prison cell is that the end of the world and rapture it happens really. You know you are in a totally different, all of a sudden the prison bars start to fall away and some angel appears and says "Rejoin God, go!" And then she together with a sheriff friend, it's a secondary, because yes, her daughter immediately disappeared, is her daughter is raptured, I mean goes to God. So she with that a sheriff there, they drive a car and you see, shot deliberately in the most primitive way, the four riders of the apocalypse riding around them and so on. And this is already a wonderful trick. The message, I read an interview with the director, it's a, is God appears as a kind of a tricky guy who counted on, you know the trick was not the usual one: "Oh, we took his message too literally, there is no hell, hell is just a metaphor for hell in ourselves when we do something horrible." No, the message of God is "Haha, when I described that apocalypse you thought I was just kidding, that it was just a, no no no, you you read, I did it! I told you! You got the four riders, it's exactly as I described it, no." And then comes so you thought it would be this type of a almost undecidable, you don't know it's a comedy which so ridiculous or to be taken seriously in a fundamentalist way. But then with this sheriff they come to a place which is basically how do you call what's between heaven and hell, purgatory or what the middle okay. It's kind of a desert place not too attractive and far there you can see heaven. It looks like heaven, some wonderful place. And from there her daughter comes, already as an angel whatever, and tells her, "Come, me and my dad, your husband, we love you, we are waiting for you, just say, just tell just tell us, just say I love God. Just express your love for God and you will be immediately in heaven." And now comes the last twist of the movie which quite shocked me. It's I never expected after all this an authentic ethical act. Then she says, that's the last seconds sorry, then she says, "No, God was so evil, stupid, what he did to me, I cannot say that I love him." And you see the point. The point is that like there is God, you see everything, she said no. And the daughter tells her asks her, "But do you know what this means? Do you know how long you will stay here in purgatory?" She says, "Yes, I know, forever." End of the film. I mean, why what do I like about this? It's of course I read it as an atheist. But I think to be really a materialist, it's not enough to say there is no God or whatever, God is maybe a nice illusion, but one has to undermine it from within. You know, you know I will tomorrow I will refer to to this guy Dupuy and he has a complex theory on this conditional statements and so on which are I am now even doing a little bit of logic because of that which are a wonderful thing name, sorry not conditional, counterfactuals, you know. Because they are very complex. Look for example, to give you just a sense of it. If you say, if Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, then another person had to write it. This is true because Hamlet exists and if Shakespeare is not the author, then if we are not in a magic universe, somebody had but if you say if Shakespeare, how do you do this conditionals my English is not so good, had not written Hamlet, another one would have. Ah, this is very problematic. And you know in this way you can read even you can even see that how maybe the big problem of how to interpret Stalinism can be formulated in this way. For those who are still pro-communist, for okay for critics of Stalinism, they would have said the same thing as Engels, I think, not Marx, said about Napoleon. If not Napoleon, then another person had to appear like it was in the air the necessity to pass from from revolutionary republic to empire. If not Napoleon, another one. But this is again a problematic too determinist position. And so my point is this one, here we come to this counterfactuals that to be an atheist it's not enough to say "If God were to exist it would have been wonderful but unfortunately he doesn't." No, one has to go to the end in this counter and say "If God were to exist it would have been horrible." You should from within demonstrate the horror of it. And the paradox, and there were some priests important who agreed with me, is that Christianity is the only religion which confronts this. This that that's what happens in the book I develop this times in my books already that that's the whole point of the book of Job. You know I repeated this even here I think a couple of times, so the message of Book of Job, the greatest my God, the first book of Marxism if you want. Because the message of the book of Job is not only this critique of ideology moment, you know after things got screwed up three or four theologians friends appear and each of them gives some bullshit to Job, no. You were punished because you must be guilty even if you don't know or what. It's ideology. Each of the three theological friends come to convince Job that his suffering has some meaning. Then that's the great moment, Jehovah God comes and does something extremely surprising, almost at the level of *The Rapture* this movie, and says "No, all that the three theological friends are saying is bullshit, the only Job is right to complain, his suffering has no meaning." And then you know the story, then finally Job asks God, "But then why did you do this?" And then I mean all the meaningless suffering you imposed on me. And then comes that crazy speech where God says "Oh, were you there when I did all those monsters blah blah monsters when I created all the strange things?" And again this is usually read as as assertion of God's arrogance. Like "Who are you stupid limited men to ask me questions, you don't get it, I move at a totally different higher level." But you know the story I repeated it here, I follow here Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who reads in a crazy way this. He says that this God statement has to be read along the lines of "You complain, but look around, it's not only you, I screwed it up, the whole universe is like that, it's crazy" and so on. And again intelligent Christians, Christian theologians know that this that eh eh that Christ is the ultimate Job. The death of Christ means precisely the ultimate fiasco of God. Like it's the message of the death of Christ is the death of this good God who you think is above us and so on and so on. So okay, let's what I want to say is that this is what I want to do tomorrow, to go into the problem of theology in the sense of what can why a materialist have to why do we even if we are materialists, why do we have to go through theological experience even to be really effectively materialists? But that's for tomorrow. Today let me after this crazy introduction, okay, another point I cannot resist this introduction. I don't have time to talk this time about politics but President Obama used a word used a term recently in one of the interviews which shocked me because of the associations that it generates. He gave some I would say two weeks ago a very strange interview where he was asked about why United States intervening now in Syria and so on and his point was not that United States are imposing themselves as universal global policemen, but that simply that's how things are, the world, other countries are addressing United States as that. And he said, "When there is an earthquake there, when there is a tsunami in Philippines and so on," you know, maybe you read it on that fragment, it was like they don't call Moscow or Beijing, they call Washington. You know, we are those who are addressed and that's how the world and he uses the verb "that's how we roll." Now my immediate association was you know that United problem when those passengers in the kidnapped plane, heroically I must admit it, attacked the kidnappers. You know what were their just this is recorded the last words was one of them said "let's roll." You know, okay, that's how they roll and they roll in this sense also. Because I I really think and I am I had a conversation I report to you with my and this time I will not criticize him in any way recently with Alain Badiou and he developed something which really did strike me. You know it's almost fashionable today to say we are approaching a new world war. But I think that maybe we are, you know in what sense? I see this statement by Obama as a very tragic one because effectively we are already in a multi-centric world. And United States for them to cling to this role of universal policeman, it means that although they think they are asserting still their pre-eminence, they are more and more doing the dirty job for others. You know this, for example, do you know this latest scandal when Obama wrote a relatively friendly letter to Khamenei of Iran offering them cooperation? Iran arrogantly rejected it. But nonetheless Iran is well aware that United States are basically by fighting ISIS helping Iran to maintain its hegemony over Iraq and so on and so on. Why? Because I think here I agree with Badiou. His idea was that these new tensions, this is no longer Cold War in the sense of different world views. We are effectively unfortunately approaching vaguely, I know it's a simplistic comparison, but nonetheless, the the situation towards the end of the 19th century. We have