German Idealism and Psychoanalysis with Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic, Mladen Dolar - Part 2
Debate · Deutsches Haus ·
2012-04-20 · 0:36:35 · 4,917 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologyhistoryfascism-populismrevolution-violencecinema-art-culturesubjectivityphilosophy-general
This talk argues for a materialist reading of Hegel's Absolute, the thesis that an event's true significance lies in its symbolic inscription (Thucydides' history, Shakespeare, Hitchcock) rather than its immediate reality, and develops it through psychoanalysis. Žižek rejects the Frankfurt School/Jungian homology of Hegelian alienation-reconciliation with Freudian repression-analysis, and the 'balance of opposites' model it licenses (communitarianism, Nazism, Stalinism, the Lion King's 'Circle of Life'). Instead he reads Hegel as insisting on the radical asymmetry of dialectical poles, a temporality in which the wrong/premature choice must precede the right one (Rosa Luxemburg, the French Revolution), and absolute knowing as objective reality plus its necessary subjective illusions.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Hegel's term for how the symbolic inscription of an event 'sublates', preserves and cancels, its immediate reality.
as “the Absolute / the Absolute standpoint”
The standpoint from which one sees how apparent opposites supplement each other, but, Žižek stresses, not to remain stuck there, rather to change the totality.
His twist on the Butlerian slogan: against revisionism, at the level of the Absolute the symbolic inscription (the book) is what matters.
Something foreign confronts the subject which it does not recognize as its own; the Frankfurt matrix pairs this with Freudian repression.
as “Vermittlung / mediation”
Hegel's subjective mediation through which alienated substantial content is reflexively re-appropriated.
Freud's formula read (by the Frankfurt/Jungian matrix) as the subject recognizing itself in its eccentric foreign compulsion; Žižek rejects this subjectivist reading.
as “shadow / anima”
Jung's figures of the disavowed feminine/other part of the ego that return as neurotic symptoms; the foil for his critique of compensation theory.
as “Versöhnung / reconciliation”
The pseudo-Hegelian notion (Jung, the young Hegel) that the subject recognizes its alienated substance in its opposite; Žižek rejects it as insufficient.
A formation of the unconscious returning the message of a disavowed part; for Žižek also what one pole needs to cover its own falsity (Nazism needs the figure of the Jew).
His Hegelian formula for radical asymmetry: in any opposition one pole already contains the other, so no third element is needed to mediate them.
His formula: true change is not balancing opposites but transforming the universal term so it no longer requires its symptom as guarantee of its unity.
as “the truth of the Lion King”
His name for what the film's Circle of Life song really shows, that the wisdom of opposites-complementing must be replaced by a different cycle.
as “the right moment only arrives through the wrong moment”
His dialectical-temporality formula: premature failed acts produce the right moment; waiting for it forecloses it.
as “Il n'y a pas de métalangage / no metalanguage”
Lacan's axiom that you cannot step outside the process and calculate it; there is no calculable shortcut to the right moment.
as “Absolutes Wissen / absolute knowing”
Not a more-objective-than-objective description of reality, but objective reality PLUS the subjective illusions necessary to it.
His reading of Absolutes Wissen: add the subjective illusions to the objective state of things to reach the absolute.
as “immanence of illusion to reality”
His formulation of psychoanalysis's lesson: truth and the Absolute are reached only through the illusions, never by bypassing them.
His reversal of the cliché: fantasy is not what hides behind the explicit desire, it is what supports reality itself.
His gloss on Hegel: what is re-appropriated in reconciliation is constituted in the very movement of returning to it; nationalism constructs the roots it returns to.
Lacan's imaginary virtual object which embodies the loss and as such moves the subject to fill it in.
Stories he reaches for 4
Left radicals (Trotskyists) say no money in communism, Bukharin says money is natural; Stalin's dialectical 'synthesis', in communism there will be money and there will not be money: some people will have money, others will not.
“In communism there will be money and there will not be money, synthesis... some people will have money, others will will not have money”
The lion tells his son that eating zebras is fine because zebras eat grass fed by lion-manure, the 'cycle of life'; Žižek says this wisdom of opposites-complementing is false, and the task is to change the cycle itself.
“true we are eating zebras, but zebras are eating, but we then turn to dust, to manure, manure feeds grass, and zebras are eating grass”
Hegel says the Peloponnesian War effectively took place so that Thucydides could write his book; from the standpoint of the Absolute the book is the gain humanity derived from the contest, more important than the suffering.
“his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the contest.”
Bernstein counseled waiting for conditions to ripen; Luxemburg answered that you must try to take power prematurely, only the failed premature attempt creates the right moment.
“If you wait for the right moment it will never come.”
Works invoked 14
Antigone play
Sophocles; Antigone as a symptom of Creon, each pole undermines its own substance, illustrating radical asymmetry.
Life is Beautiful film
'The film that I don't like'; reimagined as a Monty-Python Auschwitz cycle-of-life to expose the obscenity of balance.
Atlas Shrugged book
Ayn Rand; Bukharin's defense of money 'speaks like John Galt at the end of Atlas Shrugged.'
Hegel; source of the Thucydides/Peloponnesian War 'absolute gain' and the French Revolution analysis.
The Lion King film
'Disgusting' Circle of Life song embodies the false wisdom that opposites complement; he would 'draw my gun' hearing it.
Lukács; assumes the subject-represses-then-reappropriates model that Žižek says is wrong.
Habermas; first full elaboration of the Frankfurt School homology of Hegelian alienation and Freudian repression that Žižek rejects.
Dahmer; the 'definitive formulation' of the Frankfurt model, a 'pretty good book' whose thesis he rejects.
Ethics of the Real book
Zupančič; develops Kant's contradictions on the French Revolution; her first book in English.
The 'absolute gain to humanity' derived from Wolfman's tragic life.
Stephen Jay Gould; draws a parallel between evolution and the price/size of Hershey bars, allowing you to calculate the cost of nothing.
Thucydides; 'the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the contest.'
The 'absolute gain' humanity derived from the Eisenhower era.
Hegel; where the young Hegel's dialectic of recognition found definite expression, Žižek assigns this to the young Hegel he partly resists.
People invoked 26
Star/director of Life is Beautiful, 'the film that I don't like'; invoked in the Auschwitz cycle-of-life setpiece.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Her book Ethics of the Real develops Kant's contradictions on the French Revolution; addressed directly at the close ('Thank you very much, Alenka').
Ayn Rand negative
Invoked via John Galt / Atlas Shrugged as the figure Bukharin's defense of money imitates, a disparaging comparison.
Vladimir Lenin positive
'Lenin is for me Beckett in politics'; Leninism stays one-sided and makes repeat mistakes, unlike Stalin's false synthesis.
Georg Lukács negative
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein assumes a subject that represses then re-appropriates its content, the model Žižek says is wrong.
Arnold Schoenberg positive
Cited for dismissing Nazi racism as a miserable imitation of Jewish chosen-people identity.
Helmut Dahmer negative
Libido und Gesellschaft gives the 'definitive formulation' of the Frankfurt model Žižek rejects, though he calls it a 'pretty good book.'
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for objet petit a, 'Il n'y a pas de métalangage,' and the immanence of illusion to reality as psychoanalysis's lesson.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
'Gould was a great Hegelian'; his Hershey-bar analysis lets you calculate the cost of nothing, objet petit a.
