Hegel, Modern Art and the End of Art
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-04-07 · 2:06:35 · 16,668 words
psychoanalysisreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticsideologysubjectivityhistorycinema-art-culturephilosophy-general
In this seminar lecture Žižek moves through an extended exploration of psychoanalytic concepts, jouissance, the hysterical subject, the analyst's desire, fantasy as answer to Che vuoi?, anchored in Freud (the Käfer/Que faire? case), Lacan's four discourses, and Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier. He then pivots to theology and German Idealism, arguing via Lurianic Kabbalah, Walter Benjamin's essay on translation, and Chesterton that God is himself a 'broken vessel' whose fate depends on humanity's freedom. The lecture concludes by examining historical contingency and retroactive necessity through Dupuy's philosophy of time, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and the dialectics of truth and lie in relation to communism as 'necessary fiction'.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Laplanche's concept, cited approvingly, of the messages from parents/others that the child receives without knowing their meaning, generating the originary split of the subject.
as “prohibition turns into desire for prohibition”
Butler's formulation (cited approvingly): the prohibition of desire always generates a desire for the prohibition itself, the ritual that wards off enjoyment becomes itself the vehicle of dirty enjoyment.
Following Freud, Žižek insists obsessional neurosis is not a separate structure but a dialect of hysteria: both share the problem of the unanswerable question of desire.
as “subjectivity as feminine”
Against standard metaphysics that assigns subjectivity to men and objecthood to women, Žižek argues Lacanian subjectivity is structurally feminine: the abyss of 'What am I for the Other?' is the origin of the subject.
as “hysterical discourse / university discourse”
Lacan's four discourses invoked to distinguish inventive science (hysterical) from its institutionalisation (university discourse); the analyst occupies the place of objet a / surplus enjoyment.
as “objet petit a (object cause of desire)”
The analyst occupies the place of objet a, surplus enjoyment, a pure enigmatic object, precisely in order to provoke the analysand's desire without satisfying it.
Lacan's concept is implicitly at stake in the Wolfman case: Freud's financial help inadvertently installed him as knowing benefactor rather than opaque screen, generating paranoiac transference.
as “jouissance (surplus enjoyment)”
For Žižek following Lacan, enjoyment is defined not by its inaccessibility but by its dual character: you cannot attain it and you cannot get rid of it, it returns incessantly as symptom or ritual.
Žižek defines the Lacanian Real here as 'impossible but at the same time unavoidable, necessary', the best definition he can give of jouissance as real.
as “perversion as structure of Stalinism”
Stalinist communism has the clinical structure of perversion: cadres conceive of themselves as instruments of historical necessity, bypassing the hysterical question of subjectivity.
as “Che vuoi? (What do you want?)”
The fundamental question of desire for the subject: not 'what do I want?' but 'what am I for the Other's desire?', experienced as an enigmatic pressure from early childhood onward.
Fantasy's primary function is proto-ideological: it provides an answer to the unbearable question of what the Other wants from us, stabilising desire by scripting the Other's demand.
The development of religion is not merely our changing human understanding of a fixed God; it is an event within God himself coming to terms with himself, our discoveries are God's self-discovery.
Althusser's notion of the subject as product of ideological misrecognition is invoked, then corrected: the illusion of spontaneous agency does not mask a pre-subjective process but masks the void of subjectivity itself.
Luria's Kabbalistic notion, God contracts into punctual void to make room for creation, cited by Žižek as the move German Idealism translates into the subject's self-negation.
Drawing on Lurianic Kabbalah (tzimtzum / broken vessel) and Chesterton, Žižek argues God himself is a fragment: divinity is incomplete and depends on human freedom to realise itself.
The truth of a story resides not in one authoritative version but in the resonance among multiple contradictory versions held simultaneously, as in Kieślowski's Blind Chance or the seven last words of Christ.
as “broken vessel (shattered vessel)”
Lurianic Kabbalah's image of creation's fragility: divine light shatters the vessel of reality, leaving fragments; Žižek uses this via Benjamin to theorise translation, art, and theological incompleteness.
Following Dupuy: events are contingent at the moment of choice but, once they occur, retroactively ground their own necessity, the present changes the past counterfactually without altering the facts.
as “truth through a lie”
Sometimes only a counterfactual or ideological lie (e.g. communist utopia, a conspiracy theory) makes visible the truth of a social arrangement; the lie cannot simply be discarded without losing the truth.
Implicitly present in the discussion of ideology and counter-factuality as how abstract structures (communist ideal, God) operate as real forces even when they are 'lies'.
Stories he reaches for 10
Žižek opens by citing what he calls a Lacanian joke about time: 'My fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée.' He uses it to explain his own attitude to punctuality and to illustrate the performative constitution of a concept.
“My fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée.”
Žižek describes his own drama retelling Antigone in three versions: Sophocles' original, one where Antigone wins but causes the city to burn, and a Stalinist version where the Chorus arrests both Antigone and Creon as threats to collective good, ending with a Brechtian examination and both executed.
“While Creon and Antigone are fighting, the Chorus steps over, arrests them both and says: 'You are a threat to common good.'”
Apartheid ideology justified racial separation not through overt white supremacy but through a perverse multiculturalism: giving blacks full rights would destroy their authentic culture, turning them into vulgar Western consumers. Žižek reads this as a supreme example of ideological manipulation legible only in the official documents.
“Their point was not blacks are less or whatever, but pure hypocritical false multiculturalism: if we give to blacks all the rights like to us, in one generation their authentic original culture will be lost.”
Napoleon took the crown from the Pope's hands and placed it on his own head; the Pope replied: 'Sire, I know what you want to do, you want to destroy Christianity. Believe me you will not succeed. We the Church have been trying to do this for years.' Illustrates the self-destructive excess within Christianity.
“Sire, I know what you want to do, you want to destroy Christianity. Believe me you will not succeed. We the church are trying to do this for years.”
Freud's financial support of the destitute Wolfman after WWI, though humanely intended, was a clinical mistake: it gave the borderline/paranoid patient the nucleus of a paranoiac construction ('Why is Freud doing this? What is his plot?'). Muriel Gardiner, by contrast, maintained analytic neutrality and effectively cured him.
“Freud instead of leaving his own desire, analyst, totally impenetrable, blank... Freud provided the crucial element for a paranoiac construction.”
Caesar was free at the Rubicon not to cross; but once he crossed it became his fate. Dupuy's point: contingent act retroactively grounds its own necessity without that being empirical determinism.
“Caesar was free there. He may have not crossed the Rubicon. But the moment he did, it was his fate.”
At a UCLA conference on Spinoza, a defender could not bring himself to accept Spinoza's own conclusion that women have fewer rights because they have less power. Žižek then points out that the 'affect imitation' Deleuze celebrates was, for Spinoza himself, exemplified by the horrific lynching mob that murdered the De Witt brothers.
“When Spinoza speaks about imitation of affects it is precisely this furious crowd. It's not this Deleuzian beauty of affects.”
Žižek's New Zealand Maori artist friends initially gave him the official line about spirits dictating their art; over dinner they revealed they had agents in London and New York tracking trends to ensure the spirits told them something fashionable. Žižek celebrates this as the right relationship to one's cultural tradition.
“They had one agent in London, one in New York which informed them what are the latest trends. And then they made sure that the spirits told them something that fitted the latest fashion.”
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle staged Tristan und Isolde so that Isolde never arrives in Act 3, she stayed with her husband. The dying Tristan imagines her presence reflected in the audience's gaze, and the final 'Liebestod' is Tristan's fantasy enabling him to die in peace. Žižek reads this as the correct Che vuoi? / intersubjective structure of desire.
“The whole famous final song, the death of Isolde, is Tristan's imagination to enable him to die in peace.”
While Žižek was giving a talk, Alain Badiou (who had borrowed his phone) not only took the call in the room but asked Žižek to speak more quietly so he could hear Badiou on the phone. Žižek cites this as the definition of absolute friendship.
“Slavoj, please could you talk a little bit lower, I cannot hear Badiou.”
Works invoked 28
Žižek's own book; briefly referenced by a student asking about the 'sublime center' and ideology; Žižek acknowledges the topology.
Žižek's own book; mentioned as where he used the dedication anecdote about Badiou diagnosing him as hysterical.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera; Žižek is devoted to it ('I'm a Wagnerian'); praises Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's staging where Isolde never arrives and the Liebestod is Tristan's dying imagination.
Mel Gibson's film; sarcastically called 'violent sado-masochistic gay cinema' and criticised for vulgarly linearising the seven last words into a consistent narrative.
Described as Butler's most Hegelian later work and containing the best formula for Žižek's argument about prohibition and enjoyment.
Jesus of Nazareth film
Zeffirelli's TV film; hated both aesthetically and intellectually; criticised alongside Gibson for the same vulgar linearisation of the passion narrative.
The Ghost Writer film
Polanski's film (from Robert Harris's novel) used to illustrate the dialectic of truth and lie: the CIA-plant conspiracy is 'not true but would explain everything if it were'.
Inuit film by a director who died shortly after; Žižek praises it as genuinely watchable without requiring guilty compassion, and uses the controversy over its happy ending to argue that changing tradition is itself traditional.
Così fan tutte opera
Mozart opera; Žižek praises Peter Sellars's staging as ingenious for revealing the true tragic love between Don Alfonso and Despina.
Subjects of Desire book
Butler's first book and, in Žižek's view, her best, a very good reading of Hegel; he regrets she left Hegel studies for gender studies.
Spinoza's work cited for the 'right is power' passage (women have fewer rights because less strong); used against Deleuzian idealisation of Spinoza.
Kieślowski's film cited as the model cinematic illustration of superposition of narratives, the same story branching into three irreconcilable outcomes, none more 'true' than the others.
Co-written by Macherey; mentioned as context for situating Macherey as an Althusserian.
Divina Commedia book
Dante's work cited as an example of how a great original text becomes itself a fragment when submitted to Benjaminian translation.
Essays on Otherness book
Laplanche's collected essays; recommended for understanding psychoanalytic fantasy and the lost object of desire via the enigmatic signifier.
Hegel ou Spinoza book
Pierre Macherey's book; cited as an honest intellectual trajectory, arrogantly defending Spinoza against Hegel, then reading Hegel seriously and dropping the whole line.
Old film mentioned in passing as the one in which Vanessa Redgrave plays Muriel Gardiner ('Julia'), contextualising Gardiner's identity.
Gérard Lebrun's book on Hegel; described as 'one of the best ever written books on Hegel'; credited with converting Althusser to fascination with Hegel.
Le sage trompeur book
Jean-Claude Milner's book defending Spinoza's excommunication; Žižek finds it convincingly argues the darkness of Spinoza's teaching, appealing to his 'Stalinist instincts'.
Zachary Mason's book of alternate Odyssey versions; described as one where 'the idea is better than the realization' but liked for illustrating superposition of narratives.
Cited as the 'German worse film' that does the same thing as Blind Chance; illustrates the same superposition-of-outcomes structure.
Benjamin's early essay; the pivot of Žižek's argument on translation as metonymic broken-vessel relation rather than metaphoric approximation.
Trainspotting film
Mentioned in passing as the film that made Ewan McGregor politically acceptable to the left before he became a Jedi.
Žižek's book described as 'slightly confused' but containing a good section on the three-generation mythological structure (sin / crippled father / beautiful woman).
Brecht's poem applied in Žižek's Antigone to the Stalinist chorus executing Antigone with the logic that any virtuous motive can be reframed as hidden complicity with the enemy.
French films; Manon des Sources (Emmanuelle Béart) cited as an example of the three-generation mythological structure: grandparental sin, crippled father, beautiful third-generation woman.
Moses and Monotheism book
Freud's late work; cited as evidence that the secret of monotheism is not some pre-Judaic pagan residue but the founding gesture of monotheism itself.
Serge Leclaire's book; praised for the Port of Jakarta dream case that parallels the Käfer/Que faire? example in showing the superficial phonetic logic of the unconscious.
People invoked 44
Mel Gibson negative
The Passion is sarcastically called 'violent sado-masochistic gay cinema' and criticised, like Zeffirelli, for linearising and sensationalising the passion narrative rather than preserving its superposition.
Named alongside Santner as a Jewish friend who tries to rehabilitate Judaism's theological greatness through the maintenance of divine anxiety.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Dupuy's philosophy of time and retroactive necessity (contingency that retroactively grounds its own necessity) is the framework Žižek uses for the lecture's concluding section on history and communism.
Serge Leclaire positive
First-generation Lacanian; his book Psychoanalyser is praised for the Port of Jakarta dream case that parallels the Käfer/Que faire? example.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
His staging of Tristan und Isolde, where Isolde never arrives and her final song is Tristan's dying fantasy, is described as ingenious, absolutely right, and the perfect illustration of the Che vuoi? structure of intersubjective desire.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Named alongside Benjamin as one of the two Frankfurt School thinkers who truly deserved to survive.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: Žižek develops Lacan's four discourses, jouissance, objet a, Che vuoi?, and the Real as his main framework for the talk.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my beloved theologian'; quoted on Christianity as a sword that separates rather than a chain that connects, and on God rejoicing in the separation of the universe into living souls.
Louis Althusser positive
Discussed as an anti-Hegelian who eventually came to doubt Spinoza and became 'deeply intrigued' by Hegel; Žižek corrects the Althusserian subject by arguing ideology masks the void of subjectivity itself rather than a pre-subjective process.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Criticised for over-emphasising the negative-theological aspect of Lacan (lack/prohibition) and for a misreading of Spinoza's affect-imitation as celebratory rather than as the horror of the lynching crowd.
Peter Sellars positive
Called 'not an idiot' and praised for his TV stagings of the three Mozart operas, especially Così fan tutte where the true tragic love is between Don Alfonso and Despina.
Stephen Kotkin positive
Stalin's biographer, described as fanatically anti-communist but surprisingly nuanced: Kotkin accepts that without Stalin a technocratic Gorbachev-line would have prevailed.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek says The Psychic Life of Power contains the best formula for his own argument ('prohibition of desire always turns into desire for prohibition'); he thinks her Hegel scholarship (Subjects of Desire) is her best work, and regrets she moved to gender studies.
Pier Paolo Pasolini positive
Praised indirectly: the Vatican's list of great films on religious themes included Pasolini but not Zeffirelli, which Žižek calls a surprisingly good selection.
Mentioned as among those present at the UCLA conference on Spinoza.
Paul Claudel positive
Called a 'conservative Catholic whom I like'; quoted for his formulation that the ultimate secret of Christianity is that God is helpless without us.
Antonio Negri negative
Grouped with Deleuze and Rancière as misreading Spinoza's affect imitation in a Deleuzian celebratory key.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as a 'good friend' with two anecdotes: Badiou diagnosed Žižek as hysterical (not obsessional) and later took a phone call during Žižek's lecture asking him to speak more quietly, Žižek calls this 'absolute friendship'.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His short book on Pilate and Jesus is described as 'not too good theoretically' but pointing to the legal meaning of 'deliver' in the passion narrative, the chain of handing-over without formal judgment.
Gérard Lebrun positive
His book La Patience du Concept (The Patience of the Concept) described as 'one of the best ever written books on Hegel'; it was what opened Althusser's eyes to Hegel and made him doubt his Spinozism.
Pierre Macherey positive
Praised as 'honest': wrote Hegel ou Spinoza defending Spinoza against Hegel, but after reading Hegel seriously dropped the line entirely.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Described as very intelligent; Žižek approves of his book Le Sage Trompeur defending Spinoza's excommunication as correct, appealing to Žižek's 'Stalinist instincts'.
Isaac Luria positive
16th-century Kabbalist whose cosmology of tzimtzum and broken vessel Žižek uses as the theological backbone for his argument about God's self-constitution through human history.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Žižek sides with Kant over Spinoza; criticises the Deleuzian celebration of Spinoza's affects and points out Spinoza's own 'right is power' position entails women have fewer rights. He approves of Jean-Claude Milner's defence of Spinoza's excommunication.
Carl Jung negative
Used as the negative contrast to Freud: the Jungian would search for deep mythic meanings in the Käfer dream, whereas Freud attends to the superficial phonetic link.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as a 'good friend' who will visit the following week; narrated the anecdote of Dolar's empathetic mistake with the Slovenian psychotic patient as a counter-example to the correct analytic stance.
Jacques Rancière negative
Briefly mentioned as among those (with Negri and Deleuze) who misread Spinoza's affect imitation as emancipatory rather than recognising its horror.
Roman Polanski positive
The Ghost Writer cited as the illustration of truth requiring a lie: a conspiracy that is not true but would explain everything if it were.
Franco Zeffirelli negative
Hated; noted as an open neo-fascist who was a member of the Italian parliament on a neo-fascist list; his Jesus of Nazareth is criticised for vulgarly linearising the seven last words into a consistent narrative.
Described as a friend with whom Žižek has a 'running conflict' over whether Judaism's preservation of divine anxiety (Che vuoi?) is theologically superior to Christianity's resolution through love.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Blind Chance cited as the cinematic model of superposition of narratives; the 'right' version over Run Lola Run.
Run Lola Run described as the 'German worse film' doing the same superposition-of-outcomes structure as Kieślowski's Blind Chance.
Herbert Marcuse negative
Mentioned as one of the Frankfurt School figures who were fashionable but did not deserve to survive.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Named alongside Hegel and Eckhart as German Idealists on the right track for immanent theology, the development of religion as internal to God himself.
Walter Benjamin positive
Celebrated as one of only two Frankfurt School figures who deserved to survive (with Adorno); his essay 'The Task of the Translator' is the pivot for the broken vessel / superposition thesis.
Jean Laplanche positive
Cited approvingly for the enigmatic signifier and the theory of how the child's subjectivity arises from not knowing what it is for the Other, Žižek finds this a beautiful development of Lacanian desire.
Meister Eckhart positive
Cited as a precursor of the German Idealist line on immanent theology: the development of religion as part of God's self-becoming.
Max Horkheimer negative
Briefly mentioned alongside Marcuse as a Frankfurt School figure who did not deserve to survive, in contrast to Adorno and Benjamin.
Californian Spinozian who relayed to Žižek the story of Althusser's late fascination with Hegel after reading Lebrun.
Ivan Böszörményi-Nagy positive
Existential family therapist whose concept 'destructive entitlement' (transgenerational transmission of trauma) is briefly noted as related to Žižek's three-generation mythological structure.
Muriel Gardiner positive
Praised as a 'feminine bitch' (intended positively) who maintained proper analytic neutrality with the Wolfman, effectively curing him where Freud's sentimental financial help had triggered paranoia.
Sigmund Freud positive
Praised for the Käfer/Que faire? case as showing what makes Freud distinctively Freudian (not Jungian); also discussed critically for the clinical error with the Wolfman.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the formula on the Sphinx (Egyptian enigmas were enigmas for the Egyptians themselves), for the dialectic of alienation and Aufhebung, and as the philosopher Žižek aligns with against Spinoza.
Martin Luther positive
Praised for the strict procedural logic of declaring Pilate's wife's voice the voice of the devil: Christ wanted to be crucified, so anyone who tried to prevent it was on the devil's side.
What it argues
jouissance as both impossible and unavoidablethe hysterical subject versus the pervert as political-clinical typesfantasy as answer to Che vuoi? / the enigma of the Other's desireGod as broken vessel: theology of divine incompletenesstranslation, superposition of narratives, and the broken vessel metaphorretroactive necessity and historical contingency (Dupuy)communism as necessary ideological lie that reveals bourgeois truth
Dialectical moves 10
“The real is not lack but excess: you cannot get jouissance, but you also cannot get rid of it—the more you try, the more it returns.”
Inverts the standard (mis)reading of Lacan where the Real equals absence; Žižek insists the Real is inescapable surplus, not missing object.
“The prohibition of desire always turns into a desire for prohibition.”
The obsessional's protective rituals themselves become invested with the very dirty enjoyment they were meant to exclude, desire sneaks back through its own negation.