one predominant power which is losing its grip on it. At that point it was you, I mean the British Empire, now it's United States. We have other countries who want to who want their part of it. At that point it was literal colonization, today it's economic influence, Russia, China and so on. And then we have colonial struggles. At that point it was Balkan, Bosnia, now maybe Arab countries or whatever. So I really think that it's potentially an extremely dangerous situation, even if I don't believe maybe I'm too optimist even an all-out atomic war. But many things can happen, I claim. Because I agree with Badiou that it's really and people say colonialism is over. No, it's not, economic colonialism spheres influence. It's really exactly the same problem, to carve out spheres of economic influence and so on and so on and and again, now you will say but we are all aware of it. Ah, this is what makes me afraid. It was, if you know a little bit of history, the last decades before World War I, it was exactly the same. And it's a nice example of what my other friend whom I mentioned Dupuy is writing a lot about this: how we know it but we don't really believe it. I think that although we hear everywhere these warnings, you know and you always attribute them to others, that's typical how the West is saying, "My God what Putin is doing he's pushing us towards a new Cold War maybe a new World War." My God three days ago I read, it was reported Putin gave an interview when he said exactly the same thing but just turned it around: "We want peace but the West is pushing towards..." you know always the other is guilty. But what I want to say is that this is the danger I see. You see now all this warning against World War, it's strictly based on this logic: we we know it but we don't believe it. We think that I think there is some subtle superstitious game at work in it. As if if we talk a lot about it maybe it will not happen, you know. Fuck it, it will happen, it can happen. It was exactly the same again with the First World War. You know my God just the basic Leninist experience. You know the story the story of how repeatedly in the Second International social democratic at every meeting they had, they solemnly swore we will not, they saw the war coming, we will not vote for war credits, we will not do it and as you probably know the moment the war did erupt all social democratic parties everywhere with two notable exceptions, Serb social democrats and Bolsheviks, they all immediately voted for war credits. So why am I mentioning this? Because Dupuy describes very nice this attitude towards a catastrophe of how you see and he claims today with ecological catastrophe, with new war threats it's exactly the same. We see it coming, but we don't really take it seriously, which is why we are playing these stupid games even with ecology. You know, Dupuy is right. Of course we should do this, we should make estimates like how much in global warming temperature will go up, but we should never forget that all this scientific bullshit covers up superstitious game like you know when they say more than two degrees Celsius if it raises up global warming temperature it's a catastrophe. But this is an imaginary, you know this is an arbitrary number. Maybe the catastrophe will be here if it raises only one percent, maybe it can raise five percent nothing will happen. I mean we are not what I want to say is that all this notions of the threshold, you know how much can we still pollute how much, it's not that I am more pessimist, I'm just saying that we really don't know. That all this rational play with "it's such a possibility so we can afford to risk so much and so on", all I'm saying is that this is bullshit. I mean it's not bullshit, we have to do it, but basically we are playing games, these numbers don't really mean. It's not that okay over two degrees Celsius is a catastrophe, so let's keep it to and everything will be okay, we are safe. What I want to say then Dupuy goes on and says that the mystery is not only how we play this game of it can happen, or we know it can happen but we don't believe it that it really can happen, but how once it does happen, after the first shock it immediately gets naturalized, it becomes a new way of life. And I can tell you this from my own, not my but of my friends' painful experience in Sarajevo. Even when the siege began in what was it '91, '92, I think, of Sarajevo, I had friends there, nobody, first nobody thought it can happen, although all the signs were there. Like I remember one Sarajevo journal even published through some guy in the headquarters of Yugoslav Army who was shocked when he saw the documents, gave them to a Sarajevo newspaper, the exact blueprints, plans for where to put guns of Yugoslav Army on the hills around Sarajevo. Everything was known, but people didn't believe it can really happen. And I'm not here playing to be very clear any anti-Serb game. You remember how I mentioned before the honor of Serb social democracy which was the only one together with Bolsheviks voting against war credits. So that's not my point, my point is just this logic of how all the signs were there but nobody was ready to took them seriously. Even when conflicts began, I know I had some friends there with small children who told me, "Listen this can last maximum two weeks." It was very fashionable for of course families who were able to afford it to quickly, because at the beginning the situation was confused, it was still able to leave Sarajevo with a car, they simply sent their children to the Dalmatian coast to Croatia like stay there for two weeks and then come back. Nobody even dreamt that it will last three four years or how much it did. But here is the point made by Dupuy. Immediately afterwards, once the siege were here was there, it became a way of life. It was immediately naturalized. People got used to it, they even you know how you know that they got used to it because jokes started to circulate making fun of all the like even with the most painful situations, for example, jokes about how you have to dodge to avoid snipers and so on and all that all that. And even some vulgar jokes like I always say like it works only Serbo-Croat where "skinuo on me skinuo" it means he took off my clothes, but it also can mean somebody shot me like skinuo me snajper, it means a sniper hit me, no. And the joke is that a guy goes to work in Sarajevo under siege, comes home and sees his wife naked with another man in the bed and she says "skinuo me snajper", you know, like skinuo the same verb like took off my clothes or shot at me and so on. So this is this is where I am a pessimist. I'm a pessimist not in the sense horrible things will happen, but how quickly we will get used to them. Because again that's why I'm almost becoming a paranoiac pessimist. You see what it already happened with torture. We silently accepted it as a and I was so shocked even now in Portland, not Dupuy he is a great guy here, but how how many even so-called progressive academics all of a sudden said "but let's be realist, sometimes you have to torture" and so on and so on. I'm not taking even a position here, I'm just stating how some something which years ago was simply unthinkable, you know to say "let's torture" or even that's my point I already made it here, or even to say "let's debate it." It would have been the same obscenity as to say "let's debate if rape is admissible or not." You know and then you can have arguments for and against and so on, but there is something admittedly obscene in this. You precisely shouldn't even debate this. I think, I already used this phrase here and I like to repeat it, I think that the sign of progress is more dogmatism in this sense. More dogmatism in the sense that a sign of ethical progress is that some things, some prohibitions, simply should become something that you don't debate. We shouldn't debate "Oh, but are there exceptional cases?" and then you can go into this totally ridiculous scenario, you know. What if a woman is really an easy woman and what if the guy is desperate, he was doing great thing, can he rape her a little bit and so on, all those stupidities. No, this has to become unacceptable. And here I claim it's better to be hypocritical than realist. Again I repeat my old point to provoke you if you want to debate later which I made here also years ago already. I can imagine torturing someone vaguely, I'm not sure. Okay, I will be honest and put it in a different way. What I can imagine a situation in which I cannot guarantee to you that I will not torture. For example, this ridiculous cheap melodrama stuff. I have a nice daughter six, seven years old. Some evil pedophiles got her. I got in my hands, I mean I arrested him, one of them. I know absolutely that he knows where my daughter is. It's ridiculous, I know, but I cannot guarantee you that I would not torture him to tell me where my daughter is. It's ridiculous, I know, but what I want to tell you is that nonetheless I want torture to be prohibited. Because even if we realistically accept that some time out of pure despair you do it, you should be aware and that's the whole distinction between here I'm quite naive between civilization and barbarism. You should be fully aware that you are doing something terrible, ultimately inadmissible. The horror is not if we are doing it. I'm a