Nikolai Bukharin negative
The Right-wing deviationist in the joke; 'speaks like John Galt at the end of Atlas Shrugged.'
Judith Butler negative
Allusion via 'bodies that matter', he insists 'book matters' against the revisionist/Butlerian line that bodies matter.
Alain Badiou negative
His notion of the 'act' is the target of Cutrofello's critique that Žižek endorses: there is never a proper time for an act.
Named as the Left-wing radical in the money-in-communism joke (no money in communism).
Carl Jung negative
The 'arch-renegade'; his pseudo-Hegelian compensation theory (shadow/anima, integrating symptoms into a wider self) is the main foil he rejects as false reconciliation.
Addressed in passing ('maybe you know Mladen in which book') regarding the Gould essay.
Thucydides positive
His History of the Peloponnesian War is Hegel's 'absolute gain' of that conflict.
William Shakespeare positive
The Elizabethan era 'took place in order to give rise to Shakespeare.'
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Her polemic against Bernstein, take power prematurely, the failed attempt creates the right moment, is 'very Hegelian.'
Alfred Hitchcock positive
His fifties masterpieces are the 'absolute gain' humanity derived from the Eisenhower era.
Eduard Bernstein negative
Revisionist who counseled waiting for ripe conditions; Luxemburg's foil.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Erkenntnis und Interesse elaborates the Frankfurt School homology of Hegelian alienation and Freudian repression that Žižek rejects.
Joseph Stalin negative
Stalinism's false 'synthesis' of right and left deviations (the money-in-communism joke) exemplifies the false balance he rejects.
Sigmund Freud positive
Wo es war, soll Ich werden; the Wolfman case study as 'absolute gain'; the analytic process of repression and its overcoming.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure; Žižek defends a materialist reading of the Absolute, Aufhebung, dialectical asymmetry and temporality against pseudo-Hegelian reconciliations.
Even Kant 'blurs things' in judging the French Revolution; the point is developed in Alenka Zupančič's Ethics of the Real.
Andrew Cutrofello positive
His critique of Badiou's notion of act, an act is always too early or too late, supports the dialectical-temporality point.
What it argues
The Absolute as symbolic inscription: the book matters more than the bodiesRejecting the Frankfurt School/Jungian homology of alienation and repressionRadical asymmetry of dialectical poles: one pole already is the unity of the twoThe false 'balance of opposites' model (communitarians, Nazis, Stalinism, the Circle of Life)Dialectical temporality: the wrong/premature choice must come first to open the space for the right oneAbsolute knowing as objective reality plus its necessary subjective illusionsLoss precedes what is lost: nationalism constructs the roots it returns to
Dialectical moves 10
“the true illness is that of the ego itself, and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure.”
The symptom is the attempted cure; the ego that fights it is the real illness.
“evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself.”
The gaze that detects evil constitutes it; the perceiver, not the perceived, is the source.
“one of the poles already is the unity of the two.”
In any opposition one pole already contains the other, so no third mediating element is needed.
“the only real change is the change of totality.”
True change is not balancing opposites but transforming the universal term so it no longer needs its symptom.
“the first gesture in a choice is always the wrong, the bad choice. Only the wrong choice opens up the space for the good choice.”
The right option is accessible only through first making the wrong one; there is no shortcut.
“the right moment only arrives through the wrong moment, through premature wrong acts.”
The proper time for action is produced by premature failed action, not waited for.
“What was lost? The loss is previous to what is lost.”
What is reappropriated is constituted in the movement of returning to it; loss comes first.
“the absolute standpoint means to see how illusions are necessary to reality.”
Absolute knowing is not more-objective-than-objective but objective-plus-its-necessary-illusions.
“you are never alone in sex, you need the illusion to survive reality.”
Fantasy is the support of reality, not a screen hiding a more basic desire.
“'this is it' arises precisely through illusions. You don't get it directly.”
Truth is reached only by passing through the illusions, never by bypassing them.
Claims 17
asserts
The 'absolute gain' of an event is its symbolic inscription, not its immediate reality — Thucydides' book matters more, from the standpoint of the Absolute, than the Peloponnesian War's suffering.the Absolute / narrativization over immediate reality
asserts
This subordination of reality to its narrativization must be read in a materialist way — as a contingent materialist process, not as teleology.materialist reading of Hegel's Absolute
rejects
The Frankfurt School homology of Hegelian alienation-reappropriation with Freudian repression-analysis is the natural but insufficient matrix for linking German idealism and psychoanalysis.Habermas/Dahmer Frankfurt School model
rejects
Jung's compensation theory is a pseudo-Hegelian reconciliation of the ego with its shadow that must be radically rejected.Jung's compensation theory
rejects
It is obscene to tell Jews to recognize their own truth in the Nazis: the antisemitic figure of the Jew is a symptom of Nazism, but Nazism is not symmetrically a symptom of Judaism — the asymmetry of the poles is radical.symmetrical reconciliation of Nazis and Jews
reframes
Fundamentalism is not the symmetric opposite of liberal individualism but a symptom of the deadlocks of capitalist liberalism.fundamentalism and capitalist liberalism
rejects
The communitarian (and Nazi) proposal of a 'balance' between individualism and community is a false synthesis.the balance-of-opposites model
asserts
The solution is to revolutionize the universal term itself so that it no longer requires its symptom as the guarantee of its unity.Hegel / true change
rejects
The Lion King's 'Circle of Life' wisdom — that opposites complement each other — is false; the task is to change the cycle of life itself.the false totality of complementing opposites
asserts
Hegel's judgment of the French Revolution is unique: only the revolutionary terror opens up the space to overcome itself, so there is no shortcut past the wrong choice.dialectical temporality / French Revolution
asserts
The right moment for revolutionary action only arrives through premature, failed attempts — if you wait for the right moment it will never come (Rosa Luxemburg against Bernstein).revolutionary temporality
asserts
An act is always either too early or too late — there is never a proper time for an act (Cutrofello against Badiou).the act
reframes
Absolute knowing is not more objective than the objective description of reality; it is the objective state of things plus the subjective illusions necessary to it.Absolutes Wissen
asserts
There is no subject prior to the loss: what is re-appropriated in reconciliation is literally constituted in the very movement of returning to it.Hegel / reconciliation
asserts
Nationalisms from late-19th-century to post-communist 'returns to ethnic roots' were fake: the roots were literally constructed in the act of returning to them.nationalism
asserts
In sex you are never alone — you need the illusion (fantasy) to survive reality.sexuality and fantasy
reframes
The cartoon reversal holds: against the cliché that you say one polite thing and think of sex, psychoanalysis shows you may sincerely want sex while the fantasy is the elaborate scene that lets you bear it.conscious desire and fantasy
Quotes 14
“Not, as some revisionists claim, bodies that matter, book matters.”Slavoj Žižek · the Absolute: symbolic inscription over bodies
“how to read this apparently absurd subordination of reality to its narrativization in a materialist way. Not as some teleology, but strictly as a contingent materialist process.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist reading of the Absolute
“evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the gaze constitutes evil
“one of the poles already is the unity of the two”Slavoj Žižek · radical asymmetry of dialectical poles
“the first gesture in a choice is always the wrong, the bad choice.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical temporality
“If you wait for the right moment it will never come.”Slavoj Žižek · revolutionary temporality
“there is no metalanguage. You cannot step on your shoulder and calculate it. You cannot cheat here.”Slavoj Žižek · no metalanguage / no calculable shortcut
“The absolute standpoint means to see how illusions are necessary to reality.”Slavoj Žižek · absolute knowing
“What was lost? The loss is previous to what is lost.”Slavoj Žižek · loss precedes the lost
“you are never alone in sex, you need the illusion to survive reality.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy supports reality
“you can exactly calculate how much this nothing will cost.”Slavoj Žižek · objet petit a / the cost of nothing
“fundamentalism today is a symptom of the deadlocks of capitalist liberalism.”Slavoj Žižek · fundamentalism as symptom