“Far from being the most open, the pervert has the unconscious most obfuscated: perverts do all that hysterics only dream about doing, yet nowhere is repression more radical than in perversion.”
Inverts the 1960s-'68 rehabilitation of perversion over hysteria: doing the prohibited act is a deeper form of repression, not liberation.
“Subjectivity is not masculine agency but is as such feminine: masculine subjectivity is a compromise, an escape from the abyss of subjectivity.”
Reverses the standard metaphysical identification of subject with man and object with woman; subjectivity in its pure form is the hysterical question, not perverse self-certainty.
“The enigma of the other is the enigma for the other himself—the Sphinx is a mystery not just to us but to the ancient Egyptians themselves.”
Reverses the asymmetry between knower and unknown: the Other does not conceal a secret it knows; it is equally lost to itself, which is what makes it truly enigmatic.
“God does not need us less but needs us more: the ultimate message of Christianity is not that God will save us but that God needs our help.”
Inverts the theistic comfort of divine protection into a demand: divine sacrifice delivers human freedom, not divine guarantee.
“A good translation does not approximate the original—it treats the original itself as a fragment, and both together form two shards of a broken vessel.”
Inverts the hierarchy: the translation is not subordinate copy of a complete original; the original is itself already incomplete, revealed as such only by the translation.
“Either I fail (obstacle prevents success) or—if she says yes—there was no obstacle at all: the obstacle is retroactively cancelled, not overcome.”
Dupuy's asymmetric logic of choice: success does not mean overcoming the obstacle but establishing that the obstacle never existed, failure and success are not symmetrical outcomes.
“Those who believe in me will not be judged; those who don't believe will also not be judged—they are already condemned.”
From John's Gospel: the dialectic of judgment is asymmetric, it is not future judgment that divides believers from unbelievers but a prior, already-accomplished split.
“Communism is an impossible ideological dream—a necessary lie through which alone the truth of bourgeois alienation becomes visible; but if you discard the lie to go straight for the truth, you lose the truth itself.”
Truth requires the mediation of a constitutive lie; the counterfactual (communism) cannot be simply set aside once its 'falsity' is acknowledged without destroying the insight it enables.
Claims 19
reframes
The Lacanian Real is not a negative-theological absence but precisely what cannot be gotten rid of: jouissance returns insistently however one tries to escape it.Lacanian Real / jouissance
rejects
Deleuze's critique of Lacan overemphasises the negative-theological dimension (the lost object, Oedipal prohibition) and misses the inescapability of surplus enjoyment.Deleuze's reading of Lacan
asserts
The ultimate lost object of desire is not some external thing but the desiring subject itself—subjectivity is constitutively being a lost object for oneself.origin of desire / subjectivity
asserts
Lacanian subjectivity is structurally feminine: the masculine subject is a perverse compromise that avoids the abyss of 'What am I for the Other?'gender and subjectivity in Lacan
asserts
The origin of desire is intersubjective: the child's earliest experience is not wanting something but the enigma of what it is for the Other's desire—this is where Laplanche's enigmatic signifier is decisive.origin of desire / Laplanche
asserts
Stalinism has the clinical structure of perversion, not because of its atrocities but because cadres conceived of themselves as instruments of historical necessity, bypassing the question of subjectivity.Stalinism / perversion
asserts
Fantasy's primary function is proto-ideological: it answers the Che vuoi? by scripting what the Other wants from us.fantasy / ideology
asserts
God himself does not know what he wants from humanity; theology must transpose the enigma of divine demand onto God himself—our history of understanding God is part of God's own self-becoming.God / theology / German Idealism
asserts
Christianity's deepest insight, shared with Lurianic Kabbalah, is that God is a broken vessel—incomplete, helpless without human freedom—not a guarantor of salvation.Christianity / Gnosticism / theology
reframes
Benjamin's theory of translation is not about a metaphoric approximation to the original; original and translation relate as two fragments of a broken vessel, with the original itself treated as a fragment.translation / Benjamin
asserts
The truth of a story resides in the superposition of contradictory versions, not in any single authoritative original—it is wrong to ask which version is 'the true one'.narrative / translation / interpretation
asserts
Historical events are contingent at the moment of decision, but once they occur they retroactively ground their own necessity (Dupuy's logic): not empirical determinism but counterfactual retroaction.historical contingency / necessity
asserts
Communism as idea functions as a necessary ideological lie: it cannot be realised, but only through it can one see clearly what is alienated in bourgeois society.communism / ideology
reframes
The Althusserian subject as ideological misrecognition does not mask a pre-subjective process but masks the void and cut of subjectivity itself.Althusserian subject / ideology
asserts
Racial self-humiliation by white colonial discourse (celebrating indigenous 'spiritual depth') is the ultimate form of racism, not its critique.racism / multiculturalism / colonial ideology
asserts
Apartheid ideological documents are more revealing of ideological manipulation than any theoretical critique, because they show how the regime tried to justify itself through false multiculturalism.apartheid / ideology
reframes
The Jewish–Christian difference in theology is that Judaism maintains the anxiety of Che vuoi? (what does God want?) while Christianity resolves it through love—but Žižek argues Christ's own death (Eli, Eli) shows Christianity preserves the gap.Judaism vs. Christianity / theology
rejects
Spinoza's 'right is power' is not an aberration but Spinoza at his purest, and the Deleuzian celebration of Spinoza's affects/multitudes ignores that imitation of affects was for Spinoza the horror of the lynching mob.Spinoza / Deleuze / Negri / affect
asserts
The great films about the Gospel that display all seven last words in superposition are superior to Zeffirelli and Gibson, who vulgarly linearise them into a consistent narrative.Christian passion narrative / cinema / superposition
Quotes 17
“The best definition of the real: that it's impossible but at the same time unavoidable, necessary. You can't get it, but you can't get rid of it.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian Real as impossible-yet-inescapable
“The prohibition of desire always turns into a desire for prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · obsessional enjoyment of the prohibition itself
“The origin of desire is not 'I want that,' whatever the stupidities are. No, the origin is: 'What am I for the other's desire?'”Slavoj Žižek · intersubjective origin of desire
“Nowhere is the unconscious more obfuscated, inaccessible, than in perversion. So perversion is repression at its most radical.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion as deepest repression
“The enigma of the other is the enigma for the other himself—it's not just that we have some impenetrable divinity which is beyond enigmatic for us.”Slavoj Žižek · the Other does not know its own secret
“It's not that religion is historical in the sense that... but it's that the development of religion is immanent to God himself. Our discovering God is also an event of God himself coming to terms with himself.”Slavoj Žižek · immanent history of God
“God did not simply create the world out of nothing. He first had to create nothingness in himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Lurianic tzimtzum / divine self-contraction
“God is helpless without us. The ultimate message of Christianity is not this playing it safe because there is some old jerk up there who will help us. God needs our help.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as divine dependence on human freedom
“It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on Christianity as broken vessel / separation
“A truly ingenious translation doesn't idealize original, it treats the original itself as a fragment—both original and translation form two shards of a broken vessel.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjaminian theory of translation
“It's wrong to ask but which is the true one? No, the truth of this superposition itself. The truth is what echoes among them all.”Slavoj Žižek · superposition of narratives as the locus of truth
“If at this pre-election Monsieur Balladur will win, his victory will be necessary. Once you do something, the moment you do it it becomes necessary.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive necessity (Dupuy)
“If she says 'yes,' we cannot simply say that I successfully overcame the obstacle. The proper way to say: I established that there was no obstacle at all.”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetric logic of choice / retroactive necessity
“Sometimes precisely in a dialectical process you need a lie, a counterfactual element, to see the truth... If you discard the lie to go directly at the truth, you lose the truth itself.”Slavoj Žižek · truth requires the mediation of a constitutive lie
“I claim in my historical pessimism that unfortunately the same goes for communism. It is an instrument which enables us to see clearly what's wrong, alienated in bourgeois society, but is basically a lie, an impossible ideological dream.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as necessary impossible ideal
“My fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian joke on performative constitution and time
“It is always the ultimate racism when white people in this wrong way celebrate other races, this self-humiliation.”Slavoj Žižek · inverted racism of white self-abasement
Transcript 29 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Sorry for this one minute delay because you know in Germany, and I was half German educated, they have this strict rule, hierarchic you know. I don't know if you were there recently, but you know in the sense of it measures your status what a delay you are allowed to have. You know, if you are a nobody, on time. If you are some assistant professor, five minutes. If you are a big professor, a quarter of an hour. They call it akademische Viertelstunde, no? And then if you are a mega-star, you know. So I'm not playing those games. I'm here Lacanian. You know that wonderful joke? I always quote it. You must know it, by Lacan. This is my attitude towards time. You know: My fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée, you know. That's how I think you should do it with time. Okay, listen. Today I decided nonetheless to keep, it's against my nature I know, but to keep to the program. That is to say what I've been promising you from the first day. All that stuff about God, counterfactuals and so on. Although I must warn you in advance, of course I'm an atheist, but my big problem is precisely is there an option to refer to so-called divine dimension, theology, as a materialist? But not in that condescending pseudo-Marxist way, you know: Men project onto the idea of God all their noble properties and so on and so on. Okay, I just want to, to begin with, because I was checking some quotes this morning to help, I cannot restrain from telling you, I found a passage in Freud which I think in its very simplicity makes it so clear, to cut a long story short, why Freud is not Jung. Like what is a Freudian bug? It's an early one from when Freud was writing letters, exchanging letters with Wilhelm Fliess, another doctor colleague, and Freud reports on a guy who is of course anonymous, identified, he always reminds me of this type of you know in science fiction movies these evil murderers who keep their glasses down there to show how they're really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. You know the Orson Welles story of a scorpion and the frog? And in the middle of the river the scorpion bites the frog, even though, well I'm a scorpion here you know. Even if I'm put to some tribunal, politically correct, a bad taste joke has to be made. Categorically. Okay, sorry, let's go seriously. Okay, in a patient anonymous, of course called E like equality, just to refer to, and the dream that this patient reports to Freud is a very simple one. This happened when this guy, patient, this was a child patient of Freud, he had ten years only, and he dreamed compulsively a couple of times about, how do you call it, in German it is Käfer, it's a beetle, bug, a small bug running around and the guy is trying to catch it. Now what a Jungian would have done here? Look to all possible associations: bug, is it a racist metaphor? For example if some of you maybe know it, I think that in South Africa, in apartheid, the white light term for blacks was Kaffir, no? And even though a bad guy from South Africa told it to me, I will tell it to you because I think it's more it reflects more the stupidity of the white man, you know. The joke is, the South African white guy comes to Europe and sees five workers, white, working on something, doesn't matter. And he says: How can you, how can you spend in such a stupid inefficient way work force, workforce here? Give me ten Kaffirs and I will do it alone, you know. Racist joke, but this is the only elegant aspect that I like in South Africa, apartheid South Africa, that they at least had the decency to make jokes on themselves. Otherwise, again, if you want to learn something about real South Africa, that's what I advise you to read: official apartheid documents. Ideological, no? There, there you can see what ideological manipulation is. Me with my bad taste I almost throw up, because you know, okay this, it's of course pure bullshit, but how they tried to convince themselves that they are not doing a bad thing, how did they justify the regime, apartheid? Their point was not blacks are less or whatever, but pure hypocritical, false of course, multiculturalism, no? The idea was if we give to blacks all the rights like to us, in one generation their authentic original culture will be lost. Imagine they will become vulgar, vulgar consumerists like us. No, they'll become with those, all those pressures. And here they played another game. They were devils, the whites there. They always reminded the blacks that before even they were there, the blacks, the so-called, how would you call them, first generation aborigines, Hottentot, Bushman were already there. So this was another disgusting white strategy, to portray them as agents who defend black minorities against black majority. But my point is, okay, now they have the whole orgasmic ecstasy of compassion. What about those precious spiritual exercises of Hottentot and Bushman? And then they even went, the white ideologists, into some kind of a fake, fake self-humiliation. Like: We live in the western way, we are so vulgar consumerists, we just think about productivity, exploit. Isn't it that in a ritual performed by a simple Bushman priest there is more profound wisdom there than in... I explode when I hear this. This is why I'm always suspicious. For me it's always the ultimate racism when white people in this wrong way celebrate other races, you know, this self-humiliation. Like it's interesting to read memoirs of British colonial officers in India. Ooh they explode always: We British are so so, just when we see here Hindu saints you see depths inaccessible to us. This is why those that I really like, with whom I am friends, artists, some theorists from those non-white countries, I like them because most of them say: Fuck our culture. No, okay, you take our culture and we want to be more consumerists than you, you know. Like maybe I already told you this story years ago, not this year I'm sure. My best friends, how do you call it, New Zealand artists. My best friends. Why? You know, Maori, no? And although they were also racists there, one should at least admit one small thing to the white colonizers in New Zealand. They at least had the decency that if you have a little bit of aboriginal blood with you, it's not a handicap like this may hurt you. It's considered a necessary ingredient of the elite. Okay, it has its own racist logic, but maybe better than nothing. What I want to say is that I met there some artists who first gave me all that bullshit, you know like: We speak with the wood, spirits dictate us what to paint and so on. That was the official party line. Okay. Then I met them for dinner, we began to talk like normal human beings, and I learned the truth. Yeah, it's true but they had one agent in London, one in New York which informed them what are the latest trends. And then they made sure that the spirits told them something that was like, that fitted the latest fashion, no? And I loved them. I don't think you can in any way say that they were commercialized or whatever. That's how you do it. You have the right to proceed like that. Like maybe you know this story, it's nice to give an example what I'm aiming at. Watch that movie. It's nonetheless not politically correct. When I see a third world movie and it's shit I say: Sorry guys, I go to multiplex. I prefer a Hollywood blockbuster. But there is a very good movie. Did you see it? It's now around over ten years, I think it was made in around the Canadian Inuit movie Fast Runner. It retells an old Inuit, okay Eskimo in old terms, legend. Two tribes or two groups fighting each other, blah blah. It was really, except some camera help, it was really done by Inuits. And what surprised me is how watchable the film is, I mean you know you don't have to, you can really enjoy it. So please take it, you can maybe download it. You don't have to play this game of feeling guilty, "Oh my god I have to have compassion for Inuits." No, it's a good movie, simply no? And okay, that's my story and sorry if you know it. I read, I have a whole book even a couple of books on this film, and I read there how a white journalist, stupid jerk who wanted to be politically correct, attacked the director of conceding too much to commercialization, to Hollywood interests. Why? Because he, this is a restaging of an ancient Inuit legend, and in the original legend the two parts of the tribe or whatever, the enemies, kill each other to the end. It's a catastrophe at the end. While in the film they just throw out one bad guy, not even kill him, just reject him, excommunicate him and then it's kind of a happy ending. And the stupid journalist accused the guy of you know succumbing to Hollywood commercialism. And again, maybe you know it, I'm sorry if you do, he got the answer of a lifetime, no? The guy told him, the director who unfortunately died of cancer or whatever a couple of months later, he told him: No, you are Western cultural imperialist here. Because this, when you retell the story and change it according to present circumstances, precisely this is part of our tradition. Sticking to the original, you know this fetishizing of "Oh the original myth," this is a Western myth. We are all the time doing this. You know the story is not a fixed authentic original. You use it, you change it, turn around whatever to be... and I think so again, you see this is how true racism, much more refined, refined works, precisely in this way. Okay so, that I don't get lost, back to Jung-Freud, this example. Yes, I know where the association went. Käfer. The meaning is interesting that in East Germany, if some of you were there, somebody told me that and I like this as a metaphor, that those in East Germany, ex-DDR, who are still communist sympathizers use the term Käfer, beetle, as you know self-designation and so on. Okay but my point is this one. Again, a Jungian would have looked at all possible mythic meanings, Käfer, what does it stand for? You relate to Käfer. The boy, does this mean fear? Fear of animality? Käfer, the symbol of his mother, father, whatever. You simply see a scene, a boy trying to catch a bug, a beetle, and you look for a deeper meaning. Freud's solution is totally different. It's a very simple bug, but just observe the approach. When the session was over already, this patient he mentioned so offhand: Oh by the way, I had a French when I was ten years old, a French how do you call it, governess, on whom I had a crush. And then Freud immediately becoming attentive, asking: What does she remember about this government, governess? And then the patient tells: Oh, now I remember. And you know this is what you remember at the end as an unimportant detail is usually the most important thing. She often didn't know what to do and expressed herself in French "Que faire? Que faire?" (What to do?). And that's the link. Käfer stands for Que faire? (What to do?). Then you learn that the whole trauma is included in it. That this "Que faire?" was on the one hand the boy had a crush on the French governess and remembers this "Que faire?" of her. Second thing more directly Oedipal: the boy, the guy already as a boy heard a rumor that his mother didn't, it took her a long time to decide to marry the boy's father. She was, she was oscillating, procrastinating like "Que faire?" (What to do?). But you see now the Freudian approach. You should totally put in brackets all this fascinating presence of of the image and then look "Oh what deeper meaning." No, it doesn't matter. It's just this totally superficial link which matters. The most famous example here is and although he was not an orthodox Lacanian, but you can find it easily, Serge Leclaire, one of the first generation. He wrote a wonderful book translated twenty-thirty years ago called *Psychoanalyser*, To Psychoanalyze, where he gives another example. Again, very simple one. A guy, a patient of his was dreaming all the time about being on a ship in capital of Indonesia, whatever it was then colony, I don't know, Jakarta. Of arriving with a ship to the port of Jakarta. And you know what the analysis shows? Nothing with fascination with foreigners and so on, exotism. No, it's he really hated a guy, but wasn't fully aware of it, who was his best friend. His name was Jack, and it's in French you say *le porc de*, which means Jack is a swine, you say *le porc de Jack*. Jack the swine. And then the dream translated into the Port of Jakarta, Jack. You see, why is this important? Especially this first Freudian example, Käfer, Que faire?. What I also like is that an image stands for a question. It's a question of desire: "Que faire?" (What to do?). You know, you must know this story. I don't know if this is true, this story, but the rumor is. Here I say *Se non vero, ben trovato*, you know, even if it's not true it's a good one, that you know the origin of the term "Kangaroo." The first stupid white explorers arrived there and asked natives, whatever: What's that animal, no? And they answered "Kangaroo, Kangaroo." And they baptized it Kangaroo. No, when they later learned, they learned that the original meaning of "Kangaroo" was "I don't understand you." They just replied like "What do you mean? We don't understand you, what do you mean?" you know. It's nice. And I think this is maybe the elementary procedure in the way of ideology, that you don't know what and you obfuscate this enigma through an object. Like "Kangaroo, I don't know what, fuck you you have here an object, you stupid kangaroo" or what, you know? It's exactly the same, you remember was it yes yesterday, yes, when I took the example of anti-Semitism. You have basically just all these questions: Que faire? (What to do?). Ordinary German in '29: I don't find my way, what is happening? A question and like, you know, as they perceived it, small bourgeois moral decay, economic crisis, whatever. And you get the Jew as an object, as an answer. And again, the first, immediately, the first step of critique of ideology to see the question embodied in this answer. Yes. Yeah, my question was yeah, in your book the sublime object of the ideology... you say, I like this, sublime center. Yeah, that's what I sorry yeah, object... For this in my Stalinist universe, you know, maybe not Gulag but like two years of re-education. Okay. Yeah, sorry I was, I was thinking topology, so. Sorry? I was thinking topologically, it's kind of center of the tori, but, but that's why. We will come to this later. Yeah, yeah, but my question was in relation to your mention of '30s Germany. You say there that it's *Che vuoi?