Hegel in Athens: what would Hegel have said about our predicament?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-12-04 · 2:01:07 · 16,491 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalideologycinema-art-culturereligion-theologysexuality-genderlanguagesubjectivityethics
This is a post-lecture Q&A session in which Žižek addresses a series of audience questions ranging across Hegel's contradiction versus classical logic, the relation between Aufhebung and Derridean différance, the history of voice and writing (from Plato through medieval polyphony to military marching chants), the paradoxes of army homophobia, traversing the fantasy versus perversion/hysteria, Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship,' drive as radical 'getting stuck,' and the Kantian-Hegelian subject as constitutive decenteredness. He weaves in extended digressions on Sade, Tarkovsky, Schelling on evil, Protestant predestination, Rawlsian justice and envy, and the late Lacan's acknowledged deadlock.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “contradiction (Hegelian)”
For Žižek, Hegelian contradiction is not the classical principle of explosion but a precise symptomatic reversal in which a thing, by pursuing its own logic to the end, turns into its opposite.
Žižek uses sublation to show it is never complete, it requires an unaufhebbar inert remainder (e.g. the hereditary king) that resists mediation and makes the dialectical process possible.
The element that structurally resists sublation and is, paradoxically, necessary for Aufhebung to function, exemplified by the Hegelian king who is king by birth alone.
as “the Derridean supplement”
Žižek uses the supplement to explain why even a purely military order needs obscene singing, the supplement is dangerous and irrational yet structurally necessary.
The necessary underside of any formal order, exemplified by military marching chants (obscene limericks) that hold the disciplinary collective together precisely through their excess over official norms.
The Hegelian claim that a thing emerges only through its loss, the loss precedes what is lost, so the recoil is absolute rather than a recovery of something pre-existing.
Implied in the discussion of Marx's speculative circular movement of money begetting money, which Hegel himself missed as the truly Hegelian dimension of capitalism.
In Stalinist and more broadly in every legal system, it is not only prohibited to do X but absolutely prohibited to state the prohibition publicly, the meta-prohibition that structures power.
For Žižek following Lacan, hysteria is the attitude of questioning one's own symbolic identity ('Why am I what you say I am?') and is the true revolutionary position, the Lacanian answer to Althusserian interpellation.
The originary question 'Why am I what you are saying that I am?', the birth of subjectivity as the child's perplexity about what it is for the Other's desire.
as “perversion (psychoanalytic)”
The pervert is the one who has answers rather than questions, who 'knows better' than the subject and thereby fits perfectly into any order of power, for Žižek, Stalinism is perversion in this structural sense.
as “subject supposed to know”
The analyst plays with the illusion of being supposed to know while actually embodying the subject's own ignorance; the perverse version of analysis is when the analyst really claims to know the meaning of the symptoms.
In this talk the analyst's position: the analyst occupies the place of the void, not the one who knows but the one 'supposed to know,' embodying the subject's ignorance rather than its knowledge.
Žižek reads traversal not as stepping outside illusion but as accepting the ontological necessity of illusion as illusion, the Other is also decentered, and alienation is redoubled rather than overcome.
as “predestination (Protestant)”
Žižek reads Protestant predestination as the acceptance of divine arbitrariness, God as not just, not mysterious, but ultimately contingent or even evil, which paradoxically liberates one from the envy that justice would generate.
as “negative vs. infinite judgment (Kant)”
Žižek uses Kant's distinction, 'I am not dead' (negative) vs. 'I am undead' (infinite), to explain how Lacan's sexual non-relationship opens a third domain beyond mere disharmony, the domain of the 'living dead.'
Žižek insists this means not a mere disharmony between masculine and feminine but a radical rupture within each sexed position, two ways to fail to be one sex, not an eternal struggle between two opposed principles.
as “non-relationship (vs. no relationship)”
Following Guy Le Gaufey, Žižek distinguishes 'there is no sexual relationship' (simple disharmony) from 'there is a non-relationship', the latter on the model of Kantian infinite judgment opening a third, undead domain.
as “drive (Trieb)”
Drive is distinguished from instinct as the primordial detour: the shortest path does not lead to the object, and the true object of drive is loss itself rather than any positive goal.
Žižek's informal name for the minimal condition of human subjectivity and historical change: where instinct moves on, drive and desire remain fixated on the inaccessible object, and all genuine progress is a reaction to this fixation.
Žižek reads Derridean différance as structurally equivalent to the Freudian detour of drive, the elementary self-immanent obstacle that prevents full self-presence.
Identity for Žižek names not a positive set of properties but the void beneath them, the personal name that cannot be translated into a description, the self-reflexive nothing that is nonetheless not mere absence.
as “oppositional determination (gegensätzliche Bestimmung)”
Marx's Hegelian term for how one element of a totality (e.g. production among production/distribution/exchange/consumption) also stands for the totality itself, encountering itself as its own opposite.
Stories he reaches for 5
In a 1935 Moscow Central Committee scenario: if you attack Stalin you disappear; but if you stand up to defend Stalin by announcing 'we don't criticize Stalin here,' you disappear even sooner, the prohibition of the prohibition.
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was absolutely prohibited to announce, pronounce publicly this prohibition.”
Hegel's constitutional monarch is born into the role with no self-mediation or work, the highest ideal power coincides with the most natural, inert given; this is Hegel's own example of how Aufhebung always requires a remainder that resists sublation.
“king is what he or she, queen, is immediately by birth. There is no self-mediation, no work there”
Socialism, as the synthesis of all human achievements, took: barbarism from primitive societies, slavery from antiquity, domination from the Middle Ages, exploitation from capitalism, and from socialism it took the name. Illustrates how identity functions as a void: only the signifier remains.
“From socialism it took the name.”
At Saas-Fee, Avital Ronell praised Nietzsche for betraying Wagner as the authentic lesson of a pupil; Badiou immediately asked 'Your master is Derrida, where did you break with him?' She was caught speechless, and Sam Weber's defence ('Derrida is already self-critical so we don't need to') made things worse.
“'Okay, your master teacher is Derrida. Where did you break with Derrida?'”
US Marines sing obscene nonsense rhymes while marching ('I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold'); Žižek uses this to show that military discipline requires an obscene supplement of limericks and sexual nonsense to hold the collective together.
“I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold”
Works invoked 18
Quoted for the claim that the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were secrets for the Egyptians themselves; also cited on the chapter on Das Ding and properties, and for Hegel's statement that the only reality is finite reality.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own book; mentioned as containing his treatment of the Lacanian sexual non-relationship and the distinction between the two types of non-relationship.
The Da Vinci Code book
Used dismissively as the pop-cultural avatar of the eternal masculine/feminine dualism that Žižek rejects, reading Lacan's non-relationship as simple disharmony puts one at the level of Da Vinci Code.
Communist Manifesto book
Mentioned to defend its 'arrogance' (claiming communism solves the riddle of all history): Žižek argues every philosopher writing a book implicitly adopts the same arrogance.
Science of Logic book
Cited for the first triad Being-Nothing-Becoming and the introduction of the category of identity in the Logic of Essence; Frank Ruda's analysis of the hyphen in 'Being, pure being' is praised.
Žižek says the title is 'theoretically a wrong one' because he is not a pervert in the strict Lacanian sense; he had a conflict with director Sophie Fiennes over this.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own book; mentioned by title in the context of discussing the Hegelian notion of absolute recoil.
The Republic book
Read as revealing the primordial fear of free singing and as containing an implicit logic of the supplement, Plato bans singing but admits it is necessary for military morale.
Source of the marching chant ('Eskimo pussies are rather cold') used to illustrate the obscene supplement of military discipline.
Stalker film
Žižek now praises Stalker (having previously been wrong about Tarkovsky) for achieving mystical experience through immersion in mud and dirty water rather than transcendent elevation; confirms Tarkovsky said it could only have been made in the Soviet Union.
An American Utopia book
Fredric Jameson's forthcoming volume (edited by Žižek with ten respondents); praised for breaking leftist taboos by insisting envy and violence will persist under communism.
Solaris (film) film
Mentioned alongside Stalker as a film Tarkovsky himself acknowledged could only have been funded in the Soviet system.
Glas book
Žižek cites it as the source of Derrida's statement that nothing is closer to his notion of deconstruction than Aufhebung.
120 Days of Sodom book
Žižek finds Sade unreadable and boring, but uses 120 Days of Sodom as the exemplary case of materialism's self-subversion: the systematic catalogue of variations becomes a purely spiritualized, abstract intellectual game, losing flesh.
Mladen Dolar's book; praised for compiling historical evidence on the fear of free singing from Plato to the present.
Specters of Marx book
Žižek finds Derrida's treatment of ghosts and Hamlet 'pretty good'; it is where Derrida hints at the spectral, impenetrable voice as the true otherness.
Heraclitus Seminar book
One of Heidegger's late works cited for his admission that he cannot explain the status of entities that pre-exist humanity within his framework of the history of being.
Of Grammatology book
Referenced as a source for Derrida's early accounts of trace, spacing, temporalization, and the voice/writing opposition.
People invoked 41
Described as having 'endless patience' for Žižek's bad-taste remarks; served as his intermediary with Derrida; caught in an inconsistency at Saas-Fee when Badiou asked if she had broken with Derrida.
Gillian Rose positive
Mentioned as one of the pioneering women readers of Hegel who began the trend of sensitive feminist Hegel scholarship.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Called 'my good friend,' theorist of catastrophe; credited with a wonderful critique of Rawls showing that just inequalities would maximise envy.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my friend' in Slovenia; told Žižek the ultimate good-news/bad-news joke version; corrected his text to note that Lacan never uses the term 'sexual difference', Žižek admits she was right and is playfully jealous.
Marquis de Sade positive
Žižek finds Sade's work 'extremely boring and unreadable' but uses Sade as the clearest illustration of the dialectical reversal: radical materialism that strips transcendence ends by losing earthly experience itself.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek treats Derrida as a major interlocutor: he endorses Derrida's early différance as equivalent to Freudian drive, praises the Kafka reading on law, but critiques the ethical turn (democracy to come) as an unnecessary and quasi-Kantian supplement; regrets they never fully clarified their differences before Derrida's death.
Žižek jokes affectionately that Brandom looks like a hobbit or Gandalf, and is surprised that such a monstrous-looking figure speaks like a completely normal person in YouTube interviews.
Friedrich Hayek positive
Described as 'reactionary' but credited with a 'wonderful,' 'modest but intelligent' almost Lacanian observation: capitalism functions precisely because it is unjust, allowing losers to blame bad luck rather than their own inferiority.
Rebecca Comay positive
Identified as one of the most sensitive readers of Hegel; praised for her analysis of the Schiller hyphen at the end of the Phenomenology and her Derridean reading of 'resistance' in Hegel; Žižek is jealously envious of her discoveries.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Mentioned alongside Horkheimer and Lacan as having made the correct observation about Sade's reductive materialism destroying earthly experience.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central authority on traversing the fantasy, perversion vs. hysteria, the sexual non-relationship, the analyst as objet petit a; Žižek does however criticize Lacan's short sessions as an illusory shortcut and notes that the late Lacan openly admitted deadlock and failure.
John Rawls negative
Žižek (via Jean-Pierre Dupuy) argues Rawls's theory of justice works only if you exclude envy; a genuinely just capitalist society would be a regime of humiliation for those at the bottom.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited for an intelligent remark against atheism parallel to the critique of Sade: materialism results in the loss of wealthy material life, Žižek does not fully agree but finds the observation correct.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Mentioned alongside Lacan and Badiou as preferable to Derrida for their eclectic, non-eschatological approach to the history of philosophy.
Frank Ruda positive
German Hegelian; praised for his analysis of the hyphen at the beginning of Hegel's Logic (Being, pure being) in a forthcoming Short Circuits volume.
Georges Bataille negative
Lacan's Seminar on Ethics is criticised for being too close to Bataille's notion of inner experience, the idea of momentary transgressive access to a prohibited primordial horror, which Žižek sees as a wrong (transgressive) reading of traversing the fantasy.
Judith Butler negative
Mentioned in the context of Žižek's argument with Butler's followers: he challenges them to show a single passage where Butler acknowledges an unresolved problem in her own work, as he does with Lacan.
Samuel Weber negative
Old Derridean; made 'the most ridiculous defence' of Derrida and Avital Ronell at Saas-Fee by claiming Derrida doesn't need to be criticised because he already self-criticises, compared by Žižek to Yugoslav communists who said dissidents should join the party rather than criticise from outside.
Élisabeth Roudinesco positive
Called 'my great enemy' but credited with the accurate historical observation that the Lacanian school was the first psychoanalytic movement to accept gay analysts without question.
Mentioned as using the term Marionetten at the same time as Kant, relevant to the discussion of the puppet/marionette and determined behaviour.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my good friend Alain Badiou'; praised for catching Avital Ronell on her failure to break with Derrida; Žižek prefers Badiou's eclectic approach to philosophy's history over Derrida's eschatological 'end of metaphysics.'
Charles Taylor negative
Žižek envies him for winning a million-dollar prize with Habermas, but argues Taylor fundamentally misreads Hegel's absolute subject as a mega-substance pulling the strings behind empirical egos.
Jacqueline Rose negative
Žižek defends his description of the 'Canadian torso' against Rose's objection that it was 'too much'; insists brutal description of horror serves an emancipatory pedagogic function.
Fredric Jameson positive
Praised for pointing out that Hegel missed the truly Hegelian dimension of capitalism; mentioned for his forthcoming An American Utopia in which he usefully breaks leftist taboos by insisting on the persistence of envy and violence under communism.
Mladen Dolar positive
Called 'my friend'; credited with finding historical quotes on the fear of free singing for his book A Voice and Nothing More.
Guy Le Gaufey positive
Intelligent Lacanian reader; praised for distinguishing 'there is no sexual relationship' from 'there is a non-relationship'; Žižek recommends inviting him to speak.
Catherine Malabou positive
Listed among the most sensitive women readers of Hegel; her book mentioned alongside those of Rebecca Comay and Gillian Rose.
Michel Foucault negative
Mentioned via Derrida's critique: Foucault's analysis of law (prohibitory → regulatory) misses the third dimension, the prohibition of prohibition itself.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Accused of totally missing the point on death drive in their polemics: Laclau wrongly claims death drive must always be attached to partial objects and cannot be radically self-destructive.
Martin Heidegger positive
Discussed primarily through Derrida's Heideggerian inheritance; Žižek notes productive ambiguities in Heidegger about whether we can 'step out' of epochs of being (the problem of Hölderlin) and his beautiful speculative idea that human speech articulates nature's suffering.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
The great interpreter of Lacan; but Žižek follows Guy Le Gaufey in accusing Miller of sometimes reducing 'there is no sexual relationship' to mere disharmony (the vagina-keyhole / penis-key image), missing the more radical Lacanian point.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the insight that radical evil is more spiritual than goodness, abstract intellectual hatred of reality is purer evil than sensual fall into materiality.
Jean Laplanche positive
Credited with describing the child's perplexity ('What am I for them?') as the origin of subjectivity, the originary hysterical question; despite being 'up to a point against Lacan,' praised as 'great' here.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Briefly mentioned as ridiculously wrong for accusing Derrida of irrationalism; also mentioned as co-winner of a million-dollar prize that triggers Žižek's envy.
Max Horkheimer positive
Cited together with Adorno for the intelligent materialist critique of Sade.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Žižek says he was previously wrong in his appreciation of Tarkovsky; now sees Tarkovsky's greatness in achieving spirituality through immersion in the dirtiest materiality (Stalker, Solaris); though Žižek disagrees with Tarkovsky's conclusions he recognises the insight.
Plato positive
Read as an unwitting proto-Derridean: the Republic's fear of free singing reveals the logic of the dangerous supplement, Plato simultaneously bans singing and acknowledges it is necessary.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the Hegelian concept of oppositional determination (production as both element and totality), for the speculative circular movement of money in capital that Hegel himself missed, and briefly for the Communist Manifesto's unfashionable arrogance.
Josip Broz Tito positive
Used ironically: Tito's deathbed answer that his ideal community was a hunting party (one gives orders, others shoot, nobody talks) unwittingly illustrates the Derridean supplement, the fantasy of command without obscene excess.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; Žižek defends Hegel's concept of contradiction against the principle of explosion, argues Aufhebung always preserves an unaufhebbar remainder, and aligns Hegel with Derrida on absolute recoil.
Immanuel Kant positive
Extensively discussed for the distinction between negative and infinite judgment (key to non-relationship) and for the constitutive decenteredness of the transcendental subject (marionette passage in the Second Critique).
What it argues
Hegel's contradiction vs. classical logical contradictionAufhebung and its unaufhebbar remainderdifférance as Derridean name for drive / getting stuckvoice, writing, and the obscene supplementtraversing the fantasy vs. perversion vs. hysteriaLacan's non-relationship and the two ways to fail to be a sexdrive as stuckness and the origin of human subjectivity
Dialectical moves 12
“By pursuing too directly the goal of asserting this terrestrial life, what you lose is precisely this terrestrial life.”
The attempt to affirm pure earthly pleasure by stripping away transcendence (Sade) ends by destroying the very richness of sensual experience it sought.
“What gets lost in fundamentalism is not innocent pleasure but the authentic religious dimension itself.”
Fundamentalism, by taking religion to its extreme, negates the genuine spiritual content it claims to protect.
“Evil is much more spiritual than goodness; the original gesture of evil is withdrawal from materiality, not fall into it.”
Inverting the conventional picture, Žižek (following Schelling) argues that abstract, pale intellectual hatred of reality is the purest form of evil, not sensual excess.
“Subject is the name of this decenteredness—not only is the subject always différance but subject IS the name for radical decenteredness.”
Rather than the subject being undermined by différance, subject just is the name for that very destabilization, reflexively folding the deconstructive operation back on its own result.
“Identity is a name for radical difference; identity means that beyond all positive properties I am something, and that something is nothing.”
Identity does not name sameness but the void that self-difference produces, the proper name that cannot be cashed out in predicates.
“What Derrida sometimes missed in Hegel is not some other dimension but the very Derridean dimension of Hegel.”
The dialectical irony that the critic's own insight is precisely what the criticized thinker already contains, Hegel's absolute recoil is exactly what Derrida claims Hegel cannot do.
“The only disalienation is a redoubling of alienation—the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were also the secrets for the Egyptians themselves.”
You do not escape alienation by seeing through it; traversing the fantasy means recognizing that the Other is equally in the dark, so alienation is radicalized rather than overcome.
“The army is the most homophobic institution and simultaneously the one most deeply penetrated by homosexual innuendo—far from being opposites, the prohibition and the excess sustain each other.”
The repression of overt homosexuality requires the constant resuscitation of thwarted homosexuality as the obscene supplement that holds military community together.
“It is not that there is no sexual relationship but that there is a non-relationship—these are not the same.”
On the model of Kant's infinite judgment, the 'non' opens a third domain (like 'undead') rather than simply negating a predicate; it names a positive impossibility within each sexed position.
“If you were to know yourself as a thing-in-itself, you would become a marionette—not a free self. Paradoxically, the constitutive inaccessibility of the noumenal self is what makes it free.”
Freedom depends on ignorance of one's own noumenal nature; self-transparency would collapse subjectivity into mechanical determination.
“Things don't change when they are in flux—they change when they get stuck. All progress is a reaction to getting stuck.”
Against the identification of dynamism with change, Žižek argues that fixation (drive) is the motor of genuine historical transformation.
“From socialism it took the name—socialism is the synthesis of all historical achievements, yet can only be identified by its own name.”
The Polish joke demonstrates how identity functions as a void: the signifier falls into the signified, and the name is all that remains to guarantee belonging to a category.