“Antigone is a symptom of Creon”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetry of poles
“We should radically reject this pseudo-Hegelian notion of Versöhnung.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of reconciliation
Transcript 2 turns
unknown
Now,
Now,
Slavoj Žižek
okay, more seriously, let me begin. Now the big disappointment, this is the first non-joke, I will be the one who will somehow talk about, it’s extremely boring, psychoanalysis and German idealism. Okay, so here we go. Hegel was fully aware of how the weight of an event provided by its symbolic inscription sublates, of course I am speaking about Aufhebung, sublates the event's immediate reality. For example, in his Philosophy of History, he provides a wonderful characterization of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Quote from Hegel: In the Peloponnesian War, the struggle was essentially between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides has left us the history of the great part of it, and his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the contest. End of quote. I hope you are aware what Hegel is saying here, and I agree with him. We should read his last statement in its full naivete. In a way, from the standpoint of world history, the Peloponnesian War took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it. The term absolute, absolute gain, should be given here all its weight. From the point of relative finite human interests, numerous real tragedies of the Peloponnesian War, suffering, devastations, are of course infinitely more important than a book. But from the standpoint of the absolute, it is the book that matters. Not, as some revisionists claim, bodies that matter, book matters. One should not be afraid to say the same thing about other truly great works of art. I think even many of us would accept implicitly that the Elizabethan era took place in order to give rise to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's work is the absolute gain which humanity derived from all those vicissitudes. And why not? Hitchcock's masterpieces of the fifties are the absolute gain which humanity derived from the rather depressing Eisenhower period of the United States. So again, is this some crazy idealism? No, I think that the whole point which condenses precisely this conjuncture between psychoanalysis and German idealism is how to read this apparently absurd subordination of reality to its narrativization in a materialist way. Not as some teleology, but strictly as a contingent materialist process. So that and even we could, of course, put it in the same way apropos Wolfman. Wolfman had a tragic life, but was not obviously the absolute gain to humanity Freud's case study on Wolfman. Now, how then do we stand with regard to psychoanalysis and German idealism? The first philosophically, philosophically relevant attempt to establish the link between German idealism and psychoanalysis was the one which took place within the tradition of the Frankfurt School. It was fully elaborated by Habermas in his Erkenntnis und Interesse, Interest and Human Knowledge. And then it acquired its definitive formulation in Helmut Dahmer's pretty good book Libido und Gesellschaft, Libido and Society. The basic matrix of this attempt is the homology between the Hegelian process of alienation and its overcoming through subjective Vermittlung, mediation, that is to say, reflexive re-appropriation of the alienated substantial content, and the Freudian process of repression and its overcoming through the analytic process where the patient is brought to recognize his, her own content in what appears to him, her as weird formations of the unconscious. So I hope again you got the point here. This is the elementary, almost natural matrix. In the same way as Hegel speaks about alienation, something alien confronts you, you don't recognize yourself in it, but then through dialectical mediation you re-appropriate it. In the same way, so it seems, in psychoanalysis, this is what Freud is doing. This is how we usually read Freud's Wo es war, soll Ich werden. Where we spontaneously experience some eccentric foreign, foreign compulsion and so on, I should recognize myself in it. Okay, this would be the more, to put it naively, subjectivist version. I the subject should recognize myself in my substantial content. There is also the opposite version, but pretty similar to this, the let's call it substantialist version, which was developed by Carl Gustav Jung, the arch-renegade, in his pseudo-Hegelian so-called compensation theory. Jung's basic idea is the elevation of the unconscious, das Unbewusste, into the hidden substantial truth of the human subject. In our one-sided rationalist subjectivity, we in the West have lost from our sight the depth of the substantial truth of our being. What does Jung mean by it? When the ego gets too narrow and rigid, excluding from its scope the, they appear to him as irrational, irrational tendencies that do not fit his or her self-image, these tendencies return in the guise of neurotic symptoms. Say when a man curtails his feminine shadow, anima, cutting it off his identity, it returns to haunt him in the guise of monstrous obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself and experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions. Then of course the goal of therapy is not to fight these symptoms, not to eliminate them, but to integrate them into a wider self which transcends the narrow confines of ego. These symptoms stand for forces that are not in themselves evil and destructive. What makes them such is the false perspective of the ego. Or, as Hegel would have put it, evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself. So when ego, an ego is haunted by neurotic symptoms, the task of the Jungian therapist is to make the patient see how his ego is part of the problem, not the solution. The ego should shift its perspective and recognize in his symptoms the violent expression of the disavowed part of himself. The true illness is that of the ego itself, and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure, attempts to re-establish the balance disturbed by the ego's narrow frame which excluded crucial parts of its content. No wonder that some partisans of Jung see in this compensation theory a Hegelian background. Many formulations of Jung recall Hegel's notion of Versöhnung, reconciliation of the subject with its alienated substance. That is to say, how the subject has to recognize in the foreign power that he fights, he has to recognize the misrecognized part of his own substance. This dialectic of recognition, in so far as maybe is a little bit Hegelian, belongs to the young Hegel. It found its definite expression in the Jena period fragments on love and reconciliation, and maybe later in Hegel's reading of Antigone as the tragic confrontation of the two opposing positions, Antigone's and Creon's, which are both blinded by their one-sidedness and thus unable to recognize the moment of their truth in the opposite force. That is to say, the fact that by attacking the opponent they are undermining their own substance. So this may seem so elementarily true that you can also say what's the problem? Isn't it obvious? In formations of the unconscious, symptoms, you get back the message of the disavowed part of yourself and the point is to reconcile yourself with it. But I claim we should radically reject this pseudo-Hegelian notion of Versöhnung. It is easy to see why it is not sufficient. We should just for example, and I’m taking being here in Deutsches Haus a brutal example, to the struggle between Nazis and Jews. Again, in a first approach, the Jungian notion of shadow as the misrecognized alter ego seems fitting here. Is there effectively not a strange echoing and redoubling between the Nazi elevation of Aryan Germans and the Jewish self-perception as the chosen nation? Was it not already Arnold Schoenberg who dismissed Nazi racism as a miserable imitation of the Jewish identity as the chosen people? However, that would be my critical rejection, is it not obscene to say that each of the two parties should recognize in its opponent its own truth and substance, its own second self? The only thing this could mean for the Jews is that they should recognize how, in the guise of the Nazi hatred of them, they suffer the reaction to the fact that they excluded themselves from their organic commune life, that they abandoned themselves to rootless alienated existence. It is immediately clear what is wrong here. What is missing is the radical asymmetry of the two poles. While the antisemitic figure of the Jew effectively can be conceived as some kind of symptom of Nazism, symptom of what is false in Nazism, and to cover up again this falsity, the Nazi needs the figure of the Jew to sustain its own identity, Nazism is definitely not in a symmetrical way a symptom of Judaism, the return of its repressed, its inner truth. I mean, it would be obscene to say to a Jew, are you aware that in resisting the Nazis you are resisting your own essence and that you should reconcile yourself with the Nazis and recognize your own identity in it? Why is then this wrong, this compensation theory, when you have a conflict each side should admit, recognize its own shadow in its opposite? The