*, it's the graph of desire, Lacanian structuralist graph of desire and kind of "What do you want from me?" is the question then, right? But this, this could even get incredibly complicated in the sense of the question whose question, if you know this then you probably also know that for Lacan and here another half Lacanian Jean Laplanche wrote, okay he didn't write it, some of his best essays are collected in a book that I also advise you if you want, *Essays on Otherness*, I think. Where he developed in a wonderful way this idea of enigmatic signifier and so on, which I think really allows you to understand what does psychoanalysis mean with, with fantasy and with lost object of desire. Let me repeat the old line because it's important. The according to common sense, even some wrong reading of Lacan, desire is the object of desire, the true object is incestuous, it's forever lost, so there is forever, you know, all this turning of Lacan into some kind of a stupid negative theological church, you know like "Oh the object is always lost, we just get metonymic replacements, we never get the thing itself." Totally wrong. First, and the second misunderstanding, that yes in this sense that the object of desire is lost, this all this almost theology of lack in Lacan, the fundamental fact is this lack and so on. Ah, but Lacan nonetheless is not an idiot. You know what he knows very well? That it is lack, but at the same time excess. In the sense of let's say enjoyment, jouissance. The problem is not only that the true incestuous enjoyment is inaccessible, you think you have it but it's never there, always something else. A much more interesting problem is that not only you cannot get enjoyment, but you also cannot get rid of it. The more you try to get rid of it, the more it returns in the guise of a symptom or whatever and so on and so on. So you know that's the finesse of Lacan. Lacanian real is not some big absence. It's even more something you cannot ever get rid of. You know the classic example here would be, which I always
Sorry for this one minute delay because you know in Germany, and I was half German educated, they have this strict rule, hierarchic you know. I don't know if you were there recently, but you know in the sense of it measures your status what a delay you are allowed to have. You know, if you are a nobody, on time. If you are some assistant professor, five minutes. If you are a big professor, a quarter of an hour. They call it akademische Viertelstunde, no? And then if you are a mega-star, you know. So I'm not playing those games. I'm here Lacanian. You know that wonderful joke? I always quote it. You must know it, by Lacan. This is my attitude towards time. You know: My fiancée is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée, you know. That's how I think you should do it with time. Okay, listen. Today I decided nonetheless to keep, it's against my nature I know, but to keep to the program. That is to say what I've been promising you from the first day. All that stuff about God, counterfactuals and so on. Although I must warn you in advance, of course I'm an atheist, but my big problem is precisely is there an option to refer to so-called divine dimension, theology, as a materialist? But not in that condescending pseudo-Marxist way, you know: Men project onto the idea of God all their noble properties and so on and so on. Okay, I just want to, to begin with, because I was checking some quotes this morning to help, I cannot restrain from telling you, I found a passage in Freud which I think in its very simplicity makes it so clear, to cut a long story short, why Freud is not Jung. Like what is a Freudian bug? It's an early one from when Freud was writing letters, exchanging letters with Wilhelm Fliess, another doctor colleague, and Freud reports on a guy who is of course anonymous, identified, he always reminds me of this type of you know in science fiction movies these evil murderers who keep their glasses down there to show how they're really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. You know the Orson Welles story of a scorpion and the frog? And in the middle of the river the scorpion bites the frog, even though, well I'm a scorpion here you know. Even if I'm put to some tribunal, politically correct, a bad taste joke has to be made. Categorically. Okay, sorry, let's go seriously. Okay, in a patient anonymous, of course called E like equality, just to refer to, and the dream that this patient reports to Freud is a very simple one. This happened when this guy, patient, this was a child patient of Freud, he had ten years only, and he dreamed compulsively a couple of times about, how do you call it, in German it is Käfer, it's a beetle, bug, a small bug running around and the guy is trying to catch it. Now what a Jungian would have done here? Look to all possible associations: bug, is it a racist metaphor? For example if some of you maybe know it, I think that in South Africa, in apartheid, the white light term for blacks was Kaffir, no? And even though a bad guy from South Africa told it to me, I will tell it to you because I think it's more it reflects more the stupidity of the white man, you know. The joke is, the South African white guy comes to Europe and sees five workers, white, working on something, doesn't matter. And he says: How can you, how can you spend in such a stupid inefficient way work force, workforce here? Give me ten Kaffirs and I will do it alone, you know. Racist joke, but this is the only elegant aspect that I like in South Africa, apartheid South Africa, that they at least had the decency to make jokes on themselves. Otherwise, again, if you want to learn something about real South Africa, that's what I advise you to read: official apartheid documents. Ideological, no? There, there you can see what ideological manipulation is. Me with my bad taste I almost throw up, because you know, okay this, it's of course pure bullshit, but how they tried to convince themselves that they are not doing a bad thing, how did they justify the regime, apartheid? Their point was not blacks are less or whatever, but pure hypocritical, false of course, multiculturalism, no? The idea was if we give to blacks all the rights like to us, in one generation their authentic original culture will be lost. Imagine they will become vulgar, vulgar consumerists like us. No, they'll become with those, all those pressures. And here they played another game. They were devils, the whites there. They always reminded the blacks that before even they were there, the blacks, the so-called, how would you call them, first generation aborigines, Hottentot, Bushman were already there. So this was another disgusting white strategy, to portray them as agents who defend black minorities against black majority. But my point is, okay, now they have the whole orgasmic ecstasy of compassion. What about those precious spiritual exercises of Hottentot and Bushman? And then they even went, the white ideologists, into some kind of a fake, fake self-humiliation. Like: We live in the western way, we are so vulgar consumerists, we just think about productivity, exploit. Isn't it that in a ritual performed by a simple Bushman priest there is more profound wisdom there than in... I explode when I hear this. This is why I'm always suspicious. For me it's always the ultimate racism when white people in this wrong way celebrate other races, you know, this self-humiliation. Like it's interesting to read memoirs of British colonial officers in India. Ooh they explode always: We British are so so, just when we see here Hindu saints you see depths inaccessible to us. This is why those that I really like, with whom I am friends, artists, some theorists from those non-white countries, I like them because most of them say: Fuck our culture. No, okay, you take our culture and we want to be more consumerists than you, you know. Like maybe I already told you this story years ago, not this year I'm sure. My best friends, how do you call it, New Zealand artists. My best friends. Why? You know, Maori, no? And although they were also racists there, one should at least admit one small thing to the white colonizers in New Zealand. They at least had the decency that if you have a little bit of aboriginal blood with you, it's not a handicap like this may hurt you. It's considered a necessary ingredient of the elite. Okay, it has its own racist logic, but maybe better than nothing. What I want to say is that I met there some artists who first gave me all that bullshit, you know like: We speak with the wood, spirits dictate us what to paint and so on. That was the official party line. Okay. Then I met them for dinner, we began to talk like normal human beings, and I learned the truth. Yeah, it's true but they had one agent in London, one in New York which informed them what are the latest trends. And then they made sure that the spirits told them something that was like, that fitted the latest fashion, no? And I loved them. I don't think you can in any way say that they were commercialized or whatever. That's how you do it. You have the right to proceed like that. Like maybe you know this story, it's nice to give an example what I'm aiming at. Watch that movie. It's nonetheless not politically correct. When I see a third world movie and it's shit I say: Sorry guys, I go to multiplex. I prefer a Hollywood blockbuster. But there is a very good movie. Did you see it? It's now around over ten years, I think it was made in around the Canadian Inuit movie Fast Runner. It retells an old Inuit, okay Eskimo in old terms, legend. Two tribes or two groups fighting each other, blah blah. It was really, except some camera help, it was really done by Inuits. And what surprised me is how watchable the film is, I mean you know you don't have to, you can really enjoy it. So please take it, you can maybe download it. You don't have to play this game of feeling guilty, "Oh my god I have to have compassion for Inuits." No, it's a good movie, simply no? And okay, that's my story and sorry if you know it. I read, I have a whole book even a couple of books on this film, and I read there how a white journalist, stupid jerk who wanted to be politically correct, attacked the director of conceding too much to commercialization, to Hollywood interests. Why? Because he, this is a restaging of an ancient Inuit legend, and in the original legend the two parts of the tribe or whatever, the enemies, kill each other to the end. It's a catastrophe at the end. While in the film they just throw out one bad guy, not even kill him, just reject him, excommunicate him and then it's kind of a happy ending. And the stupid journalist accused the guy of you know succumbing to Hollywood commercialism. And again, maybe you know it, I'm sorry if you do, he got the answer of a lifetime, no? The guy told him, the director who unfortunately died of cancer or whatever a couple of months later, he told him: No, you are Western cultural imperialist here. Because this, when you retell the story and change it according to present circumstances, precisely this is part of our tradition. Sticking to the original, you know this fetishizing of "Oh the original myth," this is a Western myth. We are all the time doing this. You know the story is not a fixed authentic original. You use it, you change it, turn around whatever to be... and I think so again, you see this is how true racism, much more refined, refined works, precisely in this way. Okay so, that I don't get lost, back to Jung-Freud, this example. Yes, I know where the association went. Käfer. The meaning is interesting that in East Germany, if some of you were there, somebody told me that and I like this as a metaphor, that those in East Germany, ex-DDR, who are still communist sympathizers use the term Käfer, beetle, as you know self-designation and so on. Okay but my point is this one. Again, a Jungian would have looked at all possible mythic meanings, Käfer, what does it stand for? You relate to Käfer. The boy, does this mean fear? Fear of animality? Käfer, the symbol of his mother, father, whatever. You simply see a scene, a boy trying to catch a bug, a beetle, and you look for a deeper meaning. Freud's solution is totally different. It's a very simple bug, but just observe the approach. When the session was over already, this patient he mentioned so offhand: Oh by the way, I had a French when I was ten years old, a French how do you call it, governess, on whom I had a crush. And then Freud immediately becoming attentive, asking: What does she remember about this government, governess? And then the patient tells: Oh, now I remember. And you know this is what you remember at the end as an unimportant detail is usually the most important thing. She often didn't know what to do and expressed herself in French "Que faire? Que faire?" (What to do?). And that's the link. Käfer stands for Que faire? (What to do?). Then you learn that the whole trauma is included in it. That this "Que faire?" was on the one hand the boy had a crush on the French governess and remembers this "Que faire?" of her. Second thing more directly Oedipal: the boy, the guy already as a boy heard a rumor that his mother didn't, it took her a long time to decide to marry the boy's father. She was, she was oscillating, procrastinating like "Que faire?" (What to do?). But you see now the Freudian approach. You should totally put in brackets all this fascinating presence of of the image and then look "Oh what deeper meaning." No, it doesn't matter. It's just this totally superficial link which matters. The most famous example here is and although he was not an orthodox Lacanian, but you can find it easily, Serge Leclaire, one of the first generation. He wrote a wonderful book translated twenty-thirty years ago called *Psychoanalyser*, To Psychoanalyze, where he gives another example. Again, very simple one. A guy, a patient of his was dreaming all the time about being on a ship in capital of Indonesia, whatever it was then colony, I don't know, Jakarta. Of arriving with a ship to the port of Jakarta. And you know what the analysis shows? Nothing with fascination with foreigners and so on, exotism. No, it's he really hated a guy, but wasn't fully aware of it, who was his best friend. His name was Jack, and it's in French you say *le porc de*, which means Jack is a swine, you say *le porc de Jack*. Jack the swine. And then the dream translated into the Port of Jakarta, Jack. You see, why is this important? Especially this first Freudian example, Käfer, Que faire?. What I also like is that an image stands for a question. It's a question of desire: "Que faire?" (What to do?). You know, you must know this story. I don't know if this is true, this story, but the rumor is. Here I say *Se non vero, ben trovato*, you know, even if it's not true it's a good one, that you know the origin of the term "Kangaroo." The first stupid white explorers arrived there and asked natives, whatever: What's that animal, no? And they answered "Kangaroo, Kangaroo." And they baptized it Kangaroo. No, when they later learned, they learned that the original meaning of "Kangaroo" was "I don't understand you." They just replied like "What do you mean? We don't understand you, what do you mean?" you know. It's nice. And I think this is maybe the elementary procedure in the way of ideology, that you don't know what and you obfuscate this enigma through an object. Like "Kangaroo, I don't know what, fuck you you have here an object, you stupid kangaroo" or what, you know? It's exactly the same, you remember was it yes yesterday, yes, when I took the example of anti-Semitism. You have basically just all these questions: Que faire? (What to do?). Ordinary German in '29: I don't find my way, what is happening? A question and like, you know, as they perceived it, small bourgeois moral decay, economic crisis, whatever. And you get the Jew as an object, as an answer. And again, the first, immediately, the first step of critique of ideology to see the question embodied in this answer. Yes. Yeah, my question was yeah, in your book the sublime object of the ideology... you say, I like this, sublime center. Yeah, that's what I sorry yeah, object... For this in my Stalinist universe, you know, maybe not Gulag but like two years of re-education. Okay. Yeah, sorry I was, I was thinking topology, so. Sorry? I was thinking topologically, it's kind of center of the tori, but, but that's why. We will come to this later. Yeah, yeah, but my question was in relation to your mention of '30s Germany. You say there that it's *Che vuoi?*, it's the graph of desire, Lacanian structuralist graph of desire and kind of "What do you want from me?" is the question then, right? But this, this could even get incredibly complicated in the sense of the question whose question, if you know this then you probably also know that for Lacan and here another half Lacanian Jean Laplanche wrote, okay he didn't write it, some of his best essays are collected in a book that I also advise you if you want, *Essays on Otherness*, I think. Where he developed in a wonderful way this idea of enigmatic signifier and so on, which I think really allows you to understand what does psychoanalysis mean with, with fantasy and with lost object of desire. Let me repeat the old line because it's important. The according to common sense, even some wrong reading of Lacan, desire is the object of desire, the true object is incestuous, it's forever lost, so there is forever, you know, all this turning of Lacan into some kind of a stupid negative theological church, you know like "Oh the object is always lost, we just get metonymic replacements, we never get the thing itself." Totally wrong. First, and the second misunderstanding, that yes in this sense that the object of desire is lost, this all this almost theology of lack in Lacan, the fundamental fact is this lack and so on. Ah, but Lacan nonetheless is not an idiot. You know what he knows very well? That it is lack, but at the same time excess. In the sense of let's say enjoyment, jouissance. The problem is not only that the true incestuous enjoyment is inaccessible, you think you have it but it's never there, always something else. A much more interesting problem is that not only you cannot get enjoyment, but you also cannot get rid of it. The more you try to get rid of it, the more it returns in the guise of a symptom or whatever and so on and so on. So you know that's the finesse of Lacan. Lacanian real is not some big absence. It's even more something you cannot ever get rid of. You know the classic example here would be, which I always
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repeat, look at that you find here incidentally, although I have theoretical disagreements with her, you
repeat, look at that you find here incidentally, although I have theoretical disagreements with her, you
Slavoj Žižek
can find
can find
unknown
here some nice lines in what I
here some nice lines in what I
Slavoj Žižek
argue is the best book by Judith Butler.
argue is the best book by Judith Butler.
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I think she made a mistake messing with all this stupid gender studies stuff, she should have stuck with Hegel studies if you ask me. Her first book, I think so, *Subjects of Desire*. It's a very good reading of Hegel. And then her most Hegelian work, of her later books, it appears modest, it's just a collection of essays, but it's really good, *The Psychic Life of Power*. And there she develops whatever, how this would be the best formula for what I'm trying to develop. The prohibition of desire always turns into a desire for prohibition.
I think she made a mistake messing with all this stupid gender studies stuff, she should have stuck with Hegel studies if you ask me. Her first book, I think so, *Subjects of Desire*. It's a very good reading of Hegel. And then her most Hegelian work, of her later books, it appears modest, it's just a collection of essays, but it's really good, *The Psychic Life of Power*. And there she develops whatever, how this would be the best formula for what I'm trying to develop. The prohibition of desire always turns into a desire for prohibition.