Claims 27
asserts
Hegelian contradiction is not the logical principle of explosion but a specific symptomatic reversal in which pursuing a thing to its limit causes it to turn into its opposite.Hegel's concept of contradiction
asserts
By radically reducing all transcendence to earthly pleasure (as Sade does), one loses precisely the richness of earthly, sensual experience itself.Sade's materialism and dialectical reversal
asserts
Religious fundamentalism, by pursuing its logic to the end, loses the authentic religious dimension itself.fundamentalism as dialectical self-subversion
asserts
Tarkovsky achieves spiritual experience not through elevation above materiality but by fully immersing himself in its dirtiest form—mud, earth, dirty water.Tarkovsky's spirituality
asserts
Evil is a purely spiritual, abstract category—the original gesture of evil is withdrawal from materiality, not fall into it.the nature of evil (Schelling)
asserts
Aufhebung is never complete; it requires an unaufhebbar remainder—an inert element that resists sublation—which is central to Hegel, not an embarrassment.completeness of Hegelian sublation
rejects
Derrida's ethical turn (democracy to come, justice as indeconstructible) does not follow necessarily from his early thinking of différance and introduces a quasi-Kantian regulative idea alien to it.Derrida's ethico-political turn
asserts
Différance is structurally equivalent to the Freudian detour of drive—the self-immanent obstacle of not being able to fully be oneself.relationship between Derrida and Freud
asserts
What Hegel missed in capitalism is precisely its most Hegelian dimension—the speculative circular movement of money begetting money as described by Marx.Hegel's blindspot regarding capitalism
reframes
Voice is not the site of pure self-presence (contra Derrida's target); the most impenetrable otherness is the spectral, meaningless voice itself—which is why the entire history of music fears free singing.Derridean voice/writing opposition
asserts
Every military or disciplinary order requires an obscene supplement (marching chants, homosexual innuendo) as its necessary underside that holds it together.discipline and its obscene supplement
reframes
Traversing the fantasy does not mean stepping outside illusion but means accepting the necessity of illusion as illusion—the Other is also decentered, and the only disalienation is a redoubling of alienation.traversing the fantasy
asserts
Perversion, not neurosis, is the position of one who knows and thus fits every order of power; Stalinism is structurally perverse in this sense.perversion as political category
asserts
Hysteria, not perversion, is the true revolutionary position because it enacts the questioning of one's own symbolic identity.hysteria and political subversion
reframes
Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship' names not an eternal disharmony between masculine and feminine but a rupture within each position—two ways to fail to be one sex.Lacan's sexual non-relationship
rejects
Restoring the 'sacred feminine' is the worst thing that can happen for feminism because it reinstates the classical dualism in which women always lose.feminist spirituality / sacred feminine
asserts
The subject is not a substance but the name for radical decenteredness—a self-relating void that exists only in the phenomenal universe and becomes a marionette if it could know itself as a thing-in-itself.subject as constitutive decenteredness (Kant/Hegel)
rejects
Charles Taylor misreads Hegel's absolute subject as a mega-substance pulling the strings, whereas for Hegel the only reality is finite reality.Charles Taylor's reading of Hegel
asserts
Identity names a hole in the subject—it is not a list of positive properties but the self-reflexive void guaranteed by the proper name.Hegelian-Lacanian identity
asserts
Drive is getting stuck—the specifically human failure to move on from the unattainable object, which is also the precondition for genuine historical change.the Freudian drive and historical change
rejects
Lacan's short sessions are an illusory shortcut; the strange temporality of analysis requires talking nonsense for minutes in order to say one true thing.Lacan's technique of short sessions
asserts
A capitalist market is functional precisely because it is unjust: injustice allows the loser to blame bad luck rather than admit their own inferiority, preventing the explosion of envy.capitalism, justice, and envy (Hayek)
rejects
Rawls's theory of justice fails because a truly just society would be a hellish regime of envy in which the poor must constantly admit their own inferiority.Rawlsian justice
asserts
Dogmatic philosophical commitment is a heroic act of intellectual honesty that opens one to genuine criticism, whereas strategic half-endorsement is the worst kind of arrogance.philosophical dogmatism vs. strategic hedging
asserts
The prohibition of the prohibition—the meta-prohibition against publicly naming what is forbidden—is a structural feature of all legal and political systems, not only Stalinism.structure of prohibition in law and power
asserts
Describing horrors—colonial torture, sexual exploitation—in brutal detail has a good pedagogic function; not describing them is a form of censorship, not emancipation.graphic description vs. censorship
asserts
The late Lacan did not achieve a final shattering insight but reached a deadlock around his Seminar and his very last seminars openly admit utter failure.the late Lacan
Quotes 16
“Traversing the fantasy means accept the necessity of illusion as illusion. You learn that something is an illusion. Traversing of fantasy doesn't mean you get rid of an illusion.”Slavoj Žižek · traversing the fantasy
“The only disalienation is redoubling of alienation. The other also doesn't know it.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian disalienation
“Evil is purely spiritual category. The original gesture of evil is when you try in the wrong way to withdraw from materiality.”Slavoj Žižek · Schelling on evil as spiritual
“A pervert has answers. He doesn't have question. Pervert is somebody who says we know better than the people themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion as the position of knowing
“The hysterical question is, as Lacan puts it, 'Why am I what you are saying that I am?' The original lost object is myself.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria and the birth of subjectivity
“Subject is the name of this decenteredness. Identity is a name for radical difference.”Slavoj Žižek · subject and identity as self-difference
“Identity names a hole in you. Which is why identity is ultimately that of a personal name.”Slavoj Žižek · identity as void / proper name
“If I say 'I am not dead' I remain within the opposition of dead-alive. But 'I am undead' opens up a third domain of living dead.”Slavoj Žižek · negative vs. infinite judgment / undead
“The true object of drive is not simply lost, the true object of drive is loss itself.”Slavoj Žižek · drive and loss
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was absolutely prohibited to announce, pronounce publicly this prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · prohibition of the prohibition
“Not once does Lacan use the term sexual difference. For Lacan there is one sex and there are two ways to fail to be that sex.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's sexual non-relationship beyond sexual difference
“Dogmaticism is a heroic act because you honestly open yourself up to criticism. You say, 'Yes I am this and here you can attack me.'”Slavoj Žižek · dogmatism as intellectual honesty
“The absolute doesn't mean there is another sphere of eternal... No, all that happens happens here.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian absolute as immanent
“Without envy, what a humiliating situation for the poor: they would have to admit all the time that they are idiots, that the rich are just we have to be rich.”Slavoj Žižek · Rawlsian justice and the problem of envy
“Spirit begins not with some unheard of dynamics but when things get stuck.”Slavoj Žižek · drive and getting stuck as origin of spirit
“Difference is, when we are all cynical about them. This is for me what happens after traversing the fantasy—beliefs which function even if no one believes in them.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical ideology persisting after traversal
Transcript 38 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I don't know if your ego problem, if you want to do an introduction, I mean, I don't care. No, I don't, but I... No, I will do it in a Californian way. If it will enrich your self-experience... How
I don't know if your ego problem, if you want to do an introduction, I mean, I don't care. No, I don't, but I... No, I will do it in a Californian way. If it will enrich your self-experience... How
unknown
dare you. It will, it will, I'll lose my credibility if I do this. But I have to, I have to apologize. Yesterday, I did a really rubbish job of chairing because I didn't leave any time for questions because he was being really brilliant. So today, you
dare you. It will, it will, I'll lose my credibility if I do this. But I have to, I have to apologize. Yesterday, I did a really rubbish job of chairing because I didn't leave any time for questions because he was being really brilliant. So today, you
Slavoj Žižek
promised you would give, you would let time for questions, yeah? No, not only this. I... Is the lady here who provoked me into it? I... There was a lady sitting there who is one of my standard... spy... spy, yes, interrogators, whatever, probably working for MI6, and she... she said, could we, I, could we begin with the debate? No, don't do that because
promised you would give, you would let time for questions, yeah? No, not only this. I... Is the lady here who provoked me into it? I... There was a lady sitting there who is one of my standard... spy... spy, yes, interrogators, whatever, probably working for MI6, and she... she said, could we, I, could we begin with the debate? No, don't do that because
unknown
then
then
Slavoj Žižek
we... No, no, no, I will, I mean, you know, it will not, you know, the only thing that is endless here are my talks. You know, as I told you, it's my old joke, I'm for Plato's late dialogues. Dialogue means one guy talks all the time, the other guy says every five, ten minutes, "By Zeus, so it is," and so on. That's my idea of a dialogue, you know. Okay, so I just wanted to tell you because I was talking about it with friends. I'm not, I don't mean this as any kind of a, how do you call it, blow hitting beneath the belt or what, to Jacqueline Rose, but I would like to hear at this point your opinion. Because did you notice the point she made, that the way I describe that unfortunate Canadian torso, that that's too much for her? But the more I think about it, the more I claim that maybe I was wrong at other levels, but at that point I was right. I don't accept the logic of, you know, we shouldn't talk in that way publicly about it. Because I claim that when we talk about women, oppressed, exploitation, and so on, are you aware that if we don't talk openly about it, in what way we automatically censor it? I mean, like, I think the only way to feel the horror is at least in words to describe it. I don't see anything emancipatory or whatever in not describing it in this brutal way. Because also, for example, when people talk about torture and so on, I think it has, although it's disgusting, a good pedagogic function to describe sometimes tortures in detail. Because the nice surprise there is that you discover how even countries which are supposed to be, we identify as more civilized, gentle, what they are able to do. Did I mention this Dutch case here? I think I did. Water. No. I read in a book of history of Netherlands, Dutch colonialism, that their torture was this one: they fastened your body to some wall, and then they put like, the water was dripping into you, your head was fixed. The whole point was that while in order to breathe you had at the same time to swallow water. And it usually lasted two, three days for you to die. And you get all bloated, water everywhere. It must have been horrible, you know, you were just swallowing water. And the horrible thing that I read is that they organized in some colonies this as a spectacle, you know, people watching, making bets how long will the guy survive, and so on, and so on. Okay, maybe I'm wrong, but you know, I lived under the impression that the Dutch people are especially gentle, and so on, and so on. Nobody is. Every, everybody can do horrors. Okay, so, so the lady is not here then. There was a lady, don't you remember if you were here yesterday? Yeah, who said, oh, why don't we begin with... Okay, but nonetheless, since I talked so much, okay, I will... There's other people who want to ask questions. Sorry?
we... No, no, no, I will, I mean, you know, it will not, you know, the only thing that is endless here are my talks. You know, as I told you, it's my old joke, I'm for Plato's late dialogues. Dialogue means one guy talks all the time, the other guy says every five, ten minutes, "By Zeus, so it is," and so on. That's my idea of a dialogue, you know. Okay, so I just wanted to tell you because I was talking about it with friends. I'm not, I don't mean this as any kind of a, how do you call it, blow hitting beneath the belt or what, to Jacqueline Rose, but I would like to hear at this point your opinion. Because did you notice the point she made, that the way I describe that unfortunate Canadian torso, that that's too much for her? But the more I think about it, the more I claim that maybe I was wrong at other levels, but at that point I was right. I don't accept the logic of, you know, we shouldn't talk in that way publicly about it. Because I claim that when we talk about women, oppressed, exploitation, and so on, are you aware that if we don't talk openly about it, in what way we automatically censor it? I mean, like, I think the only way to feel the horror is at least in words to describe it. I don't see anything emancipatory or whatever in not describing it in this brutal way. Because also, for example, when people talk about torture and so on, I think it has, although it's disgusting, a good pedagogic function to describe sometimes tortures in detail. Because the nice surprise there is that you discover how even countries which are supposed to be, we identify as more civilized, gentle, what they are able to do. Did I mention this Dutch case here? I think I did. Water. No. I read in a book of history of Netherlands, Dutch colonialism, that their torture was this one: they fastened your body to some wall, and then they put like, the water was dripping into you, your head was fixed. The whole point was that while in order to breathe you had at the same time to swallow water. And it usually lasted two, three days for you to die. And you get all bloated, water everywhere. It must have been horrible, you know, you were just swallowing water. And the horrible thing that I read is that they organized in some colonies this as a spectacle, you know, people watching, making bets how long will the guy survive, and so on, and so on. Okay, maybe I'm wrong, but you know, I lived under the impression that the Dutch people are especially gentle, and so on, and so on. Nobody is. Every, everybody can do horrors. Okay, so, so the lady is not here then. There was a lady, don't you remember if you were here yesterday? Yeah, who said, oh, why don't we begin with... Okay, but nonetheless, since I talked so much, okay, I will... There's other people who want to ask questions. Sorry?
unknown
There's other people who want to ask questions apart from... Sorry, that's what? There's other people who had questions
There's other people who want to ask questions apart from... Sorry, that's what? There's other people who had questions
Slavoj Žižek
yesterday and I didn't give them a chance to, like... Okay, let's do this, but let's really now, this may, after me talking all the time, this may sound ironic and so on. But nonetheless, like, let's try to limit it in some way because I have a certain line of thought to develop. Okay, I'm very bad in all my racist prejudices, you know, and sex prejudices, whom I select, so try to be aggressive. Let's do the first round. You are not trying to scratch your back, but it is a question? Yes. Okay, immediately, just to make it sure, is it only, ah, you, you, you. Okay, one, two, three, four. Let's keep, okay, so that this is the first round. Okay, please.
yesterday and I didn't give them a chance to, like... Okay, let's do this, but let's really now, this may, after me talking all the time, this may sound ironic and so on. But nonetheless, like, let's try to limit it in some way because I have a certain line of thought to develop. Okay, I'm very bad in all my racist prejudices, you know, and sex prejudices, whom I select, so try to be aggressive. Let's do the first round. You are not trying to scratch your back, but it is a question? Yes. Okay, immediately, just to make it sure, is it only, ah, you, you, you. Okay, one, two, three, four. Let's keep, okay, so that this is the first round. Okay, please.
unknown
Yesterday you described the ABCs of Hegel's dialectic as the objectivity of contradictions in things themselves, that are the result of gaps that are irreducible and contradictions that are inherent in the normative self-adequation of concepts. As I'm sure you know, in classical logic, any unresolved contradiction results in a trivial inference, because since any consequence may follow from a contradiction, no single determinate consequence may be inferred from irreducible contradictions. Yet you clearly wish to infer some determinate third position in Hegel interpretation and politics, partly by eternally presupposing the virtual and vanishing mediation of the Christian moment. To avoid triviality, should you not more radically also affirm that the gaps of every contradiction should be resolved in and through the absolute paradox of the Trinity, which, as Hegel suggests, open gaps and resolve contradictions within itself? First,
Yesterday you described the ABCs of Hegel's dialectic as the objectivity of contradictions in things themselves, that are the result of gaps that are irreducible and contradictions that are inherent in the normative self-adequation of concepts. As I'm sure you know, in classical logic, any unresolved contradiction results in a trivial inference, because since any consequence may follow from a contradiction, no single determinate consequence may be inferred from irreducible contradictions. Yet you clearly wish to infer some determinate third position in Hegel interpretation and politics, partly by eternally presupposing the virtual and vanishing mediation of the Christian moment. To avoid triviality, should you not more radically also affirm that the gaps of every contradiction should be resolved in and through the absolute paradox of the Trinity, which, as Hegel suggests, open gaps and resolve contradictions within itself? First,
Slavoj Žižek
I know what Hegel claims, this opening gaps, resolving contradiction and so on. But here one has to be, as you know, maybe better than me, very precise. But could you just repeat that point, maybe I didn't get it correctly, about that triviality? What did you mean exactly by that? The principle
I know what Hegel claims, this opening gaps, resolving contradiction and so on. But here one has to be, as you know, maybe better than me, very precise. But could you just repeat that point, maybe I didn't get it correctly, about that triviality? What did you mean exactly by that? The principle
unknown
of explosion of pseudo-Scotus says that if there's ever a contradiction in an inference, then any consequence may follow...
of explosion of pseudo-Scotus says that if there's ever a contradiction in an inference, then any consequence may follow...