realist, I know all governments are doing it. The horror is when you normalize it. You know this is why I once he attacked me back in New York Times I got in conflict with that guy Alan Dershowitz who elaborated this notion of state regulated torture and even said that then all prisons should have doctors where let's say let's say any I don't want to point at any of you then I will be accused, you should be tortured and then doctor comes and examines you and decides how much torture will not hurt you and so I found this I find this obscene. I think if you torture, I'm not saying you should but if you, it should at least be some totally desperate act. You know the moment you are and again at this level I think that's the problem with me, this I think that the most perverse effect would have been an open debate about torture where opponents of torture would win. Because even if they win and we reasonably establish there should be no torture, in a deeper sense we've already lost because we accepted it as a topic of the debate and we shouldn't. We should be dogmatic here. So okay, I just wanted to maybe I will write something again, I don't know, because so many strange you know once after a long time I agreed with the cover of *Time* magazine. There was an issue about two months ago on gay homosexuality, gay issues and they made an observation which is true and worries me very much of how in the let's call it naively liberal part of the world, Western, more and more gay rights, but how this is accompanied by the opposite, how in many not only third world countries it's more and more anti-gay. You know this division is dangerous and things are happening. Like I have friends in Singapore who told me you know what is going on now now, okay now now, in the last month in Singapore. They are silently burning books from public libraries. No censorship, and books which paint in a positive way lesbianism or or abortion or divorce, whatever. The excuse is we are not prohibiting anything, we just try to keep calm not to arouse annoy people. You know, it's done in a very soft gentle way but slowly slowly they are doing it. So what I see is this extremes, on the other hand, in the politically correct sphere crazy things are happening. Like, no I wasn't here recently I didn't yet use at least this one I didn't, do you know it's not a joke? It was reported in the media, I didn't believe it, I thought it some joke so I called my friends to Australia. They confirmed it to me. Was it also maybe there was some note in your news about two months ago, Perth, you know Perth, West Australian city, they have an opera. That opera, it's not a joke, prohibited a staging of *Carmen*, Bizet. No, not because of sex, *Carmen*, because the first act takes place in a cigarette factory. And they claim this can be read as a propaganda for smoking. So they permanently withdraw the opera from, I found this so ridiculous, and I don't smoke. Ridiculous because even if you take it at this own level, I mean that place is not portrayed, the factory, as an attractive place, you know, it doesn't work that way at all. But I really think that we are approaching dangerous times if you ask me. Maybe even more than the Cold War. And here I return to my friend Dupuy who deployed in a wonderful way the logic of how that MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, how wonderfully it worked and he spontaneously we agreed he rediscovered there the Lacanian notion of objet petit a. He said he has this in his books in what how Mutually Assured Destruction, you know what it was, it was like no atomic war because if one side attacks then the other side will for sure be able to strike back and we are all dead. So precisely because both sides have full atomic capacities to destroy the other the opposite side, so this very equilibrium guarantees that there will be no war. But but he says something wonderful. He says no, if the situation were to be clear like that it would be still rational to hit. Why? Let's say I am one side, you are the other side. I would be tempted to bomb you because I would reason like this: I bomb you and I almost destroy you and then you would be in a tough position. Your choice would have been should I strike back? But that probably would have meant the end of civilization. Or do I not strike back and have the sympathy of the entire world, you know, I am the victim and okay my country has great loss, suffered great losses but at least I saved the human race. And it's quite rational to think that most of the world leaders would have probably chosen except some crazy American militarists. No, I am serious here. I'm sorry if I make another detour, but these are serious things. You know I have no illusion about Soviet Union and so on, but something did strike me. I've written about this in one of my earlier books deeply. I read now that they made them available, it's very instructive to read secret notes, now they some of them were rendered public about what happened within in the American headquarters, Army President Kennedy and Khrushchev, Soviet Army headquarters, during the Cuban missile crisis, no. I mean not that I was turned pro-Soviet, but what did strike me is that the American problem was almost exclusively who will blink the first, you know, let's just remain tough and so on, let's not lose nerve. While it's quite touching with all the Stalinist terror and so on. Khrushchev and his all those disgusting fat old Politburo guys, their problem was, "My God we are playing with the fate of humanity, do we have the right to do this?" and so on and so on. The Soviet side was the only one where the debates were touch this fundamental issue. Even I think today they celebrated him now again. You know that and it looks you never know that it is a true story, namely that he's called Arkhipov or what, that one Soviet submarine commander comes closest to saving the world. Because you know a Soviet submarine was there around Cuba and an American military boat above was doing some aggressive move towards it and there already was a command to rocket it, which would have triggered at least a mega war. And you know the Soviets as all of them, American also, you don't just press the button. You have all these rules that all three in a submarine, all the three commander and two main officers have to agree and then each of them has to put in his own code. And two agreed, one didn't. He as we put it bombastically, he saved the world. But again, it's typically it was the Soviet one. So what I'm saying is how complex the situation is. I'm absolutely shocked Soviet Union terror and so on, but you see how a certain, if you want, level of humanity surprisingly survived there, even at the top of the most corrupted nomenklatura and so on and so on. You know, so again, okay surprise surprise, now I will really stop this introduction. But I just wanted to to to to warn you. I really think again that we are approaching you know another sign that we are approaching dangerous times is don't take me for a fool, I am not an idiot who thinks you know like United States themselves organized and then you know all the stuff, you know that that and all the Jews were informed the previous day not to show up there. No, I am not a total paranoiac. But I don't know what to tell you but with ISIS now, the ISIS you know that state whatever, I have some marginal doubts what is going on there. First, and the source here are not some anti-semites, it's my Israeli friends who are not even very pro-Palestinian. They sent me a message telling me you know when ISIS occupied one of the cities there in Iraq or what, they did their brutal things, the usual ones, killing them, enslaving women, and they got some Israelis and they they immediately set them free. Then second thing you can check it on the web, when that guy Baghdadi or whatever, fuck him, the the boss of ISIS, was asked what to do how to what to do in Gaza, this was month ago when Gaza was still, you know what he said? He said, "Forget Israel, this will come at the end, now the main point is to fight our enemies within our world, it's to destroy Hamas." I mean on the and also you should see how ISIS perfect served a perfect function to allow the Western military establishment to reinvent itself. You know, to new investments, blah blah all that. I mean things are so unclear there. You can see in such a perfect way the rise of ISIS plays a certain role. First it fits perfectly, I am not I am not blaming them here, but I understand them strategically for the Israelis, what better thing there is than Arabs fighting each other like crazy and so on, you know. It fits them, it fits the military establishment and so on and so on. Especially those, you remember how did you see how Netanyahu, how Netanyahu reacted to ISIS? His message is not pro-ISIS, but something like "don't take ISIS too seriously, the big enemy is still Iran" and so on. You know it's all like there is something really obscure what is. I am not ready, able to make clear lines of separation. Okay, many leftists attacked me for at the beginning for taking pro-Ukrainian side at that first conflict. My answer is of course I am well aware I have connections there of all the neo-Nazis and so on in Ukraine. But you know what's the problem? It's hypocritical to say okay Russians have a point here because what about all the neo-fascists in