opposition of poles conceals the fact that one of the poles already is the unity of the two. So for Hegel, there is no need for a third element to bring the two together. Hegelian so-called reconciliation or synthesis, incidentally he never uses the word synthesis, is not, we have one one-sidedness, the other one-sidedness, and then we need a broader perspective to bring the true, the two together. What does this mean? Let me take the example of the opposition between liberal individualism and fundamentalism. Today's communitarians advocate effectively a kind of Jungian compensation theory. We in the West put too much emphasis on individualism, neglecting the community bond, which then returns to haunt us in the guise of fundamentalist threat. The way to fight fundamentalism is to change our own position, to recognize in the distorted image of fundamentalist threat the neglected aspect of our own identity. The solution is thus the proper balance between individual and community, a social body in which collective link and individual freedom organically supplement each other. Incidentally, this is, this synthesis was already proposed by the Nazis. They claimed that on the one hand, the Jewish individualism neglected community, on the other hand, the communist Bolshevik, also Jewish, but Jews are everywhere, you know this, collective, collectivism neglected individualism, and that the fascism proposes the right balance. What is wrong here is this very figure of a balance, harmony of the two opposed principles. Our starting point should be on the contrary the immanent contradiction of the capitalist individualism. Fundamentalism is ultimately a secondary reactive phenomenon, an attempt to counteract, to gentrify this antagonism. For Hegel, the goal is not to re-establish the symmetry and balance of the two opposite principles, but to recognize in one pole the symptom of the failure of the other. Like Nazis need antisemitism to cover up their own mask. Or fundamentalism today is a symptom of the deadlocks of capitalist liberalism. Or, back to Sophocles, Antigone is a symptom of Creon and so on and so on. So the solution is to revolutionize, change the universal term itself, liberalism or whatever, so that it will no longer require its symptom as the guarantee of its unity. That's the whole point of Hegel. Hegel also preaches this standpoint of the absolute, where you see how opposites are apparent and how they really supplement each other. But his point is not to remain stuck at this. His point is that precisely the only change is, is the change of totality, which means that the absolute greatest enemy of Hegel is this, sometimes even some Hegelians fall for it, this, let me call it circle, to refer to the greatest movie blah-blah, Lion King, you remember that disgusting song where I become a Goebbels guy, draw my gun when I hear it, the Circle of Life, you know when and who sings it, the lion on the top of course says to his son, you know, true we are eating zebras, but zebras are eating, but we then turn to dust, to manure, manure feeds grass, and zebras are eating grass, and we are eating zebras and so it's a cycle of life, no? I mean, what's false in it? That precisely the task is not to be stuck at this wisdom, but how to change the cycle of life itself and at least impose a different cycle. You will see my point if just, this would be for me the truth of the Lion King, to replace this song with a different song. Sorry, it's an obscenity, but I, but I present it just to make you see the obscenity of this wise position, oh, opposites complement each other. Imagine that at the end of the film that I don't like of course, Life is Beautiful, let's say that the son sees through the horror of Auschwitz and turns to father to Roberto Benigni, Dad, but it's horrid, the Nazis are killing us. And then in a Monty Python style Roberto Benigni starts to sing, but my son it's all part of the cycle of life. It’s true Nazis are killing us, but then Nazis will drop dead, their bodies will be manure to cows, from cows they will make steaks, and we with our Jewish money will buy the steaks and eat them, so it's all one big cycle of life, no? But the point is precisely that, how to make a cycle of life where Nazis don't kill, don't kill the Jew, no? In other words, this entire model of fighting the extreme and finding the balance is false, is false. You can see it even, for example, because we also have a communist version of this balance. It's even a central ingredient of Stalinism. Leninism is different. With Leninism you are always one-sided, you are by always stupid, you can only make repeat mistakes. Lenin is for me Beckett in politics more or less. I mean, but Stalin, you know, always Stalinism, do you remember if you are lucky to remember it, always Stalinism always needs two opposites, Right-wing deviation and Left-wing deviation, and then Comrade Stalin proposes the synthesis. Why is this synthesis false? Where there is one mega joke from Soviet Union, which I really like, oh for me mega joke. It refers precisely to this ability of Stalin to bring together the opposite. It's that in mid-thirties they had a big debate in Politburo: will there be money in communism or not? First, the Left-wing radicals, Trotskyists claimed, of course there will not be money in communism, we will overcome all forms of alienation. Then Bukharin, Right-wing deviationist, said no, money is natural, you know, there is no socialist, basically they, they speak like John Galt at the end of Atlas Shrugged, you know, no, without money there is blah-blah-blah. And then all look of course at Comrade Stalin, no, and Comrade Stalin says no you are both wrong, both are deviations, we need a dialectical synthesis. In communism there will be money and there will not be money, synthesis. So then somebody asks, how do you mean this Comrade Stalin? You know what he answered, you can guess, very simple: some people will have money, others will will not have money, you know. Okay, but let me go on. Now to grasp this logic of universality, which is why Hegel never speaks about symmetrical opposites, it’s always one term relating to other and the truth of it is that it’s really posited by the self-mediation of the other. To see what Hegel is aiming here, you should just focus on the temporality which is involved here. What do I mean by this? Let me briefly turn to Hegel's notion of French Revolution. Are we aware how unique Hegel is? Usually we have again one extremist who, no, French Revolution was sinful, horror, abandoning God's order. Then you have Jacobin radicals claiming no, French Revolution was good, blah-blah, Jacobin terror was necessary. And then the predominant liberal notion, it's really like Stalin's there will be money and for some or not, it's something like the basic liberal compromise, as you know, is without The first liberal phase was good, then it was bad. What's so unique about Hegel's judgment, even Kant, I don't have time to go into it, Alenka developed this in her book, in what contradictions her, her first book in English, Ethics of the Real, gets, Kant gets involved. Even Kant blurs things here. What is unique about Hegel is that he on the one time praises French Revolution in extraordinary terms. Quote: All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time, blah-blah, is the high point. And then he goes on developing the absolute necessity of French Revolution turning into self-destructive revolutionary terror, apparently condemning it. And then opposing to abstract negativity of the revolutionary terror, we are all equal, which means we should all be killed and so on, this, apparently but it's not, proto-fascist Hegelian vision of mature, mature rational state with corporations, everybody at his, her, their own place, proper place and so on and so on. But we should be here very precise what Hegel is saying here. He introduces temporality in the logical process. Hegel is not saying we should reject Jacobins and opt, you know, like instead of terror, which introduces absolute equality and thus leads to self-destruction, we should be wise and propose a compromise solution of a rational structure. No, Hegel says of course this is the choice, the true choice. We should overcome terror. But only terror opens up the space for this choice. So you should begin by error. There is no shortcut. You cannot immediately say we abandon, we abandon terror, we make the right choice. No, at the beginning the choice is only between Ancien Régime and terror. Only the terror opens up the space to overcome itself. And this would be then the proper temporality of a dialectical process. Yes, you have a choice. But the first gesture in a choice is always the wrong, the bad choice. Only the wrong choice opens up the space for as it were for the good choice. Now let me give you, I will stick too much, let me give you another example which I really like here, which is the one of a surprising one of exactly the same paradoxical temporality of Rosa Luxemburg in her polemics against Bernstein. You know Bernstein preaches, Bernstein was and revisionists were afraid that proletariat will take power prematurely before conditions will be ripe. Like he said no, no, no, we have, we have to wait for proper, proper social moment when conditions will be ripe, blah-blah-blah. But Rosa Luxemburg in