Slavoj Žižek
Ah, you mean this what I thought, yes. No, I would say here I don't have time to go into it, but you know for, again, for Hegel, what he calls contradiction is not just a general statement in the sense of, you know, you can say anything, this is white and black, this is hot and cold, or whatever. No, contradiction in Hegel, I claim, means something very precise which occurs at a singular moment of a system or whatever, which is its, let's call it, let's call it its symptomatic point, so that it's not that then you can say everything about that. It's a very precise intervention. For example, what would have been a naive example, I even wanted to mention it afterwards, this would have been a very nice, and just to go further, let's not go into it today, but I'm well aware of how one way to redeem Hegel by some analytic philosophers and others close to common sense, but I'm not dismissing them, this is not a value statement, is to try to do other subtle distinctions claiming that what Hegel means by contradiction is not in this naive sense radical contradiction, you can claim whatever you want, opposite things about, as it's... So they try to save Hegel in this way claiming that in a deeper sense, Hegel nonetheless respects the Aristotelian A is A and so on. No, I think Hegel, okay, let me give you an example that I wanted to return to and maybe if we will have time I will, it's a classical one, from De Sade. Sade's vision was, I'm putting it consciously in very primitive terms, screw the world of ideas, higher blah blah blah, what matters is radical pleasure, deprived of all transcendence, of all deeper meaning, and we have the right to go, I'm simplifying it to the utmost, but just the idea, and we have the right to go to the end in it. So in other words, screw any form of transcendence, affirm purely this earthly life here. Now, the intelligent critique of Sade by some even religious people is, and they make a correct observation, which you find also among others already in Adorno and Horkheimer and Lacan of course, is that you can feel this if you read Sade, I did read him but not a lot, I find it, sorry, it's my private problem, I find Sade extremely boring and unreadable. Is that, like, take a work like Days in Sodom*, all these ultra-extreme variations of sadism, but isn't it that, this would be a proper materialist critique of Sade, what you lose in this radical reduction of transcendence, we should focus on purely, is precisely the wealth and density of earthly experience. Sade ends, for example, in Days in Sodom*, in what is a purely spiritualized in the sense of abstract without flesh intellectual game, you know, like, you take one cow, one dog, two boys, one woman, they screw this way, then you change. Like the idea being that, and again, intelligent Catholics know how to play this game, that if you take away transcendence, you, what you lose is not transcendence, deeper meaning, but what you lose is precisely the depth of authentic sexual, even sensual experience. So in other words, by pursuing too directly the goal of asserting this terrestrial life, what you lose is precisely this terrestrial life. And that's it. I don't see here any consequence that you can say whatever you want, or whatever, and so on, and so on. I think it's something like this that Hegel is aiming at. And I think he is simply right, which is why to go, to prolong this line of debate, that's why I think I was wrong in my appreciation of Tarkovsky, the movie director. Isn't this what his greatness with which I disagree but nonetheless is about? In Tarkovsky's films, spirituality is not up. It's, you reach, you gain spiritual experience by fully immersing yourself into materiality in its dirtiest. Like his maybe most beautiful film, because I read now in a new book on Tarkovsky and incidentally he wasn't an idiot, I recently spoke with Tom Luddy or whatever, he organizes those small movie festivals in Telluride, a little bit avant-garde, and Tarkovsky was his host just before his death. And he told me that Tarkovsky confirmed this to him, that he was the great victim of communist oppression blah blah blah, but that was the tragedy of his last years, he had to admit that films like *Stalker*, *Solaris*, he was able to make them only in Soviet Union. No one would give him money to do such a film in the West. Okay, but let's go on. No, if you take a beautiful film, *Stalker*, how are these mystical experience spiritual staged there? It's usually even mud, earth, dirty water. You immerse yourself into it, that's spirituality. And I think this is even a deep insight of some speculative philosophers. For example, for example, Schelling knew this perfectly. Schelling said that radical evil is much more spiritual than goodness. Because goodness has this benevolence towards materiality, you know, we are all part of, while evil is this abstract, pale, intellectual hatred of reality. This is a very deep insight I think, that again, evil is purely spiritual category. Which is why I think we should totally abandon this primitive idea of, of that the source of evil is fall into materiality. No, the original gesture of evil is when you try in the wrong way to, to withdraw from materiality. But okay, let's not... But okay, I know I didn't really answer your claim, but you see at least the direction that I would have gone. That what Hegel calls contradiction is just this basic reversal, how by pursuing something you lose it. So it is stronger than antagonisms and so on because the thing itself does turn into its, it turns into its opposite. But it's not contradiction in the, in the sense that you can say everything you want and so on and so on. I mean, what Hegel means by contradiction is another thing. Ah, the same remark was made, for example, by I quoted in some of my books by Gilbert Keith Chesterton against atheism. I don't agree with him fully, but it's an intelligent remark where he said that he says that the result of materialism is precisely again the same point almost as a propos Sade, is precisely the loss of wealthy material life and so on. But then, I think that we can say the same thing, similar reversal with today's religious fundamentalism, that what gets lost in fundamentalism, I claim, is not so much, I don't know, innocent pleasure, ordinary life which is dismissed by them as sinful. What gets lost is the authentic religious dimension itself. And okay, we could go on here, but so you see what I mean. This is a very specific reversal that I call contradiction when a thing, by pursuing a thing up to its end, its logic, it turns into its, it turns into its opposite. Like a classical example now, which is a little bit too simplified, I don't accept it, but you, you want, you fight for freedom and you end up like Americans do, advocating torture as a means to... It's something along these lines and again, I think that you don't end up again in any kind of this trivial state where you can say anything. Again, it's a very specific point in the system. Okay, sorry, let's go on. Where was... yes, yes. Yes, so yesterday you quoted Derrida saying that he knows nothing closer to his notion of deconstruction... I can even tell you, deconstruction... yes, than *Aufhebung*. He says this is my incorrect in *Glas*. Okay, so as I would assume you would not simply equate deconstruction to sublation, I'm wondering what you would see as the most important difference or differences between the two notions. Ah, that's a good nasty question, yeah. No, what I'm aiming at, my God, again, I would have to go into it in detail. First, I think critiques of Hegelian *Aufhebung* who claim *Aufhebung* is a moment of idealization, something is annihilated but its essence is conserved and moved as a higher level, and then the usual game to play against Hegel is to say no but there is always something that resists sublation, some inert moment and so on and so on. I don't think this is for the reasons I don't, I cannot go now in detail, I don't think this exactly is what Hegel calls *Aufhebung*, sublation. This is a pseudo-problem for, for Hegel's standpoint. This idea of but there is an element that resists. What I tried to demonstrate maybe in a confused way in some of my books that Hegel is, and this would be one point that I think is maybe, I'm not sure because it's very sad, I'm not sure and I couldn't, I couldn't clarify it with Derrida. You know,
Ah, you mean this what I thought, yes. No, I would say here I don't have time to go into it, but you know for, again, for Hegel, what he calls contradiction is not just a general statement in the sense of, you know, you can say anything, this is white and black, this is hot and cold, or whatever. No, contradiction in Hegel, I claim, means something very precise which occurs at a singular moment of a system or whatever, which is its, let's call it, let's call it its symptomatic point, so that it's not that then you can say everything about that. It's a very precise intervention. For example, what would have been a naive example, I even wanted to mention it afterwards, this would have been a very nice, and just to go further, let's not go into it today, but I'm well aware of how one way to redeem Hegel by some analytic philosophers and others close to common sense, but I'm not dismissing them, this is not a value statement, is to try to do other subtle distinctions claiming that what Hegel means by contradiction is not in this naive sense radical contradiction, you can claim whatever you want, opposite things about, as it's... So they try to save Hegel in this way claiming that in a deeper sense, Hegel nonetheless respects the Aristotelian A is A and so on. No, I think Hegel, okay, let me give you an example that I wanted to return to and maybe if we will have time I will, it's a classical one, from De Sade. Sade's vision was, I'm putting it consciously in very primitive terms, screw the world of ideas, higher blah blah blah, what matters is radical pleasure, deprived of all transcendence, of all deeper meaning, and we have the right to go, I'm simplifying it to the utmost, but just the idea, and we have the right to go to the end in it. So in other words, screw any form of transcendence, affirm purely this earthly life here. Now, the intelligent critique of Sade by some even religious people is, and they make a correct observation, which you find also among others already in Adorno and Horkheimer and Lacan of course, is that you can feel this if you read Sade, I did read him but not a lot, I find it, sorry, it's my private problem, I find Sade extremely boring and unreadable. Is that, like, take a work like Days in Sodom*, all these ultra-extreme variations of sadism, but isn't it that, this would be a proper materialist critique of Sade, what you lose in this radical reduction of transcendence, we should focus on purely, is precisely the wealth and density of earthly experience. Sade ends, for example, in Days in Sodom*, in what is a purely spiritualized in the sense of abstract without flesh intellectual game, you know, like, you take one cow, one dog, two boys, one woman, they screw this way, then you change. Like the idea being that, and again, intelligent Catholics know how to play this game, that if you take away transcendence, you, what you lose is not transcendence, deeper meaning, but what you lose is precisely the depth of authentic sexual, even sensual experience. So in other words, by pursuing too directly the goal of asserting this terrestrial life, what you lose is precisely this terrestrial life. And that's it. I don't see here any consequence that you can say whatever you want, or whatever, and so on, and so on. I think it's something like this that Hegel is aiming at. And I think he is simply right, which is why to go, to prolong this line of debate, that's why I think I was wrong in my appreciation of Tarkovsky, the movie director. Isn't this what his greatness with which I disagree but nonetheless is about? In Tarkovsky's films, spirituality is not up. It's, you reach, you gain spiritual experience by fully immersing yourself into materiality in its dirtiest. Like his maybe most beautiful film, because I read now in a new book on Tarkovsky and incidentally he wasn't an idiot, I recently spoke with Tom Luddy or whatever, he organizes those small movie festivals in Telluride, a little bit avant-garde, and Tarkovsky was his host just before his death. And he told me that Tarkovsky confirmed this to him, that he was the great victim of communist oppression blah blah blah, but that was the tragedy of his last years, he had to admit that films like *Stalker*, *Solaris*, he was able to make them only in Soviet Union. No one would give him money to do such a film in the West. Okay, but let's go on. No, if you take a beautiful film, *Stalker*, how are these mystical experience spiritual staged there? It's usually even mud, earth, dirty water. You immerse yourself into it, that's spirituality. And I think this is even a deep insight of some speculative philosophers. For example, for example, Schelling knew this perfectly. Schelling said that radical evil is much more spiritual than goodness. Because goodness has this benevolence towards materiality, you know, we are all part of, while evil is this abstract, pale, intellectual hatred of reality. This is a very deep insight I think, that again, evil is purely spiritual category. Which is why I think we should totally abandon this primitive idea of, of that the source of evil is fall into materiality. No, the original gesture of evil is when you try in the wrong way to, to withdraw from materiality. But okay, let's not... But okay, I know I didn't really answer your claim, but you see at least the direction that I would have gone. That what Hegel calls contradiction is just this basic reversal, how by pursuing something you lose it. So it is stronger than antagonisms and so on because the thing itself does turn into its, it turns into its opposite. But it's not contradiction in the, in the sense that you can say everything you want and so on and so on. I mean, what Hegel means by contradiction is another thing. Ah, the same remark was made, for example, by I quoted in some of my books by Gilbert Keith Chesterton against atheism. I don't agree with him fully, but it's an intelligent remark where he said that he says that the result of materialism is precisely again the same point almost as a propos Sade, is precisely the loss of wealthy material life and so on. But then, I think that we can say the same thing, similar reversal with today's religious fundamentalism, that what gets lost in fundamentalism, I claim, is not so much, I don't know, innocent pleasure, ordinary life which is dismissed by them as sinful. What gets lost is the authentic religious dimension itself. And okay, we could go on here, but so you see what I mean. This is a very specific reversal that I call contradiction when a thing, by pursuing a thing up to its end, its logic, it turns into its, it turns into its opposite. Like a classical example now, which is a little bit too simplified, I don't accept it, but you, you want, you fight for freedom and you end up like Americans do, advocating torture as a means to... It's something along these lines and again, I think that you don't end up again in any kind of this trivial state where you can say anything. Again, it's a very specific point in the system. Okay, sorry, let's go on. Where was... yes, yes. Yes, so yesterday you quoted Derrida saying that he knows nothing closer to his notion of deconstruction... I can even tell you, deconstruction... yes, than *Aufhebung*. He says this is my incorrect in *Glas*. Okay, so as I would assume you would not simply equate deconstruction to sublation, I'm wondering what you would see as the most important difference or differences between the two notions. Ah, that's a good nasty question, yeah. No, what I'm aiming at, my God, again, I would have to go into it in detail. First, I think critiques of Hegelian *Aufhebung* who claim *Aufhebung* is a moment of idealization, something is annihilated but its essence is conserved and moved as a higher level, and then the usual game to play against Hegel is to say no but there is always something that resists sublation, some inert moment and so on and so on. I don't think this is for the reasons I don't, I cannot go now in detail, I don't think this exactly is what Hegel calls *Aufhebung*, sublation. This is a pseudo-problem for, for Hegel's standpoint. This idea of but there is an element that resists. What I tried to demonstrate maybe in a confused way in some of my books that Hegel is, and this would be one point that I think is maybe, I'm not sure because it's very sad, I'm not sure and I couldn't, I couldn't clarify it with Derrida. You know,
unknown
something very sad happened. We had kind of a misunderstanding, bad relations, and at the end we both were sending this SMSes, not in a literal
something very sad happened. We had kind of a misunderstanding, bad relations, and at the end we both were sending this SMSes, not in a literal
Slavoj Žižek
way, like getting closer, and then it ended up... I already through the lady who, with whom I don't agree theoretically but
way, like getting closer, and then it ended up... I already through the lady who, with whom I don't agree theoretically but
unknown
okay, she is not bad. By she is not bad, I mean she has the endless patience of suffering and enduring my extreme bad taste remarks, you know, Avital Ronell. Because she was with Derrida in the last month of his illness and so, I wonder if I didn't find the traces of it, if
okay, she is not bad. By she is not bad, I mean she has the endless patience of suffering and enduring my extreme bad taste remarks, you know, Avital Ronell. Because she was with Derrida in the last month of his illness and so, I wonder if I didn't find the traces of it, if
Slavoj Žižek
Derrida... No, the beautiful thing about Hegel is that, for example, it's a trivial example that I use it again and again, but nonetheless, that the idea that something resists sublation,
Derrida... No, the beautiful thing about Hegel is that, for example, it's a trivial example that I use it again and again, but nonetheless, that the idea that something resists sublation,
unknown
an inert moment that remains, is central for Hegel. This is what makes the point. Let's take the logic of state in Hegel. Hegel says in modernity, in modern society, you are self-producing individual. You are not simply what you are, you have to, this is the freedom
an inert moment that remains, is central for Hegel. This is what makes the point. Let's take the logic of state in Hegel. Hegel says in modernity, in modern society, you are self-producing individual. You are not simply what you are, you have to, this is the freedom
Slavoj Žižek
of civil society. You are free in society on the market, you produce yourself. You are not what you are, your immediate identity has to be *aufgehoben*. You are through working on yourself and so on. But then, in a wonderful typically dialectical turn around, Hegel adds that that's why a king is needed. And what is a king? Precisely a natural inertia that cannot be *aufgehoben* because, as Hegel emphasized, king, in the sense of Hegelian monarchy, is a paradoxical direct overlapping of the highest ideal power, you know, king, the top of the state and so on, but at the same time it's clear to Hegel, king is what he or she, queen, is immediately by birth. There is no self-mediation, no work there and so on. So Hegel saw this at different levels in a wonderful way, how *Aufhebung* is never complete. It needs an *unaufhebbar*, an element that resists and so on. So again, the way maybe I will try to put, not losing too much time, one way, but maybe you know more about Derrida, I'm very open here, I'm ready to change my opinion. Because it's not so much, my God, I'm nonetheless, even if I'm stupid clown, some type of philosopher, which means more than names, what means to me is the problem, the thing itself. So when I attack Derrida, attack, okay, debate with him, I'm trying to describe two position, my position and that one. And maybe I'm wrong with attributing that position to Derrida. But it's okay, in this sense, you know, I will try to put it as simple as possible. Let's take the notion of subject. For Derrida, subject is always decentered, *différance*, and so on and so on, open possibilities, blah blah blah. My point would be just to make one step further and say: not only is subject always *différance*, decentered, and so on, but subject is the name of this decenteredness. You know, to make this subtle shift. And I'm even ready to go here to the end following Hegel and claim that it's not enough to say identity is always undermined by difference, but that, and Hegel says this clearly in a wonderful way, identity is a name for a radical difference. You see, it's just this how do they call it, self-reflective term where you no longer have the external opposition, let's say presence-absence, and then, you know, ooh, there is no pure presence, all presence is undermined by traces of otherness and so on. But to claim that the ultimate otherness is this spectral presence itself. You know where here I know that I would agree with Derrida because at some point he became aware of it. Let's return to another point which is classical Derridean. The opposition of voice and writing. Voice as *s'entendre parler*, pure self-presence, and voice always undermined by writing and so on and so on. But, and Derrida has some hints somewhere, that but at the same time the utter otherness, impenetrability, is that of a meaningless voice itself. And that's what I tried to develop in some of my books years ago, how it's not, and again I checked up with Avital Ronell and she told me that Derrida agrees with this point, that that's the mystery of the history of music. It's almost the inverted Derridean story of the history of the West as the history of the, not oppression, but more control, the excess of writing. No, in the history of music it's not so much voice that should control writing. It's writing that should control the voice. The fear, I'm sorry if I repeat my old stuff but just to get the point, the fear of entire history of musical theory. Did, are you aware of this, my friend Mladen Dolar, who wrote that wonderful book *Voice and Nothing More*, he found all these quotes. The, the earliest what we can call from today's perspective aesthetic norm prescription in the history of humanity is I think some ancient Chinese, I mean aesthetic norm prescription is some ancient Chinese I don't know what edict of some king whatever which says: beware of free singing, singing should be controlled. And again, you have this fear, you should read this, this is the other side of Plato's logocentrism, what Plato says about music in his *Republic*. It's incredible, it's the primordial fear. He says that if you allow free singing, you risk to lose everything. People will become wild like apes, all social edifice will disintegrate and so on. What he fears is precisely this pure singing which becomes a kind of self-reproducing loop of pleasure where the relation to meaning, to otherness disappears. And, but at the same time, Plato as it were read Derrida and knew what supplement was, because at the same time that he attacks this, no, he says openly like no singing in my free state, singing is irrational, and there, this is so interesting, he says rational speech is needed to control voice, but it's clear that there are subtle references to writing there, you know. That his idea is speech which no longer is firmly rooted in articulated meaning, meaning as a rule articulated in writing, gets, falls into its own trap and a kind of self-referential incestuous madness just reproduces itself. Okay, the first interesting thing here is to see how constant this motif is up to the end, by this I mean up to our times. For example, you have this in Plato, this absolute fear of free singing, it's the end of civilized order. Then as we all know, the medieval church had the same problem, early, against polyphony. The idea was order, and maybe you know these jokes I used them in my books, how their fear was that if when singing you don't closely follow the rational order of words, devil intervenes. And they had this subtle hermeneutics where they described how even if you appear to praise God, devil is there. For example, standard medieval example, let's say you have a religious song: "Oh our Lord, we celebrate your goodness." And then you think you are religious if you emphasize the word Lord or God. Oh my God, but you add just "oh my go-o-o-od," no, ah, devil is here. You know, you come close and so it's again the whole medieval times were obsessed by keeping control here. Now things go further in early modernity, for example in the French Revolution, even my beloved Jacobins, for them religion was obscene, their bad guys were the castratos, no. That was for them nightmare. And they basically return to Plato. Plato claimed that the only singing that should be allowed is military songs. You see Plato was a Derridean, he knew that singing is something literally the Derridean supplement, it's dangerous but you need it. You know, ideal military unit would need no songs, it's just you give orders, you shoot. And sometimes this is set, I'm sorry if I improvise a little bit in a wonderful way. Like in Yugoslavia we had the great fat guy you remember, you don't remember, the President Tito, no. I remember his last visit to Slovenia where he came and then he died there in a hospital and you know, remember he was close to his death, he was absolutely sacred person, by this I mean anything that he said it was published. So nobody dared to censor him. And in this way we learned some wonderful stupidities that he said. Half a year before his death, they asked Tito: what is for you the ideal human community, human group? And he openly said it. No, in a normal Stalinist universe he would have been... he said a group of hunters. They asked him why, he said because one is giving orders and the others are shooting and nobody talks. I mean I find this so wonderful that finally he did show the car... but what I want to say is that you see, but Tito didn't know, he didn't read Plato and Derrida that: no, unfortunately you need singing. It's a supplement, it's an obscene supplement. And I think that, I often use these examples, that the late this what you find in many movies about Marines, so-called marching chants. This is the necessary, you know what are marching chants, these songs which are that Marines sing, probably also other soldiers while marching and they are very interesting. They are usually a mixture of like limericks, how do you call this, nonsense rhymes and utter obscenities. For example, sorry I always repeat this one I love it, from I think *An Officer and a Gentleman*. They sing, "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." Like it's maybe it's true I don't know they spend a lot of time there in snow but you know it's the utter nonsense and and obscenity. Now the true mystery is, and I can guarantee you it is like this, I did serve the army, why do you need this, you know. The point is you cannot have pure army discipline. It ha... it needs this supplement as it were. And here there are some bad consequences, unpleasant of, what fascinated me in the army is the contradictory nature of the army collective. Maybe, I'm sorry if you already know this story. On the one hand the army was extremely homophobic. When a soldier was discovered to be gay, he was thrown out of the army but that one or two weeks before the bureaucracy decided were pure hell. Usually he was awakened every night and you know these standard military rituals. Guys while you're asleep surround you, one puts a pillow on your head or a cover that you don't see who they are and others are beating you by their belts and so on, something like that you know. This is one aspect, absolute homophobia. Okay now we can find quick let's be in quick agreement with all those political rec, yeah yeah army homophobic blah blah. But it was much more ambiguous. At the same time I never saw a human collective which was so deeply penetrated by homosexual innuendos. You may know my standard stories, for example in my unit we didn't say to another soldier in the morning, "Hello, good morning," but "I'll smoke yours." It meant fellatio. "Okay, and I will smoke yours." This was our way to say good morning or whatever. And I think this is the paradox of the army. It is homophobic, absolutely, against open gay sexuality. But at the same time it's as if this thwarted homosexuality has to be resuscitated and just beneath the surface kept alive all the time. And I can go on telling you dirty stories there, incredible. For example, I know when we were waiting for lunch in a line, the big joke, it's so stupid that I'm embarrassed to tell you was, people are behind you, one of them quickly put his finger into your ass, withdrew it, you turned around furious and then "Hehe, guess who it was," you know. But again it's so embarrassing. But again, the reason I'm telling you this is to see that this is not some kind of a, how should I call it, deconstructive subversive... No, my point is that this excess is a necessary part of human, sorry, not of human, of military community. It's what effectively helps it together. So here, here I tend to... here I would just supplement Derrida with this kind of opposition, you know, like yes writing undermines voice but at the same time the most inert impenetrable thing is voice itself. Like that voice as the Derridean voice, this hearing oneself talking, this immediate self-transparency is always accompanied by spectral otherness which is a totally impenetrable voice. This spectral voice which precisely in its inertia undermines at the most radical level possible. You know where you find some