Russia who are not even marginalized but fully part of the Putin camp? I mean it's and the key guy is here I almost like him that Orbán, the Hungarian government right wing, they went so far now, they pursue that path. Orbán is now openly taking sides with Putin and China claiming that you know Hungarians this is not for us, Western democracy, liberalism is a danger and so on and so on. So what's the point here? My point is that what I'm always repeating, that effectively a new form of global capitalism is emerging where economic global capitalism fits, functions perfectly with narrow violent nationalism. In India it's the same, how's it called that guy Modi or whatever. Yeah, within okay, he is a Hinduist nationalist, but at the same time he is much more than before radical global capitalist. He said openly, I was shocked, shocked at that he openly said it, that how he sees India's chance in the fact that China is getting a little bit too overdeveloped and will have to raise the price of their working force, so it's a chance here for India, all those cheap assembly stores, millions of underpaid workers, that's that's. So you see, you see the paradox. Ruthless global capitalism and violent ethnic fundamentalism. No contradiction here, they function together in a perfect way. Okay, after all this my God maybe maybe what do you think it's time that we begin? Let's do it. According to Hegel, I am talking about Hegel aesthetics, Hegel's diagnosis, you all know this, with the rise of modernity and here by modernity I mean socio-economic modernity, bourgeois society, post-medieval society, a quote from Hegel: "The form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit." You know that when it really matters the ultimate truth about our predicament, it's no longer in art that it is articulated. Now Hegel was well aware that technically even a more perfect art than ever can be created in our times. We enjoy it immensely, whatever you want, but as Hegel puts it nicely: we bow the knee no longer. It's not no longer that absolute respect. And I think if you ask me that Hegel was right more than he thought. Because later in the 19th century when with this new technological scientific civilization, and it's not science in Hegel's sense but the positivist science technology and so on, this became what's our attitude towards art today? We enjoy it, we even say it's wisdom, it's calm, you know. Even when we show respect for it, here Hegel was right, it's already a patronizing respect. Like the most disgusting slight symptom of this that I really like is many cognitivists like to boast discreetly that they are not just stupid scientists, they really appreciate art, but the way they do it is so terribly patronizing. For example, Damasio, maybe already used this example here, I hate this so much, it's so humiliating and patronizing. There is, I'm sorry it's not racism it's just senility, there is a great Portuguese pianist, a lady Maria something. Okay she is great and famous and Damasio in his one of his books about how our brain work, he wants to make a point of how hearing functions, no. And instead of simply making the point he cannot resist the temptation of boasting like "yesterday Maria blah blah visited us and she played the piece by Beethoven and I enjoyed it so much but then what happened when the sounds", you know like it's all about how your ears function, but he had to add this ornament to boast. That's their attitude. They can sincerely praise art, religious meditation, like there are scientists today who love as you probably know maybe even better than me Buddhist meditation because they prove scientifically that it really works and so on. But it's but it's but it's deprived of its substance. It's no longer what authentic art or religion was to be, what aesthetically we should call a contact with the absolute. I mean we can also understand this in a non-idealist way. It simply means it really matters, that art can is not just an kind of a aesthetic supplement or something that calms you down, that makes you function better. It's not a subjective experience. In art you formulate, you experience what it really matters, the truth of your life as it were. In this sense absolute. Yes, another example of this although he is more pleasant than Damasio would be Oliver Sacks. You know his Musicology, he obviously likes art and all this. But again, it's not a medium of truth art. Now and again I think that so Hegel was simply in this sense right. We today we believe in science, we look for the ultimate answers there. And I claim that this is implicitly admitted not only by artists but even by many religious people. If you look at it closely, when they try to find a space for religion also, what depresses me is how they do it. It's already in this let's call it therapeutic way. "Art can science is cold cannot satisfy you to retain your balance, the meaning of life you need a deeper mystical experience" blah blah. But this is horrible. They themselves are already treating religion implicitly as another way to facilitate your ego trip, you know. My God if you are seriously religious, it's not about how I feel, it's about God, it's about the truth of it. This is why were you here at that conference no it was in another room the theology with Rowan Williams and so on. Were some of you there? The Actuality of the Theologico-Political. There was a terrifying moment there. I'm sorry if I repeat myself. At the beginning, I don't know who, three of them were up on the podium and I asked them a simple question: "We are at a theologico-political conference, you talk about God. How do you mean it? Is just a metaphor, is just how religion maybe can serve our progressive struggle or do you really believe it? Where do you stand?" It was incredible. They basically behaved as if I asked them in what position did you fuck yesterday evening or what? As if you know it was literally as if I asked them some dirty private secret you know and how can you I remember my good friend Eric Santner, he was just the the last one to answer, he said "I am here as a literary analyst, I just analyze the text there it has." I mean and to avoid a misunderstanding I am an atheist. But here I had a sympathy with my friend, we don't agree don't be afraid, John Milbank, who was also shocked later we talked about how my God you know and this is so sad this is where religion is dead today I claim. That you have two types you have either this is predominant form of religion there are very few who are still doing serious theology either you have this cheap preaching, you know, popularizing it which is really a big ego trip, or you have science. Science in the sense of you know all those boring books which are so irrelevant, they are worse than the most vulgar atheism. Those what was the real Chris, you know that I read it with pleasure but fuck it that Aslan *Zealot*, you know. Like you know this endless stories, they always make the same point: St. Paul is to blame for everything, Jesus was not that, the original Jesus was some I don't know good revolutionary whatever. This historical point but so what's the point? Where do you you see what I mean? The moment you approach it like this it's already a positivist problem. The question but where do you stand with regard to it? Of course Aslan finishes his book with this in this way he says "Nonetheless Jesus deserves respect, he was a great man." Fuck it, was he God or not? What do I care if he was a great man? I mean you see these are the signs of this is why I wrote in one of my earlier books do you remember you are probably most of you too young when was this '90s or when it I totally get confused when Taliban were in power in Afghanistan. You remember they shot those Bamiyan gigantic Buddha statues. In a way they showed more respect for Buddhism because they took it as an actual religious threat. It was a sacred war. In a way they showed more respect to religion than we who were outraged by what they did. Because our outrage was not "Oh my God they are ruining God!" No, it was "What a great monument to the culture of humanity!" The moment you talk about religion in this way it's over, religion is dead. Now be careful, I am not saying we should return to religion to authenticity of the sacred. I not only think that that we cannot, I think that when we do it's usually something fundamentalist terrible and so on. So I developed this in a I think it's my this I call my Norman Bates book. You know why absolute recoil? Because you know they did the way Verso did it and this time I like them the cover: it's as if it is I am Norman Bates and enter the shower. You know how it's the cover, the letters carved by no? I am Norman Bates now. That identity, but what I'm saying is that you see I just wanted to improvise here in what sense Hegel was right, religion no longer has this substantial truth. Which is why I claim all these attempts to as they call it "reenchant the world", to return magic to the world, so that to paraphrase Hegel we would be able to to to bend the knee again, show humility in front of the greatness of art of nature whatever. They are they are a fake, they are an aesthetic game I claim. So in this sense Hegel was right. How then are we to advocate against Hegel and his diagnostic of the end of art, but in the spirit of Hegel the continuing relevance of art? Hegel was