a very Hegelian way answers that, that there is the right moment. But in order for the right moment to emerge, you have to try and take power prematurely. Only this premature failed attempt create the right moment through their failure. If you wait for the right moment it will never come. It's a nice Hegelian point, which I don't have time to do it now, was also nicely developed by Andrew Cutrofello from Chicago in his very refined critique of Alain Badiou, of his notion of act, where he pointed out how an act is always either too early or too late. There is never a proper time for an act. It's always too early because again if you wait for the proper conditions of an act it never come. You have to strike too early. But at the same time it's always too late for structural reasons and so on and so on. So again, you see the paradox: the right moment only arrives through wrong moment, through, through sorry through premature wrong acts. Now you will tell me but what's the problem? I can be so bright that I as it were step on my shoulder and calculate, okay, let's make a couple of attempts at revolution, they will fail, but then after all of them I can even calculate the years we will grow mature. No, this is what is not possible. This is what Lacan calls Il n'y a pas de métalangage, there is no, there is no, there is no metalanguage. You cannot step on your shoulder and calc-, and calculate it. You can-, you cannot cheat here. Now from here we are almost at the end, I would like just to go on with brief insight into how Hegelian apparently difficult notion of Absolutes Wissen, absolute knowing, is to be conceived. We have subjective knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, our illusions, blah-blah. And we have let's call it objective knowledge, how things really are. What Hegel means by absolute knowing, it's also important it's Wissen knowing, is not something more objective than the objective description of reality, how things really are. But it's something much more refined. It is what really happened, the objective state of things, but what you add to it are precisely subjective illusions. In the way I describe them. You know an, a from the standpoint of, let's take French Revolution. A dialectical analysis does not discover just the inner objective necessity, but it shows how this necessity could have realized itself only through all subjective illusions and so on and so on. This is how you get to the absolute. Again, what absolute is not more objective than objective, it's you add illusions. The absolute standpoint means to see how illusions are necessary to reality. If you permit me an old joke that I repeat already twenty times in my first book, but maybe you forgot it so I will tell it. This would be the absolute position, a joke from my military service, probably you know it, you know the a guy as we were all doing when I was young try, tries to get rid of the military service by claiming that he is stupid, no, a madness, no. I failed terribly there. I counted on all my nervous tics, so I went to a doctor, I remember psychiatrist clinical and I thought he would be more Hegelian that he was. I went to him and said I know I have psychic troubles but I want to go to the army it would cure me and so on. But I put it on in such a crazy way that I thought that the doctor will say my God, the way this guy is telling that he wants to go to the army is so obviously crazy that... But no I got my lesson, he said okay you want to go so you go, you know. But, but there is this legendary joke where you will just get the point, which is that a guy wants to get rid of the army and, okay, claims he is crazy and produces a certain symptom, no, which is all he looks at all the papers that he sees, just every paper and just repeats this is not it, this is not it, this is not it and so on and so forth. Finally he is called to the military doctors' commission and there also he looks at everything and says this is not it, this is not it, no? The doctor says the guy is obviously crazy and they proclaimed him insane and gave him the document stating this. And he looked at it and says, yes, this is it. You know, like but you see how this is it arises precisely through illusions. You don't get it directly. Again, what does it mean? This, this immanence of illusion to reality is the big lesson of psychoanalysis. And let me just now conclude with two very short points. I remember some twenty years ago in a German, I think it was in Stern magazine, there was a caricature depicting five men who were asked what will you do next summer? And each of them gave the expected polite answer. One said oh, I'm already dreaming about reading in peace a good book. Another guy said I want to visit a faraway country. A third guy said I want to rest on a sunny beach and so on and so on. But then above the head of each of them was this, like in cartoon the, the cloud, where of course in each case you find a naked woman, no. Like it was vulgar idea, blah-blah-blah, you talk but you all think about this. Now this is totally wrong. The whole point of psychoanalysis is that it's exactly the opposite that is true. If we probably maybe, maybe not all but most of us, if we were to be asked probably sincerely yes, we would probably have stated something like explicitly, not in the cloud, my God I just want to screw like crazy all the time whatever. But then the crucial thing would be in the cloud, where one's fantasy would have been for example to make love, to make love while the girl is reading a good book, you know this erotic game where it can be nicely done, you know where like the woman is on her knees reading a book, you penetrate her a tergo and you can pretend oh I'm just doing back this you are... Okay, then maybe to do it in a faraway country, maybe to do it on a sunny beach. You know what I mean, like you need precisely, you are never alone in sex, you need the illusion to survive reality. Now we come to the final point and with this yes I will conclude. Now you will say but still, am I, what I am not saying is this nonetheless not a version of reconciliation? Maybe not this primitive one that subjects appropriates the alienated substance, but still in the sense of we see how illusion is immanent to, is immanent to reality, so nonetheless in a way the subject returns to itself. Now I don't have time to develop this, because here serious philosophy begins, I would just make two points. One is that when Hegel speaks about, this is what is wrong in that model automatically assumed by Lukács for example in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, or later by, by for example by Habermas or Helmut Dahmer, as if there is a subject which represses, alienates part of his, her, their content and then re-appropriates it. It’s absolutely crucial to understand Hegel to see how there is no subject, not even logically prior to the loss. As Hegel puts it literally: what was lost? The loss is previous to what is lost. What was lost, what we re-appropriate in reconciliation, is literally constituted in the very movement of returning to it. And I think we have a triumphant example of it, for example in every form of nationalism. From the late 19th century nationalism to, to our own in post-communist countries where we all from Slovenes to Albanians were returning to old ethnic roots. But these were all fake. We were literally forming, constructing these roots in, in returning to them. So again this is absolutely crucial for Hegel, that paradoxically, I don't have time to develop it but this the deepest temporality, that you don't have something and then you lose it and get it back in a richer form. Like loss comes first and all that you have, you form it to fill in the loss. How does this work? Here I will just mention briefly, you find this in our work, we are all obsessed by this, here you need what Lacan calls objet petit a, an imaginary virtual object which embodies the loss and as such moves you to fill it in. And let me now really conclude with a nice example I claim of this, taken from of course Stephen Jay Gould. You know in one of his early texts, I forgot maybe you know Mladen in which book, he draws a parallel between evolution and the relationship between price and size of Hershey chocolate bars. Comparing price and size changes from forty-nine through seventy-nine, Gould discovered how the company gradually diminished the size, like let's say the price was five cents, but the size was smaller and smaller. Then at a certain point they raised the price and the size, but not to the level the size even when chocolates became larger again where did not, did not reach the size of at the beginning. So the size go down when the price remains the same, the size goes down, then price goes up size goes down, then again the same process, no, to maintain the same price chocolates getting smaller and smaller, then again, and now comes here you can see that Gould was a great Hegelian, no? He says if you extrapolate from this tendency you can exactly calculate at what point you will get nothing, you know. Just, and he says and you can exactly calculate how much this nothing will cost. The big problem we are struggling with, this is what Lacan calls object a, is did was Hegel is, is Hegel, can we within Hegelian horizon think this or not? Thank you very much, Alenka.