of this stuff? In Derrida's book on Marx, I think, when he speaks about ghosts and all that, pretty good I think, Hamlet reading and so on and so on. So again, you see, it's a, how should I put it, it's a much more refined difference. I'm even tempted to say that I did something like this and my Lacanian friends didn't like it. Where I claim that if you try to find, to locate what can be called the elementary gesture of Freudian theory, which would be this idea of drive, not instinct but drive. Drive is a detour. Instinct is... sorry for the, instinct is I need sex, I jump on a lady. Drive is, you know, why to do it immediately, why not, you know that the shortest path doesn't lead to the object. You know, the whole point is in detour. This paradox is basically the Freudian name for drive. And I ask myself what if *différance* is the Derridean name for this elementary detour? And now I will tell you, and many Derridean friends of mine from Ed Kadava to others, see the problem, some even agree with me. The problem for me with Derrida is his ethical turn where you have ethics of deconstruction, you have democracy to come, and so on and so on. I think this does not follow automatically from his early thinking of *différance*. A certain ethical dimension of, you know, democracy to come or justice, justice as indeconstructible, and so on and so on. If anything, I'm even more the earlier Derridean. So, to conclude it with a dirty joke, I think in this room, some I don't know how many years ago, soon after Derrida's death, I hope you were not here, I gave a talk in praise of Derrida and I cannot resist retelling extremely bad jokes. I told a joke, you know that United States their great contribution to world culture is double I claim. A, but I will not go into that, that I did speak one thousand times about canned laughter, you know the TV screen laughs for you, that's one. The other contribution are vulgar sexual jokes, but of a very specific kind. First, there are great jokes about, you know, doctor, first good news then bad news. And I will not repeat again the boring examples that I always use like, you know, bad news is we discovered you have cancer and you will be dead in two months. Then you ask, "Fuck you, what is the good news?" The good news that we always also discovered that you have, that you have, what is it called, Alzheimer's amnesia and you will forget bad news before you reach home. It's so stupid. But this is not truly Hegelian Derridean. I claim that recently my good friend Lacanian Alenka Zupančič in Slovenia told me she heard somewhere the ultimate version of this good news-bad news joke. Okay. You ask your doctor, doctor tells you, "I have good news and bad news." "What do you want to begin with?" You say, because you are stupid, I mean me, I say, "Okay, first the good news." And you hear the good news which are: "Soon you will be a household name, a mortal disease will be named after you." I mean, who wants to hear bad news if these are the good news? You know, this would be some... this would have been the Hegelian trick. So the dirty joke I learned is: okay, so you have this good news-bad news, and the other great American invention are jokes about sexual initiation joke. A man, a complete idiot, is introduced into sex by an experienced woman. And I'm sorry if you know it but I love it. Once I attacked Badiou on these lines that he sometimes when he said "il faut décider," we have to decide, no, he didn't like it, my good friend Alain Badiou. Namely, there is a wonderful American joke where an experienced woman introduces an idiot into sex. Okay, they undress. She says, "You see, this is my vagina, your penis." She masturbates him. "Now you have an erection." She touches herself. "You see, I'm wet now." Then he penetrates her, and then she tells him, "Now you start moving, up-down, up-down." And after half a minute, the guy says, "Can't you finally decide? Is it in or out? Is it up and down?" you know. And Derrida laughed very much, Avital told me when she told him that, "this is for me *différance*," then you know. Like the end will come but, you know, it will come by itself, you know, you just do up and down and you don't think about the end, you know what I mean, don't you. So again, you see, things are... The key, the crucial point is and I forgot his name but an American guy, I forgot his name, I'm so sad, I quote him in my big fat book, did a text on this notion which I even use as the title of my book, "absolute recoil." And he claims that because Derrida also reads that passage but reads it in a way which he accuses He... Okay. The point this guy tries to make is that what Hegel claims with this notion of absolute recoil is precisely what Derrida claims that Hegel cannot do. Hegel's claim of absolute recoil is that it's not only this pseudo-dialectical circle, you have to lose a thing then to regain it again, but that the thing itself emerges only through its loss. The loss comes first. Absolute recoil means that it's only by way of recoil losing itself then what is... you know that the loss, to put it like this, the loss precedes what is lost. And this guy convinced me how, and it's the beautiful paradox, the same as with Hegel, that in his, what Derrida sometimes missed in his reading of Hegel is not some other dimension for which he is stupid, but the very Derridean dimension of Hegel. And this is typical for dialectics. For example, as Fred Jameson in a very nice way pointed out, what Hegel missed in contemporary society is not some otherness, but it's precisely the Hegelian dimension of capitalism. Hegel still conceived of capitalism in this, you know, artisans, Adam Smith market and so on. But where capitalism becomes really Hegelian, with what Marx describes as the speculative circular movement, money begetting more money, all that stuff which Marx describes in a purely Hegelian way, Hegel misses that. So as you can see, if what I told you now appears confused, it's because it is confused, the things are very subtle here. I don't think... that's the problem, you know. Both Hegel and Derrida are, they both have a certain circularity for which they are criticized, and it's interesting how often they are attacked for the same point. The usual Hegelian critique of Hegel is he is so tricky that whatever you say he will tell you, but this is already accounted in my system as one figure and so on. And the approach to Derrida is often the same one, that he will pull the same trick and so on. But in a way, maybe this is true, but again, that's why, that's why I think again that it's a very tricky question, I mean. What I, this is a personal remark, I don't know how you relate to it. What I don't like at the level of style in some Derrida is, like you know, a typical mid in his mid-term, the middle term of his career, Derrida sometimes did like this, like you have a text on something, but instead of going to the point, you have to go through these first pages of all these rhetorical pirouettes, "am I writing this text or am I written by this text," and all that stuff. Like sometimes I have this, like "fuck off, go to the point." And then he does get to the point and it's as a rule a very good point. For example, this is Derrida at his Hegelian best. His reading of Kafka and the law, "Door of the Law," where he notices something which is I claim absolutely crucial for how authority functions today. That law is not only an agency of prohibition, but it's itself prohibited. You know, law doesn't only prohibit. And that this he makes a, because they didn't like each other too much, he makes here a very precise, how do you call it, stab at Foucault, who talks about all this, you know, traditional prohibitory functioning of law which is then superseded by regulatory functioning of law and so on and so on. No, but there is then a third dimension about which I think Foucault doesn't write a lot, a lot. You know, this paradox of how at its most fundamental dimension prohibition itself has to be prohibited. And I'm sorry if I repeat myself a little bit. I mean this literally. This is maybe the mystery of our so-called permissive societies. It's not that there are no prohibitions, it's that prohibitions themselves are prohibited. And this is happening. There are so many examples here that I find, don't be afraid if I'm getting lost, I didn't forget my promise to you that through Julia, who will hopefully stay here till New Year, I will, you will get the stuff. If my... that this again prohibiting the prohibition itself. Many women complain about this, how men treat them. Like, we have officially we all respect women and so on. But then if a woman brings out where she still feels oppressed, it's as if she said some obscenity, you know. This is how male chauvinism functions today. You know, when a woman says, "But nonetheless you did oppress me there, there, there," it's done as if she said something that shouldn't be said. But let me give you another, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here, much better example from Stalinism. I know I often use this here. In Stalinism, it's not that there were simply prohibitions. The crucial point is that these prohibitions were themselves prohibited. Like the example I like to use, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. Let's say that we are here, hahaha, Central Committee in '35 in Moscow. Let's say that one of you is so stupid after the end... I am Stalin, of course. I give a report to the Central Committee. Then there is a debate, of course. Okay, one of you stands up and attacks me. That's not a good idea. Next day the big question will be who saw him last alive, of course. But that's okay, still okay. Let's say that another of you then stands up and defends me, Stalin, and attacks that guy, claiming, "But are you crazy? Don't you know we don't criticize Stalin here?" and so on. I can guarantee you, he will disappear even sooner. You see the point? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was absolutely prohibited to announce, pronounce publicly this prohibition. And every legal system, it's not just Stalinism, plays in this way. Like let's return to my religious transcendental experience, the Yugoslav army, which I served. No, I will not tell you all those paradoxes that I repeated too much about the guy who obtained an order to swear freely and so on, military oath, but a more interesting one. In the Yugoslav army, in the constitution and army rules, it was said that all languages of Yugoslav nations which were officially equal are legal in the army. This meant Serbo-Croat, at that point they were unified, Slovene, Albanian, Kosovo, and Macedonian. The constitution says only that only at the level of pure commandment, only Serbo-Croat should be used. Which is incidentally understandable. You cannot say, I don't know, in six languages "shoot," "fire," or whatever. But de facto, it was only Serbo-Croat. Also at everyday life, education, classes, and so on. So it was an absolutely obvious violation of the Yugoslav constitution. And now comes the trick. I didn't do it, I was too scared. A colleague of mine raised this question. He go, he went to military prison a couple for a couple of weeks, just by stating the obvious. Like "But listen, it says in the constitution all languages are equal of Yugoslav nations, why do we have all to speak Serbo-Croat? It's guaranteed in constitution." You know, these examples I like, of this... and again, Derrida, that's the whole point, similar examples and so on, of Derrida's great text on Kafka. All these ambiguities in Freudian terms, super-ego or ideal ego, they are not the same, I know, and the id, and so on, how law, law is not pure. In order to be operative, the law that fights obscenity or whatever has to be sustained by its own kind of obscenity and all these, all these paradoxes and so on and so on. So again, you see, I'm very much confused. Okay, there is maybe another thing that I disagree with Derrida. Like this, he took maybe this from from Heidegger, this a little bit eschatological thinking in the sense of we live in the time of the end of metaphysics. You know, this idea, the era of metaphysics is coming to an end. So and then, I much prefer here, I must say this, approach which is that of Deleuze, Lacan, and Badiou, which is more an eclectic approach on, you know, like you take whatever you want from history of philosophy and so on, our era is not privileged in this way. Because you know where I found, my God, I'm sorry, I will stop soon, otherwise we will go crazy, but there is another problem that I didn't found and maybe you can immediately correct me if I'm wrong in Derrida. On the one hand he did assume this Heideggerian notion of an epoch of metaphysics of presence is approaching its end. But then, for example, okay, but then will we ever be able to step... You know, Derrida, I claim, and please I would like to be enlightened here. My impression was that Derrida oscillated between two versions here. One is metaphysics of presence, or whatever you call this, onto-teleology and so on, is specifically Western phenomenon, Western metaphysics. And he preferred not to talk too much about what would be, I don't know, the ancient Chinese metaphysics, Indian, Latino-American and so on. But on the other hand, sometimes he writes as if there is no outside. However we are, we are always within metaphysics and it's kind of an endless struggle to marking the difference but never simple outside and so on and so on. So it was never clear to me, with his apparatus of deconstructing metaphysics of presence, what would he have done for example with ancient Chinese thought? Is it simply, is it also another version of metaphysics of presence, and we should play all these games, or is it simply a totally different universe? Even more complex, if it's a totally different universe, how can we say it and see it? You know it's the same problem you find incidentally if you read him closely already in Heidegger. Because officially Heidegger's line is that this strict, I don't want to... determinism is not a good term, but radical historicism, each epoch is an event but in Heideggerian sense, grounded in a certain evental disclosure of being. Modern epoch is epoch of subjectivity and so on and so on. But for example, if we are part of this destiny of being, historically determined by a certain disclosure of being, how then is a figure like Hölderlin possible? Because it's clear that for Heidegger, Hölderlin saw beyond German idealist metaphysic. Heidegger is very clear here, even his other beloved poets like Rilke, they are still within the scope of modern metaphysics. Other German philosophers, Hegel, Schelling, or poets, Novalis and so on, they are in, but Hölderlin broke out. How? So it is as if he has to admit that as it were exceptionally we can, to put it in very naive term, step out of the history of being. You know, again, and he gets very ambiguous here, Heidegger. This is Heidegger that interests me. The Heidegger that asks all these awkward questions, almost common-sense questions. For example, Heidegger was not a stupid idealist. History of being is not some kind of a divine power which creates entities existing entities. No, he knows very well that, for example, when he says that beings always appear to us within a certain horizon of the meaning of being, he doesn't mean that history of being that that what he calls event, a disclosure of being creates entities. He says somewhere quite naively even that, of course a chair or whatever, a moon objects exists independently of our history of being. They were there before human... there was humanity on earth. But how to think that? And three, four times from late 20s till one of his last works, *Heraclitus Seminar*, he admits that he doesn't know how to approach it. His most beautiful reflections are a kind of a almost mystic Benjaminian speculation which is that when human speech emerges it was a cosmic event in the sense that, it's a beautiful mystical speculation, that there is a great suffering in animal kingdom. Life suffers. But only through human speech nature was able to articulate its suffering, its pain, you know. That human speech also concerns in this sense in human entities like animals and so on and so on. But again what's the status of it and so on and so on. This is where philosophy becomes, becomes interesting for me. Sorry I've lost so much time but fuck life. Okay, you and you. No the dark guy, I want communism to win. You are dark fascism then I want you red shirt to win over. Sorry, please. Having traversed your fantasy, why is it necessary for the barred subject to again become submissive to a new socio-symbolic order? Because this necessity is a priori, we cannot be satisfied only with empirical example, for example the description of what happens after after revolutions. So what is this a priori necessity? This a priori... yes necessity. Ah... ah they, you raise here a very good point and this you provided now or you pointed in the direction of why I am a Hegelian. Because your approach I think hits a certain type of Marxism fighting alienation, you know. Yes, you know in what sense? In the sense of... Okay, I'll put it in another way. Maybe you will agree with this one. When you said traversing the fantasy. Okay, the most easy way to squeeze out would have been said that this idea that we can live simply outside illusion, this is the ultimate fantasy. Traversing from a strict Hegelian standpoint, traversing fantasy means precisely renouncing the fantasy that you can step outside. Traversing fantasy means to accept the ontological necessity of an illusion. Hegel says this. I know, I know. But my question is how is it that after you traversed our fantasy, how is it that after you realized that you are not in a position to be a subject which posits object? Yeah, yeah. After you realize this, how is it that you have to again become submissive to a socio-symbolic order? It happens. I will tell you. And it is necessary a priori. I mean, it's not that we can... I mean we cannot resort to empirical examples and say, "Oh you see that after even after authentic revolutions, a new established symbolic order happens, people I mean relapse into into inertia again," and so on. My question is how is it necessary? How this a priori... Ah, maybe, okay. Maybe I wasn't convincing enough but I think that precisely the whole point of Hegel is to provide this subtle answer to this question. Subtle answer again in the sense that traversing the fantasy means exactly seeing the necessity of that new submission what you called. The only thing that changes in traversing the fantasy is not that you are no longer submitted, that you see that there is no big other. Which means that you are decentered but the other is also decentered. This is where Hegel uses this term when he says a passage that I maybe my favorite passage that I quote all the time, when Hegel says the secrets of the ancient Egyptians for us, we don't know what Sphinx meant, were also the secrets for the Egyptians themselves. The other also doesn't know it. You just for Hegel the only disalienation is redoubling of alienation. Where do you disagree? My my my problem is that you don't answer my question. Which is... Which is how is it that after you realized all this, again the moment of simple vulgarity will happen? How is it that after you traverse your fantasy you you do a big job if this crucial moment doesn't coincide with your real death? If you stay alive in the biological sense, again you will become submissive to simple vulgarity without being really authentic. And it has to happen. Why? I I oh my god there are so many presuppositions. Again we don't have time to go in detail into it now. But I would have said that that I find problematic it's too radical in a bad sense, your reading of traversing the fantasy. As if this is a kind of ultimate almost deathly liberation and so on and so on. It's not this. Lacan is very precise here. Traversing the fantasy doesn't mean stepping out of the fantasy in the sense of "we are now free for some authentic being" and so on. Lacan explicitly emphasizes this. Let's not read too much into it. Because again I'm almost tempted to say and Hegel emphasizes this again and again. The paradox is that how this is the deepest insight of what Lacan calls traversing the fantasy, how even if you see the untruth of something, you still have to live in it. You know traversing of fantasy doesn't mean you get rid of an illusion. Traversing the fantasy means accept the necessity of illusion as illusion. That's the tension of traversing the fantasy. You learn that something is an illusion. What's the difference between this and perversion? Oh perv... ah that I can. If you use here the term perversion in the strict Freudian and Lacanian sense it's easy to answer. A pervert doesn't... pervert knows. Pervert doesn't live in... perversion is the nastiest position that I can imagine. Which is why incidentally the title *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*. I had a conflict with Sophie Fiennes. I think it's theoretically a wrong one because I'm not a pervert. As Lacan emphasizes all the time, a pervert fits perfectly every order of power. It's its obscene double. Lacan is here a great feminist because Lacan always emphasizes the true revolutionary dimension is in hysteria, not in perversion. So when you say pervert, you know what's the basic pervert's position is? Hysteria as well as obsession... obsessional neurosis as its sub-species, here Lacan closely follows Freud's indication that obsessional neurosis, it's not another species, it's a sub-species of hysteria, it's just a kind of inner torsion of hysteria. The hysterical point is questioning. Hysteria is basically an attitude of questioning, like... And even one can even claim that hysteria is Lacanian answer in Lacanian to Althusser's interpellation, no? Interpellation is the social order which provides you with an identification. You are a woman, a teacher, whatever. The hysterical question is, as Lacan puts it very nicely already in his Seminar and especially on psychosis, "Why am I what you are saying that I am?" No, this doubting like... Like I, the society ideology provides a certain symbolic identity for me even if I reject it. I am, I don't know, professor of philosophy which I myself doubt that I am or whatever. But the hysterical question is, "Why am I that?" Which means that, and here we have to clarify things so much... Haha she doubts her identity so much that she rather results to hysterical reaction. Sorry I cannot
of civil society. You are free in society on the market, you produce yourself. You are not what you are, your immediate identity has to be *aufgehoben*. You are through working on yourself and so on. But then, in a wonderful typically dialectical turn around, Hegel adds that that's why a king is needed. And what is a king? Precisely a natural inertia that cannot be *aufgehoben* because, as Hegel emphasized, king, in the sense of Hegelian monarchy, is a paradoxical direct overlapping of the highest ideal power, you know, king, the top of the state and so on, but at the same time it's clear to Hegel, king is what he or she, queen, is immediately by birth. There is no self-mediation, no work there and so on. So Hegel saw this at different levels in a wonderful way, how *Aufhebung* is never complete. It needs an *unaufhebbar*, an element that resists and so on. So again, the way maybe I will try to put, not losing too much time, one way, but maybe you know more about Derrida, I'm very open here, I'm ready to change my opinion. Because it's not so much, my God, I'm nonetheless, even if I'm stupid clown, some type of philosopher, which means more than names, what means to me is the problem, the thing itself. So when I attack Derrida, attack, okay, debate with him, I'm trying to describe two position, my position and that one. And maybe I'm wrong with attributing that position to Derrida. But it's okay, in this sense, you know, I will try to put it as simple as possible. Let's take the notion of subject. For Derrida, subject is always decentered, *différance*, and so on and so on, open possibilities, blah blah blah. My point would be just to make one step further and say: not only is subject always *différance*, decentered, and so on, but subject is the name of this decenteredness. You know, to make this subtle shift. And I'm even ready to go here to the end following Hegel and claim that it's not enough to say identity is always undermined by difference, but that, and Hegel says this clearly in a wonderful way, identity is a name for a radical difference. You see, it's just this how do they call it, self-reflective term where you no longer have the external opposition, let's say presence-absence, and then, you know, ooh, there is no pure presence, all presence is undermined by traces of otherness and so on. But to claim that the ultimate otherness is this spectral presence itself. You know where here I know that I would agree with Derrida because at some point he became aware of it. Let's return to another point which is classical Derridean. The opposition of voice and writing. Voice as *s'entendre parler*, pure self-presence, and voice always undermined by writing and so on and so on. But, and Derrida has some hints somewhere, that but at the same time the utter otherness, impenetrability, is that of a meaningless voice itself. And that's what I tried to develop in some of my books years ago, how it's not, and again I checked up with Avital Ronell and she told me that Derrida agrees with this point, that that's the mystery of the history of music. It's almost the inverted Derridean story of the history of the West as the history of the, not oppression, but more control, the excess of writing. No, in the history of music it's not so much voice that should control writing. It's writing that should control the voice. The fear, I'm sorry if I repeat my old stuff but just to get the point, the fear of entire history of musical theory. Did, are you aware of this, my friend Mladen Dolar, who wrote that wonderful book *Voice and Nothing More*, he found all these quotes. The, the earliest what we can call from today's perspective aesthetic norm prescription in the history of humanity is I think some ancient Chinese, I mean aesthetic norm prescription is some ancient Chinese I don't know what edict of some king whatever which says: beware of free singing, singing should be controlled. And again, you have this fear, you should read this, this is the other side of Plato's logocentrism, what Plato says about music in his *Republic*. It's incredible, it's the primordial fear. He says that if you allow free singing, you risk to lose everything. People will become wild like apes, all social edifice will disintegrate and so on. What he fears is precisely this pure singing which becomes a kind of self-reproducing loop of pleasure where the relation to meaning, to otherness disappears. And, but at the same time, Plato as it were read Derrida and knew what supplement was, because at the same time that he attacks this, no, he says openly like no singing in my free state, singing is irrational, and there, this is so interesting, he says rational speech is needed to control voice, but it's clear that there are subtle references to writing there, you know. That his idea is speech which no longer is firmly rooted in articulated meaning, meaning as a rule articulated in writing, gets, falls into its own trap and a kind of self-referential incestuous madness just reproduces itself. Okay, the first interesting thing here is to see how constant this motif is up to the end, by this I mean up to our times. For example, you have this in Plato, this absolute fear of free singing, it's the end of civilized order. Then as we all know, the medieval church had the same problem, early, against polyphony. The idea was order, and maybe you know these jokes I used them in my books, how their fear was that if when singing you don't closely follow the rational order of words, devil intervenes. And they had this subtle hermeneutics where they described how even if you appear to praise God, devil is there. For example, standard medieval example, let's say you have a religious song: "Oh our Lord, we celebrate your goodness." And then you think you are religious if you emphasize the word Lord or God. Oh my God, but you add just "oh my go-o-o-od," no, ah, devil is here. You know, you come close and so it's again the whole medieval times were obsessed by keeping control here. Now things go further in early modernity, for example in the French Revolution, even my beloved Jacobins, for them religion was obscene, their bad guys were the castratos, no. That was for them nightmare. And they basically return to Plato. Plato claimed that the only singing that should be allowed is military songs. You see Plato was a Derridean, he knew that singing is something literally the Derridean supplement, it's dangerous but you need it. You know, ideal military unit would need no songs, it's just you give orders, you shoot. And sometimes this is set, I'm sorry if I improvise a little bit in a wonderful way. Like in Yugoslavia we had the great fat guy you remember, you don't remember, the President Tito, no. I remember his last visit to Slovenia where he came and then he died there in a hospital and you know, remember he was close to his death, he was absolutely sacred person, by this I mean anything that he said it was published. So nobody dared to censor him. And in this way we learned some wonderful stupidities that he said. Half a year before his death, they asked Tito: what is for you the ideal human community, human group? And he openly said it. No, in a normal Stalinist universe he would have been... he said a group of hunters. They asked him why, he said because one is giving orders and the others are shooting and nobody talks. I mean I