right, but nonetheless in what sense was Hegel right? That's what I want briefly to develop. In what sense precisely remaining within Hegel's horizon we can fight against Hegel with Hegel himself? Where was Hegel too short? Here I will give you now some quotes from this Robert Pippin's book "After the Beautiful" where he says that Hegel had a double limitation. Now I will try to prove later why still we can remain Hegelians and criticize Hegel through Hegel himself. Here Pippin is right, these are simple statements but I think they are correct. First, there was a blind spot in Hegel's treatment of modernity. You know Hegel's vision at the end of his eh eh philosophy of right, that he speaks about the modern post-revolutionary revolutionary French Revolution modernity against the remains of the more traditional world. But for Hegel in a post-revolutionary world we no longer have these fights. This world is basically reconciled with itself. Here since probably I talked too much and I will not have time to to return to it, I will just give you an idea. Towards the end of his Lectures of Aesthetics Hegel does ask a question: what kind of art can we still imagine in this world in which art no longer has this substantial, you know for Hegel really big art stages renders the big historical conflict, the big antagonism of an epoch. *Antigone*, whatever, struggle modernity tradition, there art must recapture a big historical tension. Today we no longer for Hegel we no longer have such tensions. So Hegel gives a precise answer in his aesthetics. He says that the topic of the new art is something he called with a strange word, of course I know what it means but strange what he means by it, *humanus*, which he simply means all the ridiculous particularities of our ordinary lives: our stupid misunderstandings, struggles, small personal tragedies, comic confusions, all this what we say ordinary life. It has no big historical relevance, but this is what our ordinary non-historical prosaic life is about. And Hegel says since it's not a great historical tragedy, it's a comedy. Not comedy necessarily in the sense that you laugh, but comedy in the sense that it's from the standpoint of the absolute irrelevant. You know like you can have there a madman, a serial killer, blah blah. Now if you want to make this would be the Hegelian standpoint an authentic tragedy out of it, you would have some how to historically mediate serial killing, you know, to show how I don't know how a serial killer somehow brings out in a of course crazily radicalized version some fundamental attitude which is immanent to bourgeois subjectivity let us say. I am not claiming this totally seriously, but it must be something like this to make it relevant. If a serial killer is just a private pathology even if he does all the horrors that he does, these are just ridiculous idiosyncrasies. It doesn't have relevance. So that's Hegel's view. That we live in a prosaic modern world. Conflicts are just these ridiculous particular idiosyncrasies. And it's a comedy again because it does not reflect, render, express an absolute historical tension. I it came to me I wonder if you would agree that I claim only today we found a form of art, Hegel was ahead of his time, which perfectly fits what Hegel was after. Today's sitcoms. Are they not exactly like this? Think about I don't know *Seinfeld* or all of this, even not just the stupid comedies with canned laughter but these endless sitcoms where you know the conflicts are irrelevant, small jealousies, troubles at your job, love quarrels and so on with a comical flair, even from time to time tragic, but nothing world historical happens. So that would be a nice thesis to develop that Hegel was the first, without knowing, theorist of *Seinfeld* or all these sitcoms and so on. But and this is why incidentally I think that they are a perfect form of ideology today these sitcoms. Their message is precisely this: we live in a reconciled world. All that happens, all that happens within our world there is always an evil other Muslim or whatever outside, all that happens is are these idiosyncratic conflict. Again there can be horrible, someone can kidnap you and slowly torture you to death whatever, but you see my point, it doesn't have historical relevance. Was Hegel right or not? Unfortunately not I claim. In what sense again back to Pippin. Pippin claims that Hegel, I quote, there is Hegel's quote, "failure to anticipate the dissatisfactions that his prosaic world would generate." Or "Hegel's failure to appreciate that there might be a basic form of disunity or alienation that his project could not account for, for which there was no overcoming yet on the horizon." So this is the first point, that in other words and Pippin is here almost a Marxist. Although Hegel wrote about excessive wealth and all that how bourgeois society necessarily generates excessive wealth and on the other hand those Pöbel, rebel, those excluded and so on, but this is marginalized. Hegel did not admit that in the prosaic modern world that he describes as our contemporary world, that there can be some fundamental however you call it dissatisfaction precisely in Hegelian sense of obstacles to actualize your human dignity, equality, recognition potentials. And as Pippin points it out, when of course Hegel has all this point about how the progress of modern society is universal freedom, it's to overcome master-servant relations, but for him the only relations of social antagonism and hierarchy that Hegel was able to perceive, Hegel was not yet fully a thinker of capitalism where these precisely pre-modern hierarchical relations of domination. What Hegel couldn't imagine is precisely what Marx did, a society which is legally fully eh eh egalitarian, we are all the same blah blah we have all the freedoms, but nonetheless there is class antagonism. So that's what Hegel wasn't able to see. And at the same time there is another limit of Hegel. His notion Hegel's notion of art remains the let's call it naive realist notion. To cut a long story short, for Hegel art is still a realist staging of something eh eh mimetic representation or subjective expression. The notion of modern art was unthinkable for Hegel. So-called abstract art. Hegel knew well, Hegel did in a way foretold foretell sorry so-called conceptual art because Hegel says that in our age, I quote Hegel, "art invites us to intellectual consideration." By this he meant that art lost its innocence, that intellectual consideration is part of it. But I think Hegel wasn't able to go to the end here and in imagine a form of art which remains authentic art although it's problematic this today but nonetheless as art includes explicitly the moment of reflexivity, intellectual consideration and so on and so on. And it's true with modernism proper art did lose its innocence, you know. I mean it's ridiculous today to claim, you know romantics were the last to be able to say "When I write or paint, I don't know what's happening, some higher force is talking creating through me" blah blah. You are a fake. But where was Hegel right? Okay also what Hegel this would have been unthinkable for him did not imagine is that the other part of this reflexivization of art, and this is typical for modernism where you know practically every modernist at the same time had some kind of at least of theory about what he is doing. And even if in his practice he violated his theory, nonetheless this violation implied the theory. Or as some of my friends claimed, art historians they are writing a book some my Slovene friends, one can even say that with some modernist orientations like fut some futurism and so on, their manifestos theoretical are the only interesting part, you know, who cares about the bullshit they were doing their manifesto is even in a way the only work of art that they did. In what sense? In the sense of what Hegel didn't foresee is that this reflexivization of art also implies the opposite, that thinking philosophy itself starts to imitate art with Nietzsche and so on. Philosophy itself becomes an aesthetic of writing and so on and so on. But where was Hegel right here? Isn't there a problem with conceptual art, which is the ultimate example of art which includes reflexivity? That as a rule, usually, it has the structure of what we call hapax, only one example. You know what I mean, to put it very simply, for someone like Duchamp: okay, you have that that pissoir, how do you call it in English, urinary, whatever, yeah. Okay you put it there and fuck you, you made your point. You know what I mean. Then you can, you know, once you did, okay, it's over, you know. You cannot then next time put on I don't know put on I don't know some cooking utensil next time you put on a pillow or whatever. Once you make your point. It's the same with Malevich whom I really appreciate. Okay he did his black square on white surface. So fuck off! Yes, you made your point. You know what I mean. The problem is how you go on. And this is for me the big problem. Although of course with Duchamp you can complicate things. And here I always like to annoy my friends, you know. Maybe you know the story I used it in some of my books. Imagine that you are at an exhibition and you have that stupid pissoir or what? Yeah, eh then and they explain to you "Yeah, you know this is not really a pissoir, this is up there a work