Slavoj Žižek
Which means what? Let's say you have something what will be experienced as a prohibited, unacceptable object of desire. Okay, so if you are a normal obsessional, like I am, if you are not a total idiot this must be clear for you in like two-three minutes of my speaking, but if there ever was an obsessional neurotic it's me. Okay so although my good friend Alain Badiou, you see this is what friends do to you. At one talk and there were people, when I made this cheap joke at myself "obsessional," Badiou, the great Badiou, he stood up, interrupted me and said: No, you are wrong, you are hysterical. And then it was so crazy, you know, people thought we are crazy, for minutes we debated my clinic, you know like what am I. But you know I used it I think in that, which book, *In Defense of the Lost Causes* or where, that dedication. You know if people ask me what is true friendship, I mean repeat the story even some of you
Which means what? Let's say you have something what will be experienced as a prohibited, unacceptable object of desire. Okay, so if you are a normal obsessional, like I am, if you are not a total idiot this must be clear for you in like two-three minutes of my speaking, but if there ever was an obsessional neurotic it's me. Okay so although my good friend Alain Badiou, you see this is what friends do to you. At one talk and there were people, when I made this cheap joke at myself "obsessional," Badiou, the great Badiou, he stood up, interrupted me and said: No, you are wrong, you are hysterical. And then it was so crazy, you know, people thought we are crazy, for minutes we debated my clinic, you know like what am I. But you know I used it I think in that, which book, *In Defense of the Lost Causes* or where, that dedication. You know if people ask me what is true friendship, I mean repeat the story even some of you
unknown
know it. That's absolute friendship
know it. That's absolute friendship
Slavoj Žižek
what he did to me. It was a group like this, I was giving a talk. Before that he asked me to lend him my phone because I have through some obscure corrupt friends in Slovenia who were members of the board of some cell phone company, eh it's nice to have this, I got a phone totally anonymous which works everywhere for free and so on. So okay, so while I was giving a talk, a phone rang. Somebody called Badiou, he had it. And he said yes and then not only he didn't
what he did to me. It was a group like this, I was giving a talk. Before that he asked me to lend him my phone because I have through some obscure corrupt friends in Slovenia who were members of the board of some cell phone company, eh it's nice to have this, I got a phone totally anonymous which works everywhere for free and so on. So okay, so while I was giving a talk, a phone rang. Somebody called Badiou, he had it. And he said yes and then not only he didn't
unknown
stand up and leave, but he
stand up and leave, but he
Slavoj Žižek
turned to me while I was giving a talk and told me: Slavoj, please could you talk a little bit lower, I cannot hear Badiou? I said either the guy is total enemy or your absolute best friend, if the guy can do something like this. Okay but let's go back to this stuff, where we were? Yes. So again this is the first paradox of jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Again back to Judith Butler. And you know this is the logic. You're obsessional neurotic, you establish a set of rituals to keep at a distance the enjoyment that you try to, that you find unacceptable. But what happens then, every obsessional knows that these very rituals become invested by the same dirty enjoyment. You start to enjoy the rituals. So you know this is the ABC of also what Lacan means by enjoyment as real. It's precisely this combination of, this is maybe the best definition of the real, that it's impossible but at the same time unavoidable, unavoidable, necessary. You can't get it, but you can't get rid of it. And I think this second part is missed a little bit by Gilles Deleuze's critique of Lacan. Deleuze emphasizes too much this negative theological aspect of Lacan: ooh Oedipus prohibition, everything is prohibited, it's forever lost. No, it's not lost. But let's go on. So again, que faire? What you find in Laplanche is another point, is that the lost object of desire is not out there. It's not, ooh I don't know what I want. The ultimate lost object of desire is the desiring subject itself. That's why for Lacan, when he analyzes the hysterical structure and defines femininity as hysterical in its structure, Lacan's point is profoundly feminist here. The point is that, you know the hysterical question is not "What do I really want?" but "What am I for others as an object? What do others want from me?" You know this difficult division of "I see that others project, expect something into me, from me, but what is this? What am I for the others?" And for Lacan, the ultimate question of desire is this one. It's not this stupid teleology "Do I really want that? Don't I want something else?" No, it's "What am I?" Desire is in this sense originally intersubjective, that the original lost object is me myself. And for Lacan, subjectivity is absolutely correlative with me being lost object for myself. Which is why and if anything for Lacan, male subjectivity is a compromise. To give you the most succinct elementary definition of male subjectivity for Lacan is that its structure is perverse. Perversion is for Lacan precisely that: you avoid this terrible gap of "What for an object I am?" and you assume that you are an object instrument. You know because as Lacan puts it nicely, hysterical subjects inclusive obsessional neurotics, who are also you should always bear in mind this. We don't have neurosis divided into hysteria and obsessional neurotics. As Freud already put it nicely: obsessional neurotic is a how do you call it, argot, some language, a dialect I think Freud says, a dialect of hysteria. So there the problem is the problem of the question, while perverts they don't raise questions, they have an answer. They know what's the best for the other. They are instruments of the other's desire. In this sense I claimed in my books that Stalinism, the totalitarian version of communism, has the structure of perversion. Not in the sense of ooh what horrible things they were doing, although they were well doing these things immediately, but in the more elementary sense of the basic conviction of a Stalinist communist is you know they even used this term: we communists are object instruments of historical will. We know where history goes and we are instruments to realize, to realize that will. Which is why again, Lacan is far from dismissing hysterical subjectivity. The first hint you get here is that for Lacan in contrast to the standard metaphysics which claims men are subjects, women are objects, for Lacan if you want to put it in sex terms, subjectivity is as such feminine. And masculine subjectivity always involves a minimum of escape of the, of the obfuscation of the abyss of subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan also, two further political and theoretical consequences from here: for Lacan for example, what's the status of science? Science as a discourse. It's not what Lacan calls university discourse. University discourse is the institutionalization of science but science in its inventive moment as it were, in its invention, is hysterical. First. Second point politically. You know in the '60s when I was very, very young and later all that bullshit, '68 revolution he-he, it was fashionable but I think it was a deeply anti-feminist trend. It was fashionable to oppose hysterics and perverts, praising the perverts. The idea is that hysterical subject just provokes the master, you know. You provoke him, but at the same time in this provocation there is a call: "But I want even a stronger master" and so on like that. Hysterics go only halfway while perverts open it up. We don't have time to go into it now, just beware that already Freud knew a perfect answer to this, when he says that far from being the most open like you know the idea this is the simplistic idea, even Freud wrongly formulated it once when he says: perverts do all that hysterics only dream about doing. No, Lacan at the same time says, this is so important for clinics, that nowhere is the unconscious more obfuscated, inaccessible, than in perversion. So perversion is for Lacan the, even if you do all the horrible things whatever perverts do, it's repression at its most, at its most radical. So, Laplanche. Ah fuck you, I didn't use my threat. I somehow forgot it. Laplanche formulates in a nice way what's the birth of subjectivity. How does a small child subjectivize itself? His point is precisely to put it simply this way that already very early you as a small child you not only notice that you are desire in all ways including of hatred by other, your immediate environment: mother, father, sister, brother, whatever. But that they, you are something for them, but you don't know what you are for them. You know this pressure of the small child: my god, why is my mommy caressing me so much? Why is father, my father casting this glance at me? You feel that they want something from me, but what? What am I for them? That's the origin of desire for Lacan. The origin is not "I want that" whatever the stupidities are, mother's milk or whatever. No, the origin's: "What am I for the other's desire?" And that's the beauty of Laplanche, he develops very nicely how the point is not that parents know in themselves what they want, but just the child doesn't know it. The point is that the child, even very young one, notices from the way how parents or others treat him that they themselves don't know what they want from him. In this sense he feels this "Che vuoi?" in Italian. This is a long story why Lacan uses it in Italian. He refers to some well known diabolical story where the guy meets the devil or the opposite and the devil says in Italian: *Che vuoi?* (What do you want?) and so on. The... and this here it's a long story, even theologically it's interesting because I have a running conflict for years with my Jewish friends, especially Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, who try to rehabilitate Judaism at this level. They claim that the greatness of Jewish experience is that God remains an object of anxiety. In the sense that this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want of the divine other, remains open. And that Christianity obfuscates this by love. The gap, abyss of anxiety is no longer here, we know God loves us. Okay we will not go into this now, just to tell you I think we as faithful Christians we can answer to this. No, it's Christ that loves us. And it's rather a fiasco. Christ dies on the cross because you know, *Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani*, he himself doesn't know what God the Father wants. I mean the only consistent reading of Christianity for me is some element of Gnosticism. I don't accept Gnosticism because you know what's the basic Gnostic theory, that the God which who created the world, who said let it be light, no, is the devil himself. Then you have this wonderful reading of Christ's sacrifice: that Christ was sacrificed to us humans, that the sacrifice of Christ is a kind of a divine excuse to us: Sorry humanity, I screwed it up, I made you a terrible world, I give you as a gift. It's almost like you know Yakuza, the Japanese monsters. Now I don't know if this is Hollywood or not but I spoke with some Japanese friends they claim that it's also in some Japanese movie, Yakuza do this. Namely what, that there if you offend someone whom you really respect, the thing to do is to cut off one of your fingers and give it to him as a present, a sincere apology. And again, the idea is this is what Jesus Christ was, a Yakuza mobster who screwed it up or whatever no. So again as what is so important and now you can also see for psychoanalysis the most elementary function of fantasy. Fantasy is simply an answer to this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want. Fantasy is an answer. In fantasy you learn what the other wants from you. This is the basic function of fantasy: to clarify of course in an proto-ideological way what the other wants from you. Let's not get lost, do it quickly. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to ask in terms of the discourse of hysteric and pervert. So the analyst's discourse in this case would be to position oneself in the position of this questioning hysteric? No, it would be to position oneself at the foundation of... No, the analyst, the idea is this one to put it very simply. The analyst precisely embodies this *Che vuoi?* itself. The the function of the analyst is to provoke totally the analysand, the patient, in this sense in the discourse of the analysis the analyst occupies the place of object, object in the sense of surplus enjoyment. Like this pure which is why the good analyst never tells you what you want or... he even shouldn't be too good to the patient because you know where you should, if you are interested in Freud it must still be available, I have an old edition thirty years ago in Ben-Zuss, Muriel Gardiner. She was quite an interesting woman, very intelligent, her other name is Vanessa Redgrave, I'm not kidding. Did you see that movie, it's too old, *Julia*, where she figures, Vanessa Redgrave, she is basically Muriel Gardiner. She was an American, very honest, got caught into anti-Nazi resistance later but she was very close to Freud, and after Freud dropped him, him who, Wolfman, the Russian, his patient, she Muriel Gardiner took over his analysis. And basically let's be frank, she cured him. And she in a very nice way located one of Freud's faithful errors. Wolfman was a from came from a rich Russian family and when the World War I ended, October Revolution and so on of course, his family was lost, no money, he was all of a sudden poor. And Freud because he was a good decent man, he helped him financially while continuing analysis. It was a beautiful gesture from humanitarian step point, it was a mega mistake from the clinical point because Wolfman was as Lacan says somewhere the first pure borderline patient, which means on the edge of psychosis, paranoia. And typically this is why Freud's help was a mistake. It triggered paranoia, like: Why is Freud doing this? What's his plot? Why is Freud helping me? You know Freud instead of leaving his own desire, analyst, totally impenetrable, blank, and in this sense a projection screen onto which true transference the patient can confront his desire, Freud provided the crucial element for for a paranoiac construction, no? You need I mean this in the loving way, the feminine bitch like Muriel Gardiner who didn't play this game to to cure him really. And it was incredible. He was totally cured. This was a mythic event. An American soldier, I read in this biography, was walking around Vienna and he saw some guy, started to talk with him, the guy spoke German with a Russian accent. The miracle was that this American soldier was an officer who knew about psychoanalysis and imagine the shock. He learned, he knew Wolfman as a mythical example from the most famous, this was Wolfman! You know you walked in '46 along Vienna and he did it quite well, even as an old man he married again. In other words you may hear hear all these rumors how psychoanalysis doesn't really work as clinic. Well there at least it worked, it worked very well. But again you see my point and my good friend Mladen Dolar, who will be here a week from now, Monday more, he made the same mistake in Ljubljana. I don't know if you know this story I already mentioned it years ago. Some years ago there was a young guy in Ljubljana who was obviously more or less a psychotic, gay at the same time, you'll see why this is important I'll tell you immediately. And he came to me once at my institute which was it was summer windows were open on the fourth floor of a building in downtown center of Ljubljana and he told me: I want to go to analysis with you. I know what you are trying you and Mladen Dolar, you are trying to control me and to force me to castrate myself, whatever no. I did the right thing although it was a risky thing. I told the guy it's much worse than you think. I don't even care about you. And then I pointed the open window and said: Look, because at that point when he got me I was eating a sandwich, if you throw yourself out of the window I will not even stop eating my sandwich. It was a risky move but it worked. The guy looked at me: "Oh it doesn't function" and left. Mladen Dolar, heartly liberal, emotionally, politically, then he went to Mladen Dolar with the same complaint. Mladen Dolar tried to help him. "No, it's not like this..." You know the result? That for two-three weeks this guy then was serially, almost every day, going to the police denouncing there Mladen for murder attempt. That Mladen wants to kill him and we all made fun
turned to me while I was giving a talk and told me: Slavoj, please could you talk a little bit lower, I cannot hear Badiou? I said either the guy is total enemy or your absolute best friend, if the guy can do something like this. Okay but let's go back to this stuff, where we were? Yes. So again this is the first paradox of jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Again back to Judith Butler. And you know this is the logic. You're obsessional neurotic, you establish a set of rituals to keep at a distance the enjoyment that you try to, that you find unacceptable. But what happens then, every obsessional knows that these very rituals become invested by the same dirty enjoyment. You start to enjoy the rituals. So you know this is the ABC of also what Lacan means by enjoyment as real. It's precisely this combination of, this is maybe the best definition of the real, that it's impossible but at the same time unavoidable, unavoidable, necessary. You can't get it, but you can't get rid of it. And I think this second part is missed a little bit by Gilles Deleuze's critique of Lacan. Deleuze emphasizes too much this negative theological aspect of Lacan: ooh Oedipus prohibition, everything is prohibited, it's forever lost. No, it's not lost. But let's go on. So again, que faire? What you find in Laplanche is another point, is that the lost object of desire is not out there. It's not, ooh I don't know what I want. The ultimate lost object of desire is the desiring subject itself. That's why for Lacan, when he analyzes the hysterical structure and defines femininity as hysterical in its structure, Lacan's point is profoundly feminist here. The point is that, you know the hysterical question is not "What do I really want?" but "What am I for others as an object? What do others want from me?" You know this difficult division of "I see that others project, expect something into me, from me, but what is this? What am I for the others?" And for Lacan, the ultimate question of desire is this one. It's not this stupid teleology "Do I really want that? Don't I want something else?" No, it's "What am I?" Desire is in this sense originally intersubjective, that the original lost object is me myself. And for Lacan, subjectivity is absolutely correlative with me being lost object for myself. Which is why and if anything for Lacan, male subjectivity is a compromise. To give you the most succinct elementary definition of male subjectivity for Lacan is that its structure is perverse. Perversion is for Lacan precisely that: you avoid this terrible gap of "What for an object I am?" and you assume that you are an object instrument. You know because as Lacan puts it nicely, hysterical subjects inclusive obsessional neurotics, who are also you should always bear in mind this. We don't have neurosis divided into hysteria and obsessional neurotics. As Freud already put it nicely: obsessional neurotic is a how do you call it, argot, some language, a dialect I think Freud says, a dialect of hysteria. So there the problem is the problem of the question, while perverts they don't raise questions, they have an answer. They know what's the best for the other. They are instruments of the other's desire. In this sense I claimed in my books that Stalinism, the totalitarian version of communism, has the structure of perversion. Not in the sense of ooh what horrible things they were doing, although they were well doing these things immediately, but in the more elementary sense of the basic conviction of a Stalinist communist is you know they even used this term: we communists are object instruments of historical will. We know where history goes and we are instruments to realize, to realize that will. Which is why again, Lacan is far from dismissing hysterical subjectivity. The first hint you get here is that for Lacan in contrast to the standard metaphysics which claims men are subjects, women are objects, for Lacan if you want to put it in sex terms, subjectivity is as such feminine. And masculine subjectivity always involves a minimum of escape of the, of the obfuscation of the abyss of subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan also, two further political and theoretical consequences from here: for Lacan for example, what's the status of science? Science as a discourse. It's not what Lacan calls university discourse. University discourse is the institutionalization of science but science in its inventive moment as it were, in its invention, is hysterical. First. Second point politically. You know in the '60s when I was very, very young and later all that bullshit, '68 revolution he-he, it was fashionable but I think it was a deeply anti-feminist trend. It was fashionable to oppose hysterics and perverts, praising the perverts. The idea is that hysterical subject just provokes the master, you know. You provoke him, but at the same time in this provocation there is a call: "But I want even a stronger master" and so on like that. Hysterics go only halfway while perverts open it up. We don't have time to go into it now, just beware that already Freud knew a perfect answer to this, when he says that far from being the most open like you know the idea this is the simplistic idea, even Freud wrongly formulated it once when he says: perverts do all that hysterics only dream about doing. No, Lacan at the same time says, this is so important for clinics, that nowhere is the unconscious more obfuscated, inaccessible, than in perversion. So perversion is for Lacan the, even if you do all the horrible things whatever perverts do, it's repression at its most, at its most radical. So, Laplanche. Ah fuck you, I didn't use my threat. I somehow forgot it. Laplanche formulates in a nice way what's the birth of subjectivity. How does a small child subjectivize itself? His point is precisely to put it simply this way that already very early you as a small child you not only notice that you are desire in all ways including of hatred by other, your immediate environment: mother, father, sister, brother, whatever. But that they, you are something for them, but you don't know what you are for them. You know this pressure of the small child: my god, why is my mommy caressing me so much? Why is father, my father casting this glance at me? You feel that they want something from me, but what? What am I for them? That's the origin of desire for Lacan. The origin is not "I want that" whatever the stupidities are, mother's milk or whatever. No, the origin's: "What am I for the other's desire?" And that's the beauty of Laplanche, he develops very nicely how the point is not that parents know in themselves what they want, but just the child doesn't know it. The point is that the child, even very young one, notices from the way how parents or others treat him that they themselves don't know what they want from him. In this sense he feels this "Che vuoi?" in Italian. This is a long story why Lacan uses it in Italian. He refers to some well known diabolical story where the guy meets the devil or the opposite and the devil says in Italian: *Che vuoi?* (What do you want?) and so on. The... and this here it's a long story, even theologically it's interesting because I have a running conflict for years with my Jewish friends, especially Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, who try to rehabilitate Judaism at this level. They claim that the greatness of Jewish experience is that God remains an object of anxiety. In the sense that this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want of the divine other, remains open. And that Christianity obfuscates this by love. The gap, abyss of anxiety is no longer here, we know God loves us. Okay we will not go into this now, just to tell you I think we as faithful Christians we can answer to this. No, it's Christ that loves us. And it's rather a fiasco. Christ dies on the cross because you know, *Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani*, he himself doesn't know what God the Father wants. I mean the only consistent reading of Christianity for me is some element of Gnosticism. I don't accept Gnosticism because you know what's the basic Gnostic theory, that the God which who created the world, who said let it be light, no, is the devil himself. Then you have this wonderful reading of Christ's sacrifice: that Christ was sacrificed to us humans, that the sacrifice of Christ is a kind of a divine excuse to us: Sorry humanity, I screwed it up, I made you a terrible world, I give you as a gift. It's almost like you know Yakuza, the Japanese monsters. Now I don't know if this is Hollywood or not but I spoke with some Japanese friends they claim that it's also in some Japanese movie, Yakuza do this. Namely what, that there if you offend someone whom you really respect, the thing to do is to cut off one of your fingers and give it to him as a present, a sincere apology. And again, the idea is this is what Jesus Christ was, a Yakuza mobster who screwed it up or whatever no. So again as what is so important and now you can also see for psychoanalysis the most elementary function of fantasy. Fantasy is simply an answer to this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want. Fantasy is an answer. In fantasy you learn what the other wants from you. This is the basic function of fantasy: to clarify of course in an proto-ideological way what the other wants from you. Let's not get lost, do it quickly. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to ask in terms of the discourse of hysteric and pervert. So the analyst's discourse in this case would be to position oneself in the position of this questioning hysteric? No, it would be to position oneself at the foundation of... No, the analyst, the idea is this one to put it very simply. The analyst precisely embodies this *Che vuoi?