find this so wonderful that finally he did show the car... but what I want to say is that you see, but Tito didn't know, he didn't read Plato and Derrida that: no, unfortunately you need singing. It's a supplement, it's an obscene supplement. And I think that, I often use these examples, that the late this what you find in many movies about Marines, so-called marching chants. This is the necessary, you know what are marching chants, these songs which are that Marines sing, probably also other soldiers while marching and they are very interesting. They are usually a mixture of like limericks, how do you call this, nonsense rhymes and utter obscenities. For example, sorry I always repeat this one I love it, from I think *An Officer and a Gentleman*. They sing, "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." Like it's maybe it's true I don't know they spend a lot of time there in snow but you know it's the utter nonsense and and obscenity. Now the true mystery is, and I can guarantee you it is like this, I did serve the army, why do you need this, you know. The point is you cannot have pure army discipline. It ha... it needs this supplement as it were. And here there are some bad consequences, unpleasant of, what fascinated me in the army is the contradictory nature of the army collective. Maybe, I'm sorry if you already know this story. On the one hand the army was extremely homophobic. When a soldier was discovered to be gay, he was thrown out of the army but that one or two weeks before the bureaucracy decided were pure hell. Usually he was awakened every night and you know these standard military rituals. Guys while you're asleep surround you, one puts a pillow on your head or a cover that you don't see who they are and others are beating you by their belts and so on, something like that you know. This is one aspect, absolute homophobia. Okay now we can find quick let's be in quick agreement with all those political rec, yeah yeah army homophobic blah blah. But it was much more ambiguous. At the same time I never saw a human collective which was so deeply penetrated by homosexual innuendos. You may know my standard stories, for example in my unit we didn't say to another soldier in the morning, "Hello, good morning," but "I'll smoke yours." It meant fellatio. "Okay, and I will smoke yours." This was our way to say good morning or whatever. And I think this is the paradox of the army. It is homophobic, absolutely, against open gay sexuality. But at the same time it's as if this thwarted homosexuality has to be resuscitated and just beneath the surface kept alive all the time. And I can go on telling you dirty stories there, incredible. For example, I know when we were waiting for lunch in a line, the big joke, it's so stupid that I'm embarrassed to tell you was, people are behind you, one of them quickly put his finger into your ass, withdrew it, you turned around furious and then "Hehe, guess who it was," you know. But again it's so embarrassing. But again, the reason I'm telling you this is to see that this is not some kind of a, how should I call it, deconstructive subversive... No, my point is that this excess is a necessary part of human, sorry, not of human, of military community. It's what effectively helps it together. So here, here I tend to... here I would just supplement Derrida with this kind of opposition, you know, like yes writing undermines voice but at the same time the most inert impenetrable thing is voice itself. Like that voice as the Derridean voice, this hearing oneself talking, this immediate self-transparency is always accompanied by spectral otherness which is a totally impenetrable voice. This spectral voice which precisely in its inertia undermines at the most radical level possible. You know where you find some of this stuff? In Derrida's book on Marx, I think, when he speaks about ghosts and all that, pretty good I think, Hamlet reading and so on and so on. So again, you see, it's a, how should I put it, it's a much more refined difference. I'm even tempted to say that I did something like this and my Lacanian friends didn't like it. Where I claim that if you try to find, to locate what can be called the elementary gesture of Freudian theory, which would be this idea of drive, not instinct but drive. Drive is a detour. Instinct is... sorry for the, instinct is I need sex, I jump on a lady. Drive is, you know, why to do it immediately, why not, you know that the shortest path doesn't lead to the object. You know, the whole point is in detour. This paradox is basically the Freudian name for drive. And I ask myself what if *différance* is the Derridean name for this elementary detour? And now I will tell you, and many Derridean friends of mine from Ed Kadava to others, see the problem, some even agree with me. The problem for me with Derrida is his ethical turn where you have ethics of deconstruction, you have democracy to come, and so on and so on. I think this does not follow automatically from his early thinking of *différance*. A certain ethical dimension of, you know, democracy to come or justice, justice as indeconstructible, and so on and so on. If anything, I'm even more the earlier Derridean. So, to conclude it with a dirty joke, I think in this room, some I don't know how many years ago, soon after Derrida's death, I hope you were not here, I gave a talk in praise of Derrida and I cannot resist retelling extremely bad jokes. I told a joke, you know that United States their great contribution to world culture is double I claim. A, but I will not go into that, that I did speak one thousand times about canned laughter, you know the TV screen laughs for you, that's one. The other contribution are vulgar sexual jokes, but of a very specific kind. First, there are great jokes about, you know, doctor, first good news then bad news. And I will not repeat again the boring examples that I always use like, you know, bad news is we discovered you have cancer and you will be dead in two months. Then you ask, "Fuck you, what is the good news?" The good news that we always also discovered that you have, that you have, what is it called, Alzheimer's amnesia and you will forget bad news before you reach home. It's so stupid. But this is not truly Hegelian Derridean. I claim that recently my good friend Lacanian Alenka Zupančič in Slovenia told me she heard somewhere the ultimate version of this good news-bad news joke. Okay. You ask your doctor, doctor tells you, "I have good news and bad news." "What do you want to begin with?" You say, because you are stupid, I mean me, I say, "Okay, first the good news." And you hear the good news which are: "Soon you will be a household name, a mortal disease will be named after you." I mean, who wants to hear bad news if these are the good news? You know, this would be some... this would have been the Hegelian trick. So the dirty joke I learned is: okay, so you have this good news-bad news, and the other great American invention are jokes about sexual initiation joke. A man, a complete idiot, is introduced into sex by an experienced woman. And I'm sorry if you know it but I love it. Once I attacked Badiou on these lines that he sometimes when he said "il faut décider," we have to decide, no, he didn't like it, my good friend Alain Badiou. Namely, there is a wonderful American joke where an experienced woman introduces an idiot into sex. Okay, they undress. She says, "You see, this is my vagina, your penis." She masturbates him. "Now you have an erection." She touches herself. "You see, I'm wet now." Then he penetrates her, and then she tells him, "Now you start moving, up-down, up-down." And after half a minute, the guy says, "Can't you finally decide? Is it in or out? Is it up and down?" you know. And Derrida laughed very much, Avital told me when she told him that, "this is for me *différance*," then you know. Like the end will come but, you know, it will come by itself, you know, you just do up and down and you don't think about the end, you know what I mean, don't you. So again, you see, things are... The key, the crucial point is and I forgot his name but an American guy, I forgot his name, I'm so sad, I quote him in my big fat book, did a text on this notion which I even use as the title of my book, "absolute recoil." And he claims that because Derrida also reads that passage but reads it in a way which he accuses He... Okay. The point this guy tries to make is that what Hegel claims with this notion of absolute recoil is precisely what Derrida claims that Hegel cannot do. Hegel's claim of absolute recoil is that it's not only this pseudo-dialectical circle, you have to lose a thing then to regain it again, but that the thing itself emerges only through its loss. The loss comes first. Absolute recoil means that it's only by way of recoil losing itself then what is... you know that the loss, to put it like this, the loss precedes what is lost. And this guy convinced me how, and it's the beautiful paradox, the same as with Hegel, that in his, what Derrida sometimes missed in his reading of Hegel is not some other dimension for which he is stupid, but the very Derridean dimension of Hegel. And this is typical for dialectics. For example, as Fred Jameson in a very nice way pointed out, what Hegel missed in contemporary society is not some otherness, but it's precisely the Hegelian dimension of capitalism. Hegel still conceived of capitalism in this, you know, artisans, Adam Smith market and so on. But where capitalism becomes really Hegelian, with what Marx describes as the speculative circular movement, money begetting more money, all that stuff which Marx describes in a purely Hegelian way, Hegel misses that. So as you can see, if what I told you now appears confused, it's because it is confused, the things are very subtle here. I don't think... that's the problem, you know. Both Hegel and Derrida are, they both have a certain circularity for which they are criticized, and it's interesting how often they are attacked for the same point. The usual Hegelian critique of Hegel is he is so tricky that whatever you say he will tell you, but this is already accounted in my system as one figure and so on. And the approach to Derrida is often the same one, that he will pull the same trick and so on. But in a way, maybe this is true, but again, that's why, that's why I think again that it's a very tricky question, I mean. What I, this is a personal remark, I don't know how you relate to it. What I don't like at the level of style in some Derrida is, like you know, a typical mid in his mid-term, the middle term of his career, Derrida sometimes did like this, like you have a text on something, but instead of going to the point, you have to go through these first pages of all these rhetorical pirouettes, "am I writing this text or am I written by this text," and all that stuff. Like sometimes I have this, like "fuck off, go to the point." And then he does get to the point and it's as a rule a very good point. For example, this is Derrida at his Hegelian best. His reading of Kafka and the law, "Door of the Law," where he notices something which is I claim absolutely crucial for how authority functions today. That law is not only an agency of prohibition, but it's itself prohibited. You know, law doesn't only prohibit. And that this he makes a, because they didn't like each other too much, he makes here a very precise, how do you call it, stab at Foucault, who talks about all this, you know, traditional prohibitory functioning of law which is then superseded by regulatory functioning of law and so on and so on. No, but there is then a third dimension about which I think Foucault doesn't write a lot, a lot. You know, this paradox of how at its most fundamental dimension prohibition itself has to be prohibited. And I'm sorry if I repeat myself a little bit. I mean this literally. This is maybe the mystery of our so-called permissive societies. It's not that there are no prohibitions, it's that prohibitions themselves are prohibited. And this is happening. There are so many examples here that I find, don't be afraid if I'm getting lost, I didn't forget my promise to you that through Julia, who will hopefully stay here till New Year, I will, you will get the stuff. If my... that this again prohibiting the prohibition itself. Many women complain about this, how men treat them. Like, we have officially we all respect women and so on. But then if a woman brings out where she still feels oppressed, it's as if she said some obscenity, you know. This is how male chauvinism functions today. You know, when a woman says, "But nonetheless you did oppress me there, there, there," it's done as if she said something that shouldn't be said. But let me give you another, I'm sorry if I repeat myself here, much better example from Stalinism. I know I often use this here. In Stalinism, it's not that there were simply prohibitions. The crucial point is that these prohibitions were themselves prohibited. Like the example I like to use, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. Let's say that we are here, hahaha, Central Committee in '35 in Moscow. Let's say that one of you is so stupid after the end... I am Stalin, of course. I give a report to the Central Committee. Then there is a debate, of course. Okay, one of you stands up and attacks me. That's not a good idea. Next day the big question will be who saw him last alive, of course. But that's okay, still okay. Let's say that another of you then stands up and defends me, Stalin, and attacks that guy, claiming, "But are you crazy? Don't you know we don't criticize Stalin here?" and so on. I can guarantee you, he will disappear even sooner. You see the point? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin. It was absolutely prohibited to announce, pronounce publicly this prohibition. And every legal system, it's not just Stalinism, plays in this way. Like let's return to my religious transcendental experience, the Yugoslav army, which I served. No, I will not tell you all those paradoxes that I repeated too much about the guy who obtained an order to swear freely and so on, military oath, but a more interesting one. In the Yugoslav army, in the constitution and army rules, it was said that all languages of Yugoslav nations which were officially equal are legal in the army. This meant Serbo-Croat, at that point they were unified, Slovene, Albanian, Kosovo, and Macedonian. The constitution says only that only at the level of pure commandment, only Serbo-Croat should be used. Which is incidentally understandable. You cannot say, I don't know, in six languages "shoot," "fire," or whatever. But de facto, it was only Serbo-Croat. Also at everyday life, education, classes, and so on. So it was an absolutely obvious violation of the Yugoslav constitution. And now comes the trick. I didn't do it, I was too scared. A colleague of mine raised this question. He go, he went to military prison a couple for a couple of weeks, just by stating the obvious. Like "But listen, it says in the constitution all languages are equal of Yugoslav nations, why do we have all to speak Serbo-Croat? It's guaranteed in constitution." You know, these examples I like, of this... and again, Derrida, that's the whole point, similar examples and so on, of Derrida's great text on Kafka. All these ambiguities in Freudian terms, super-ego or ideal ego, they are not the same, I know, and the id, and so on, how law, law is not pure. In order to be operative, the law that fights obscenity or whatever has to be sustained by its own kind of obscenity and all these, all these paradoxes and so on and so on. So again, you see, I'm very much confused. Okay, there is maybe another thing that I disagree with Derrida. Like this, he took maybe this from from Heidegger, this a little bit eschatological thinking in the sense of we live in the time of the end of metaphysics. You know, this idea, the era of metaphysics is coming to an end. So and then, I much prefer here, I must say this, approach which is that of Deleuze, Lacan, and Badiou, which is more an eclectic approach on, you know, like you take whatever you want from history of philosophy and so on, our era is not privileged in this way. Because you know where I found, my God, I'm sorry, I will stop soon, otherwise we will go crazy, but there is another problem that I didn't found and maybe you can immediately correct me if I'm wrong in Derrida. On the one hand he did assume this Heideggerian notion of an epoch of metaphysics of presence is approaching its end. But then, for example, okay, but then will we ever be able to step... You know, Derrida, I claim, and please I would like to be enlightened here. My impression was that Derrida oscillated between two versions here. One is metaphysics of presence, or whatever you call this, onto-teleology and so on, is specifically Western phenomenon, Western metaphysics. And he preferred not to talk too much about what would be, I don't know, the ancient Chinese metaphysics, Indian, Latino-American and so on. But on the other hand, sometimes he writes as if there is no outside. However we are, we are always within metaphysics and it's kind of an endless struggle to marking the difference but never simple outside and so on and so on. So it was never clear to me, with his apparatus of deconstructing metaphysics of presence, what would he have done for example with ancient Chinese thought? Is it simply, is it also another version of metaphysics of presence, and we should play all these games, or is it simply a totally different universe? Even more complex, if it's a totally different universe, how can we say it and see it? You know it's the same problem you find incidentally if you read him closely already in Heidegger. Because officially Heidegger's line is that this strict, I don't want to... determinism is not a good term, but radical historicism, each epoch is an event but in Heideggerian sense, grounded in a certain evental disclosure of being. Modern epoch is epoch of subjectivity and so on and so on. But for example, if we are part of this destiny of being, historically determined by a certain disclosure of being, how then is a figure like Hölderlin possible? Because it's clear that for Heidegger, Hölderlin saw beyond German idealist metaphysic. Heidegger is very clear here, even his other beloved poets like Rilke, they are still within the scope of modern metaphysics. Other German philosophers, Hegel, Schelling, or poets, Novalis and so on, they are in, but Hölderlin broke out. How? So it is as if he has to admit that as it were exceptionally we can, to put it in very naive term, step out of the history of being. You know, again, and he gets very ambiguous here, Heidegger. This is Heidegger that interests me. The Heidegger that asks all these awkward questions, almost common-sense questions. For example, Heidegger was not a stupid idealist. History of being is not some kind of a divine power which creates entities existing entities. No, he knows very well that, for example, when he says that beings always appear to us within a certain horizon of the meaning of being, he doesn't mean that history of being that that what he calls event, a disclosure of being creates entities. He says somewhere quite naively even that, of course a chair or whatever, a moon objects exists independently of our history of being. They were there before human... there was humanity on earth. But how to think that? And three, four times from late 20s till one of his last works, *Heraclitus Seminar*, he admits that he doesn't know how to approach it. His most beautiful reflections are a kind of a almost mystic Benjaminian speculation which is that when human speech emerges it was a cosmic event in the sense that, it's a beautiful mystical speculation, that there is a great suffering in animal kingdom. Life suffers. But only through human speech nature was able to articulate its suffering, its pain, you know. That human speech also concerns in this sense in human entities like animals and so on and so on. But again what's the status of it and so on and so on. This is where philosophy becomes, becomes interesting for me. Sorry I've lost so much time but fuck life. Okay, you and you. No the dark guy, I want communism to win. You are dark fascism then I want you red shirt to win over. Sorry, please. Having traversed your fantasy, why is it necessary for the barred subject to again become submissive to a new socio-symbolic order? Because this necessity is a priori, we cannot be satisfied only with empirical example, for example the description of what happens after after revolutions. So what is this a priori necessity? This a priori... yes necessity. Ah... ah they, you raise here a very good point and this you provided now or you pointed in the direction of why I am a Hegelian. Because your approach I think hits a certain type of Marxism fighting alienation, you know. Yes, you know in what sense? In the sense of... Okay, I'll put it in another way. Maybe you will agree with this one. When you said traversing the fantasy. Okay, the most easy way to squeeze out would have been said that this idea that we can live simply outside illusion, this is the ultimate fantasy. Traversing from a strict Hegelian standpoint, traversing fantasy means precisely renouncing the fantasy that you can step outside. Traversing fantasy means to accept the ontological necessity of an illusion. Hegel says this. I know, I know. But my question is how is it that after you traversed our fantasy, how is it that after you realized that you are not in a position to be a subject which posits object? Yeah, yeah. After you realize this, how is it that you have to again become submissive to a socio-symbolic order? It happens. I will tell you. And it is necessary a priori. I mean, it's not that we can... I mean we cannot resort to empirical examples and say, "Oh you see that after even after authentic revolutions, a new established symbolic order happens, people I mean relapse into into inertia again," and so on. My question is how is it necessary? How this a priori... Ah, maybe, okay. Maybe I wasn't convincing enough but I think that precisely the whole point of Hegel is to provide this subtle answer to this question. Subtle answer again in the sense that traversing the fantasy means exactly seeing the necessity of that new submission what you called. The only thing that changes in traversing the fantasy is not that you are no longer submitted, that you see that there is no big other. Which means that you are decentered but the other is also decentered. This is where Hegel uses this term when he says a passage that I maybe my favorite passage that I quote all the time, when Hegel says the secrets of the ancient Egyptians for us, we don't know what Sphinx meant, were also the secrets for the Egyptians themselves. The other also doesn't know it. You just for Hegel the only disalienation is redoubling of alienation. Where do you disagree? My my my problem is that you don't answer my question. Which is... Which is how is it that after you realized all this, again the moment of simple vulgarity will happen? How is it that after you traverse your fantasy you you do a big job if this crucial moment doesn't coincide with your real death? If you stay alive in the biological sense, again you will become submissive to simple vulgarity without being really authentic. And it has to happen. Why? I I oh my god there are so many presuppositions. Again we don't have time to go in detail into it now. But I would have said that that I find problematic it's too radical in a bad sense, your reading of traversing the fantasy. As if this is a kind of ultimate almost deathly liberation and so on and so on. It's not this. Lacan is very precise here. Traversing the fantasy doesn't mean stepping out of the fantasy in the sense of "we are now free for some authentic being" and so on. Lacan explicitly emphasizes this. Let's not read too much into it. Because again I'm almost tempted to say and Hegel emphasizes this again and again. The paradox is that how this is the deepest insight of what Lacan calls traversing the fantasy, how even if you see the untruth of something, you still have to live in it. You know traversing of fantasy doesn't mean you get rid of an illusion. Traversing the fantasy means accept the necessity of illusion as illusion. That's the tension of traversing the fantasy. You learn that something is an illusion. What's the difference between this and perversion? Oh perv... ah that I can. If you use here the term perversion in the strict Freudian and Lacanian sense it's easy to answer. A pervert doesn't... pervert knows. Pervert doesn't live in... perversion is the nastiest position that I can imagine. Which is why incidentally the title *Pervert's Guide to Cinema*. I had a conflict with Sophie Fiennes. I think it's theoretically a wrong one because I'm not a pervert. As Lacan emphasizes all the time, a pervert fits perfectly every order of power. It's its obscene double. Lacan is here a great feminist because Lacan always emphasizes the true revolutionary dimension is in hysteria, not in perversion. So when you say pervert, you know what's the basic pervert's position is? Hysteria as well as obsession... obsessional neurosis as its sub-species, here Lacan closely follows Freud's indication that obsessional neurosis, it's not another species, it's a sub-species of hysteria, it's just a kind of inner torsion of hysteria. The hysterical point is questioning. Hysteria is basically an attitude of questioning, like... And even one can even claim that hysteria is Lacanian answer in Lacanian to Althusser's interpellation, no? Interpellation is the social order which provides you with an identification. You are a woman, a teacher, whatever. The hysterical question is, as Lacan puts it very nicely already in his Seminar and especially on psychosis, "Why am I what you are saying that I am?" No, this doubting like... Like I, the society ideology provides a certain symbolic identity for me even if I reject it. I am, I don't know, professor of philosophy which I myself doubt that I am or whatever. But the hysterical question is, "Why am I that?" Which means that, and here we have to clarify things so much... Haha she doubts her identity so much that she rather results to hysterical reaction. Sorry I cannot
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resist being evil. But no, point is this one, that which is why you know when Lacan speaks about the lost object of desire. People usually think that it's this boring postmodern bullshit, you know, whatever we are grabbing it's never that, the true object is always elsewhere. No, the original lost object is myself. The original hysterical experience for Lacan and at the same time the birth of subjectivity. And it's nicely described by the one who was also up to a point against Lacan but here he was great I think, Jean Laplanche did this
resist being evil. But no, point is this one, that which is why you know when Lacan speaks about the lost object of desire. People usually think that it's this boring postmodern bullshit, you know, whatever we are grabbing it's never that, the true object is always elsewhere. No, the original lost object is myself. The original hysterical experience for Lacan and at the same time the birth of subjectivity. And it's nicely described by the one who was also up to a point against Lacan but here he was great I think, Jean Laplanche did this
Slavoj Žižek
a lot. Of how let's say you are a small child, you feel all the games that your parents, brothers, sisters play with you. They see something in you, they play games with you, they want something from you, they project, but what are you for them? It's this perplexity, "Why am I this object of desire for them? What do they see in me?" And this questioning is the origin of it all. This is the original hysterical questioning. It's the self-questioning. "Who am I?" It's not simply what the other wants from me. It's not just some Levinasian impenetrable other. It's self-identity. "What am I for others?" And but perversion for Lacan and already Freud is precisely a pervert has answers. He doesn't have question. Pervert is somebody who says, "That's why I claim Stalinists were perverts." Because not because of the horrors they did, but because this basic position of "we are serving the people," which means "we know better than the people themselves." Do you know Maria that while you exited I humiliated you? I said this is the hysterical reaction and so on. I knew, I knew what you were going to say, that's why I
a lot. Of how let's say you are a small child, you feel all the games that your parents, brothers, sisters play with you. They see something in you, they play games with you, they want something from you, they project, but what are you for them? It's this perplexity, "Why am I this object of desire for them? What do they see in me?" And this questioning is the origin of it all. This is the original hysterical questioning. It's the self-questioning. "Who am I?" It's not simply what the other wants from me. It's not just some Levinasian impenetrable other. It's self-identity. "What am I for others?" And but perversion for Lacan and already Freud is precisely a pervert has answers. He doesn't have question. Pervert is somebody who says, "That's why I claim Stalinists were perverts." Because not because of the horrors they did, but because this basic position of "we are serving the people," which means "we know better than the people themselves." Do you know Maria that while you exited I humiliated you? I said this is the hysterical reaction and so on. I knew, I knew what you were going to say, that's why I
unknown
took the opportunity. Are you claiming that you are so bright that you don't? No, I'm claiming that... You see, that's the tragedy of French Revolution. They said freedom to all, freedom to women, and then women can talk like this to us men.