of art, you know like put into the" the point is obvious that it's the position, place that makes a work of art not its attributes. Now imagine a vulgar guy like me walking up there and urinating into it. Now an idiot would tell me "Idiot, you totally miss the point! This is not a real urin- urinal it's a piece of art." Eh, fuck you, I have an answer: "But I also became in this way part of that eh world of art, you know, why shouldn't then also my urinating be world of art, work of art and so on and so on." So again, there is a deadlock here and what I nonetheless appreciate so much in all really great modern artists is that they were able to move as it were beyond hapax, you know. Malevich didn't just go on doing these stupid squares. Although for some time he was, I think he even did something like white square on white background or whatever. Okay but once he did this and it's totally wrong to see his modest return to more realist painting as they usually dismiss it as a compromise with Stalinist realism. No, it's there still. You know this famous late self-portrait from early '30s, I think close to his death of Malevich, where you see him and he makes this gesture with hand square, like the square is still here, you know. The the big test is how to return to even more apparently traditional art, but in such a way that it's not just a regressive return, that the outcome is there. Okay, now one thing that back to Pippin. One thing that Pippin doesn't do and I was very surprised and here I will at least do what I wanted to do, I will show you some of those the best known I will not do anything great paintings by Manet to make the simple point of art and modernity. Eh eh we have these two limitations of Hegel: on the one hand we have a fundamental dissatisfaction with modernity which is not just individual idiosyncrasy, like there is something structurally wrong with our world, there is a fundamental alienation, displacement, whatever, and on the other hand, art moved to an abstract level in the sense of that it doesn't simply rely on a reality out there that you depict, render inner or outer reality but in a way reflexively the form itself becomes problematic. Eh, now I will improvise a little bit so that from the later part namely eh what I find so weird with Pippin is that he doesn't ask the obvious question: how are these two connected? That is to say if, and that's the implicit lesson of Hegel, art is only possible in non-reconciled society, in a society where there is a fundamental tension and where this tension cannot be fully intellectually grasped, so you render it in art. What then happens with in modernity, what kind of a tension it is that you cannot render it adequately in the traditional realist way? Why is it that to put it in very naive terms, why is it that to articulate what is wrong in our world you need to undermine the very coordinates of our sense of reality as it were? You have to move to abstraction, you have to doubt about reality itself all that stuff and so on and so on. Why can't you depict what is wrong with our world in standard realist way? And this is where of course although I appreciate him, he's not such a total idiot as people the great Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, who at least towards the end remained for not socialist but critical realism. What he didn't see nonetheless, Lukács, when he criticized Kafka for abstraction and so on was that like why didn't Kafka realistically depict the alienation of our society? Why do you have to go through all that fantastic phantasmagoria crazy world? Why can't you simply do a realist novel? That's the big question. And now I will make my first point how on both these counts, the two limitations of Hegel, what I find so attractive, here Pippin is convincing, but I developed it is that on both counts, Hegel it's not that something new appeared Hegel was not able to grasp it, Hegel was not Hegelian enough. We I already written about it a lot about capitalism. What when he speaks about market, Hegel we all know he did read Adam Smith "invisible hand" all that bullshit, but eh Hegel's notion of capit of modern market society was and I use on purpose this word he was too much of a vulgar materialist, he wasn't idealist enough. Hegel still thought market: each of us just work and simply it's coordinated contingently through the market. What Hegel was not able to imagine is capital as such where abstraction rules directly. You know that's the point of Marx. When Marx describes in *Capital* the passage from money to capital, he says with capital money becomes its own pseudo-autonomous subject. Money capital is money which mediates itself with itself, circulates, and we actual people are just so abstraction directly rules. It's a totally Hegelian notion and Marx consistently uses Hegelian terms. Capital is actual idealism. It's an ideal entity, the real of an ideal entity structuring our reality. Hegel remained too much of a vulgar realist here and eh sorry materialist even. Then the same goes for we know this. So paradoxically again Marx's achievement was not simply to materialize Hegel's speculation, but to show to Hegel that in the domain of political economy he wasn't idealist enough. He wasn't able to imagine and today it's getting even more crazy with all those speculations on futures and so on where everything happens in some totally abstract level and our real lives are dominated by that. We live in a totally idealist world today. The same goes for art. What what is the big lesson for example of modern painting? Just read although I don't like him too much eh neither as a painter Kandinsky nor as a theorist, he is too much of a New Ager. But something he saw clearly, that there is he is idealist in a good Hegelian sense. You know his famous text eh concerning the spiritual, about the spiritual *das Geistige* the spiritual dimension of art. His point is that eh in standard notion of painting, what you see is an expression of some spiritual content, but mediated by what is represented there. You paint a church, of course even if it's done in a non-realist way, it's through this representation that spiritual content enters. But what the basic breakthrough of Kandinsky is that eh there is a spirit again that it is that already visual form before representative level as it were. Already at the purely former level is spiritualized. That you can render a spiritual conflict, ethical, world historical even at the pure level of form: triangle, square, colors and so on. So you see and this point Pippin demonstrates nicely how Hegel was not idealist enough here. He didn't see that the form itself is already spiritualized, not in any mystical sense, but in the sense that there is a certain spiritual content, spiritual struggle. By spiritual we shouldn't think about spirits, but precisely and Pippin points out this nicely spiritual in the Hegelian sense of *Geist*, collective identity, public space of recognition, that you don't you don't have to mediate it through representation. You see? and this is where Pippin again shows nicely how if the progress of history in dialectic means that more and more spirit mediates immediate materiality, then modern art is more Hegelian idealist, abstract art, because it as it were lowers the level of spiritualization. It's already prior to representation. So again these two limitations of Hegel that he didn't see the fundamental instability of the modern world, okay, now how do we see this? Now I will try to do a little bit of Manet and please take this I am not faking here, I am I wouldn't say bluffing but like what I will tell you is very elementary, it's the ABC what the connection I want to make eh eh obvious one but very elementary because Pippin also I hope this still works yes I will see wait a minute okay fuck it that it also cannot see okay let me first show Manet this eh eh almost let's do it best okay why this girl behind a bar or whatever what is so what strikes you? As Pippin points out two things and it all concerns in a very Lacanian way of course the gaze. First you have the gaze of the bar girl which is the typical Manet gaze of let's call it seeing eh looking by some people sorry people usually call it as seeing but not looking. You have this typical Manet distracted gaze which works in a disturbing way because it is as if she is aware of you looking of her but at the same time you are irrelevant. So you are at the same time excessively included, the picture looks at you, but nonetheless excluded and eh this dislocation is even more clearly rendered by another feature: you see the lady's reflection in the mirror there. But it's a confusion of perspective because if you are where you are, you cannot see it like that in the mirror. It is as if you the viewer are directly addressed but the point you don't have a fixed point. And eh Pippin's idea is that this let's call it subjective dislocation not only of the painted girl who again like okay you can say she is just tired after whole night work whatever, but nonetheless it's as if like why am I here, it's some kind of a fundamental dislocation. And what is so nice and I think Pippin is not aware enough is that the ambiguity of this dislocation. On the one hand it's the basic form of alienation, like she is almost in a textbook way alienated like what am I doing here? But at the same time this