* itself. The the function of the analyst is to provoke totally the analysand, the patient, in this sense in the discourse of the analysis the analyst occupies the place of object, object in the sense of surplus enjoyment. Like this pure which is why the good analyst never tells you what you want or... he even shouldn't be too good to the patient because you know where you should, if you are interested in Freud it must still be available, I have an old edition thirty years ago in Ben-Zuss, Muriel Gardiner. She was quite an interesting woman, very intelligent, her other name is Vanessa Redgrave, I'm not kidding. Did you see that movie, it's too old, *Julia*, where she figures, Vanessa Redgrave, she is basically Muriel Gardiner. She was an American, very honest, got caught into anti-Nazi resistance later but she was very close to Freud, and after Freud dropped him, him who, Wolfman, the Russian, his patient, she Muriel Gardiner took over his analysis. And basically let's be frank, she cured him. And she in a very nice way located one of Freud's faithful errors. Wolfman was a from came from a rich Russian family and when the World War I ended, October Revolution and so on of course, his family was lost, no money, he was all of a sudden poor. And Freud because he was a good decent man, he helped him financially while continuing analysis. It was a beautiful gesture from humanitarian step point, it was a mega mistake from the clinical point because Wolfman was as Lacan says somewhere the first pure borderline patient, which means on the edge of psychosis, paranoia. And typically this is why Freud's help was a mistake. It triggered paranoia, like: Why is Freud doing this? What's his plot? Why is Freud helping me? You know Freud instead of leaving his own desire, analyst, totally impenetrable, blank, and in this sense a projection screen onto which true transference the patient can confront his desire, Freud provided the crucial element for for a paranoiac construction, no? You need I mean this in the loving way, the feminine bitch like Muriel Gardiner who didn't play this game to to cure him really. And it was incredible. He was totally cured. This was a mythic event. An American soldier, I read in this biography, was walking around Vienna and he saw some guy, started to talk with him, the guy spoke German with a Russian accent. The miracle was that this American soldier was an officer who knew about psychoanalysis and imagine the shock. He learned, he knew Wolfman as a mythical example from the most famous, this was Wolfman! You know you walked in '46 along Vienna and he did it quite well, even as an old man he married again. In other words you may hear hear all these rumors how psychoanalysis doesn't really work as clinic. Well there at least it worked, it worked very well. But again you see my point and my good friend Mladen Dolar, who will be here a week from now, Monday more, he made the same mistake in Ljubljana. I don't know if you know this story I already mentioned it years ago. Some years ago there was a young guy in Ljubljana who was obviously more or less a psychotic, gay at the same time, you'll see why this is important I'll tell you immediately. And he came to me once at my institute which was it was summer windows were open on the fourth floor of a building in downtown center of Ljubljana and he told me: I want to go to analysis with you. I know what you are trying you and Mladen Dolar, you are trying to control me and to force me to castrate myself, whatever no. I did the right thing although it was a risky thing. I told the guy it's much worse than you think. I don't even care about you. And then I pointed the open window and said: Look, because at that point when he got me I was eating a sandwich, if you throw yourself out of the window I will not even stop eating my sandwich. It was a risky move but it worked. The guy looked at me: "Oh it doesn't function" and left. Mladen Dolar, heartly liberal, emotionally, politically, then he went to Mladen Dolar with the same complaint. Mladen Dolar tried to help him. "No, it's not like this..." You know the result? That for two-three weeks this guy then was serially, almost every day, going to the police denouncing there Mladen for murder attempt. That Mladen wants to kill him and we all made fun
unknown
of Mladen because he learned this, you know this guy even dreamed about a detailed way how that Mladen would seduce him, then a tergo fuck him into the ass and while fucking him he will strangle him and
of Mladen because he learned this, you know this guy even dreamed about a detailed way how that Mladen would seduce him, then a tergo fuck him into the ass and while fucking him he will strangle him and
Slavoj Žižek
so on. Poor Mladen, this was his life for years. But you see the, no, I don't mean telling you be be good. My god, I'm a sentimentalist, that's why I never would be able to be an analyst. One thing is I would be too sentimental, and the second reason you probably guessed it. Be sincere, can you imagine me listening to someone patient for twenty minutes or personal, I don't feel myself doing it. Okay let's go back. So again, so this is the first paradox of jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Again back to Judith Butler. And you know this is the logic. You're obsessional neurotic, you establish a set of rituals to keep at a distance the enjoyment that you try to, that you find unacceptable. But what happens then, every obsessional knows that these very rituals become invested by the same dirty enjoyment. You start to enjoy the rituals. So you know this is the ABC of also what Lacan means by enjoyment as real. It's precisely this combination of, this is maybe the best definition of the real, that it's impossible but at the same time unavoidable, unavoidable, necessary. You can't get it, but you can't get rid of it. And I think this second part is missed a little bit by Gilles Deleuze's critique of Lacan. Deleuze emphasizes too much this negative theological aspect of Lacan: ooh Oedipus prohibition, everything is prohibited, it's forever lost. No, it's not lost. But let's go on. So again, que faire? What you find in Laplanche is another point, is that the lost object of desire is not out there. It's not, ooh I don't know what I want. The ultimate lost object of desire is the desiring subject itself. That's why for Lacan, when he analyzes the hysterical structure and defines femininity as hysterical in its structure, Lacan's point is profoundly feminist here. The point is that, you know the hysterical question is not "What do I really want?" but "What am I for others as an object? What do others want from me?" You know this difficult division of "I see that others project, expect something into me, from me, but what is this? What am I for the others?" And for Lacan, the ultimate question of desire is this one. It's not this stupid teleology "Do I really want that? Don't I want something else?" No, it's "What am I?" Desire is in this sense originally intersubjective, that the original lost object is me myself. And for Lacan, subjectivity is absolutely correlative with me being lost object for myself. Which is why and if anything for Lacan, male subjectivity is a compromise. To give you the most succinct elementary definition of male subjectivity for Lacan is that its structure is perverse. Perversion is for Lacan precisely that: you avoid this terrible gap of "What for an object I am?" and you assume that you are an object instrument. You know because as Lacan puts it nicely, hysterical subjects inclusive obsessional neurotics, who are also you should always bear in mind this. We don't have neurosis divided into hysteria and obsessional neurotics. As Freud already put it nicely: obsessional neurotic is a how do you call it, argot, some language, a dialect I think Freud says, a dialect of hysteria. So there the problem is the problem of the question, while perverts they don't raise questions, they have an answer. They know what's the best for the other. They are instruments of the other's desire. In this sense I claimed in my books that Stalinism, the totalitarian version of communism, has the structure of perversion. Not in the sense of ooh what horrible things they were doing, although they were well doing these things immediately, but in the more elementary sense of the basic conviction of a Stalinist communist is you know they even used this term: we communists are object instruments of historical will. We know where history goes and we are instruments to realize, to realize that will. Which is why again, Lacan is far from dismissing hysterical subjectivity. The first hint you get here is that for Lacan in contrast to the standard metaphysics which claims men are subjects, women are objects, for Lacan if you want to put it in sex terms, subjectivity is as such feminine. And masculine subjectivity always involves a minimum of escape of the, of the obfuscation of the abyss of subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan also, two further political and theoretical consequences from here: for Lacan for example, what's the status of science? Science as a discourse. It's not what Lacan calls university discourse. University discourse is the institutionalization of science but science in its inventive moment as it were, in its invention, is hysterical. First. Second point politically. You know in the '60s when I was very, very young and later all that bullshit, '68 revolution he-he, it was fashionable but I think it was a deeply anti-feminist trend. It was fashionable to oppose hysterics and perverts, praising the perverts. The idea is that hysterical subject just provokes the master, you know. You provoke him, but at the same time in this provocation there is a call: "But I want even a stronger master" and so on like that. Hysterics go only halfway while perverts open it up. We don't have time to go into it now, just beware that already Freud knew a perfect answer to this, when he says that far from being the most open like you know the idea this is the simplistic idea, even Freud wrongly formulated it once when he says: perverts do all that hysterics only dream about doing. No, Lacan at the same time says, this is so important for clinics, that nowhere is the unconscious more obfuscated, inaccessible, than in perversion. So perversion is for Lacan the, even if you do all the horrible things whatever perverts do, it's repression at its most, at its most radical. So, Laplanche. Ah fuck you, I didn't use my threat. I somehow forgot it. Laplanche formulates in a nice way what's the birth of subjectivity. How does a small child subjectivize itself? His point is precisely to put it simply this way that already very early you as a small child you not only notice that you are desire in all ways including of hatred by other, your immediate environment: mother, father, sister, brother, whatever. But that they, you are something for them, but you don't know what you are for them. You know this pressure of the small child: my god, why is my mommy caressing me so much? Why is father, my father casting this glance at me? You feel that they want something from me, but what? What am I for them? That's the origin of desire for Lacan. The origin is not "I want that" whatever the stupidities are, mother's milk or whatever. No, the origin's: "What am I for the other's desire?" And that's the beauty of Laplanche, he develops very nicely how the point is not that parents know in themselves what they want, but just the child doesn't know it. The point is that the child, even very young one, notices from the way how parents or others treat him that they themselves don't know what they want from him. In this sense he feels this *Che vuoi?* in Italian. This is a long story why Lacan uses it in Italian. He refers to some well known diabolical story where the guy meets the devil or the opposite and the devil says in Italian: *Che vuoi?* (What do you want?) and so on. The... and this here it's a long story, even theologically it's interesting because I have a running conflict for years with my Jewish friends, especially Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, who try to rehabilitate Judaism at this level. They claim that the greatness of Jewish experience is that God remains an object of anxiety. In the sense that this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want of the divine other, remains open. And that Christianity obfuscates this by love. The gap, abyss of anxiety is no longer here, we know God loves us. Okay we will not go into this now, just to tell you I think we as faithful Christians we can answer to this. No, it's Christ that loves us. And it's rather a fiasco. Christ dies on the cross because you know, *Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani*,
so on. Poor Mladen, this was his life for years. But you see the, no, I don't mean telling you be be good. My god, I'm a sentimentalist, that's why I never would be able to be an analyst. One thing is I would be too sentimental, and the second reason you probably guessed it. Be sincere, can you imagine me listening to someone patient for twenty minutes or personal, I don't feel myself doing it. Okay let's go back. So again, so this is the first paradox of jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Again back to Judith Butler. And you know this is the logic. You're obsessional neurotic, you establish a set of rituals to keep at a distance the enjoyment that you try to, that you find unacceptable. But what happens then, every obsessional knows that these very rituals become invested by the same dirty enjoyment. You start to enjoy the rituals. So you know this is the ABC of also what Lacan means by enjoyment as real. It's precisely this combination of, this is maybe the best definition of the real, that it's impossible but at the same time unavoidable, unavoidable, necessary. You can't get it, but you can't get rid of it. And I think this second part is missed a little bit by Gilles Deleuze's critique of Lacan. Deleuze emphasizes too much this negative theological aspect of Lacan: ooh Oedipus prohibition, everything is prohibited, it's forever lost. No, it's not lost. But let's go on. So again, que faire? What you find in Laplanche is another point, is that the lost object of desire is not out there. It's not, ooh I don't know what I want. The ultimate lost object of desire is the desiring subject itself. That's why for Lacan, when he analyzes the hysterical structure and defines femininity as hysterical in its structure, Lacan's point is profoundly feminist here. The point is that, you know the hysterical question is not "What do I really want?" but "What am I for others as an object? What do others want from me?" You know this difficult division of "I see that others project, expect something into me, from me, but what is this? What am I for the others?" And for Lacan, the ultimate question of desire is this one. It's not this stupid teleology "Do I really want that? Don't I want something else?" No, it's "What am I?" Desire is in this sense originally intersubjective, that the original lost object is me myself. And for Lacan, subjectivity is absolutely correlative with me being lost object for myself. Which is why and if anything for Lacan, male subjectivity is a compromise. To give you the most succinct elementary definition of male subjectivity for Lacan is that its structure is perverse. Perversion is for Lacan precisely that: you avoid this terrible gap of "What for an object I am?" and you assume that you are an object instrument. You know because as Lacan puts it nicely, hysterical subjects inclusive obsessional neurotics, who are also you should always bear in mind this. We don't have neurosis divided into hysteria and obsessional neurotics. As Freud already put it nicely: obsessional neurotic is a how do you call it, argot, some language, a dialect I think Freud says, a dialect of hysteria. So there the problem is the problem of the question, while perverts they don't raise questions, they have an answer. They know what's the best for the other. They are instruments of the other's desire. In this sense I claimed in my books that Stalinism, the totalitarian version of communism, has the structure of perversion. Not in the sense of ooh what horrible things they were doing, although they were well doing these things immediately, but in the more elementary sense of the basic conviction of a Stalinist communist is you know they even used this term: we communists are object instruments of historical will. We know where history goes and we are instruments to realize, to realize that will. Which is why again, Lacan is far from dismissing hysterical subjectivity. The first hint you get here is that for Lacan in contrast to the standard metaphysics which claims men are subjects, women are objects, for Lacan if you want to put it in sex terms, subjectivity is as such feminine. And masculine subjectivity always involves a minimum of escape of the, of the obfuscation of the abyss of subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan also, two further political and theoretical consequences from here: for Lacan for example, what's the status of science? Science as a discourse. It's not what Lacan calls university discourse. University discourse is the institutionalization of science but science in its inventive moment as it were, in its invention, is hysterical. First. Second point politically. You know in the '60s when I was very, very young and later all that bullshit, '68 revolution he-he, it was fashionable but I think it was a deeply anti-feminist trend. It was fashionable to oppose hysterics and perverts, praising the perverts. The idea is that hysterical subject just provokes the master, you know. You provoke him, but at the same time in this provocation there is a call: "But I want even a stronger master" and so on like that. Hysterics go only halfway while perverts open it up. We don't have time to go into it now, just beware that already Freud knew a perfect answer to this, when he says that far from being the most open like you know the idea this is the simplistic idea, even Freud wrongly formulated it once when he says: perverts do all that hysterics only dream about doing. No, Lacan at the same time says, this is so important for clinics, that nowhere is the unconscious more obfuscated, inaccessible, than in perversion. So perversion is for Lacan the, even if you do all the horrible things whatever perverts do, it's repression at its most, at its most radical. So, Laplanche. Ah fuck you, I didn't use my threat. I somehow forgot it. Laplanche formulates in a nice way what's the birth of subjectivity. How does a small child subjectivize itself? His point is precisely to put it simply this way that already very early you as a small child you not only notice that you are desire in all ways including of hatred by other, your immediate environment: mother, father, sister, brother, whatever. But that they, you are something for them, but you don't know what you are for them. You know this pressure of the small child: my god, why is my mommy caressing me so much? Why is father, my father casting this glance at me? You feel that they want something from me, but what? What am I for them? That's the origin of desire for Lacan. The origin is not "I want that" whatever the stupidities are, mother's milk or whatever. No, the origin's: "What am I for the other's desire?" And that's the beauty of Laplanche, he develops very nicely how the point is not that parents know in themselves what they want, but just the child doesn't know it. The point is that the child, even very young one, notices from the way how parents or others treat him that they themselves don't know what they want from him. In this sense he feels this *Che vuoi?* in Italian. This is a long story why Lacan uses it in Italian. He refers to some well known diabolical story where the guy meets the devil or the opposite and the devil says in Italian: *Che vuoi?* (What do you want?) and so on. The... and this here it's a long story, even theologically it's interesting because I have a running conflict for years with my Jewish friends, especially Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, who try to rehabilitate Judaism at this level. They claim that the greatness of Jewish experience is that God remains an object of anxiety. In the sense that this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want of the divine other, remains open. And that Christianity obfuscates this by love. The gap, abyss of anxiety is no longer here, we know God loves us. Okay we will not go into this now, just to tell you I think we as faithful Christians we can answer to this. No, it's Christ that loves us. And it's rather a fiasco. Christ dies on the cross because you know, *Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani*,
unknown
he himself doesn't know what God the Father wants. I mean the only consistent reading of Christianity for me is some element of Gnosticism. I don't accept Gnosticism because you know what's the basic Gnostic theory,
he himself doesn't know what God the Father wants. I mean the only consistent reading of Christianity for me is some element of Gnosticism. I don't accept Gnosticism because you know what's the basic Gnostic theory,
Slavoj Žižek
that the God which who created the world, who said let it be light, no, is the devil himself. Then you have this wonderful reading of Christ's sacrifice: that Christ was sacrificed to us humans, that the sacrifice of Christ is a kind of a divine excuse to us: Sorry humanity, I screwed it up, I made you a terrible world, I give you as a gift. It's almost like you know Yakuza, the Japanese monsters. Now I don't know if this is Hollywood or not but I spoke with some Japanese friends they claim that it's also in some Japanese movie, Yakuza do this. Namely what, that there if you offend someone whom you really respect, the thing to do is to cut off one of your fingers and give it to him as a present, a sincere apology. And again, the idea is this is what Jesus Christ was, a Yakuza mobster who screwed it up or whatever no. So again as what is so important and now you can also see for psychoanalysis the most elementary function of fantasy. Fantasy is simply an answer to this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want. Fantasy is an answer. In fantasy you learn what the other wants from you. This is the basic function of fantasy: to clarify of course in an proto-ideological way what the other wants from you. Let's not get lost, do it quickly. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to ask in terms of the discourse of hysteric and pervert. So the analyst's discourse in this case would be to position oneself in the position of this questioning hysteric? No, it would be to position oneself at the foundation of... No, the analyst, the idea is this one to put it very simply. The analyst precisely embodies this *Che vuoi?