took the opportunity. Are you claiming that you are so bright that you don't? No, I'm claiming that... You see, that's the tragedy of French Revolution. They said freedom to all, freedom to women, and then women can talk like this to us men.
unknown
Horrible. Well I wanted to hear more about the... No no I will, yeah, sorry but no no, yeah yeah. No no, what I wanted to say is that that's why I like it but I have to pretend that I am a bad guy and that I find it humiliating that... Did you notice that in the last decades all good books on Hegel are written by women mostly? It began with with that, how is it called, not Catherine Malabou, there my God her name I forgot. Judith Butler. No no no, these are the last two but there is another one at this point I missed her name. Gillian Rose. No no no no. Ah did you notice this to be evil towards Jacqueline Rose how when she raised some points Hegel... Ahah, this was sisterly competition you know there. Okay but let me go on. So it's that who wrote a
Horrible. Well I wanted to hear more about the... No no I will, yeah, sorry but no no, yeah yeah. No no, what I wanted to say is that that's why I like it but I have to pretend that I am a bad guy and that I find it humiliating that... Did you notice that in the last decades all good books on Hegel are written by women mostly? It began with with that, how is it called, not Catherine Malabou, there my God her name I forgot. Judith Butler. No no no, these are the last two but there is another one at this point I missed her name. Gillian Rose. No no no no. Ah did you notice this to be evil towards Jacqueline Rose how when she raised some points Hegel... Ahah, this was sisterly competition you know there. Okay but let me go on. So it's that who wrote a
Slavoj Žižek
book, my God at this point Hegel and the critique of metaphysics is the title of the book. Then... Rebecca Comay. No, you don't know because she is unknown now. Then it's of course Catherine Malabou, then it's Rebecca Comay and so on. It's something incredible in on this how the most sensitive readers of Hegel appear more and more to be women. And this in spite of all the criticism of Lacan and so on that he is a male chauvinist. Lacan here has nothing to be ashamed. I learned this even from my great enemy Elisabeth Roudinesco who wrote that you know, they claim Lacan normativity of heterosexuality blah blah, I'm sorry, from the very beginning of the Lacanian school, gays were totally simply without any question accepted as analysts while all others, IPA and so on, did this only I don't know when late 60s and so on. Lacan was by far Lacanian school the
book, my God at this point Hegel and the critique of metaphysics is the title of the book. Then... Rebecca Comay. No, you don't know because she is unknown now. Then it's of course Catherine Malabou, then it's Rebecca Comay and so on. It's something incredible in on this how the most sensitive readers of Hegel appear more and more to be women. And this in spite of all the criticism of Lacan and so on that he is a male chauvinist. Lacan here has nothing to be ashamed. I learned this even from my great enemy Elisabeth Roudinesco who wrote that you know, they claim Lacan normativity of heterosexuality blah blah, I'm sorry, from the very beginning of the Lacanian school, gays were totally simply without any question accepted as analysts while all others, IPA and so on, did this only I don't know when late 60s and so on. Lacan was by far Lacanian school the
unknown
first which didn't make any problems by this. Okay but nonetheless, sorry, and then I go to Hegel. To return to your point, in this sense, no, it's not a pervert position. Because a pervert is the one who knows. A pervert has the one who basically assumes this position of "A pervert is pretends to be your... pretends to be your servant, but your servant in the sense
first which didn't make any problems by this. Okay but nonetheless, sorry, and then I go to Hegel. To return to your point, in this sense, no, it's not a pervert position. Because a pervert is the one who knows. A pervert has the one who basically assumes this position of "A pervert is pretends to be your... pretends to be your servant, but your servant in the sense
Slavoj Žižek
of 'I know better.' When I serve you I can terrorize you because I know better than you what is good for you," and so on and so on. And I think that when Lacan says that in psychoanalysis the analyst occupies the post of *objet petit a*, it means exactly the post of the void. It's not the one who knows. It's the one who is supposed to know, but he plays with this illusion of supposed to know in reality he knows very well that he doesn't know. I mean, again, the pervert version of psychoanalysis would be you come to the analyst and the analyst knows the meaning of your symptoms. No, the great thing of psychoanalysis proper is that analyst just has to play with this... he the analyst should embody your ignorance, not your knowledge. The analyst should just provoke you, confuse you, no no he doesn't know anything. I claim that even Lacan here maybe fell into a trap. Why did he, I never was convinced by this idea of short sessions, you know. Three four minutes and I know I went through it, like if you were lucky it was four minutes, no. I mean, the idea of Lacan was this one: most of the psychoanalytic session is blah blah blah, you lose time. Only at certain moments towards the end you finally say the truth. So his idea was a beautiful terrorist one: why don't we put the analyst under the pressure that it can end at any moment and in this way we will get to the... but to the element moment of truth faster. I don't think it works. I think we have this strange temporality where to say one true thing you have to talk nonsense for minutes. It's an illusory shortcut I think what Lacan is doing there. But nonetheless, and then I didn't forget about the red savior, yes. To return to you, I know I didn't satisfy you, but you see you see my point here. How should I put it, Guy Le Gaufey, an intelligent reader of Lacan who even I think we should invite him here, John Coplans invited him, he, which is a big surprise for French people, he is very fluent in English. He, he pointed out this dimension that what you learn in traversing the fantasy is that the illusion persists in reality even when even after no one believes in the illusion but sees through it, you know. That the, the traversing the fantasy is precisely the fantasy of the illusion being dominated, founded by some agent and so on. No, illusion there are nameless illusions, there are beliefs which function even if no one believes in them. Which means even if we are all cynical about them. This, this is for me what happens after traversing the fantasy. Okay, I didn't satisfy you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But it's a very serious question but I will admit something now, that the question that you touched here, it's a crucial one because it's a warning against this, let's call it, transgressive notion of analysis, no. We step out and this is why Lacan later dismissed, didn't like his Seminar on ethics, which is for me too close to Georges Bataille in the sense of it is as if we live in ordinary vulgar times usually, but from one moment to the other we can gain access to that prohibited domain of the primordial horror, but you cannot survive long there, you return to your ordinary reality. This transgressive notion of what Bataille would have called inner experience or whatever, momentary blinding transgression... No, I think that I am... my answer to you would be this one. The authenticity of traversing the fantasy would be... now I'm just translating into this language the political point that would be... I don't care about these authentic experiences from. You said correctly that after we return to the same vulgar bullshit. Is it totally the same or not? My hope is that maybe it's just not as shitty as it was before. Because now I'm simply repeating the point of revolution. You know, I hate this Tahrir Square one million people singing there and so on. What interests me is was there a change when things returned to normal afterwards in Egypt? And I'm not a total pessimist. People usually say, "No, now it's the same shit as before." No, it's not because civil society, student, women, all these movements are there. You know, it's up... there is civil society alive. This is the result of Tahrir Square and so on. You know, it's not as simple as that. So again, I think that the question you raised is an absolutely crucial one even politically to redeem us from this standard leftist dreams of, you know, inner revolution, all these standard oppositions will be overcome, sex will become life, daily life will become sexual, whatever, and and this is why I like, it will appear late spring this volume, Fred Jameson *An American Utopia* and then I edited ten people replying to him. Because all these taboos are wonderfully broken by
of 'I know better.' When I serve you I can terrorize you because I know better than you what is good for you," and so on and so on. And I think that when Lacan says that in psychoanalysis the analyst occupies the post of *objet petit a*, it means exactly the post of the void. It's not the one who knows. It's the one who is supposed to know, but he plays with this illusion of supposed to know in reality he knows very well that he doesn't know. I mean, again, the pervert version of psychoanalysis would be you come to the analyst and the analyst knows the meaning of your symptoms. No, the great thing of psychoanalysis proper is that analyst just has to play with this... he the analyst should embody your ignorance, not your knowledge. The analyst should just provoke you, confuse you, no no he doesn't know anything. I claim that even Lacan here maybe fell into a trap. Why did he, I never was convinced by this idea of short sessions, you know. Three four minutes and I know I went through it, like if you were lucky it was four minutes, no. I mean, the idea of Lacan was this one: most of the psychoanalytic session is blah blah blah, you lose time. Only at certain moments towards the end you finally say the truth. So his idea was a beautiful terrorist one: why don't we put the analyst under the pressure that it can end at any moment and in this way we will get to the... but to the element moment of truth faster. I don't think it works. I think we have this strange temporality where to say one true thing you have to talk nonsense for minutes. It's an illusory shortcut I think what Lacan is doing there. But nonetheless, and then I didn't forget about the red savior, yes. To return to you, I know I didn't satisfy you, but you see you see my point here. How should I put it, Guy Le Gaufey, an intelligent reader of Lacan who even I think we should invite him here, John Coplans invited him, he, which is a big surprise for French people, he is very fluent in English. He, he pointed out this dimension that what you learn in traversing the fantasy is that the illusion persists in reality even when even after no one believes in the illusion but sees through it, you know. That the, the traversing the fantasy is precisely the fantasy of the illusion being dominated, founded by some agent and so on. No, illusion there are nameless illusions, there are beliefs which function even if no one believes in them. Which means even if we are all cynical about them. This, this is for me what happens after traversing the fantasy. Okay, I didn't satisfy you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But it's a very serious question but I will admit something now, that the question that you touched here, it's a crucial one because it's a warning against this, let's call it, transgressive notion of analysis, no. We step out and this is why Lacan later dismissed, didn't like his Seminar on ethics, which is for me too close to Georges Bataille in the sense of it is as if we live in ordinary vulgar times usually, but from one moment to the other we can gain access to that prohibited domain of the primordial horror, but you cannot survive long there, you return to your ordinary reality. This transgressive notion of what Bataille would have called inner experience or whatever, momentary blinding transgression... No, I think that I am... my answer to you would be this one. The authenticity of traversing the fantasy would be... now I'm just translating into this language the political point that would be... I don't care about these authentic experiences from. You said correctly that after we return to the same vulgar bullshit. Is it totally the same or not? My hope is that maybe it's just not as shitty as it was before. Because now I'm simply repeating the point of revolution. You know, I hate this Tahrir Square one million people singing there and so on. What interests me is was there a change when things returned to normal afterwards in Egypt? And I'm not a total pessimist. People usually say, "No, now it's the same shit as before." No, it's not because civil society, student, women, all these movements are there. You know, it's up... there is civil society alive. This is the result of Tahrir Square and so on. You know, it's not as simple as that. So again, I think that the question you raised is an absolutely crucial one even politically to redeem us from this standard leftist dreams of, you know, inner revolution, all these standard oppositions will be overcome, sex will become life, daily life will become sexual, whatever, and and this is why I like, it will appear late spring this volume, Fred Jameson *An American Utopia* and then I edited ten people replying to him. Because all these taboos are wonderfully broken by
unknown
Jameson.
Jameson.
Slavoj Žižek
He claims: no, there will be divisions even stronger in communism if we can even imagine it. He claims envy will be absolutely the big problem of communism and so on. There will be, he even says as some point I like this, "There will be more hatred and violence in communism than in our societies." You know why? Because, and I can return here to your question, I'm sorry if I repeat my old stuff but a reactionary guy like Friedrich Hayek made one wonderful observation a propos markets. People reproached him for saying that he doesn't see, Hayek, how unjust market is. Like, market is not the best wins but, you know all these stories, you work hard your neighbor does nothing, then the neighbor is lucky because of some economic events and you lose it all, your lazy neighbor becomes rich. Hayek has an interesting answer here. He says: "But that's why capitalism works." He means this, and it's a modest but intelligent observation, almost Lacanian. The true horror would have been a just capitalism, because then if I'm poor and you Maria are rich, are you secretly rich? Okay, but let's assume then then I would have to admit that because we live in a just society that you are that it's my fault. But this injustice of capitalism allows me to suffer defeat by blaming the other. "Oh no, you were stupid bitch, you were just more lucky," you know. And because, you know, without if people were to believe that capitalism is just, envy would have exploded, it would have for me intolerable to see in your success my stupidity daily embodied and so on and so on. This is what my good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, that theorist of catastrophe, develops as a wonderful critique of John Rawls. He claims that Rawls's theory of justice works only if you exclude envy. You know, because you know what's Rawls's formula, no? Rawls's formula is inequalities should be permitted, but A, if they are really the result of your hard work, like I get more money than you but because I worked harder I'm more bright and so on, and B, if my wealth also helps, makes the situation of those lower than me, especially those at the bottom to live better. Like I can be richer than you if my being richer makes also all of you, especially the poorest, a little bit better. And Dupuy has a wonderful answer: "No, this would have been a terrifying situation of envy." Because in this Rawlsian just society, can you imagine what a humiliating situation this would have been for the poor people? They would have to admit all the time that they are idiots, that the rich are just we have to be rich and so on and so on. So I would say that, you see, this type of traversing the fantasy means precisely accepting this contingency of the other. It doesn't really... and this is why I think, this is why I like again Protestantism. Protestantism accepts this that's why the lady who I think is a theologian who wanted to debate the last time, isn't here to... namely Protestantism with its theory of predestination. What is predestination? It's let's cut the crap it's ultimate almost evil contingency of God. God some of us are redeemed others are condemned to eternal suffering before we even exist. It's a totally contingent game of God. And intelligent Protestants accept this even as the other secret side of divine evil. You know, that God is ultimately not a just God but an arbitrary God. In other words, usually Protestants talk about divine mystery, we don't know why God did that, predestination. The radical Protestant answer is: God was just stupid or evil, there is no reason. I mean something along these lines we should do. Sorry let's go on. Red flag, raise high the flag of communism, yeah okay. I have many questions but I will limit myself to one. We were talking before about... I would like to hear from you I have many questions but I will limit myself to ten or whatever. No no let's squeeze it, my God because I talk too much. I promise tonight you will get the text, my God it's one hour and twenty. Okay sorry that we... It's quite naive but we were talking before about homosexuality in the army. In the army and sublation. And it's also, I mean it's about *Less Than Nothing* because you conceive it as a kind of sex between Hegel and Lacan. Do I say this? I don't think I say this. Isn't it in the form? This this is what I wanted to ask you because you have... But if you want to translate in this term is it clear that I want to screw both of them? I mean I want to it's a subtle distanciation of the book towards Hegel. There is that chapter "Beyond Hegel," and at the end I also go into all this which I think is a correct reading, how you know I'm opposed to this reading that at the very end Lacan had some final shattering insight. No, I think Lacan reached a certain point of of a deadlock around Seminar and then what he did later were just failed attempts to to come out of to resolve this deadlock. And his very last seminars, the short ones, five pages the whole year, are very tragic because he basically I quote one of the passages openly admits his utter failure. I think it's much more tragic the fate of Lacan. I also like this as a general reading of thinkers. I don't think I think thinkers are a little bit like Shakespeare's games. You have this lowest point of dark tragedies and then you get in Shakespeare you know that final turn towards how do you call them these late games, it's a totally different universe like fairytales, blessing, you know *Winter's Tale*, *Tempest* and so on. But the truth is that dark or even in Mozart operas, it goes down down. *Don Giovanni* down, *Così fan tutte* the most desperate then what can you do after *Così fan tutte*? *Magic Flute*, pure bliss. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah no, I mean I just wanted to say if this is might be correct reading that there is kind of a there is a non-sexual relationship between them and from Lacanian point it's love that fills it but from Hegelian... No, here I refer to the guy I hope they will translate some of his stuff Guy Le Gaufey whom I quote where he in such a nice way I envied him so much like fuck you why didn't I do this you know this discover this. He draws a line he introduces a certain wonderful distinction claiming that Lacan that sometimes it's not the same thing to say "there is no sexual relationship" and "there is a non-relationship." And all the last Lacan hinges on this oscillation you know, which incidentally if some of you know philosophy it's very close to the beautiful Kantian distinction between two types of negation. You know I've repeated this often, this is even I claim the key to the notion of subjectivity. You know Kant distinguishes begin between negative and infinite judgment. Negative a negative judgment simply denies a predicate, like: "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, which simply means I am alive, no? Okay. Then the infinite judgment. You do just something very simple: instead of denying negating the predicate, you affirm a non-predicate. Like instead of saying "I am not dead," you say "I am undead." My God if you know Stephen King and so on you know that this is not at all the same thing. Because "I am not dead" remains within this opposition of dead-alive. But "I am undead," that's why Kant calls it infinite judgment, opens up a third domain of living dead. Undead means as dead you are alive. Undead doesn't negate being dead but you remain alive as dead. And I think it's the same with this non-relationship. If we say just "there is no sexual relationship," then we get this kind of pagan vulgarity, you know, there is an eternal struggle between masculine and feminine principle, there is no ultimate harmony among them. That's nothing, that's bullshit. And Guy Le Gaufey is right when he hints that even Miller, the great interpreter of Lacan, makes this mistake sometimes. For example, when he interprets "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" as simple how should I put it disharmony. Like he says, imagine he does it in a pretty vulgar way Miller, even I with my bad taste find this vulgar, he says with all the obvious sexual innuendos it's like if vagina is a how do you call it keyhole, penis is never the ideal key to open the keyhole, they never fit. But this is not it. This is simply eternal struggle, disharmony and so on. This is part of classical mythology. What Lacan is saying by his "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" is something much more radical. The contradiction I developed this read my big fat book that you mention is not first it's very interesting Alenka Zupančič my friend corrected me here and pointed out. Did you notice we all the time speak about sexual difference and so on. Did you notice a very strange thing? My God I was so mad at her again fuck her why didn't I observe this. Not once does Lacan use the term sexual difference. No, he is not in this domain. For Lacan, if you read his formulas of sexuation, it's not that there is an eternal disharmony between masculine feminine position. No, the disharmony, the rupture, disparity, is within each position. You know it's twice missed identity. It's as if almost for Lacan there is one sex and there are two ways to fail to be that sex, how should I put it, it's a it's again Lacan because the moment you go into this eternal disharmony and so on eternal struggle of sexes, then you are at the level of *Da Vinci Code* and so on. Like you know we in the West emphasize too much the masculine rational principle, we should bring back you know Jesus screwing Virgin or no Virgin Mary was his mother that's too much, Mary Magdalene or whatever. You know all that stuff about bringing in the feminine element, which I think is the worst thing that can happen for feminism. Because the way if you bring in the feminine element in this way reestablishing some sacred feminine and so on and so on, you just return to this classical dualism where women precisely always lose. Like maybe already told you the story I read a wonderful report on some I don't know where tribe where even the big goddess was a feminine one, you know, like it was a village houses and then the central sacred hut, place, was formed like