alienation this alienation is freedom. It's you are autonomous you cannot be identified to a certain fixed place and so on and so on. Okay let's not lose time let's go on, his breakfast or dinner or whatever I don't care in the grass. Now this is another mystery. You have of course especially with the naked lady here the same dislocated gaze. Then another, okay I will not go into it because of course I'm a psychoanalyst guy so I immediately did a primitive not even Lacanian but analysis. Pippin himself draws attention to the fact that the lady who is not totally naked washing herself in the background, he claims and I checked with some other art historians that this is usually eh read as post-coital washing. Okay so I ask you a simple question: who fucked her? There are two men and two no did the one who talks here or the guy behind there and many things can be developed by that? The other mystery is the double source of light and so on. It's the same dislocation. Let's drop that and let's go to his eh maybe most famous painting *Olympia* too. You see you have the same dislocated gaze. Eh there are two mysteries here. One is the source of light. The big rule of classical painting was you should have it clearly indicated, it's the sun or whatever, the source of light within the space of the painting. Here it's as if we the viewers are the source of light. It's we and it's even an extra strong life. Of course this is a prostitute, a black eh servant bringing her flowers from some customer, maybe from us and so on. So one point is this simple we are directly put into we I I I felt when you look at this painting you cannot but feel like a customer in those famous Amsterdam red light district, you know, watching them. Although incidentally the last time I was in Amsterdam I loved the experience in Red Light District. You know why? Because it's in a very Hegelian way at three-four level mediated experience. You have girls who are usually I was told Filipino girls, no longer Dutch girls, within the that frame of the window. They are watched by prospective customers who are usually some eh some some some some Arab-African eh immigrant workers. Both of them are watched by usually Japanese tourists taking photo of them and then local Dutch people are just with a amused detached amusement observing the entire scene. But what I want to say is what Pippin develops there is another feature here in a nice way is that although this is clearly the portrait of a prostitute with all the vulgarity with all the signs of flesh and so on even subtle signs of the nastiness fil- filth and so on, it's clearly a copy an imitation of those classical paintings of nudes like Angres did his *Venus* in exactly the same position, the hand covering the pubic area and so on and so on. But what's interesting is that the you know till Manet it was still possible to do naked painting in a totally sublimated however you put it innocent way. Here the effect is retroactive in the sense that not only do we pass from those saintly or whatever naked desexualized bodies to a clearly sexualized body, but I claim the effect is retroactive in the sense once you see this you cannot look at the same in the same way to all those *Venus* paintings and so on and so on. It's ruined. And this brings us again to my friend with whom I began Dupuy, to that problem of retroactivity. It's that you see this is how it works a true revolution. It's not up till now it was like this, from now on it's like that. It's when something new emerges retroactively we lost you know it's not that once we see this we cannot return to to early modern all those naked painting and see them in their innocence. No, retroactively they lose their innocence. It's lost. So eh again the main point here, there are other points how he plays with frame and so on but the idea is again that the subjects in these paintings are even if they are eh commodified like here object, again crucial is that dislocated gaze. And then I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this. Hegel is here incredible. Hegel claims that gaze is the window to the soul, no? There you feel subjectivity. But Hegel does something, ah sorry let me finish this line of thought. I claim that nonetheless there is some type that what Pippin that Pippin is too nonetheless too idealist. He speaks a lot about abstraction as abstraction as eh spiritualization of form itself like all those early modernist abstract paintings, but I claim that something more happens with modern art. It's not only that the form itself is not just material form gets abstracted, because this is usually what they say about Manet, that reflexively it includes references to the painting itself. How often he reproduces within the painting the form of the frame and all that and eh imitates the texture of the materiality of the painting. But I think there is something more going on here. Here is my first guy eh Edvard Munch of course. Look, this is you can read it as a realist painting, a melancholic idiot close to the coast whatever. Then you have the materiality of painting, but the way I read it, we know what these objects are supposed to be, it's water up there, up on the left side beneath are some stones and so on, but don't you feel here and even more will it work no sorry yes somehow okay I'm ashamed to point show this one it's *The Scream* of course and every self-respecting intellectual has to have some items at home, you know that you can buy them, these commercially commercialized items like I have it such a big one you blow it with this ah this figure as a doll at home, as a plastic doll. Then I have even a pillow with this figure on it and then the trick is you don't know when you lie on it and then in the middle of the night wah it starts to scream. That's what I call respect for modern art. But what I want to say something else. Again realistically we know behind it's a stream, grass, field, sky. But don't you feel a certain weight, materiality? For example, those lines in the sky or water, it's as if it functions as a kind of a stain which is too strong. You don't experience it as the materiality of the sky. But it's also not the immediate materiality of the painting. It's very strange for me this phenomenon of what maybe with Schelling we could call okay I did it correctly okay now let's go eh briefly on here. Ah, so again a quote from Pippin I jump. What vouchers for Manet's painting is the definite birth of an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world. The viewer is commanded to position himself as an autonomous subject lacking the possible means to identify himself or to project himself into the artwork he confronts and so on and so on. I said or the gaze is directed outside the frame addressing us viewers but we are treated as if invisible or indifferent, occupying no important presence and so on and so on. Then okay we have that *Olympia* stuff, this brutal realization and again back to gaze. What Hegel develops in a in a beautiful way is how he says the eye is the organ which points indicates the inside of a body. And Hegel is incredibly modern here. He says that the symbol of art is therefore, he evokes a a Greek mythological entity, a thousand-eyed Argus, a monster you know his his whole body there are eyes everywhere. And he says that the work of art is something like that, looking at us from all points, not only from the eye. But and then he uses even a stranger metaphor, he says that this thousand-eyed work of art is essentially a question, an address to a responsive breast, a call to the mind and the spirit. What's so strange is that one would have expected in standard subject-object division that you know the world the work of art is the breast and we subjects are feeding from no, it's a pretty horrible metaphor, the idea is that we the viewers are reduced to a breast and the gaze which emanates from the painting is sucking us. But the miracle of Hegel is this one. First and Hegel is aware if art is fundamentally this thousand-eyed monster, but this is precisely a monstrosity. I mean this is can you imagine this monster eyes everywhere? So Hegel already had the had this incredible insight which we can read through Lacan when he says in Seminar XI of how a work of art acquires its beauty through deposing, gentrifying the gaze. Which is why for Hegel in a beautiful passage in his aesthetics, he claims how this is why Greek art, and as you probably know Greek art it was for Hegel the art in historical sense, only in Greek art was the supreme form of the expression of the absolute, of the spirit. In medieval times it was religion, in modern time is science, thinking. But and that's a beautiful point of Hegel. He claims that precisely because of this the Greek statues have eyes but don't have a gaze. You know it's kind of a flat and in a way true but nonetheless Hegel sees that for this Greek art to have this effect of desubjectivization, the Greek art as it were has to the gaze has to be there but it has to be eh repressed forever. And even further and then with romanticism the gaze returns and so on and so on. A further thing that Hegel does is to to emphasize how all art is art is not simply beautiful but its beauty its a way to cover up, to contain, to mask the horror of the gaze, this thousand-eyed Argus which is ugliness. Which is why I claim and there is a wonderful book