okay, more seriously, let me begin. Now the big disappointment, this is the first non-joke, I will be the one who will somehow talk about, it’s extremely boring, psychoanalysis and German idealism. Okay, so here we go. Hegel was fully aware of how the weight of an event provided by its symbolic inscription sublates, of course I am speaking about Aufhebung, sublates the event's immediate reality. For example, in his Philosophy of History, he provides a wonderful characterization of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Quote from Hegel: In the Peloponnesian War, the struggle was essentially between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides has left us the history of the great part of it, and his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the contest. End of quote. I hope you are aware what Hegel is saying here, and I agree with him. We should read his last statement in its full naivete. In a way, from the standpoint of world history, the Peloponnesian War took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it. The term absolute, absolute gain, should be given here all its weight. From the point of relative finite human interests, numerous real tragedies of the Peloponnesian War, suffering, devastations, are of course infinitely more important than a book. But from the standpoint of the absolute, it is the book that matters. Not, as some revisionists claim, bodies that matter, book matters. One should not be afraid to say the same thing about other truly great works of art. I think even many of us would accept implicitly that the Elizabethan era took place in order to give rise to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's work is the absolute gain which humanity derived from all those vicissitudes. And why not? Hitchcock's masterpieces of the fifties are the absolute gain which humanity derived from the rather depressing Eisenhower period of the United States. So again, is this some crazy idealism? No, I think that the whole point which condenses precisely this conjuncture between psychoanalysis and German idealism is how to read this apparently absurd subordination of reality to its narrativization in a materialist way. Not as some teleology, but strictly as a contingent materialist process. So that and even we could, of course, put it in the same way apropos Wolfman. Wolfman had a tragic life, but was not obviously the absolute gain to humanity Freud's case study on Wolfman. Now, how then do we stand with regard to psychoanalysis and German idealism? The first philosophically, philosophically relevant attempt to establish the link between German idealism and psychoanalysis was the one which took place within the tradition of the Frankfurt School. It was fully elaborated by Habermas in his Erkenntnis und Interesse, Interest and Human Knowledge. And then it acquired its definitive formulation in Helmut Dahmer's pretty good book Libido und Gesellschaft, Libido and Society. The basic matrix of this attempt is the homology between the Hegelian process of alienation and its overcoming through subjective Vermittlung, mediation, that is to say, reflexive re-appropriation of the alienated substantial content, and the Freudian process of repression and its overcoming through the analytic process where the patient is brought to recognize his, her own content in what appears to him, her as weird formations of the unconscious. So I hope again you got the point here. This is the elementary, almost natural matrix. In the same way as Hegel speaks about alienation, something alien confronts you, you don't recognize yourself in it, but then through dialectical mediation you re-appropriate it. In the same way, so it seems, in psychoanalysis, this is what Freud is doing. This is how we usually read Freud's Wo es war, soll Ich werden. Where we spontaneously experience some eccentric foreign, foreign compulsion and so on, I should recognize myself in it. Okay, this would be the more, to put it naively, subjectivist version. I the subject should recognize myself in my substantial content. There is also the opposite version, but pretty similar to this, the let's call it substantialist version, which was developed by Carl Gustav Jung, the arch-renegade, in his pseudo-Hegelian so-called compensation theory. Jung's basic idea is the elevation of the unconscious, das Unbewusste, into the hidden substantial truth of the human subject. In our one-sided rationalist subjectivity, we in the West have lost from our sight the depth of the substantial truth of our being. What does Jung mean by it? When the ego gets too narrow and rigid, excluding from its scope the, they appear to him as irrational, irrational tendencies that do not fit his or her self-image, these tendencies return in the guise of neurotic symptoms. Say when a man curtails his feminine shadow, anima, cutting it off his identity, it returns to haunt him in the guise of monstrous obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself and experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions. Then of course the goal of therapy is not to fight these symptoms, not to eliminate them, but to integrate them into a wider self which transcends the narrow confines of ego. These symptoms stand for forces that are not in themselves evil and destructive. What makes them such is the false perspective of the ego. Or, as Hegel would have put it, evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself. So when ego, an ego is haunted by neurotic symptoms, the task of the Jungian therapist is to make the patient see how his ego is part of the problem, not the solution. The ego should shift its perspective and recognize in his symptoms the violent expression of the disavowed part of himself. The true illness is that of the ego itself, and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure, attempts to re-establish the balance disturbed by the ego's narrow frame which excluded crucial parts of its content. No wonder that some partisans of Jung see in this compensation theory a Hegelian background. Many formulations of Jung recall Hegel's notion of Versöhnung, reconciliation of the subject with its alienated substance. That is to say, how the subject has to recognize in the foreign power that he fights, he has to recognize the misrecognized part of his own substance. This dialectic of recognition, in so far as maybe is a little bit Hegelian, belongs to the young Hegel. It found its definite expression in the Jena period fragments on love and reconciliation, and maybe later in Hegel's reading of Antigone as the tragic confrontation of the two opposing positions, Antigone's and Creon's, which are both blinded by their one-sidedness and thus unable to recognize the moment of their truth in the opposite force. That is to say, the fact that by attacking the opponent they are undermining their own substance. So this may seem so elementarily true that you can also say what's the problem? Isn't it obvious? In formations of the unconscious, symptoms, you get back the message of the disavowed part of yourself and the point is to reconcile yourself with it. But I claim we should radically reject this pseudo-Hegelian notion of Versöhnung. It is easy to see why it is not sufficient. We should just for example, and I’m taking being here in Deutsches Haus a brutal example, to the struggle between Nazis and Jews. Again, in a first approach, the Jungian notion of shadow as the misrecognized alter ego seems fitting here. Is there effectively not a strange echoing and redoubling between the Nazi elevation of Aryan Germans and the Jewish self-perception as the chosen nation? Was it not already Arnold Schoenberg who dismissed Nazi racism as a miserable imitation of the Jewish identity as the chosen people? However, that would be my critical rejection, is it not obscene to say that each of the two parties should recognize in its opponent its own truth and substance, its own second self? The only thing this could mean for the Jews is that they should recognize how, in the guise of the Nazi hatred of them, they suffer the reaction to the fact that they excluded themselves from their organic commune life, that they abandoned themselves to rootless alienated existence. It is immediately clear what is wrong here. What is missing is the radical asymmetry of the two poles. While the antisemitic figure of the Jew effectively can be conceived as some kind of symptom of Nazism, symptom of what is false in Nazism, and to cover up again this falsity, the Nazi needs the figure of the Jew to sustain its own identity, Nazism is definitely not in a symmetrical way a symptom of Judaism, the return of its repressed, its inner truth. I mean, it would be obscene to say to a Jew, are you aware that in resisting the Nazis you are resisting your own essence and that you should reconcile yourself with the Nazis and recognize your own identity in it? Why is then this wrong, this compensation theory, when you have a conflict each side should admit, recognize its own shadow in its opposite? The opposition of poles conceals the fact that one of the poles already is the unity of the two. So for Hegel, there is no need for a third element to bring the two together. Hegelian so-called reconciliation or