* itself. The the function of the analyst is to provoke totally the analysand, the patient, in this sense in the discourse of the analysis the analyst occupies the place of object, object in the sense of surplus enjoyment. Like this pure which is why the good analyst never tells you what you want or... he even shouldn't be too good to the patient because you know where you should, if you are interested in Freud it must still be available, I have an old edition thirty years ago in Ben-Zuss, Muriel Gardiner. She was quite an interesting woman, very intelligent, her other name is Vanessa Redgrave, I'm not kidding. Did you see that movie, it's too old, *Julia*, where she figures, Vanessa Redgrave, she is basically Muriel Gardiner. She was an American, very honest, got caught into anti-Nazi resistance later but she was very close to Freud, and after Freud dropped him, him who, Wolfman, the Russian, his patient, she Muriel Gardiner took over his analysis. And basically let's be frank, she cured him. And she in a very nice way located one of Freud's faithful errors. Wolfman was a from came from a rich Russian family and when the World War I ended, October Revolution and so on of course, his family was lost, no money, he was all of a sudden poor. And Freud because he was a good decent man, he helped him financially while continuing analysis. It was a beautiful gesture from humanitarian step point, it was a mega mistake from the clinical point because Wolfman was as Lacan says somewhere the first pure borderline patient, which means on the edge of psychosis, paranoia. And typically this is why Freud's help was a mistake. It triggered paranoia, like: Why is Freud doing this? What's his plot? Why is Freud helping me? You know Freud instead of leaving his own desire, analyst, totally impenetrable, blank, and in this sense a projection screen onto which true transference the patient can confront his desire, Freud provided the crucial element for for a paranoiac construction, no? You need I mean this in the loving way, the feminine bitch like Muriel Gardiner who didn't play this game to to cure him really. And it was incredible. He was totally cured. This was a mythic event. An American soldier, I read in this biography, was walking around Vienna and he saw some guy, started to talk with him, the guy spoke German with a Russian accent. The miracle was that this American soldier was an officer who knew about psychoanalysis and imagine the shock. He learned, he knew Wolfman as a mythical example from the most famous, this was Wolfman! You know you walked in '46 along Vienna and he did it quite well, even as an old man he married again. In other words you may hear hear all these rumors how psychoanalysis doesn't really work as clinic. Well there at least it worked, it worked very well. But again you see my point and my good friend Mladen Dolar, who will be here a week from now, Monday more, he made the same mistake in Ljubljana. I don't know if you know this story I already mentioned it years ago. Some years ago there was a young guy in Ljubljana who was obviously more or less a psychotic, gay at the same time, you'll see why this is important I'll tell you immediately. And he came to me once at my institute which was it was summer windows were open on the fourth floor of a building in downtown center of Ljubljana and he told me: I want to go to analysis with you. I know what you are trying you and Mladen Dolar, you are trying to control me and to force me to castrate myself, whatever no. I did the right thing although it was a risky thing. I told the guy it's much worse than you think. I don't even care about you. And then I pointed the open window and said: Look, because at that point when he got me I was eating a sandwich, if you throw yourself out of the window I will not even stop eating my sandwich. It was a risky move but it worked. The guy looked at me: "Oh it doesn't function" and left. Mladen Dolar, heartly liberal, emotionally, politically, then he went to Mladen Dolar with the same complaint. Mladen Dolar tried to help him. "No, it's not like this..." You know the result? That for two-three weeks this guy then was serially, almost every day, going to the police denouncing there Mladen for murder attempt. That Mladen wants to kill him and we all made fun of Mladen because he learned this, you know this guy even dreamed about a detailed way how that Mladen would seduce him, then a tergo fuck him into the ass and while fucking him he will strangle him and so on. Poor Mladen, this was his life for years. But you see the, no, I don't mean telling you be be good. My god, I'm a sentimentalist, that's why I never would be able to be an analyst. One thing is I would be too sentimental, and the second reason you probably guessed it. Be sincere, can you imagine me listening to someone patient for twenty minutes or personal, I don't feel myself doing it. Okay let's go back. So I'm so sad we don't have time to do that. This would be one, maybe we can do it okay on on next Monday if you want, you know, these four discourses is maybe Lacan at his best. It's a simple four formulas and it's so productive in the sense that it really works as a position. But I shouldn't drop I shouldn't lose too much time here. Okay this was all the introductory association about Que faire?, the enigma of the other and so on and so on. So ah yes back to so again but at the end I did arrive at God. God as the ultimate "Que faire? What do you want?" And I think all truly radical religion does here one thing which is to be done: transposes the enigma of what God wants from us onto God himself. God himself doesn't know it. You know you have all this wonderful I think that theological points which arise when, and here for me serious theology begins. And this is where I claim German idealist Schelling, Hegel, but also already beginning with Meister Eckhart and German mystics where on the right track. You know what's their basic premise? It's that it's not just that religion is historical in the sense that it but it's that the development of religion is immanent to God himself. Our discovering God is also an event of God himself coming to terms with himself. That's the that's the formula. So in other words it is absolutely crucial to apply here that wonderful formula of Hegel, you must know it, apropos ancient Greeks, you know where Sphinx, Sphinx we don't know what Sphinx an enigma. And Hegel says it beautifully that the enigmas of ancient Greeks like Sphinx for us were also enigmas, mysteries for the Greeks themselves, for the ancient sorry Egyptians, Egyptians themselves so that you know. That's the basic operation. Your enigma, it's not that we have some impenetrable divinity which is beyond enigmatic for us, but the enigma of the other is the enigma for the other himself. And we will come to this today, incidentally maybe we can even go there right now because I don't want to talk too much about it later. Sorry, yes I have it here, namely this idea... yes, I had a question about the the ancient Egyptians. Is it possible that there was a previous race like the Hottentots in Egypt where the Sphinx was maybe less of a mystery or had a different cultural reference? It is possible although, you know, my problem is always this one. I think that when you have a new religion, the mystery is not what was before, but the true mystery is the other like for example, this is what my beloved theologian Chesterton liked to repeat, that if we talk about the passage from apes to humans, the mysterious point is not we cannot know what apes really were, the mysterious point is what we humans are not once we are already established as humans but what we are in the eyes of the apes as it were. Kierkegaard would have called this the universal in-becoming. And here everything depends on this. For example, another example if you know a little bit of a theory, it was fashionable following Louis Althusser to emphasize how subject, this is Althusser's notion of subject, subject is ideological in its very constitution. Subject is an element of ideological misrecognition. Like the idea is vaguely this one: you have an overdetermined process without subject and in subjectivity as self-awareness you as a subject misperceive yourself as an agent. Like as if you are the agent, spontaneous origin of it all and you obfuscate this decentered process which generates you and so on and so on. But from the Lacanian point, yes it's true that this subjectivity as origin of itself, spontaneous creativity is an illusion, but it doesn't obfuscate some pre-subjective process. It obfuscates subjectivity itself as cut, as a cut, as a gap, as you know. So that a new or that would be my reading of Christianity: there is a secret in Christianity, but it's not some stupid pagan tradition which survived. It is the founding gesture, the horror of the founding gesture of Christianity itself. That's why I like to quote it, I think I did it here on the first day for the hundredth time. You know when Napoleon crowned himself, took the crown. Napoleon organized his crowning as an emperor in the presence of the Pope. And when the Pope was approaching him with the crown, Napoleon simply took the crown from Pope's hand and put it on himself. And Pope, the Pope gave him a wonderful answer which was: Sire, Pope to Napoleon, I know what you want to do, you want to destroy Christianity. Believe me you will not succeed. We the church are trying to do this for years. You know this idea that the excess that for example monotheism, and this is what Freud was searching for in his *Moses and Monotheism*. The secret is not some pagan secret from before. We can play these games, they are easy to do how you know all the motives were already before like I don't know, Book of Job you have it before, reincarnation... yes, but what is obfuscated in Judaism for Freud is the as it were original constitutive gesture of monotheism itself. It's its own dark it's its own dark object. Nonetheless so that I, sorry, yes. My point is this one, that God himself doesn't know what he wants, so then that the process of our human understanding of God is part of the history of God himself. In other words, it's not only that we need God, God needs us to become fully God. That's the that's the best, not even necessarily Gnostic thought. So maybe I spoke about this a year ago but with a different twist I want just to go a little bit into it and since there is a guy here who pretends to know Benjamin, maybe he mentioned it no, I will mention Benjamin a little bit. Incidentally the fate of Benjamin shows don't you think that there is some justice in the world? Justice in the sense that theoreticians who survive deserve to survive. Namely, I remember when I was very young, '60s and you know critical theory, Frankfurt school, and all of them were popular at that point: Herbert Marcuse, Horkheimer, blah blah. Now basically two survived: Adorno and Walter Benjamin. And I think the right ones survived. I think they they were by far the only ones who deserved to survive. Okay, Benjamin. You know that when Benjamin speaks about translation, he uses the well-known Lurianic, Luria was a guy who lived in the 16th century somewhere central Europe, Poland, and has a wonderful theological notion of creation of the world. And his teachings are called after Luria, Lurianic Kabbalah. The basic metaphor of Luria is broken vessel. I will simplify to the utmost. At the beginning we have Ein Sof, creator energy, whatever. It is infinite but formless, without purpose, pure stupid energy. Now this Ein Sof, the primordial not even creator, creative energy, resolved to create something with form and purpose, human beings, to understand itself, not even himself. And here already an ingenious gesture happens. I think it's such a right insight which can even be translated, I admit it in a very suspicious way, but nonetheless into modern physics. Namely, his idea, for me here serious theology begins. The idea is that God did not simply create the world out of nothing. He first had to create nothingness in himself. The idea is that this formless energy had to and he uses this crucial mystical term which stands for what German idealism calls Zusammenziehung, contraction. To contract itself into the punctuality of the subject so that all this chaotic mess is reduced to nothing, void, and this nothing is then the space for creation. Okay where do things get of interest here? The idea is then that after creating material that is this material reality that God then creates is too fragile, the divine light is too strong so reality explodes like a broken vessel. And then it's our duty, us as believers, to help God, but also ourselves, in restoring the vessel, putting together all the fragments and so on and so on. Okay, let's draw this point that what this implies is that again only through this broken vessel and in our efforts to reconstruct the vessel God himself begins maybe to understand itself. So the fate of us how we understand God is the fate of God himself. We decide of the fate of God himself. And even a conservative Catholic whom I like, like Paul Claudel, the famous French poet, dramatist, he put it this surprisingly for a Catholic in a wonderful way. He says somewhere that the ultimate secret of Christianity is that God is helpless without us. That the ultimate message of Christianity is not this playing it safe because there is some old jerk up there who will help us. It's not, no, it's not you know God will somehow intervene and help, it's on the contrary: God needs our help. And this is then a wonderful reading of the sacrifice of Christ. Which is not simply: Okay, I sacrifice myself so now you are safe because I paid the price, God will help, you know is that divine sacrifice means that God delivers the fate of his creation into our hands. We are condemned to freedom. God's sacrifice literally provides grounds our freedom. So let's go back. The idea is then this one: how to read this bringing the fragments of the vessel together? Here Benjamin does something truly ingenious. First I will try to describe it how Benjamin means it, then I will move to a different artistic example and finally we will come to the old jerk, to God himself. First, here is a quote, because Benjamin uses this metaphor of broken vessel in his wonderful early essay *The Task of the Translator*. Incidentally sometimes I'm almost tempted to think, aren't you sometimes tempted that it is as if Benjamin in his early years, in a slightly confused mystical way, said the crucial things and then he was almost fighting himself to understand as if he was a crazy God, but he didn't fully succeed. Okay here is the quote, which is supposed to describe with this metaphor of the broken vessel the inner workings of the process of translation. Quote: "Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together, must follow one another in the smallest detail, but need not resemble one another, so instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, the translation must rather lovingly and in detail in its own language, form itself according to the way of signifying (Art des Meines in German) of the original, to make both (both means original and the translation) recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel." I hope you get the point why this is so wonderful. Because the usual standard, it's a very simple operation. The standard notion of translation is that you have the original which is the thing itself, and then you try creatively in another speech universe to come as close as possible to the original. This would be to put it roughly metaphoric dimension. Original is original, translation should is a metaphor, never the original, but it should be as perfect as possible a metaphor. My God, Benjamin says the exact opposite: that it's not metaphor but metonymy. That the relationship between original and translation is not between, in what sense it is a broken vessel? It's not that when you step into another language the vessel is broken, the perfection of the original is lost so you have to reconstruct the totality as much as possible. No, no, he says something different. He says that a good translation and the original must fit together as two fragments of a broken vessel. Which means that the truly ingenious translation doesn't idealize original, it treats the original itself as a fragment. And it tries to supplement it so that both original and translation will form, will come as close as possible to reconstructed vessel. But as Benjamin is well aware things get complicated here. Why? Because you know in a way a good translation in trying to reconstruct the unbroken vessel breaks it. In what sense? Let's say we have an idea, work of art, idea in the simple sense in the original. Take Dante's *Divina Commedia*. When we translate it, if we translate it in Benjaminian way, the moment we start to translate it the original is broken because it appears only as a fragment. You see the idea is this one: a true translation treats the original as a fragment and tries to translate not faithfully what the fragment says, but what precisely the fragment failed to grasp, so that both of them together would tell the story. Which is why I think even an even better example than this stupid translation is something that I cannot resist, I am in love in it from when I was young I remember, this retelling of the same story from different angles. Or a different example, just changing slightly the original story, you know this idea of alternate possibilities. Like did you see the movie of Kieślowski, *Blind Chance*, and then the German worse film by Tom Tykwer, *Run Lola Run*? The idea is you have a narrative, at a certain point the story takes three possible directions. And of course the point is what, that it is wrong to ask but which is the proper original? There is none. You get the meaning just by almost, I'm bluffing, but as what they call in quantum physics superposition. You know all three echoing in each other. This is what I must say fascinates me so much. This is why again already when I was young I loved this modern staging of the operas where you change a little bit the original story and I don't like postmodern experiments as such, you just have to do something to provoke. No, but sometimes the right intervention is ingenious. For example the jerk our friend who will come tomorrow morning, will he give a talk here? Yes, he is not an idiot, Peter Sellars. He did he did you can find them on DVD now, he did three great Mozart operas for TV, he staged them: *Figaro*, *Don Giovanni*, and *Cosi fan tutte*. I think the first two so-so but the true genius is *Cosi fan tutte*. You know you have two couples in all this masks and so on and then you have just two other persons: Don Alfonso, a philosopher who organizes this, and poor servant girl Despina or who. And you know how he Peter Sellars reinterprets it? That the true traumatic love is between philosopher and the servant and because the two of them cannot realize their love they manipulate the others. It's a crazy idea but it works so well. You know what I mean at a very naive level all of a sudden you feel: My god, that's it, now I get it. Or my example which I mentioned I would say some ten times in my books: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle version of *Tristan und Isolde*, Wagner's opera. You know how the story officially ends? Tristan is dying in the last minute Isolde comes, they die together. It's more complex because the King also comes but basically. You know how Ponnelle staged it, staged it? It's so efficient, much more tragic. That in act two they have they make love they are interrupted and then Tristan is wounded, goes the third act, he waits for her. And no wonder that he dies, you know that Tristan act three is maybe physically the most difficult role in the history of opera. Ludwig von Schorr, Carolsfeld, or whatever, the first singer of Tristan effectively died after the first performance in Munich. Because you know like Tristan I mean I as a Wagnerian got nervous like "Fuck off, drop dead, you know," he sings for about forty minutes no, and is supposed to be mortally wounded, you know. The only parallel that I know is some friends in South Korea showed this to me. There is a North Korean opera, sure, praising a guy who in the war against Americans bombs a, sacrifices himself, explodes himself, but kills twenty Americans. And the scene is like this, that's how it is described. The guy has his legs and arms cut off, exploded, but while he is totally bleeding he somehow with his head grabs the the grenade, the bomb, and explodes it, and while telling this he gives a long two-page speech on how he is glad to die for Kim Il Sung or whatever. No, well it's almost as good as Wagner but back to my point. So what Ponnelle does and it's so ingenious is that in his version there is no Isolde. For Isolde this was a nice adventure as long as it went, she stayed with her husband no. So in act three when Tristan is approaching death, he just imagines Isolde coming. Imagining, and this is done in a wonderful way, that *Che vuoi?* structure intersubjective way. He doesn't see Isolde. He looks let's say I'm the guy in Tristan hoho, I look at you the public in the opera and behind me with totally with total with all the lights as a kind of a magical apparition Isolde stands and it's in your gaze that I see her. And then it's done so nicely because if you so the whole famous final song *Mild und leise*, the death of Isolde is Tristan's imagination to enable him to die in peace. And it's done so touchingly because when Isolde sings her last notes, you have them one second of color and then the last twenty seconds by orchestra. Ponnelle did this in such a wonderful cinematic way: when Isolde stops singing you have one-two seconds of darkness, then light goes on but everything is grey, Tristan is alone dead. You see what I'm aiming at? It changes the story but it feels so absolutely right the way, the way it is done. Okay, I will not bore you by the fact that I think already mentioned it every year because this is my mega narcissism. I'm not just a philosopher, I'm also a great artist dramatist. I wrote finally and it's already accepted by a Berlin theater, big one, and in Croatia, Zagreb, Slovenia I prohibited in my country to do it, and now I'm sending it around everyone wants to perform it already, my version, you know the story of *Antigone*. The same, three: the first one like Sophocles, the second one Antigone wins. She convinces Creon that Polynices should be buried. The result is even worse: the whole city is in fire. And then in my version, Antigone wandering around, the whole city is in fire and she says her her hit line of *Antigone*: "I was created for love, not for war." And then Chorus sings back basically, I translate it in a vulgar way: "Fuck off stupid girl, you are the reason of this, you know, with your stupid insistence that your brother should be buried." And then the third version is my favorite Stalinist one, probably heard about it. While Creon and Antigone are fighting, the Chorus steps over, arrests them both and says: "You are a threat to common good," this kind of Jacobinic *Comité de Salut Public*, "you are, you will both be liquidated, we establish ourselves as the tool of people's dictatorship whatever." And they are both killed and at the end I apply to Antigone that wonderful totalitarian poem, *The Examination Questioning of the Good Person* by Brecht where Chorus Antigone defends herself no like: "But I always kept my word." Chorus answer: "But to whom did you give the word?" And she said: "I never looked for at my interests." The Chorus says: "Ah, at whose interests are you then looking, like enemy?" Okay after a couple of exchanges like this, the Chorus answer: "You convinced us, you are a very good person. So we will kill you with the good words and bury you in good earth." And then the Chorus celebrates people's democracy or what. But so now you will find and there are other incidentally wonderful examples here. For example, it's not a great book, but I like it, I bought it at some discount, Zachary Mason, *The Lost Books of the Odyssey*. It's allegedly, allegedly it brings out some forgotten versions, the idea is that Homer had a whole bunch of contradictory narratives and he just put together the the Odyssey window, the story of Ulysses. So here it's so wonderful, you know,
that the God which who created the world, who said let it be light, no, is the devil himself. Then you have this wonderful reading of Christ's sacrifice: that Christ was sacrificed to us humans, that the sacrifice of Christ is a kind of a divine excuse to us: Sorry humanity, I screwed it up, I made you a terrible world, I give you as a gift. It's almost like you know Yakuza, the Japanese monsters. Now I don't know if this is Hollywood or not but I spoke with some Japanese friends they claim that it's also in some Japanese movie, Yakuza do this. Namely what, that there if you offend someone whom you really respect, the thing to do is to cut off one of your fingers and give it to him as a present, a sincere apology. And again, the idea is this is what Jesus Christ was, a Yakuza mobster who screwed it up or whatever no. So again as what is so important and now you can also see for psychoanalysis the most elementary function of fantasy. Fantasy is simply an answer to this *Che vuoi?*, what do you want. Fantasy is an answer. In fantasy you learn what the other wants from you. This is the basic function of fantasy: to clarify of course in an proto-ideological way what the other wants from you. Let's not get lost, do it quickly. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to ask in terms of the discourse of hysteric and pervert. So the analyst's discourse in this case would be to position oneself in the position of this questioning hysteric? No, it would be to position oneself at the foundation of... No, the analyst, the idea is this one to put it very simply. The analyst precisely embodies this *Che vuoi?* itself. The the function of the analyst is to provoke totally the analysand, the patient, in this sense in the discourse of the analysis the analyst occupies the place of object, object in the sense of surplus enjoyment. Like this pure which is why the good analyst never tells you what you want or... he even shouldn't be too good to the patient because you know where you should, if you are interested in Freud it must still be available, I have an old edition thirty years ago in Ben-Zuss, Muriel Gardiner. She was quite an interesting woman, very intelligent, her other name is Vanessa Redgrave, I'm not kidding. Did you see that movie, it's too old, *Julia*, where she figures, Vanessa Redgrave, she is basically Muriel Gardiner. She was an American, very honest, got caught into anti-Nazi resistance later but she was very close to Freud, and after Freud dropped him, him who, Wolfman, the Russian, his patient, she Muriel Gardiner took over his analysis. And basically let's be frank, she cured him. And she in a very nice way located one of Freud's faithful errors. Wolfman was a from came from a rich Russian family and when the World War I ended, October Revolution and so on of course, his family was lost, no money, he was all of a sudden poor. And Freud because he was a good decent man, he helped him financially while continuing analysis. It was a beautiful gesture from humanitarian step point, it was a mega mistake from the clinical point because Wolfman was as Lacan says somewhere the first pure borderline patient, which means on the edge of psychosis, paranoia. And typically this is why Freud's help was a mistake. It triggered paranoia, like: Why is Freud doing this? What's his plot? Why is Freud helping me? You know Freud instead of leaving his own desire, analyst, totally impenetrable, blank, and in this sense a projection screen onto which true transference the patient can confront his desire, Freud provided the crucial element for for a paranoiac construction, no? You need I mean this in the loving way, the feminine bitch like Muriel Gardiner who didn't play this game to to cure him really. And it was incredible. He was totally cured. This was a mythic event. An American soldier, I read in this biography, was walking around Vienna and he saw some guy, started to talk with him, the guy spoke German with a Russian accent. The miracle was that this American soldier was an officer who knew about psychoanalysis and imagine the shock. He learned, he knew Wolfman as a mythical example from the most famous, this was Wolfman! You know you walked in '46 along Vienna and he did it quite well, even as an old man he married again. In other words you may hear hear all these rumors how psychoanalysis doesn't really work as clinic. Well there at least it worked, it worked very well. But again you see my point and my good friend Mladen Dolar, who will be here a week from now, Monday more, he made the same mistake in Ljubljana. I don't know if you know this story I already mentioned it years ago. Some years ago there was a young guy in Ljubljana who was obviously more or less a psychotic, gay at the same time, you'll see why this is important I'll tell you immediately. And he came to me once at my institute which was it was summer windows were open on the fourth floor of a building in downtown center of Ljubljana and he told me: I want to go to analysis with you. I know what you are trying you and Mladen Dolar, you are trying to control me and to force me to castrate myself, whatever no. I did the right thing although it was a risky thing. I told the guy it's much worse than you think. I don't even care about you. And then I pointed the open window and said: Look, because at that point when he got me I was eating a sandwich, if you throw yourself out of the window I will not even stop eating my sandwich. It was a risky move but it worked. The guy looked at me: "Oh it doesn't function" and left. Mladen Dolar, heartly liberal, emotionally, politically, then he went to Mladen Dolar with the same complaint. Mladen Dolar tried to help him. "No, it's not like this..." You know the result? That for two-three weeks this guy then was serially, almost every day, going to the police denouncing there Mladen for murder attempt. That Mladen wants to kill him and we all made fun of Mladen because he learned this, you know this guy even dreamed about a detailed way how that Mladen would