I'm so sad that it's not translated into English, a pupil of Hegel called eh Karl Rosenkranz. It translated this book from German I think only in French, maybe some other language but from what I know maybe I am wrong not in English. He published in a book called *Aesthetik des Hässlichen*, *Hässlichen*, Aesthetics of the Ugly, where in a very boring systematic Hegelian way he develops all forms of ugliness, like this eh ugliness in the sense of ridiculous excess, ugliness in the sense of distortion, disfigurement and so on, disgust and so on. It's it's eh it's an incredible work. Although it remains conceptually traditional, the guy just wants to show how the beautiful needs to be mediated by the ugliness and of course Adorno had a whole chapter on it in his Aesthetic Theory where of course he is more radical. He claims that beauty can emerge only against the background of the ugly and of course the big problem is here double. One is in what precise sense then is ugliness necessary as the background of the beautiful and how can we in a work of art overcome it? Rosenkranz's solution is eh comedy. First you begin with beauty, this beauty is distorted then once you acquire a distance of comedy of a distance towards it and see the ugly in its ridiculous character you enter the comedy. Another way would have been and it's interesting that Hegel neither Hegel nor Rosenkranz follow this path, another way would have been eh the sublime. In the sense of you know in Kant you know his theory of the sublime. Something monstrous, excessive, but in a negative way it points out the beauty or the beauty okay it's precisely not beautiful but the spiritual like Kant what's Kant's theory of the why is for example wild nature sublime? Because it can be earthquake monstrosity and so on but in a negative way you become aware however no matter how wild nature is it cannot shake our moral law in us, our spiritual dimension, in this negative way it evokes it. So again it can be either ridiculous or sublime the way to overcome ugliness. And ridiculous and sublime can easily pass into one another. Isn't it that if you try to be sublime in a too brutal direct way it can turn ridiculous, or the other way around? Someone can be ridiculous but in such a touching way that it becomes sublime. You know who was a great master here I claim? Late Charlie Chaplin talking movies. It's clear example of ridiculous this helpless old clown all of a sudden turning into sublime. Then the point is this one. But if ugliness becomes really really ugly, yeah the first theological point here and Adorno knew this well, you know the standard theological theory about eh evil? This is the standard official Catholic position that evil doesn't have any positivity, evil is just the absence of goodness, evil is privation of good, and in the same way can we say in the same way then that ugliness is just the privation of beauty? I claim and Adorno points in this way that we should rather say the opposite. What if beauty is the privation of the ugly? You take away something from the ugly you get beauty and I am tempted to go to the end what is even goodness, good is the privation of the evil. You erase a little bit of the evil it becomes good. But I want to make this point. And here it's incredible. The I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this but namely this. Now you will say "Okay, we have this monstrosity of the ugliness. But how can we be sure that it will be that it will turn around into sublime or comical? What if it's simply too strong and it remains monstrous?" Even Kant allows for this option. When Kant says that sublime only works a monstrous phenomenon engenders sublime effect if we are safe from a safe position, like storm is sublime if you observe it through a window, no not if you are in the middle there directly threatened. And then Kant does something incredible and I'm sorry I talk so much so fuck it with this I will end but we go on tomorrow. It's eh eh Kant distinguishes here colossal from the monstrous. Colossal is this too great monstrous which still engenders the effect of sublime, but if monstrous gets too monstrous, then we just get some total terror total unpleasure. And it's incredible what Kant does here. He directly, I couldn't believe it so maybe Lacan was not totally idiot, he directly uses the couple *Lust* pleasure and enjoyment *Genuss*. He said that when things are moderately monstrous they can still work in the economy of pleasure unpleasure. It's eh *Unlust* non-pleasure which nonetheless engenders sublime pleasure and so on. But he says when monstrous gets too monstrous, it's not pleasure but my God it's ah you see Kant says *wo in diesem Erfahrung von Lust die Lust zugleich Kultur ist*, where pleasure is at the same time culture, but he says eh that eh with when things are just monstrous, we get enjoyment *Genuss* destructive of culture. What bothered Kant was why enjoyment why monstrosity fascinates us? And he uses for this weird attraction, you know something is disgusting but you cannot stop looking at it, no sublime effect, just here enters enjoyment *Genuss*. My God this is Lacan *das Ding* and so on, eh every everything is here in a way. Eh and then okay we could go on from here in what way the disgusting dimension functions, disgust as as we know disgust always enters when the the skin, the limit between inside and outside is violated. You probably know this example I used it often but let me repeat it: like make a simple experiment. Without any problem you always swallow your saliva, no? No problem. Okay do it, I tried it, it work. It's disgusting, I couldn't do it. Take a glass and spit your saliva into it and then try to drink it. I cannot. You see? The moment it's outside it's over, although my God seconds before you were without any problem swallowing it. So eh with all that stuff eh disgust and so on, I would like to pursue, sorry if it was a little bit confused, but tomorrow we will go on from here just some finishing thoughts of Hegel. That Hegel's my thesis will be that the limitation of Hegel was that what he also and maybe this is much more serious than what Pippin delineates. What brought us 20th century with its horrors was a why does Hegel automatically think that comedy is comedy of reconciliation, no conflict? What we experienced in 20th century is a comedy which is when things get so terrible that they are no longer be tragic they get comic. Which is why you know my old point like why are all good films about Holocaust comical? Comedies and so on. Because in tragedy you still retain a certain dignity as a subject. Tragedy means you screw me, I said no, kill me but I will you know a certain greatness. But in with this is why Auschwitz was not a tragedy. If you say in Auschwitz Jews were in a tragic position it's an obscenity. You concede too much to the Nazis. The deprivation of humanity was so horrible there that the victim was not able to maintain a tragic a tragic position. Eh this is why as I used it quite often, you have scenes in Auschwitz which are in a weird obscene way comical. Like eh all those games of formalized gestures, in a way it's a terrifying comedy and this I claim Hegel was not able to see. That there is also for Hegel evil was tragedy. Tragedy in the sense that what's the basic feature of tragedy is that you think an external enemy counterforce is attacking you, but the tragic point is that when you see your co-responsibility that in fighting your opponent you are fighting yourself. You are always in a you know like Oedipus, you know. He discovers how he is involved in it and so on and so on. But already in this sense Auschwitz is not a tragedy. To read Auschwitz as a tragedy would have meant to say the Jews who experienced how when they are tortured and destroyed by the Nazis they are really torturing themselves is ultimately their responsibility. No, precisely this is an obscenity to say this. Tragedy is sorry it becomes comic in this weird way precisely when you see the total contingency of it. I am tortured it has no meaning no point and so on and so on. So again from this to to give you a little bit of forelust fore-pleasure of forthcoming attraction. What I will do tomorrow to begin with before we go to theology but it's all connected is my friend Adam Kotsko, a very nice from Chicago eh he was here for that theologico-political conference eh he just finished a wonderful new book on creepiness, creepy heroes, you know that all the TV heroes in that we have they are creepy. How can it be that almost the main form of sitcom of heroes are creepy guys? And to develop all these models of ugliness, how they function and so on and from here we will then go to the ultimate creepy guy, God, and so on. You know so and then we will return maybe to politics a little bit. So eh now you have minus two minutes to ask questions but because it's minus two minutes you have no chance to ask questions so please because I really feel bad, the usual rule tomorrow, but remember tomorrow it's at two PM. Don't ask me why. I am here like a Jew in Auschwitz, you know, tragic I didn't do it I didn't do it, just fate but eh so again if you want but don't really do it I will show you the last ten minutes watch that crazy watch that crazy movie again it's better than *Interstellar* probably not eh okay so thanks very much and tomorrow we go on thanks. [Applause]