synthesis, incidentally he never uses the word synthesis, is not, we have one one-sidedness, the other one-sidedness, and then we need a broader perspective to bring the true, the two together. What does this mean? Let me take the example of the opposition between liberal individualism and fundamentalism. Today's communitarians advocate effectively a kind of Jungian compensation theory. We in the West put too much emphasis on individualism, neglecting the community bond, which then returns to haunt us in the guise of fundamentalist threat. The way to fight fundamentalism is to change our own position, to recognize in the distorted image of fundamentalist threat the neglected aspect of our own identity. The solution is thus the proper balance between individual and community, a social body in which collective link and individual freedom organically supplement each other. Incidentally, this is, this synthesis was already proposed by the Nazis. They claimed that on the one hand, the Jewish individualism neglected community, on the other hand, the communist Bolshevik, also Jewish, but Jews are everywhere, you know this, collective, collectivism neglected individualism, and that the fascism proposes the right balance. What is wrong here is this very figure of a balance, harmony of the two opposed principles. Our starting point should be on the contrary the immanent contradiction of the capitalist individualism. Fundamentalism is ultimately a secondary reactive phenomenon, an attempt to counteract, to gentrify this antagonism. For Hegel, the goal is not to re-establish the symmetry and balance of the two opposite principles, but to recognize in one pole the symptom of the failure of the other. Like Nazis need antisemitism to cover up their own mask. Or fundamentalism today is a symptom of the deadlocks of capitalist liberalism. Or, back to Sophocles, Antigone is a symptom of Creon and so on and so on. So the solution is to revolutionize, change the universal term itself, liberalism or whatever, so that it will no longer require its symptom as the guarantee of its unity. That's the whole point of Hegel. Hegel also preaches this standpoint of the absolute, where you see how opposites are apparent and how they really supplement each other. But his point is not to remain stuck at this. His point is that precisely the only change is, is the change of totality, which means that the absolute greatest enemy of Hegel is this, sometimes even some Hegelians fall for it, this, let me call it circle, to refer to the greatest movie blah-blah, Lion King, you remember that disgusting song where I become a Goebbels guy, draw my gun when I hear it, the Circle of Life, you know when and who sings it, the lion on the top of course says to his son, you know, true we are eating zebras, but zebras are eating, but we then turn to dust, to manure, manure feeds grass, and zebras are eating grass, and we are eating zebras and so it's a cycle of life, no? I mean, what's false in it? That precisely the task is not to be stuck at this wisdom, but how to change the cycle of life itself and at least impose a different cycle. You will see my point if just, this would be for me the truth of the Lion King, to replace this song with a different song. Sorry, it's an obscenity, but I, but I present it just to make you see the obscenity of this wise position, oh, opposites complement each other. Imagine that at the end of the film that I don't like of course, Life is Beautiful, let's say that the son sees through the horror of Auschwitz and turns to father to Roberto Benigni, Dad, but it's horrid, the Nazis are killing us. And then in a Monty Python style Roberto Benigni starts to sing, but my son it's all part of the cycle of life. It’s true Nazis are killing us, but then Nazis will drop dead, their bodies will be manure to cows, from cows they will make steaks, and we with our Jewish money will buy the steaks and eat them, so it's all one big cycle of life, no? But the point is precisely that, how to make a cycle of life where Nazis don't kill, don't kill the Jew, no? In other words, this entire model of fighting the extreme and finding the balance is false, is false. You can see it even, for example, because we also have a communist version of this balance. It's even a central ingredient of Stalinism. Leninism is different. With Leninism you are always one-sided, you are by always stupid, you can only make repeat mistakes. Lenin is for me Beckett in politics more or less. I mean, but Stalin, you know, always Stalinism, do you remember if you are lucky to remember it, always Stalinism always needs two opposites, Right-wing deviation and Left-wing deviation, and then Comrade Stalin proposes the synthesis. Why is this synthesis false? Where there is one mega joke from Soviet Union, which I really like, oh for me mega joke. It refers precisely to this ability of Stalin to bring together the opposite. It's that in mid-thirties they had a big debate in Politburo: will there be money in communism or not? First, the Left-wing radicals, Trotskyists claimed, of course there will not be money in communism, we will overcome all forms of alienation. Then Bukharin, Right-wing deviationist, said no, money is natural, you know, there is no socialist, basically they, they speak like John Galt at the end of Atlas Shrugged, you know, no, without money there is blah-blah-blah. And then all look of course at Comrade Stalin, no, and Comrade Stalin says no you are both wrong, both are deviations, we need a dialectical synthesis. In communism there will be money and there will not be money, synthesis. So then somebody asks, how do you mean this Comrade Stalin? You know what he answered, you can guess, very simple: some people will have money, others will will not have money, you know. Okay, but let me go on. Now to grasp this logic of universality, which is why Hegel never speaks about symmetrical opposites, it’s always one term relating to other and the truth of it is that it’s really posited by the self-mediation of the other. To see what Hegel is aiming here, you should just focus on the temporality which is involved here. What do I mean by this? Let me briefly turn to Hegel's notion of French Revolution. Are we aware how unique Hegel is? Usually we have again one extremist who, no, French Revolution was sinful, horror, abandoning God's order. Then you have Jacobin radicals claiming no, French Revolution was good, blah-blah, Jacobin terror was necessary. And then the predominant liberal notion, it's really like Stalin's there will be money and for some or not, it's something like the basic liberal compromise, as you know, is without The first liberal phase was good, then it was bad. What's so unique about Hegel's judgment, even Kant, I don't have time to go into it, Alenka developed this in her book, in what contradictions her, her first book in English, Ethics of the Real, gets, Kant gets involved. Even Kant blurs things here. What is unique about Hegel is that he on the one time praises French Revolution in extraordinary terms. Quote: All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time, blah-blah, is the high point. And then he goes on developing the absolute necessity of French Revolution turning into self-destructive revolutionary terror, apparently condemning it. And then opposing to abstract negativity of the revolutionary terror, we are all equal, which means we should all be killed and so on, this, apparently but it's not, proto-fascist Hegelian vision of mature, mature rational state with corporations, everybody at his, her, their own place, proper place and so on and so on. But we should be here very precise what Hegel is saying here. He introduces temporality in the logical process. Hegel is not saying we should reject Jacobins and opt, you know, like instead of terror, which introduces absolute equality and thus leads to self-destruction, we should be wise and propose a compromise solution of a rational structure. No, Hegel says of course this is the choice, the true choice. We should overcome terror. But only terror opens up the space for this choice. So you should begin by error. There is no shortcut. You cannot immediately say we abandon, we abandon terror, we make the right choice. No, at the beginning the choice is only between Ancien Régime and terror. Only the terror opens up the space to overcome itself. And this would be then the proper temporality of a dialectical process. Yes, you have a choice. But the first gesture in a choice is always the wrong, the bad choice. Only the wrong choice opens up the space for as it were for the good choice. Now let me give you, I will stick too much, let me give you another example which I really like here, which is the one of a surprising one of exactly the same paradoxical temporality of Rosa Luxemburg in her polemics against Bernstein. You know Bernstein preaches, Bernstein was and revisionists were afraid that proletariat will take power prematurely before conditions will be ripe. Like he said no, no, no, we have, we have to wait for proper, proper social moment when conditions will be ripe, blah-blah-blah. But Rosa Luxemburg in a very Hegelian way answers that, that there is the right moment. But in order for the right moment to