He claims: no, there will be divisions even stronger in communism if we can even imagine it. He claims envy will be absolutely the big problem of communism and so on. There will be, he even says as some point I like this, "There will be more hatred and violence in communism than in our societies." You know why? Because, and I can return here to your question, I'm sorry if I repeat my old stuff but a reactionary guy like Friedrich Hayek made one wonderful observation a propos markets. People reproached him for saying that he doesn't see, Hayek, how unjust market is. Like, market is not the best wins but, you know all these stories, you work hard your neighbor does nothing, then the neighbor is lucky because of some economic events and you lose it all, your lazy neighbor becomes rich. Hayek has an interesting answer here. He says: "But that's why capitalism works." He means this, and it's a modest but intelligent observation, almost Lacanian. The true horror would have been a just capitalism, because then if I'm poor and you Maria are rich, are you secretly rich? Okay, but let's assume then then I would have to admit that because we live in a just society that you are that it's my fault. But this injustice of capitalism allows me to suffer defeat by blaming the other. "Oh no, you were stupid bitch, you were just more lucky," you know. And because, you know, without if people were to believe that capitalism is just, envy would have exploded, it would have for me intolerable to see in your success my stupidity daily embodied and so on and so on. This is what my good friend Jean-Pierre Dupuy, that theorist of catastrophe, develops as a wonderful critique of John Rawls. He claims that Rawls's theory of justice works only if you exclude envy. You know, because you know what's Rawls's formula, no? Rawls's formula is inequalities should be permitted, but A, if they are really the result of your hard work, like I get more money than you but because I worked harder I'm more bright and so on, and B, if my wealth also helps, makes the situation of those lower than me, especially those at the bottom to live better. Like I can be richer than you if my being richer makes also all of you, especially the poorest, a little bit better. And Dupuy has a wonderful answer: "No, this would have been a terrifying situation of envy." Because in this Rawlsian just society, can you imagine what a humiliating situation this would have been for the poor people? They would have to admit all the time that they are idiots, that the rich are just we have to be rich and so on and so on. So I would say that, you see, this type of traversing the fantasy means precisely accepting this contingency of the other. It doesn't really... and this is why I think, this is why I like again Protestantism. Protestantism accepts this that's why the lady who I think is a theologian who wanted to debate the last time, isn't here to... namely Protestantism with its theory of predestination. What is predestination? It's let's cut the crap it's ultimate almost evil contingency of God. God some of us are redeemed others are condemned to eternal suffering before we even exist. It's a totally contingent game of God. And intelligent Protestants accept this even as the other secret side of divine evil. You know, that God is ultimately not a just God but an arbitrary God. In other words, usually Protestants talk about divine mystery, we don't know why God did that, predestination. The radical Protestant answer is: God was just stupid or evil, there is no reason. I mean something along these lines we should do. Sorry let's go on. Red flag, raise high the flag of communism, yeah okay. I have many questions but I will limit myself to one. We were talking before about... I would like to hear from you I have many questions but I will limit myself to ten or whatever. No no let's squeeze it, my God because I talk too much. I promise tonight you will get the text, my God it's one hour and twenty. Okay sorry that we... It's quite naive but we were talking before about homosexuality in the army. In the army and sublation. And it's also, I mean it's about *Less Than Nothing* because you conceive it as a kind of sex between Hegel and Lacan. Do I say this? I don't think I say this. Isn't it in the form? This this is what I wanted to ask you because you have... But if you want to translate in this term is it clear that I want to screw both of them? I mean I want to it's a subtle distanciation of the book towards Hegel. There is that chapter "Beyond Hegel," and at the end I also go into all this which I think is a correct reading, how you know I'm opposed to this reading that at the very end Lacan had some final shattering insight. No, I think Lacan reached a certain point of of a deadlock around Seminar and then what he did later were just failed attempts to to come out of to resolve this deadlock. And his very last seminars, the short ones, five pages the whole year, are very tragic because he basically I quote one of the passages openly admits his utter failure. I think it's much more tragic the fate of Lacan. I also like this as a general reading of thinkers. I don't think I think thinkers are a little bit like Shakespeare's games. You have this lowest point of dark tragedies and then you get in Shakespeare you know that final turn towards how do you call them these late games, it's a totally different universe like fairytales, blessing, you know *Winter's Tale*, *Tempest* and so on. But the truth is that dark or even in Mozart operas, it goes down down. *Don Giovanni* down, *Così fan tutte* the most desperate then what can you do after *Così fan tutte*? *Magic Flute*, pure bliss. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah no, I mean I just wanted to say if this is might be correct reading that there is kind of a there is a non-sexual relationship between them and from Lacanian point it's love that fills it but from Hegelian... No, here I refer to the guy I hope they will translate some of his stuff Guy Le Gaufey whom I quote where he in such a nice way I envied him so much like fuck you why didn't I do this you know this discover this. He draws a line he introduces a certain wonderful distinction claiming that Lacan that sometimes it's not the same thing to say "there is no sexual relationship" and "there is a non-relationship." And all the last Lacan hinges on this oscillation you know, which incidentally if some of you know philosophy it's very close to the beautiful Kantian distinction between two types of negation. You know I've repeated this often, this is even I claim the key to the notion of subjectivity. You know Kant distinguishes begin between negative and infinite judgment. Negative a negative judgment simply denies a predicate, like: "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, which simply means I am alive, no? Okay. Then the infinite judgment. You do just something very simple: instead of denying negating the predicate, you affirm a non-predicate. Like instead of saying "I am not dead," you say "I am undead." My God if you know Stephen King and so on you know that this is not at all the same thing. Because "I am not dead" remains within this opposition of dead-alive. But "I am undead," that's why Kant calls it infinite judgment, opens up a third domain of living dead. Undead means as dead you are alive. Undead doesn't negate being dead but you remain alive as dead. And I think it's the same with this non-relationship. If we say just "there is no sexual relationship," then we get this kind of pagan vulgarity, you know, there is an eternal struggle between masculine and feminine principle, there is no ultimate harmony among them. That's nothing, that's bullshit. And Guy Le Gaufey is right when he hints that even Miller, the great interpreter of Lacan, makes this mistake sometimes. For example, when he interprets "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" as simple how should I put it disharmony. Like he says, imagine he does it in a pretty vulgar way Miller, even I with my bad taste find this vulgar, he says with all the obvious sexual innuendos it's like if vagina is a how do you call it keyhole, penis is never the ideal key to open the keyhole, they never fit. But this is not it. This is simply eternal struggle, disharmony and so on. This is part of classical mythology. What Lacan is saying by his "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" is something much more radical. The contradiction I developed this read my big fat book that you mention is not first it's very interesting Alenka Zupančič my friend corrected me here and pointed out. Did you notice we all the time speak about sexual difference and so on. Did you notice a very strange thing? My God I was so mad at her again fuck her why didn't I observe this. Not once does Lacan use the term sexual difference. No, he is not in this domain. For Lacan, if you read his formulas of sexuation, it's not that there is an eternal disharmony between masculine feminine position. No, the disharmony, the rupture, disparity, is within each position. You know it's twice missed identity. It's as if almost for Lacan there is one sex and there are two ways to fail to be that sex, how should I put it, it's a it's again Lacan because the moment you go into this eternal disharmony and so on eternal struggle of sexes, then you are at the level of *Da Vinci Code* and so on. Like you know we in the West emphasize too much the masculine rational principle, we should bring back you know Jesus screwing Virgin or no Virgin Mary was his mother that's too much, Mary Magdalene or whatever. You know all that stuff about bringing in the feminine element, which I think is the worst thing that can happen for feminism. Because the way if you bring in the feminine element in this way reestablishing some sacred feminine and so on and so on, you just return to this classical dualism where women precisely always lose. Like maybe already told you the story I read a wonderful report on some I don't know where tribe where even the big goddess was a feminine one, you know, like it was a village houses and then the central sacred hut, place, was formed like
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a vagina. Ooh, how
a vagina. Ooh, how
Slavoj Žižek
subversive and so on. Yes, there was just one tiny problem empirically: women were prohibited to enter that sacred place you know. No, I believe that again the only way to be a feminist is to go through Descartes, to accept this let's call it desexualization
subversive and so on. Yes, there was just one tiny problem empirically: women were prohibited to enter that sacred place you know. No, I believe that again the only way to be a feminist is to go through Descartes, to accept this let's call it desexualization
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of nature. No, sexual difference is not just an application to humans of some eternal dualism. So again, back to your point, I would say what I will apply, I didn't lose my thread, exactly the same formula. I
of nature. No, sexual difference is not just an application to humans of some eternal dualism. So again, back to your point, I would say what I will apply, I didn't lose my thread, exactly the same formula. I
Slavoj Žižek
would have said that there is a non-relationship within Hegel
would have said that there is a non-relationship within Hegel
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and within Lacan. They both screw it up. So it's not it's definitely of course not a matter
and within Lacan. They both screw it up. So it's not it's definitely of course not a matter
Slavoj Žižek
of bringing them together. And I especially emphasize this because we Lacanians are often accused of being dogmatic and so on and so on. I had many fights with followers of Judith Butler concerning this and they always claim like, "Why are you such a dogmatic?" And I tell them: "Okay, I can immediately enumerate to you passages where I clearly point at unresolved problem in Lacan. Show me one passage in your work where you do the same to Judith Butler." And this with my friend even Avital Ronell. I don't even know it I had a wonderful experience in Saas-Fee. She was giving a talk on Wagner and Nietzsche. And her point was to to praise Nietzsche for breaking with Wagner, claiming that the authentic lesson of the pupil is to betray his master. You know, the young Wagner, sorry, the young Nietzsche was pupil, faithful of Wagner, then he broke with Wagner, no? And then something so wonderful happened, my eternal gratitude goes here to Alain Badiou, who just asked her, "Okay, your master teacher is Derrida. Where did you break with Derrida?" And it was so ridiculous because he caught, he caught her, as they say, with her pants down, without... no, like it was totally unexpected and her defense was empirical one, like "No, you haven't today take it literally, sometimes you don't have to," horror. Then Sam Weber, the old Derridean, was there and he did the most ridiculous defense of her and Derrida that you can imagine. He said, "But Derrida is an exception
of bringing them together. And I especially emphasize this because we Lacanians are often accused of being dogmatic and so on and so on. I had many fights with followers of Judith Butler concerning this and they always claim like, "Why are you such a dogmatic?" And I tell them: "Okay, I can immediately enumerate to you passages where I clearly point at unresolved problem in Lacan. Show me one passage in your work where you do the same to Judith Butler." And this with my friend even Avital Ronell. I don't even know it I had a wonderful experience in Saas-Fee. She was giving a talk on Wagner and Nietzsche. And her point was to to praise Nietzsche for breaking with Wagner, claiming that the authentic lesson of the pupil is to betray his master. You know, the young Wagner, sorry, the young Nietzsche was pupil, faithful of Wagner, then he broke with Wagner, no? And then something so wonderful happened, my eternal gratitude goes here to Alain Badiou, who just asked her, "Okay, your master teacher is Derrida. Where did you break with Derrida?" And it was so ridiculous because he caught, he caught her, as they say, with her pants down, without... no, like it was totally unexpected and her defense was empirical one, like "No, you haven't today take it literally, sometimes you don't have to," horror. Then Sam Weber, the old Derridean, was there and he did the most ridiculous defense of her and Derrida that you can imagine. He said, "But Derrida is an exception
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because he is already so self-critical all the time betraying himself that we don't he is already doing that job." And then I exploded and told him, "You sound like Yugoslav
because he is already so self-critical all the time betraying himself that we don't he is already doing that job." And then I exploded and told him, "You sound like Yugoslav
Slavoj Žižek
communists when they were in power." Because you know what was their reply when you were a dissident? They said, "But don't you see that we as creative self-managing communists, we are already self-critical all the time, the way to be critical is to join us. You know, like not to criticize us from outside," and so on and so on. So in other words, I think that today if you ask me, I wonder if you would agree, when it's so fashionable, you know like nobody wants to be identified, even when you make a simple statement. It's good to say, "Maybe strategically we can risk the hypothesis that things are like that." Yeah, no even you shouldn't even fully identify with what you claim. I almost think that today the subversive thing would be to adopt a kind of a simply dogmatic attitude and like: you can criticize Lacan and Hegel, I am for Lacan and for Hegel, they were both right and so on. Of course, there are empirical problems, like they were not right and here and there and but but my point is that my point is that there is something so false about this signaling that you don't fully agree with yourself. Why are you talking then? Today I gave an interview for some BBC series of Marx where a nice lady was asked me, "But isn't there in Marx's Communist Manifesto something extremely arrogant?" He claims to provide there as he says that communism is the solution of the riddle of the entire history as if he knows everything and so on and so on. But I told her, "But isn't every philosopher who writes a book adopting exactly the same arrogance? Let's say you wrote a book. Either you are bluffing or you wrote it because of ontology, you wrote it because in some way you think that you propose what all others from Plato to Hegel to Wittgenstein ultimately didn't see what you see and you have the ultimate answer. Let's prow..." You know, in some way I think dogmaticism is a heroic act because you honestly open yourself up to criticism. You say, "Yes I am this and here you can attack me." While all that sleazy stuff, "I say this but only strategically, maybe it's not like that," and so on and so on. It's the worst kind of arrogance. Basically you are saying secretly I am always a little bit brighter than than I than I than I appear to be. You know? Okay, sorry you did you finish your question? Yeah yeah I mean... But okay let's be fair. Do others have some questions? You... okay first lady in the middle and then the bearded guy like you remind me of who are those, this is a loving statement, who are all, you know did you meet do you know Robert Brandom about whom I talked? Check his image, isn't he like those hobbit pictures in in in *Lord of the Rings* and so on, or whatever no? It I was so shocked like you are the guy who embodies a kind of a dark magician and he is preaching this discursive logic and so on. Sorry? You know Finnlay the really early Hegelian? Yeah, he is even worse or what? He also had the beard. I don't know. Yeah but it's not just a beard, it is *the* beard, you know. And also the way he is he he who is also in *Harry Potter*, that big fat bearded guy who... sorry? Gandalf? Yeah, isn't Brandom something like... Okay, sorry, so first the lady then you, please. I just want to go back to the idea of deconstruction and what you spoke about the subject. So if you can think in terms of, you know, what Derrida says about the trace and the structure of time in his idea of the trace. That's the first question and you know in terms of the simultaneous idea of specialization and temporalization. And if you can also link that up the structure of the trace and temporality with his idea that deconstruction is law or even say *Specters* when he says that you know ideology in a certain sense is a necessary error. And do you see a connection hence between the early Derrida, what he says in *Grammatology* and the ethical turn? Maybe I'm wrong, I'm very open here, I try not to bluff all the time. But I precisely think that this passage even if we agree it or not is not necessary. I think that this passage to let's call it deconstruction as law, infinite task, justice as the only that it's not a necessary passage. That it introduces a certain no matter how much radicalized let's call it, I would almost have said and Derrida even once or twice gently hinted that you it's almost a kind of a Kantian regulative idea, you know, the endless task of deconstruction we never finish it and so on and so on. I I I know what Derrida is after. I mean the early Derrida was often misinterpreted as a kind of a big joker, you know, deconstruction like everything is a game double meaning blah blah. In this sense I fully agree with his let's call it ethico-political term turn in pointing out at this my God deconstruction for me also when people think deconstruction is some playing games with words and so on, deconstruction, authentic deconstruction, which means inquiring in detail how a certain theoretical edifice undermines itself, how it has to self-contradict itself. This is for me an extreme high practicing of reason, even argumentation. If there is a philosopher who is not an irrationalist is Derrida. I think Habermas is here ridiculously wrong in accusing Derrida of or all that you know my bad guy is not so much Habermas as Richard Wolin, you know, who would like now to criminalize Heidegger and so on and for whom deconstruction is a kind of justification of collaboration with fascism and so on. But okay I'm I admit too confused now to answer you in detail but but what I would have said is that that what you described now as all this topic temporalization of space and all that, this exactly I will just provide a statement is I think what is the ultimate secrecy of the Freudian notion of drive. Drive desire is already this teleological even if you have lost object of desire but you know it's a void okay but we run after the object of desire we always meet it and miss it and so on and so on while drive is something different as I try to develop in some of my books years ago, the object of drive is not simply lost, the true object of drive is loss itself. The and also at another level even death drive is not here Ernesto Laclau when I had the polemics with him he totally misses the point I think. When he speaks about how we cannot have radical death drive that would have meant self-destruction but just always that death drive is always attached to certain partial object whatever. But my point is but this is drive. The primordial experience of drive is and some Derrideans and some Hegelians like the big couple, they are not connected sexually, don't misunderstand me, but the two good Hegelians now Rebecca Comay and ahah now I'm Da Vinci we had the masculine counterpole to her Frank Ruda, the German guy. They will now publish a little bit of propaganda in the series that I co-edit with my friend Short Circuits, the most wonderful book on Hegel that you can imagine. It will be about the two hyphens in Hegel. First, Ruda no first Rebecca will do you know at the very that quote from Schiller at the very end of *Phenomenology*. There is a hyphen in Schiller which Hegel obliterates. And she wrote pages about why. Excellent text. Then Frank Ruda goes to the hyphen at the very beginning of Hegel's Logic. Not introduction but logic proper. Well Hegel says: Being pure being, *reines sein*, and nothing else. Like what happens in between? What does it mean to pass from being to pure being? It's mad. But what I wanted to say is that both of them now wrote wonderful short texts reasserting Hegel as the thinker of resistance, procrastination, like the usual reproach to Hegel is: in Hegel always things run all too smoothly, you know, the process goes on. But what if things get stuck? What if you get fixated and so on. Triumphantly they redeem Hegel especially with regard to the notion of resistance. Rebecca Comay does a wonderful analysis here where again I'm mad at her because she brings out something that I would like to observe but I didn't. This deep ambiguity, in a very Derridean way she demonstrates how necessary it is because incidentally Derrida already noticed it. The ambiguity in our everyday use of the very word "resistance." On the one hand it's resistance in under quotation marks good sense, resistance against fascism, against imperialism, fighting against. But resistance also means there is progress, let's say feminism, but some old patriarchal jerks resist it, you know. So resistance it's the same word which signals at the same time resisting the established system and the very inertia of this system. And she goes then wonderfully okay into details but the main point in this one how what I
communists when they were in power." Because you know what was their reply when you were a dissident? They said, "But don't you see that we as creative self-managing communists, we are already self-critical all the time, the way to be critical is to join us. You know, like not to criticize us from outside," and so on and so on. So in other words, I think that today if you ask me, I wonder if you would agree, when it's so fashionable, you know like nobody wants to be identified, even when you make a simple statement. It's good to say, "Maybe strategically we can risk the hypothesis that things are like that." Yeah, no even you shouldn't even fully identify with what you claim. I almost think that today the subversive thing would be to adopt a kind of a simply dogmatic attitude and like: you can criticize Lacan and Hegel, I am for Lacan and for Hegel, they were both right and so on. Of course, there are empirical problems, like they were not right and here and there and but but my point is that my point is that there is something so false about this signaling that you don't fully agree with yourself. Why are you talking then? Today I gave an interview for some BBC series of Marx where a nice lady was asked me, "But isn't there in Marx's Communist Manifesto something extremely arrogant?" He claims to provide there as he says that communism is the solution of the riddle of the entire history as if he knows everything and so on and so on. But I told her, "But isn't every philosopher who writes a book adopting exactly the same arrogance? Let's say you wrote a book. Either you are bluffing or you wrote it because of ontology, you wrote it because in some way you think that you propose what all others from Plato to Hegel to Wittgenstein ultimately didn't see what you see and you have the ultimate answer. Let's prow..." You know, in some way I think dogmaticism is a heroic act because you honestly open yourself up to criticism. You say, "Yes I am this and here you can attack me." While all that sleazy stuff, "I say this but only strategically, maybe it's not like that," and so on and so on. It's the worst kind of arrogance. Basically you are saying secretly I am always a little bit brighter than than I than I than I appear to be. You know? Okay, sorry you did you finish your question? Yeah yeah I mean... But okay let's be fair. Do others have some questions? You... okay first lady in the middle and then the bearded guy like you remind me of who are those, this is a loving statement, who are all, you know did you meet do you know Robert Brandom about whom I talked? Check his image, isn't he like those hobbit pictures in in in *Lord of the Rings* and so on, or whatever no? It I was so shocked like you are the guy who embodies a kind of a dark magician and he is preaching this discursive logic and so on. Sorry? You know Finnlay the really early Hegelian? Yeah, he is even worse or what? He also had the beard. I don't know. Yeah but it's not just a beard, it is *the* beard, you know. And also the way he is he he who is also in *Harry Potter*, that big fat bearded guy who... sorry? Gandalf? Yeah, isn't Brandom something like... Okay, sorry, so first the lady then you, please. I just want to go back to the idea of deconstruction and what you spoke about the subject. So if you can think in terms of, you know, what Derrida says about the trace and the structure of time in his idea of the trace. That's the first question and you know in terms of the simultaneous idea of specialization and temporalization. And if you can also link that up the structure of the trace and temporality with his idea that deconstruction is law or even say *Specters* when he says that you know ideology in a certain sense is a necessary error. And do you see a connection hence between the early Derrida, what he says in *Grammatology* and the ethical turn? Maybe I'm wrong, I'm very open here, I try not to bluff all the time. But I precisely think that this passage even if we agree it or not is not necessary. I think that this passage to let's call it deconstruction as law, infinite task, justice as the only that it's not a necessary passage. That it introduces a certain no matter how much radicalized let's call it, I would almost have said and Derrida even once or twice gently hinted that you it's almost a kind of a Kantian regulative idea, you know, the endless task of deconstruction we never finish it and so on and so on. I I I know what Derrida is after. I mean the early Derrida was often misinterpreted as a kind of a big joker, you know, deconstruction like everything is a game double meaning blah blah. In this sense I fully agree with his let's call it ethico-political term turn in pointing out at this my God deconstruction for me also when people think deconstruction is some playing games with words and so on, deconstruction, authentic deconstruction, which means inquiring in detail how a certain theoretical edifice undermines itself, how it has to self-contradict itself. This is for me an extreme high practicing of reason, even argumentation. If there is a philosopher who is not an irrationalist is Derrida. I think Habermas is here ridiculously wrong in accusing Derrida of or all that you know my bad guy is not so much Habermas as Richard Wolin, you know, who would like now to criminalize Heidegger and so on and for whom deconstruction is a kind of justification of collaboration with fascism and so on. But okay I'm I admit too confused now to answer you in detail but but what I would have said is that that what you described now as all this topic temporalization of space and all that, this exactly I will just provide a statement is I think what is the ultimate secrecy of the Freudian notion of drive. Drive desire is already this teleological even if you have lost object of desire but you know it's a void okay but we run after the object of desire we always meet it and miss it and so on and so on while drive is something different as I try to develop in some of my books years ago, the object of drive is not simply lost, the true object of drive is loss itself. The and also at another level even death drive is not here Ernesto Laclau when I had the polemics with him he totally misses the point I think. When he speaks about how we cannot have radical death drive that would have meant self-destruction but just always that death drive is always attached to certain partial object whatever. But my point is but this is drive. The primordial experience of drive is and some Derrideans and some Hegelians like the big couple, they are not connected sexually, don't misunderstand me, but the two good Hegelians now Rebecca Comay and ahah now I'm Da Vinci we had the masculine counterpole to her Frank Ruda, the German guy. They will now publish a little bit of propaganda in the series that I co-edit with my friend Short Circuits, the most wonderful book on Hegel that you can imagine. It will be about the two hyphens in Hegel. First, Ruda no first Rebecca will do you know at the very that quote from Schiller at the very end of *Phenomenology*. There is a hyphen in Schiller which Hegel obliterates. And she wrote pages about why. Excellent text. Then Frank Ruda goes to the hyphen at the very beginning of Hegel's Logic. Not introduction but logic proper. Well Hegel says: Being pure being, *reines sein*, and nothing else. Like what happens in between? What does it mean to pass from being to pure being? It's mad. But what I wanted to say is that both of them now wrote wonderful short texts reasserting Hegel as the thinker of resistance, procrastination, like the usual reproach to Hegel is: in Hegel always things run all too smoothly, you know, the process goes on. But what if things get stuck? What if you get fixated and so on. Triumphantly they redeem Hegel especially with regard to the notion of resistance. Rebecca Comay does a wonderful analysis here where again I'm mad at her because she brings out something that I would like to observe but I didn't. This deep ambiguity, in a very Derridean way she demonstrates how necessary it is because incidentally Derrida already noticed it. The ambiguity in our everyday use of the very word "resistance." On the one hand it's resistance in under quotation marks good sense, resistance against fascism, against imperialism, fighting against. But resistance also means there is progress, let's say feminism, but some old patriarchal jerks resist it, you know. So resistance it's the same word which signals at the same time resisting the established system and the very inertia of this system. And she goes then wonderfully okay into details but the main point in this one how what I