emerge, you have to try and take power prematurely. Only this premature failed attempt create the right moment through their failure. If you wait for the right moment it will never come. It's a nice Hegelian point, which I don't have time to do it now, was also nicely developed by Andrew Cutrofello from Chicago in his very refined critique of Alain Badiou, of his notion of act, where he pointed out how an act is always either too early or too late. There is never a proper time for an act. It's always too early because again if you wait for the proper conditions of an act it never come. You have to strike too early. But at the same time it's always too late for structural reasons and so on and so on. So again, you see the paradox: the right moment only arrives through wrong moment, through, through sorry through premature wrong acts. Now you will tell me but what's the problem? I can be so bright that I as it were step on my shoulder and calculate, okay, let's make a couple of attempts at revolution, they will fail, but then after all of them I can even calculate the years we will grow mature. No, this is what is not possible. This is what Lacan calls Il n'y a pas de métalangage, there is no, there is no, there is no metalanguage. You cannot step on your shoulder and calc-, and calculate it. You can-, you cannot cheat here. Now from here we are almost at the end, I would like just to go on with brief insight into how Hegelian apparently difficult notion of Absolutes Wissen, absolute knowing, is to be conceived. We have subjective knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, our illusions, blah-blah. And we have let's call it objective knowledge, how things really are. What Hegel means by absolute knowing, it's also important it's Wissen knowing, is not something more objective than the objective description of reality, how things really are. But it's something much more refined. It is what really happened, the objective state of things, but what you add to it are precisely subjective illusions. In the way I describe them. You know an, a from the standpoint of, let's take French Revolution. A dialectical analysis does not discover just the inner objective necessity, but it shows how this necessity could have realized itself only through all subjective illusions and so on and so on. This is how you get to the absolute. Again, what absolute is not more objective than objective, it's you add illusions. The absolute standpoint means to see how illusions are necessary to reality. If you permit me an old joke that I repeat already twenty times in my first book, but maybe you forgot it so I will tell it. This would be the absolute position, a joke from my military service, probably you know it, you know the a guy as we were all doing when I was young try, tries to get rid of the military service by claiming that he is stupid, no, a madness, no. I failed terribly there. I counted on all my nervous tics, so I went to a doctor, I remember psychiatrist clinical and I thought he would be more Hegelian that he was. I went to him and said I know I have psychic troubles but I want to go to the army it would cure me and so on. But I put it on in such a crazy way that I thought that the doctor will say my God, the way this guy is telling that he wants to go to the army is so obviously crazy that... But no I got my lesson, he said okay you want to go so you go, you know. But, but there is this legendary joke where you will just get the point, which is that a guy wants to get rid of the army and, okay, claims he is crazy and produces a certain symptom, no, which is all he looks at all the papers that he sees, just every paper and just repeats this is not it, this is not it, this is not it and so on and so forth. Finally he is called to the military doctors' commission and there also he looks at everything and says this is not it, this is not it, no? The doctor says the guy is obviously crazy and they proclaimed him insane and gave him the document stating this. And he looked at it and says, yes, this is it. You know, like but you see how this is it arises precisely through illusions. You don't get it directly. Again, what does it mean? This, this immanence of illusion to reality is the big lesson of psychoanalysis. And let me just now conclude with two very short points. I remember some twenty years ago in a German, I think it was in Stern magazine, there was a caricature depicting five men who were asked what will you do next summer? And each of them gave the expected polite answer. One said oh, I'm already dreaming about reading in peace a good book. Another guy said I want to visit a faraway country. A third guy said I want to rest on a sunny beach and so on and so on. But then above the head of each of them was this, like in cartoon the, the cloud, where of course in each case you find a naked woman, no. Like it was vulgar idea, blah-blah-blah, you talk but you all think about this. Now this is totally wrong. The whole point of psychoanalysis is that it's exactly the opposite that is true. If we probably maybe, maybe not all but most of us, if we were to be asked probably sincerely yes, we would probably have stated something like explicitly, not in the cloud, my God I just want to screw like crazy all the time whatever. But then the crucial thing would be in the cloud, where one's fantasy would have been for example to make love, to make love while the girl is reading a good book, you know this erotic game where it can be nicely done, you know where like the woman is on her knees reading a book, you penetrate her a tergo and you can pretend oh I'm just doing back this you are... Okay, then maybe to do it in a faraway country, maybe to do it on a sunny beach. You know what I mean, like you need precisely, you are never alone in sex, you need the illusion to survive reality. Now we come to the final point and with this yes I will conclude. Now you will say but still, am I, what I am not saying is this nonetheless not a version of reconciliation? Maybe not this primitive one that subjects appropriates the alienated substance, but still in the sense of we see how illusion is immanent to, is immanent to reality, so nonetheless in a way the subject returns to itself. Now I don't have time to develop this, because here serious philosophy begins, I would just make two points. One is that when Hegel speaks about, this is what is wrong in that model automatically assumed by Lukács for example in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, or later by, by for example by Habermas or Helmut Dahmer, as if there is a subject which represses, alienates part of his, her, their content and then re-appropriates it. It’s absolutely crucial to understand Hegel to see how there is no subject, not even logically prior to the loss. As Hegel puts it literally: what was lost? The loss is previous to what is lost. What was lost, what we re-appropriate in reconciliation, is literally constituted in the very movement of returning to it. And I think we have a triumphant example of it, for example in every form of nationalism. From the late 19th century nationalism to, to our own in post-communist countries where we all from Slovenes to Albanians were returning to old ethnic roots. But these were all fake. We were literally forming, constructing these roots in, in returning to them. So again this is absolutely crucial for Hegel, that paradoxically, I don't have time to develop it but this the deepest temporality, that you don't have something and then you lose it and get it back in a richer form. Like loss comes first and all that you have, you form it to fill in the loss. How does this work? Here I will just mention briefly, you find this in our work, we are all obsessed by this, here you need what Lacan calls objet petit a, an imaginary virtual object which embodies the loss and as such moves you to fill it in. And let me now really conclude with a nice example I claim of this, taken from of course Stephen Jay Gould. You know in one of his early texts, I forgot maybe you know Mladen in which book, he draws a parallel between evolution and the relationship between price and size of Hershey chocolate bars. Comparing price and size changes from forty-nine through seventy-nine, Gould discovered how the company gradually diminished the size, like let's say the price was five cents, but the size was smaller and smaller. Then at a certain point they raised the price and the size, but not to the level the size even when chocolates became larger again where did not, did not reach the size of at the beginning. So the size go down when the price remains the same, the size goes down, then price goes up size goes down, then again the same process, no, to maintain the same price chocolates getting smaller and smaller, then again, and now comes here you can see that Gould was a great Hegelian, no? He says if you extrapolate from this tendency you can exactly calculate at what point you will get nothing, you know. Just, and he says and you can exactly calculate how much this nothing will cost. The big problem we are struggling with, this is what Lacan calls object a, is did was Hegel is, is Hegel, can we within Hegelian horizon think this or not? Thank you very much, Alenka.