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already
already
Slavoj Žižek
improvised I think yesterday even at the beginning. How the whole Hegelian dialectical process as it's exemplified in so-called
improvised I think yesterday even at the beginning. How the whole Hegelian dialectical process as it's exemplified in so-called
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infinite judgments is based on this things get stuck. No, the process doesn't run smoothly. You get stuck and then in order to get out of... you know all progress is a reaction to getting stuck, if I may put it like this. That's even even at the very beginning I think Frank Ruda develops this at the very beginning of Hegel's Logic, the first triad: Being-Nothing-Becoming. Being being fuck it being you get stuck and nothing it's the fact that you got nothing of it you got stuck,
infinite judgments is based on this things get stuck. No, the process doesn't run smoothly. You get stuck and then in order to get out of... you know all progress is a reaction to getting stuck, if I may put it like this. That's even even at the very beginning I think Frank Ruda develops this at the very beginning of Hegel's Logic, the first triad: Being-Nothing-Becoming. Being being fuck it being you get stuck and nothing it's the fact that you got nothing of it you got stuck,
Slavoj Žižek
you know. Like again it's not things are running smoothly. The entire Hegelian or French Revolution things got stuck at terror and then you desperately try to... So again, I think what Freud calls drive is precisely this minimum of getting stuck as it were. You know like life and this is a wonderful idea which also explains the ambiguity of the notion of resistance that the true, I use consciously this naive terms, spirit begins not with some unheard of dynamics but when things get stuck. Like what is human sexuality? Okay animals do it but it's clearly part of the flow of things of life. Oh my God it's spring mating season ooh I do all the sounds to attract females we screw. It's just part of some standard run of things. What does sexual passion means? You get stuck. Instead of say, "Okay now we screwed small rabbits are on the way we go on hunting whatever," no you get stuck on that. But I still want you. It has no evolutionary function but I insist on it. The idea and even at the level of behavior my good friend one of the top brain scientists told me even at an empirical level how he is doing analysis of ape behavior. And he told me how if you give to an ape two primate two how do you call them she-apes whatever, female apes, one is obviously more attractive than the other. The ape is much more plastic, free than man. First the ape, male ape, tries to get the attractive one. When it doesn't without any problem the ape moves to the second one. But the specifically human thing would be that your very the very impossibility to get the beautiful ape would stuck you onto that one. Like when something become gets out of your reach you don't say, "Fuck it I cannot get it let's move elsewhere." No you remain stuck on that. This stuckness is maybe the Freudian term for for change. Which is why even socially things don't like today we live in an extremely dynamic society, late capitalism. All the time new products everything is in flux and so on. How will things really change? When they will get stuck. When you know things will no longer run smoothly and so on and so on. So back to you at this level as I already hinted before especially but we don't have time of course to go into it now because this is a very interesting topic philosophically what you mentioned. I know from early Derrida this notion of time-space, spacing of time and vice-versa and so on. But I won't say centeredness, I would say again that subject is the name a name for radical decenteredness. That would be my point. Subject is simply the void of decenteredness. And even literally you find this in some way already in Kant. Because the whole identity of the Kantian subject of pure apperception is that you are radically forever decentered from what you are as the thing in itself. And Kant openly approaches this problem in that mysterious part that I often quote the very finale of its very short second part of *Critique of Pure Reason* where Kant says ask the obvious question, but why are we limited only to phenomenal domain? Why can't we get to know things in themselves? And Kant gives a crazy answer, that it's all part of the divine plan to make us ethical beings. Kant says that if we were to know how things really are, then we would all be good because we would see what God wants blah blah, and we would be how should I put it, we would be ethical, we would act ethically but not for right ethical reasons. It's simply you see how things are, if I do something wrong I'm punished and so on. So we will be doing the right thing but not in the Kantian ethical sense, not for the sake of duty but because I don't know I am not stupid I don't want to suffer. It's pure calculation. And Kant even goes a step further and says: if we human beings were to have access to things in themselves we would turn into marionettes, *Marionetten*. Which is a crucial term used at the same time, you know, with Heinrich von Kleist and so on. So you know, Kant here in a beautiful way contradicts himself. The transcendental ego, this free self of self-apperception for Kant, is not the noumenal as he sometimes claims. No, it's pure self, of course it's not an empirical self, you don't encounter it. But it exists as a self-relating void only in the phenomenal universe. If self were to be able to transgress phenomenal universe and know itself as a thing in itself, it would be a marionette. Not a not a free self. So again I would say that you can see how the very base of Kantian subject is this absolutely constitutive decenteredness. The self is inaccessible to itself in its noumenal and that's what makes it a free self. If paradoxically if you were to get to know too much how things are in themselves you would become a marionette. You would no longer be a... I I am not saying I agree with it. I just effectively think that one can think subject as precisely that's how I read Hegel's subject is not a substance. Because when people read Hegel as asserting some kind of an absolute subject which generates everything and so on and so on, they are simply making subject a kind of mega-substance. And that is incidentally why I disagree with Charles Taylor. I not only envy him because fuck them, did you read in the news a month ago Habermas and Taylor got some big prize each of them million dollars and so on? My God. Okay but what I'm I wouldn't protest. What I'm saying is that Charles Taylor reads Hegel precisely in this wrong way. As if Hegelian absolute subject means that beneath us empirical egos there is some kind of absolute master subject who pulls the strings and so on all that. No, Hegel is absolutely not this. Hegel says explicitly in *Phenomenology* and other places that the only reality there is is our finite reality. The absolute doesn't mean there is another sphere of eternal... No, all that happens happens here. Sorry but I know so again going back to my point my point would have been that this idea of trace, space, time and so on, getting stuck I would connect it to it, this would have been something again where I as already answered previously where I would have been looking for a link between Derridean *différance*, I think *différance* is simply the Derridean name for this getting stuck, you know, like for this absolutely self-immanent obstacle. The problem is not that we cannot reach God. The problem is that we cannot reach ourselves. That we cannot fully be ourselves. And this does not imply that we that there is a true self, this is Jung, Carl Gustav Jung, that of course there is a substantial unconscious which we cannot reach. No, there is nothing beyond, it's simply this pure inaccessibility. And but the Lacanian trick here is that to claim that this inaccessibility, I cannot be fully myself, is the very resource of my self-identity. In the sense of that self-identity is always self-identity in Hegelian sense of this minimal... You know, Hegel knows this very well, that's why Hegel, be careful here, he introduces the term identity only at the beginning of the second volume of logic, of Logic of Essence. Which means identity is for Hegel already a reflexive category. You are not identity doesn't mean that you are simply what you are. Okay even if I say this I already said too much. Identity means that beyond all my positive properties I am something. That something is nothing and that's my identity. Identity names a hole in you. Which is why identity is ultimately that of a personal name. If I want to designate you as an self-identical individual I say your name. But I cannot, here we should be against Bertrand Russell, we cannot translate this name into a list of properties. Identity, you know what is identity? Let me repeat an old joke and then we conclude, I'm life is shit I'm falling apart. I'm sorry for repeating this joke but this is the logic of identity Hegelian. Imagine a species divided into sub-species. And then you have a certain sub-species in which species encounters itself. You know like for example Marx, he uses the Hegelian term *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*, oppositional determination. He says that we we have four elements of economic process. We have production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. I hate these people. Production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. But Marx says in a very Hegelian way that all these four together constitute the production process. So production is at the same time the all-encompassing production and an element of itself. Marx uses this wonderful Hegelian term that production encounters itself among its species as its own oppositional determination, *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*. So okay I will show you how this works. I'm sorry if you know it, an old wonderful Polish anti-communist joke that I quote often in my books. Just bear in mind that socialism claimed to be the highest achievement of humanity, the synthesis of all highest results of past history of humanity. So they claimed this: socialism in Poland at that point is the synthesis of all greatest achievements of humanity. From primitive societies it took barbarism. From ancient societies it took slavery. From medieval society it took domination. From capitalism it took exploitation. And now comes the beauty you guess it, from socialism it took the name. But you see the point? That's the point of identity where as Lacan puts it in a wonderful way the signifier falls into the signified. You need the signifier to guarantee the identity. That's identity. So again, in this sense I'm returning to identity. Identity is precisely the name for this radical reflexive split or self-difference. Identity means is literally the contradictory in order to be identical to yourself you have to reach that void. Like socialism is the greatest shit in the history of humanity but then you say but there it's only a name. No, and this is the big problem that already and Derrida knew it he wrote about it, how this is what Hegel is struggling in the second chapter of *Phenomenology* on *das Ding*, the thing and its properties. How difficult it is to to to define what is a thing beyond above its properties. It's too easy to say it's just a synthesis of these properties. But in what sense it is a synthesis? And Hegel knew it very well, even evolutionary biologists confirm him today, that you know things get complicated when you have the self-identity of a living being. Because there like there you can clearly distinguish between properties and the thing. Like I'm an animal I have a hand. But if you chop off that hand in some sense I still am an animal and so on. You know like what properties are constitutive in... Like are you simply your properties or are you something more? The Lacanian sense is no you are nothing more but this nothing is not just an absence. This nothing is the point of self-reflection and so on and so on. Sorry I propose that we end, no? Okay. And I promise, I promise that I will if you want it that I will send you the... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, yeah the hobbit, hobbit will remain. I'm so sorry. Did you really meet Brandom? Ah you just saw him, yeah okay yeah. No because it always interested me. I saw some scenes interviews by him on YouTube and the surprise is that you know he speaks totally as a normal guy. Like it's not the voice you expect from that monstrous figure you know what I mean. I also okay thanks very much. Let's call it a day. Thank you.
you know. Like again it's not things are running smoothly. The entire Hegelian or French Revolution things got stuck at terror and then you desperately try to... So again, I think what Freud calls drive is precisely this minimum of getting stuck as it were. You know like life and this is a wonderful idea which also explains the ambiguity of the notion of resistance that the true, I use consciously this naive terms, spirit begins not with some unheard of dynamics but when things get stuck. Like what is human sexuality? Okay animals do it but it's clearly part of the flow of things of life. Oh my God it's spring mating season ooh I do all the sounds to attract females we screw. It's just part of some standard run of things. What does sexual passion means? You get stuck. Instead of say, "Okay now we screwed small rabbits are on the way we go on hunting whatever," no you get stuck on that. But I still want you. It has no evolutionary function but I insist on it. The idea and even at the level of behavior my good friend one of the top brain scientists told me even at an empirical level how he is doing analysis of ape behavior. And he told me how if you give to an ape two primate two how do you call them she-apes whatever, female apes, one is obviously more attractive than the other. The ape is much more plastic, free than man. First the ape, male ape, tries to get the attractive one. When it doesn't without any problem the ape moves to the second one. But the specifically human thing would be that your very the very impossibility to get the beautiful ape would stuck you onto that one. Like when something become gets out of your reach you don't say, "Fuck it I cannot get it let's move elsewhere." No you remain stuck on that. This stuckness is maybe the Freudian term for for change. Which is why even socially things don't like today we live in an extremely dynamic society, late capitalism. All the time new products everything is in flux and so on. How will things really change? When they will get stuck. When you know things will no longer run smoothly and so on and so on. So back to you at this level as I already hinted before especially but we don't have time of course to go into it now because this is a very interesting topic philosophically what you mentioned. I know from early Derrida this notion of time-space, spacing of time and vice-versa and so on. But I won't say centeredness, I would say again that subject is the name a name for radical decenteredness. That would be my point. Subject is simply the void of decenteredness. And even literally you find this in some way already in Kant. Because the whole identity of the Kantian subject of pure apperception is that you are radically forever decentered from what you are as the thing in itself. And Kant openly approaches this problem in that mysterious part that I often quote the very finale of its very short second part of *Critique of Pure Reason* where Kant says ask the obvious question, but why are we limited only to phenomenal domain? Why can't we get to know things in themselves? And Kant gives a crazy answer, that it's all part of the divine plan to make us ethical beings. Kant says that if we were to know how things really are, then we would all be good because we would see what God wants blah blah, and we would be how should I put it, we would be ethical, we would act ethically but not for right ethical reasons. It's simply you see how things are, if I do something wrong I'm punished and so on. So we will be doing the right thing but not in the Kantian ethical sense, not for the sake of duty but because I don't know I am not stupid I don't want to suffer. It's pure calculation. And Kant even goes a step further and says: if we human beings were to have access to things in themselves we would turn into marionettes, *Marionetten*. Which is a crucial term used at the same time, you know, with Heinrich von Kleist and so on. So you know, Kant here in a beautiful way contradicts himself. The transcendental ego, this free self of self-apperception for Kant, is not the noumenal as he sometimes claims. No, it's pure self, of course it's not an empirical self, you don't encounter it. But it exists as a self-relating void only in the phenomenal universe. If self were to be able to transgress phenomenal universe and know itself as a thing in itself, it would be a marionette. Not a not a free self. So again I would say that you can see how the very base of Kantian subject is this absolutely constitutive decenteredness. The self is inaccessible to itself in its noumenal and that's what makes it a free self. If paradoxically if you were to get to know too much how things are in themselves you would become a marionette. You would no longer be a... I I am not saying I agree with it. I just effectively think that one can think subject as precisely that's how I read Hegel's subject is not a substance. Because when people read Hegel as asserting some kind of an absolute subject which generates everything and so on and so on, they are simply making subject a kind of mega-substance. And that is incidentally why I disagree with Charles Taylor. I not only envy him because fuck them, did you read in the news a month ago Habermas and Taylor got some big prize each of them million dollars and so on? My God. Okay but what I'm I wouldn't protest. What I'm saying is that Charles Taylor reads Hegel precisely in this wrong way. As if Hegelian absolute subject means that beneath us empirical egos there is some kind of absolute master subject who pulls the strings and so on all that. No, Hegel is absolutely not this. Hegel says explicitly in *Phenomenology* and other places that the only reality there is is our finite reality. The absolute doesn't mean there is another sphere of eternal... No, all that happens happens here. Sorry but I know so again going back to my point my point would have been that this idea of trace, space, time and so on, getting stuck I would connect it to it, this would have been something again where I as already answered previously where I would have been looking for a link between Derridean *différance*, I think *différance* is simply the Derridean name for this getting stuck, you know, like for this absolutely self-immanent obstacle. The problem is not that we cannot reach God. The problem is that we cannot reach ourselves. That we cannot fully be ourselves. And this does not imply that we that there is a true self, this is Jung, Carl Gustav Jung, that of course there is a substantial unconscious which we cannot reach. No, there is nothing beyond, it's simply this pure inaccessibility. And but the Lacanian trick here is that to claim that this inaccessibility, I cannot be fully myself, is the very resource of my self-identity. In the sense of that self-identity is always self-identity in Hegelian sense of this minimal... You know, Hegel knows this very well, that's why Hegel, be careful here, he introduces the term identity only at the beginning of the second volume of logic, of Logic of Essence. Which means identity is for Hegel already a reflexive category. You are not identity doesn't mean that you are simply what you are. Okay even if I say this I already said too much. Identity means that beyond all my positive properties I am something. That something is nothing and that's my identity. Identity names a hole in you. Which is why identity is ultimately that of a personal name. If I want to designate you as an self-identical individual I say your name. But I cannot, here we should be against Bertrand Russell, we cannot translate this name into a list of properties. Identity, you know what is identity? Let me repeat an old joke and then we conclude, I'm life is shit I'm falling apart. I'm sorry for repeating this joke but this is the logic of identity Hegelian. Imagine a species divided into sub-species. And then you have a certain sub-species in which species encounters itself. You know like for example Marx, he uses the Hegelian term *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*, oppositional determination. He says that we we have four elements of economic process. We have production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. I hate these people. Production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. But Marx says in a very Hegelian way that all these four together constitute the production process. So production is at the same time the all-encompassing production and an element of itself. Marx uses this wonderful Hegelian term that production encounters itself among its species as its own oppositional determination, *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*. So okay I will show you how this works. I'm sorry if you know it, an old wonderful Polish anti-communist joke that I quote often in my books. Just bear in mind that socialism claimed to be the highest achievement of humanity, the synthesis of all highest results of past history of humanity. So they claimed this: socialism in Poland at that point is the synthesis of all greatest achievements of humanity. From primitive societies it took barbarism. From ancient societies it took slavery. From medieval society it took domination. From capitalism it took exploitation. And now comes the beauty you guess it, from socialism it took the name. But you see the point? That's the point of identity where as Lacan puts it in a wonderful way the signifier falls into the signified. You need the signifier to guarantee the identity. That's identity. So again, in this sense I'm returning to identity. Identity is precisely the name for this radical reflexive split or self-difference. Identity means is literally the contradictory in order to be identical to yourself you have to reach that void. Like socialism is the greatest shit in the history of humanity but then you say but there it's only a name. No, and this is the big problem that already and Derrida knew it he wrote about it, how this is what Hegel is struggling in the second chapter of *Phenomenology* on *das Ding*, the thing and its properties. How difficult it is to to to define what is a thing beyond above its properties. It's too easy to say it's just a synthesis of these properties. But in what sense it is a synthesis? And Hegel knew it very well, even evolutionary biologists confirm him today, that you know things get complicated when you have the self-identity of a living being. Because there like there you can clearly distinguish between properties and the thing. Like I'm an animal I have a hand. But if you chop off that hand in some sense I still am an animal and so on. You know like what properties are constitutive in... Like are you simply your properties or are you something more? The Lacanian sense is no you are nothing more but this nothing is not just an absence. This nothing is the point of self-reflection and so on and so on. Sorry I propose that we end, no? Okay. And I promise, I promise that I will if you want it that I will send you the... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, yeah the hobbit, hobbit will remain. I'm so sorry. Did you really meet Brandom? Ah you just saw him, yeah okay yeah. No because it always interested me. I saw some scenes interviews by him on YouTube and the surprise is that you know he speaks totally as a normal guy. Like it's not the voice you expect from that monstrous figure you know what I mean. I also okay thanks very much. Let's call it a day. Thank you.