seduce him, then a tergo fuck him into the ass and while fucking him he will strangle him and so on. Poor Mladen, this was his life for years. But you see the, no, I don't mean telling you be be good. My god, I'm a sentimentalist, that's why I never would be able to be an analyst. One thing is I would be too sentimental, and the second reason you probably guessed it. Be sincere, can you imagine me listening to someone patient for twenty minutes or personal, I don't feel myself doing it. Okay let's go back. So I'm so sad we don't have time to do that. This would be one, maybe we can do it okay on on next Monday if you want, you know, these four discourses is maybe Lacan at his best. It's a simple four formulas and it's so productive in the sense that it really works as a position. But I shouldn't drop I shouldn't lose too much time here. Okay this was all the introductory association about Que faire?, the enigma of the other and so on and so on. So ah yes back to so again but at the end I did arrive at God. God as the ultimate "Que faire? What do you want?" And I think all truly radical religion does here one thing which is to be done: transposes the enigma of what God wants from us onto God himself. God himself doesn't know it. You know you have all this wonderful I think that theological points which arise when, and here for me serious theology begins. And this is where I claim German idealist Schelling, Hegel, but also already beginning with Meister Eckhart and German mystics where on the right track. You know what's their basic premise? It's that it's not just that religion is historical in the sense that it but it's that the development of religion is immanent to God himself. Our discovering God is also an event of God himself coming to terms with himself. That's the that's the formula. So in other words it is absolutely crucial to apply here that wonderful formula of Hegel, you must know it, apropos ancient Greeks, you know where Sphinx, Sphinx we don't know what Sphinx an enigma. And Hegel says it beautifully that the enigmas of ancient Greeks like Sphinx for us were also enigmas, mysteries for the Greeks themselves, for the ancient sorry Egyptians, Egyptians themselves so that you know. That's the basic operation. Your enigma, it's not that we have some impenetrable divinity which is beyond enigmatic for us, but the enigma of the other is the enigma for the other himself. And we will come to this today, incidentally maybe we can even go there right now because I don't want to talk too much about it later. Sorry, yes I have it here, namely this idea... yes, I had a question about the the ancient Egyptians. Is it possible that there was a previous race like the Hottentots in Egypt where the Sphinx was maybe less of a mystery or had a different cultural reference? It is possible although, you know, my problem is always this one. I think that when you have a new religion, the mystery is not what was before, but the true mystery is the other like for example, this is what my beloved theologian Chesterton liked to repeat, that if we talk about the passage from apes to humans, the mysterious point is not we cannot know what apes really were, the mysterious point is what we humans are not once we are already established as humans but what we are in the eyes of the apes as it were. Kierkegaard would have called this the universal in-becoming. And here everything depends on this. For example, another example if you know a little bit of a theory, it was fashionable following Louis Althusser to emphasize how subject, this is Althusser's notion of subject, subject is ideological in its very constitution. Subject is an element of ideological misrecognition. Like the idea is vaguely this one: you have an overdetermined process without subject and in subjectivity as self-awareness you as a subject misperceive yourself as an agent. Like as if you are the agent, spontaneous origin of it all and you obfuscate this decentered process which generates you and so on and so on. But from the Lacanian point, yes it's true that this subjectivity as origin of itself, spontaneous creativity is an illusion, but it doesn't obfuscate some pre-subjective process. It obfuscates subjectivity itself as cut, as a cut, as a gap, as you know. So that a new or that would be my reading of Christianity: there is a secret in Christianity, but it's not some stupid pagan tradition which survived. It is the founding gesture, the horror of the founding gesture of Christianity itself. That's why I like to quote it, I think I did it here on the first day for the hundredth time. You know when Napoleon crowned himself, took the crown. Napoleon organized his crowning as an emperor in the presence of the Pope. And when the Pope was approaching him with the crown, Napoleon simply took the crown from Pope's hand and put it on himself. And Pope, the Pope gave him a wonderful answer which was: Sire, Pope to Napoleon, I know what you want to do, you want to destroy Christianity. Believe me you will not succeed. We the church are trying to do this for years. You know this idea that the excess that for example monotheism, and this is what Freud was searching for in his *Moses and Monotheism*. The secret is not some pagan secret from before. We can play these games, they are easy to do how you know all the motives were already before like I don't know, Book of Job you have it before, reincarnation... yes, but what is obfuscated in Judaism for Freud is the as it were original constitutive gesture of monotheism itself. It's its own dark it's its own dark object. Nonetheless so that I, sorry, yes. My point is this one, that God himself doesn't know what he wants, so then that the process of our human understanding of God is part of the history of God himself. In other words, it's not only that we need God, God needs us to become fully God. That's the that's the best, not even necessarily Gnostic thought. So maybe I spoke about this a year ago but with a different twist I want just to go a little bit into it and since there is a guy here who pretends to know Benjamin, maybe he mentioned it no, I will mention Benjamin a little bit. Incidentally the fate of Benjamin shows don't you think that there is some justice in the world? Justice in the sense that theoreticians who survive deserve to survive. Namely, I remember when I was very young, '60s and you know critical theory, Frankfurt school, and all of them were popular at that point: Herbert Marcuse, Horkheimer, blah blah. Now basically two survived: Adorno and Walter Benjamin. And I think the right ones survived. I think they they were by far the only ones who deserved to survive. Okay, Benjamin. You know that when Benjamin speaks about translation, he uses the well-known Lurianic, Luria was a guy who lived in the 16th century somewhere central Europe, Poland, and has a wonderful theological notion of creation of the world. And his teachings are called after Luria, Lurianic Kabbalah. The basic metaphor of Luria is broken vessel. I will simplify to the utmost. At the beginning we have Ein Sof, creator energy, whatever. It is infinite but formless, without purpose, pure stupid energy. Now this Ein Sof, the primordial not even creator, creative energy, resolved to create something with form and purpose, human beings, to understand itself, not even himself. And here already an ingenious gesture happens. I think it's such a right insight which can even be translated, I admit it in a very suspicious way, but nonetheless into modern physics. Namely, his idea, for me here serious theology begins. The idea is that God did not simply create the world out of nothing. He first had to create nothingness in himself. The idea is that this formless energy had to and he uses this crucial mystical term which stands for what German idealism calls Zusammenziehung, contraction. To contract itself into the punctuality of the subject so that all this chaotic mess is reduced to nothing, void, and this nothing is then the space for creation. Okay where do things get of interest here? The idea is then that after creating material that is this material reality that God then creates is too fragile, the divine light is too strong so reality explodes like a broken vessel. And then it's our duty, us as believers, to help God, but also ourselves, in restoring the vessel, putting together all the fragments and so on and so on. Okay, let's draw this point that what this implies is that again only through this broken vessel and in our efforts to reconstruct the vessel God himself begins maybe to understand itself. So the fate of us how we understand God is the fate of God himself. We decide of the fate of God himself. And even a conservative Catholic whom I like, like Paul Claudel, the famous French poet, dramatist, he put it this surprisingly for a Catholic in a wonderful way. He says somewhere that the ultimate secret of Christianity is that God is helpless without us. That the ultimate message of Christianity is not this playing it safe because there is some old jerk up there who will help us. It's not, no, it's not you know God will somehow intervene and help, it's on the contrary: God needs our help. And this is then a wonderful reading of the sacrifice of Christ. Which is not simply: Okay, I sacrifice myself so now you are safe because I paid the price, God will help, you know is that divine sacrifice means that God delivers the fate of his creation into our hands. We are condemned to freedom. God's sacrifice literally provides grounds our freedom. So let's go back. The idea is then this one: how to read this bringing the fragments of the vessel together? Here Benjamin does something truly ingenious. First I will try to describe it how Benjamin means it, then I will move to a different artistic example and finally we will come to the old jerk, to God himself. First, here is a quote, because Benjamin uses this metaphor of broken vessel in his wonderful early essay *The Task of the Translator*. Incidentally sometimes I'm almost tempted to think, aren't you sometimes tempted that it is as if Benjamin in his early years, in a slightly confused mystical way, said the crucial things and then he was almost fighting himself to understand as if he was a crazy God, but he didn't fully succeed. Okay here is the quote, which is supposed to describe with this metaphor of the broken vessel the inner workings of the process of translation. Quote: "Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together, must follow one another in the smallest detail, but need not resemble one another, so instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, the translation must rather lovingly and in detail in its own language, form itself according to the way of signifying (Art des Meines in German) of the original, to make both (both means original and the translation) recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel." I hope you get the point why this is so wonderful. Because the usual standard, it's a very simple operation. The standard notion of translation is that you have the original which is the thing itself, and then you try creatively in another speech universe to come as close as possible to the original. This would be to put it roughly metaphoric dimension. Original is original, translation should is a metaphor, never the original, but it should be as perfect as possible a metaphor. My God, Benjamin says the exact opposite: that it's not metaphor but metonymy. That the relationship between original and translation is not between, in what sense it is a broken vessel? It's not that when you step into another language the vessel is broken, the perfection of the original is lost so you have to reconstruct the totality as much as possible. No, no, he says something different. He says that a good translation and the original must fit together as two fragments of a broken vessel. Which means that the truly ingenious translation doesn't idealize original, it treats the original itself as a fragment. And it tries to supplement it so that both original and translation will form, will come as close as possible to reconstructed vessel. But as Benjamin is well aware things get complicated here. Why? Because you know in a way a good translation in trying to reconstruct the unbroken vessel breaks it. In what sense? Let's say we have an idea, work of art, idea in the simple sense in the original. Take Dante's *Divina Commedia*. When we translate it, if we translate it in Benjaminian way, the moment we start to translate it the original is broken because it appears only as a fragment. You see the idea is this one: a true translation treats the original as a fragment and tries to translate not faithfully what the fragment says, but what precisely the fragment failed to grasp, so that both of them together would tell the story. Which is why I think even an even better example than this stupid translation is something that I cannot resist, I am in love in it from when I was young I remember, this retelling of the same story from different angles. Or a different example, just changing slightly the original story, you know this idea of alternate possibilities. Like did you see the movie of Kieślowski, *Blind Chance*, and then the German worse film by Tom Tykwer, *Run Lola Run*? The idea is you have a narrative, at a certain point the story takes three possible directions. And of course the point is what, that it is wrong to ask but which is the proper original? There is none. You get the meaning just by almost, I'm bluffing, but as what they call in quantum physics superposition. You know all three echoing in each other. This is what I must say fascinates me so much. This is why again already when I was young I loved this modern staging of the operas where you change a little bit the original story and I don't like postmodern experiments as such, you just have to do something to provoke. No, but sometimes the right intervention is ingenious. For example the jerk our friend who will come tomorrow morning, will he give a talk here? Yes, he is not an idiot, Peter Sellars. He did he did you can find them on DVD now, he did three great Mozart operas for TV, he staged them: *Figaro*, *Don Giovanni*, and *Cosi fan tutte*. I think the first two so-so but the true genius is *Cosi fan tutte*. You know you have two couples in all this masks and so on and then you have just two other persons: Don Alfonso, a philosopher who organizes this, and poor servant girl Despina or who. And you know how he Peter Sellars reinterprets it? That the true traumatic love is between philosopher and the servant and because the two of them cannot realize their love they manipulate the others. It's a crazy idea but it works so well. You know what I mean at a very naive level all of a sudden you feel: My god, that's it, now I get it. Or my example which I mentioned I would say some ten times in my books: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle version of *Tristan und Isolde*, Wagner's opera. You know how the story officially ends? Tristan is dying in the last minute Isolde comes, they die together. It's more complex because the King also comes but basically. You know how Ponnelle staged it, staged it? It's so efficient, much more tragic. That in act two they have they make love they are interrupted and then Tristan is wounded, goes the third act, he waits for her. And no wonder that he dies, you know that Tristan act three is maybe physically the most difficult role in the history of opera. Ludwig von Schorr, Carolsfeld, or whatever, the first singer of Tristan effectively died after the first performance in Munich. Because you know like Tristan I mean I as a Wagnerian got nervous like "Fuck off, drop dead, you know," he sings for about forty minutes no, and is supposed to be mortally wounded, you know. The only parallel that I know is some friends in South Korea showed this to me. There is a North Korean opera, sure, praising a guy who in the war against Americans bombs a, sacrifices himself, explodes himself, but kills twenty Americans. And the scene is like this, that's how it is described. The guy has his legs and arms cut off, exploded, but while he is totally bleeding he somehow with his head grabs the the grenade, the bomb, and explodes it, and while telling this he gives a long two-page speech on how he is glad to die for Kim Il Sung or whatever. No, well it's almost as good as Wagner but back to my point. So what Ponnelle does and it's so ingenious is that in his version there is no Isolde. For Isolde this was a nice adventure as long as it went, she stayed with her husband no. So in act three when Tristan is approaching death, he just imagines Isolde coming. Imagining, and this is done in a wonderful way, that *Che vuoi?* structure intersubjective way. He doesn't see Isolde. He looks let's say I'm the guy in Tristan hoho, I look at you the public in the opera and behind me with totally with total with all the lights as a kind of a magical apparition Isolde stands and it's in your gaze that I see her. And then it's done so nicely because if you so the whole famous final song *Mild und leise*, the death of Isolde is Tristan's imagination to enable him to die in peace. And it's done so touchingly because when Isolde sings her last notes, you have them one second of color and then the last twenty seconds by orchestra. Ponnelle did this in such a wonderful cinematic way: when Isolde stops singing you have one-two seconds of darkness, then light goes on but everything is grey, Tristan is alone dead. You see what I'm aiming at? It changes the story but it feels so absolutely right the way, the way it is done. Okay, I will not bore you by the fact that I think already mentioned it every year because this is my mega narcissism. I'm not just a philosopher, I'm also a great artist dramatist. I wrote finally and it's already accepted by a Berlin theater, big one, and in Croatia, Zagreb, Slovenia I prohibited in my country to do it, and now I'm sending it around everyone wants to perform it already, my version, you know the story of *Antigone*. The same, three: the first one like Sophocles, the second one Antigone wins. She convinces Creon that Polynices should be buried. The result is even worse: the whole city is in fire. And then in my version, Antigone wandering around, the whole city is in fire and she says her her hit line of *Antigone*: "I was created for love, not for war." And then Chorus sings back basically, I translate it in a vulgar way: "Fuck off stupid girl, you are the reason of this, you know, with your stupid insistence that your brother should be buried." And then the third version is my favorite Stalinist one, probably heard about it. While Creon and Antigone are fighting, the Chorus steps over, arrests them both and says: "You are a threat to common good," this kind of Jacobinic *Comité de Salut Public*, "you are, you will both be liquidated, we establish ourselves as the tool of people's dictatorship whatever." And they are both killed and at the end I apply to Antigone that wonderful totalitarian poem, *The Examination Questioning of the Good Person* by Brecht where Chorus Antigone defends herself no like: "But I always kept my word." Chorus answer: "But to whom did you give the word?" And she said: "I never looked for at my interests." The Chorus says: "Ah, at whose interests are you then looking, like enemy?" Okay after a couple of exchanges like this, the Chorus answer: "You convinced us, you are a very good person. So we will kill you with the good words and bury you in good earth." And then the Chorus celebrates people's democracy or what. But so now you will find and there are other incidentally wonderful examples here. For example, it's not a great book, but I like it, I bought it at some discount, Zachary Mason, *The Lost Books of the Odyssey*. It's allegedly, allegedly it brings out some forgotten versions, the idea is that Homer had a whole bunch of contradictory narratives and he just put together the the Odyssey window, the story of Ulysses. So here it's so wonderful, you know,
unknown
okay it's one of those books where the idea is better than
okay it's one of those books where the idea is better than
Slavoj Žižek
realization, but I like it because like in one of the stories it's so tragic but beautiful: Odysseus, Ulysses returns and sees that in his absence Penelope did marry another guy who is quite a good king, they are happy and gently he withdraws like: "Why would I disturb this happiness?" In the last most ironic version, the very old Ulysses visits Troy and sees that there is the whole tourist industry there, you know. They are selling they are selling Achilles' Achilles' spear or whatever, all of it. And then he says: "But fuck you, I'm Ulysses, I was here." And they laugh at him, no no, they already have their mythology. And also the story of Polyphemus, one-eyed giant, is wonderfully retold from the standpoint of Polyphemus: he is a good guy, poor shepherd there taking care of his sheep, then this sleazy Greeks come stealing his food and so on. No. So you see my point? I think that this way of superimposing different versions, you see my point, it's wrong to ask but which is the true one? No, the truth of this superposition itself. The truth is what echoes among the all. And now, I didn't forget about it, back to Christianity. Isn't the ultimate example, I claim, of the broken vessel, the seven last words of Christ? You know, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Truly second: "I say to you today you will be with me in paradise." Third one: "Woman behold your son, behold your mother." Fourth: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Five: "I thirst." Six: "It is finished." Seven: "Father into your hands I commit my spirit." Incidentally this is a bad translation because yesterday I bought it here, I read Agamben's book on how do you pronounce the guy who condemned... Pilate? Pilate and Jesus. It's a short book, it's not too good theoretically but he points something which others have already observed nicely, that the verb used here in this last words, "Into my hands I commit," it's "I deliver myself" in strictly legal term of you know you deliver a prisoner to or you deliver like a gangster who wants to come clean, delivers himself to the police. And Agamben shows how how this is a regular verb in the history of Christ. First it is said that God delivers his son to humans. Then then Judas, God basically orders Judas to deliver him to the Romans. Then Pilate delivers him to Jews. And it's a wonderful legal analysis of Agamben when he draws attention to the fact that there is no judgment. It's a very weird trial. At no point does Pilate say, "Okay, I condemn you to crucifixion." No, he just said, "Okay, back to Jews, I deliver him to you." And then washes his hands or whatever. And here I like the dogma, Luther at his best. You know that there are now big debates: Christian tradition from the very beginning desperately tried to redeem Pilate. Why? It's clear why: the beginnings of anti-Semitism are there. To cleanse the Romans as much as and possible as possible, to put the blame on the Jews, you know. So Pilate had to be made some kind of a pure Roman who is just shocked at the barbarism of the Jews and so on. But then comes a wonderful problem. You know that Pilate has a wife who is anonymous in the Gospels but she is sometimes called Procla or Procula and sometimes Claudia I think. The point is that just on the morning of the trial she warns her husband Pilate not to have anything to do with trial of Christ because she had a terrible dream announcing to her that this is a great sacred man, don't mess with that. Now some Orthodox Christians even had her as a saint, like she was already believing in Christ. Ah, you will not trick Martin Luther in this way. Luther claims, I love this logic in a purely procedural way, her voice is the voice of the devil. Why? Because Christ wanted to be delivered and crucified to redeem us. She on behalf of devil wanted to stop the process of crucifixion. Because you know if Pilate were not to deliver Christ to the Jews there would be no crucifixion, we would not be redeemed and so on and so on. So okay we have all this. Now two mistakes you can make here. One version in those two horrible... do you like gay cinema? Violent sado-masochistic gay cinema? If you do, borrow Mel Gibson's *Passion*. I think that's the only interest of the movie: you see a naked male body tortured in all the ways. It's ridiculous. And she but also Zeffirelli, I hate Franco Zeffirelli, you know the legendary Italian. You know that he is a neo-fascist openly? He was some years ago a member of Italian parliament of course on the neo-fascist list. To make things worse, when they were celebrating '95 or when years of the invention of cinema, cinema you know Lumière or whatever, Vatican did a surprisingly good thing, you can check it. They published the list of best films of all time. And it's a surprisingly good list. Like under religious films you don't find his Zeffirelli's bullshit, *Jesus of Nazareth*. But you you do find Pasolini. I mean it's incredibly good selection. You know what Zeffirelli did as every good right-winger would have done? He made a public statement that obviously Vatican is already under the control of communists. Okay so what do both these movies, Zeffirelli's *Jesus of Nazareth* and *Passion*, they do the most stupid thing imaginable. They try to combine all these seven words into one consistent narrative. Like, first Christ is desperate, "Oh father why did you abandon me," then after shouting this "Yum yum, I'm thirsty," says "I'm thirsty," then Christ get a dream and says "Okay, it's finished, now father I deliver myself to you." You see the utter vulgarity of it? Because it only works if precisely you have all the versions superimposed, not put into a linear narrative. And it's also wrong to pick out one which would have been the original. Yes, we can play the Freudian game of looking for something, but it should be something ultimately traumatic. One should maybe construct another scene which is really possible and as if you it's it explodes into six, seven again because it is. So again, even in even God himself, Christ functions as a broken vessel, a fragment. And that's what Christianity knows. Here is the quote that I love from my beloved Gilbert Keith Chesterton who with a clear reference to broken vessel writes wrote this: "It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and back. Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls," and so on and so on. I think he is correct. I think this is the trick of Christianity. Like imagine yourself abandoned by God, alone, desperate. How do you get from here to redemption? Not by: "Now I'm really, really a desperate, oh wait a minute, there is the light at the end of the tunnel, nonetheless God comes." No, the message of Christianity is much more radical one. Again, let's say that you are totally desperate without any God guaranteeing and then, you know what's the Christian answer? But this is deliverance. No reference to God to guide you means you are condemned to freedom. It's your responsibility. This means that God gave us freedom. You know freedom is not cheap. You pay the price for it, you know. So again in this sense I claim the ultimate lesson of Christianity is that God himself is a broken vessel, a fragment. It's not just again and that if anything the fate of us, the task of us humans is to break him further, to make him a fragment. Yes. In this way can we think of God as this Spinozist structure? No. My maybe I'm wrong but I am... okay I will tell you another thing. If you I don't agree with the guy theoretically. He is not a Jew and often the most violent Zionists are not Jews: Jean-Claude Milner, not Miller. But he's extremely intelligent guy, I read him. What he did is he wrote a book, *Le Sage Trompeur*, The Cheating Wise Wise Man. Whatever. No, wise guy is ironic, not wise man. Whatever. Where I like this. It appeals to all my Stalinist instincts. The thesis is you know that terrible Jewish corps which excommunicated forever Spinoza? That they were right. And it it demonstrates in such a convincing way all the potential darkness of Spinoza's teaching. And I often was afraid why didn't we notice this that from Deleuze onwards you have this absolute deification of Spinoza. Spinoza is one one of the untouchables today, you know. And I remember when there was some years ago there was at UCLA a conference on Spinoza. All were there from Balibar to Badiou, Judith Butler and so on. And there was some guy there who radically defended Spinoza and of course he couldn't ignore, I think it's towards the very end of *Tractatus Theologico-Politicus*, where Spinoza defines his notion of "Right is Power." You have as many rights as you are as strong as you are, so you have the right to do what you are able to do. And Spinoza gives as an example: women. He says obviously women has less rights because as we can see they are less strong and so on and so on. And this guy exploded, he wanted to be a good feminist claiming: "No, I must something must have been wrong. Was he drunk or whatever? Like this is not Spinoza." It was so stupid, this is Spinoza at its purest. Spinoza even against all truly great democratic, called them ironically as these philosophers, directly advocated this Platonic double truth theory. You know Spinoza was okay, the first enlightened guy, you know he says this narrative form, God as an old father, prohibition, he says this is just naive way for ordinary people to get the message which can be formulated in non-ethical but clearly ontological terms. He even gives the example: like you are prohibited to eat from the tree of knowledge. In reality this means imagine a scientist saying "Apples are not good from that tree because they were not organically grown" whatever, you know? That is just bad, but at the same time Spinoza always maintained that this is just for the unenlightened majority, that the majority needs narratives, myths, they're too stupid to get it. Also, it's wrong here I think Rancière, Negri and already Deleuze get a little bit confused, you know this affect imitation, how do you call this in Spinoza, this one affect imitating the other... no another term, I'm sorry. The point is they celebrate this as you know another metonymic causality. But are they crazy? For Spinoza this is the ultimate horror. You know where to Spinoza this idea came of affects imitating each other? When he saw the lynching of, who were those two brothers, my god, his political allies? De Witt, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know when they were lynched, Spinoza was absolutely shocked and for him when he speaks about imitation of affects it is precisely this furious crowd. It's not this Deleuzian beauty of affects, multitudes whatever in each other, no? So again, things get a little bit more complicated here with Spinoza. So I would say no, I think you find yeah, yeah a mega great philosopher, I agree, all of this. But no, I am on the Kant in so far as the great choice is Kant versus Spinoza, I am for Kant. And this is why I admire some of Althusser's followers who began as fanatical anti-Hegelians and then broke down. For example Pierre Macherey, the one who co-wrote *Lire le Capital*, Reading Capital, he did write years when I was young a book, *Hegel ou Spinoza*, Hegel or Spinoza, confronting the two, even arrogantly claiming not only was Spinoza better in the sense that Hegel's critique of Spinoza totally misses the point, but that you already find in Spinoza in advance a critique of Hegel. Well he was an honest guy. After that he began to read Hegel and dropped the whole line. Warren Montag, a Spinozian from California, told me that because he had contact in the last years with Louis Althusser, and he told me that with Althusser himself it was the same. This strict anti-Hegelian line of the early Althusser, then he started to doubt, and the source of his doubt was actually one of the best ever written books on Hegel, it's so sad we cannot get your money, me, Judith Butler we try to push: beautiful title, *La Patience du Concept*, The Patience of the Concept, of the Notion. Gérard Lebrun is his name. Reading this simply, Warren Montag told me Althusser got it: I still love Spinoza but I don't have not even an idea what Hegel really is about, and he was deeply intrigued, deeply intrigued by Hegel. So okay, let us go on my god a little bit now into what I wanted to do this we will arrive in another way at this superposition of multiple narratives or whatever you want. As I already mentioned to you then I debated in New York last week with Stephen Kotkin, who can shout at you he did it in today's next building here, the biographer of you know writes three big volumes a new biography of Stalin. We focused on that in that New York Public Library debate that's the big problem of how to read Stalinism. Can we really say if there had been no Stalin, someone else would have done it? So as if there was a general necessity of someone like Stalin, so if not Stalin another guy would have taken place this role? Or is it that Stalin's personality, his contingent personality played such a strong role that if not, if no Stalin, then at least it would have been much different. It's interesting how although this guy Kotkin, you see this is why I think one should speak with intelligent conservatives, he is absolutely fanatically anti-communist but he has he has two small but nonetheless redeeming points features. One is that he accepts rather surprisingly for an anti-communist the second version. He thinks that without Stalin, probably a much more technocratic almost pro-Gorbachev line would have prevailed because as we know in last years Lenin not that he became a democrat but nonetheless he became extremely pragmatic. For example in one of his last desperate letters he said: just don't mention me
realization, but I like it because like in one of the stories it's so tragic but beautiful: Odysseus, Ulysses returns and sees that in his absence Penelope did marry another guy who is quite a good king, they are happy and gently he withdraws like: "Why would I disturb this happiness?" In the last most ironic version, the very old Ulysses visits Troy and sees that there is the whole tourist industry there, you know. They are selling they are selling Achilles' Achilles' spear or whatever, all of it. And then he says: "But fuck you, I'm Ulysses, I was here." And they laugh at him, no no, they already have their mythology. And also the story of Polyphemus, one-eyed giant, is wonderfully retold from the standpoint of Polyphemus: he is a good guy, poor shepherd there taking care of his sheep, then this sleazy Greeks come stealing his food and so on. No. So you see my point? I think that this way of superimposing different versions, you see my point, it's wrong to ask but which is the true one? No, the truth of this superposition itself. The truth is what echoes among the all. And now, I didn't forget about it, back to Christianity. Isn't the ultimate example, I claim, of the broken vessel, the seven last words of Christ? You know, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Truly second: "I say to you today you will be with me in paradise." Third one: "Woman behold your son, behold your mother." Fourth: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Five: "I thirst." Six: "It is finished." Seven: "Father into your hands I commit my spirit." Incidentally this is a bad translation because yesterday I bought it here, I read Agamben's book on how do you pronounce the guy who condemned... Pilate? Pilate and Jesus. It's a short book, it's not too good theoretically but he points something which others have already observed nicely, that the verb used here in this last words, "Into my hands I commit," it's "I deliver myself" in strictly legal term of you know you deliver a prisoner to or you deliver like a gangster who wants to come clean, delivers himself to the police. And Agamben shows how how this is a regular verb in the history of Christ. First it is said that God delivers his son to humans. Then then Judas, God basically orders Judas to deliver him to the Romans. Then Pilate delivers him to Jews. And it's a wonderful legal analysis of Agamben when he draws attention to the fact that there is no judgment. It's a very weird trial. At no point does Pilate say, "Okay, I condemn you to crucifixion." No, he just said, "Okay, back to Jews, I deliver him to you." And then washes his hands or whatever. And here I like the dogma, Luther at his best. You know that there are now big debates: Christian tradition from the very beginning desperately tried to redeem Pilate. Why? It's clear why: the beginnings of anti-Semitism are there. To cleanse the Romans as much as and possible as possible, to put the blame on the Jews, you know. So Pilate had to be made some kind of a pure Roman who is just shocked at the barbarism of the Jews and so on. But then comes a wonderful problem. You know that Pilate has a wife who is anonymous in the Gospels but she is sometimes called Procla or Procula and sometimes Claudia I think. The point is that just on the morning of the trial she warns her husband Pilate not to have anything to do with trial of Christ because she had a terrible dream announcing to her that this is a great sacred man, don't mess with that. Now some Orthodox Christians even had her as a saint, like she was already believing in Christ. Ah, you will not trick Martin Luther in this way. Luther claims, I love this logic in a purely procedural way, her voice is the voice of the devil. Why? Because Christ wanted to be delivered and crucified to redeem us. She on behalf of devil wanted to stop the process of crucifixion. Because you know if Pilate were not to deliver Christ to the Jews there would be no crucifixion, we would not be redeemed and so on and so on. So okay we have all this. Now two mistakes you can make here. One version in those two horrible... do you like gay cinema? Violent sado-masochistic gay cinema? If you do, borrow Mel Gibson's *Passion*. I think that's the only interest of the movie: you see a naked male body tortured in all the ways. It's ridiculous. And she but also Zeffirelli, I hate Franco Zeffirelli, you know the legendary Italian. You know that he is a neo-fascist openly? He was some years ago a member of Italian parliament of course on the neo-fascist list. To make things worse, when they were celebrating '95 or when years of the invention of cinema, cinema you know Lumière or whatever, Vatican did a surprisingly good thing, you can check it. They published the list of best films of all time. And it's a surprisingly good list. Like under religious films you don't find his Zeffirelli's bullshit, *Jesus of Nazareth*. But you you do find Pasolini. I mean it's incredibly good selection. You know what Zeffirelli did as every good right-winger would have done? He made a public statement that obviously Vatican is already under the control of communists. Okay so what do both these movies, Zeffirelli's *Jesus of Nazareth* and *Passion*, they do the most stupid thing imaginable. They try to combine all these seven words into one consistent narrative. Like, first Christ is desperate, "Oh father why did you abandon me," then after shouting this "Yum yum, I'm thirsty," says "I'm thirsty," then Christ get a dream and says "Okay, it's finished, now father I deliver myself to you." You see the utter vulgarity of it? Because it only works if precisely you have all the versions superimposed, not put into a linear narrative. And it's also wrong to pick out one which would have been the original. Yes, we can play the Freudian game of looking for something, but it should be something ultimately traumatic. One should maybe construct another scene which is really possible and as if you it's it explodes into six, seven again because it is. So again, even in even God himself, Christ functions as a broken vessel, a fragment. And that's what Christianity knows. Here is the quote that I love from my beloved Gilbert Keith Chesterton who with a clear reference to broken vessel writes wrote this: "It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and back. Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls," and so on and so on. I think he is correct. I think this is the trick of Christianity. Like imagine yourself abandoned by God, alone, desperate. How do you get from here to redemption? Not by: "Now I'm really, really a desperate, oh wait a minute, there is the light at the end of the tunnel, nonetheless God comes." No, the message of Christianity is much more radical one. Again, let's say that you are totally desperate without any God guaranteeing and then, you know what's the Christian answer? But this is deliverance. No reference to God to guide you means you are condemned to freedom. It's your responsibility. This means that God gave us freedom. You know freedom is not cheap. You pay the price for it, you know. So again in this sense I claim the ultimate lesson of Christianity is that God himself is a broken vessel, a fragment. It's not just again and that if anything the fate of us, the task of us humans is to break him further, to make him a fragment. Yes. In this way can we think of God as this Spinozist structure? No. My maybe I'm wrong but I am... okay I will tell you another thing. If you I don't agree with the guy theoretically. He is not a Jew and often the most violent Zionists are not Jews: Jean-Claude Milner, not Miller. But he's extremely intelligent guy, I read him. What he did is he wrote a book, *Le Sage Trompeur*, The Cheating Wise Wise Man. Whatever. No, wise guy is ironic, not wise man. Whatever. Where I like this. It appeals to all my Stalinist instincts. The thesis is you know that terrible Jewish corps which excommunicated forever Spinoza? That they were right. And it it demonstrates in such a convincing way all the potential darkness of Spinoza's teaching. And I often was afraid why didn't we notice this that from Deleuze onwards you have this absolute deification of Spinoza. Spinoza is one one of the untouchables today, you know. And I remember when there was some years ago there was at UCLA a conference on Spinoza. All were there from Balibar to Badiou, Judith Butler and so on. And there was some guy there who radically defended Spinoza and of course he couldn't ignore, I think it's towards the very end of *Tractatus Theologico-Politicus*, where Spinoza defines his notion of "Right is Power." You have as many rights as you are as strong as you are, so you have the right to do what you are able to do. And Spinoza gives as an example: women. He says obviously women has less rights because as we can see they are less strong and so on and so on. And this guy exploded, he wanted to be a good feminist claiming: "No, I must something must have been wrong. Was he drunk or whatever? Like this is not Spinoza." It was so stupid, this is Spinoza at its purest. Spinoza even against all truly great democratic, called them ironically as these philosophers, directly advocated this Platonic double truth theory. You know Spinoza was okay, the first enlightened guy, you know he says this narrative form, God as an old father, prohibition, he says this is just naive way for ordinary people to get the message which can be formulated in non-ethical but clearly ontological terms. He even gives the example: like you are prohibited to eat from the tree of knowledge. In reality this means imagine a scientist saying "Apples are not good from that tree because they were not organically grown" whatever, you know? That is just bad, but at the same time Spinoza always maintained that this is just for the unenlightened majority, that the majority needs narratives, myths, they're too stupid to get it. Also, it's wrong here I think Rancière, Negri and already Deleuze get a little bit confused, you know this affect imitation, how do you call this in Spinoza, this one affect imitating the other... no another term, I'm sorry. The point is they celebrate this as you know another metonymic causality. But are they crazy? For Spinoza this is the ultimate horror. You know where to Spinoza this idea came of affects imitating each other? When he saw the lynching of, who were those two brothers, my god, his political allies? De Witt, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know when they were lynched, Spinoza was absolutely shocked and for him when he speaks about imitation of affects it is precisely this furious crowd. It's not this Deleuzian beauty of affects, multitudes whatever in each other, no? So again, things get a little bit more complicated here with Spinoza. So I would say no, I think you find yeah, yeah a mega great philosopher, I agree, all of this. But no, I am on the Kant in so far as the great choice is Kant versus Spinoza, I am for Kant. And this is why I admire some of Althusser's followers who began as fanatical anti-Hegelians and then broke down. For example Pierre Macherey, the one who co-wrote *Lire le Capital*, Reading Capital, he did write years when I was young a book, *Hegel ou Spinoza*, Hegel or Spinoza, confronting the two, even arrogantly claiming not only was Spinoza better in the sense that Hegel's critique of Spinoza totally misses the point, but that you already find in Spinoza in advance a critique of Hegel. Well he was an honest guy. After that he began to read Hegel and dropped the whole line. Warren Montag, a Spinozian from California, told me that because he had contact in the last years with Louis Althusser, and he told me that with Althusser himself it was the same. This strict anti-Hegelian line of the early Althusser, then he started to doubt, and the source of his doubt was actually one of the best ever written books on Hegel, it's so sad we cannot get your money, me, Judith Butler we try to push: beautiful title, *La Patience du Concept*, The Patience of the Concept, of the Notion. Gérard Lebrun is his name. Reading this simply, Warren Montag told me Althusser got it: I still love Spinoza but I don't have not even an idea what Hegel really is about, and he was deeply intrigued, deeply intrigued by Hegel. So okay, let us go on my god a little bit now into what I wanted to do this we will arrive in another way at this superposition of multiple narratives or whatever you want. As I already mentioned to you then I debated in New York last week with Stephen Kotkin, who can shout at you he did it in today's next building here, the biographer of you know writes three big volumes a new biography of Stalin. We focused on that in that New York Public Library debate that's the big problem of how to read Stalinism. Can we really say if there had been no Stalin, someone else would have done it? So as if there was a general necessity of someone like Stalin, so if not Stalin another guy would have taken place this role? Or is it that Stalin's personality, his contingent personality played such a strong role that if not, if no Stalin, then at least it would have been much different. It's interesting how although this guy Kotkin, you see this is why I think one should speak with intelligent conservatives, he is absolutely fanatically anti-communist but he has he has two small but nonetheless redeeming points features. One is that he accepts rather surprisingly for an anti-communist the second version. He thinks that without Stalin, probably a much more technocratic almost pro-Gorbachev line would have prevailed because as we know in last years Lenin not that he became a democrat but nonetheless he became extremely pragmatic. For example in one of his last desperate letters he said: just don't mention me
unknown
socialism,
socialism,
Slavoj Žižek
all we Bolsheviks can do now is to, even in this very
all we Bolsheviks can do now is to, even in this very
unknown
Eurocentric way, is to bring in our primitive Russia a little bit of West
Eurocentric way, is to bring in our primitive Russia a little bit of West
Slavoj Žižek
European civilization and culture and so on. Which is why this may interest you. If you talk today with I wrote there is this big debate: who is to be blamed for Stalinism? Not in this sense that, is it east or west? Western Marxists like
European civilization and culture and so on. Which is why this may interest you. If you talk today with I wrote there is this big debate: who is to be blamed for Stalinism? Not in this sense that, is it east or west? Western Marxists like
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to play the stupid game which is wrong
to play the stupid game which is wrong
Slavoj Žižek
I think of blame the Russian primitivism, you know this stupid idea which is very racist of: revolution just took place in in the wrong place. It should have taken place in much more developed Germany, England, then you would have had your wonderful democratic system but oriental despotism all that bullshit, fuck them, they got what they wanted. But what's so interesting, if you talk today with Russian conservatives, they will give you and with no less justification the exactly opposite story. It is that for them Bolsheviks are together in the line with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the
I think of blame the Russian primitivism, you know this stupid idea which is very racist of: revolution just took place in in the wrong place. It should have taken place in much more developed Germany, England, then you would have had your wonderful democratic system but oriental despotism all that bullshit, fuck them, they got what they wanted. But what's so interesting, if you talk today with Russian conservatives, they will give you and with no less justification the exactly opposite story. It is that for them Bolsheviks are together in the line with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the
unknown
Great: brutal western modernizers. For them
Great: brutal western modernizers. For them
Slavoj Žižek
communism is precisely a radical break with traditional Russia, it's the imposition of a brutal Western program of modernization and if anything there are good elements for this: what Stalin tried with forced collectivization etc. it's precisely to do an extremely accelerated modernization. But what I okay I already developed this I would not go into it the idea is here the following one. Let's go step by step. That Dupuy's solution is, I already developed this here I'll just recapitulating is that this is a wrong way. We cannot simply say either a necessity or it depended on that person. Yes history is contingent but once it happens it as it were changes the past. Not factually but counterfactually in the sense that it grounds its own necessity. To give you a very naive I used it here many times already example of love: you fall in love contingently but once you are in, it appears to you as if you know all your life was a preparation for this moment and so on. Okay the great example that Dupuy uses is of course Julius Caesar, Rubicon. No, Caesar was free there. He may have not crossed the Rubicon. But the moment he did, it was his fate. So again the beauty is that something happens contingently but once it happens it becomes retroactively necessary. There is Dupuy quotes, I quote it three-four times in my book, a wonderful passage from some short political commentary some ten years ago of French elections when one of the candidates was Edouard Balladur who was under Chirac in some the same I don't know whom Prime Minister for some time. And *Le Monde* put it in this way: if, this were still these how do you call them pre-elections or whatever, not yet proper. If at this pre-elections whatever Monsieur Balladur will win, his victory will be necessary. It's a beautiful formulation. You know again the idea is that once you do something but the moment you do it it becomes necessary. Now I will give you I think one I already did, two others I didn't, some other examples of this. The point is asymmetry. The choice is not what Dupuy tries to argue against, he argues against this common sense notion that you know we are at a threshold, you either make this choice or that choice. No, the choice is always asymmetrical. In what sense? Again first the example I know just to remind you just I immediately I want to repeat it to make this point clear, this asymmetry. Let's say we are in the middle of a political of a seduction process. One of the partners makes a pass, explicitly declaring his desire. This as we all know is always a risky point. You can be rejected, even basically you risk being accused of harassment. Where here the asymmetry? It's here and I take this example from Dupuy's himself. Okay, sorry, I will then again be accused of whatever, but let's say I'm the guy, there is a woman, I tell her, I will not be vulgar, whatever, I want to do you know what. Okay. If she says "no," I can be accused of harassment. But now comes the catch. So there is an obstacle I have to overcome. If she says "yes," we cannot simply say that I successfully overcome the obstacle. No, the proper way to say that I established that there was no obstacle at all. So you see the paradox: either there is, either we fail, the obstacle prevents us to
communism is precisely a radical break with traditional Russia, it's the imposition of a brutal Western program of modernization and if anything there are good elements for this: what Stalin tried with forced collectivization etc. it's precisely to do an extremely accelerated modernization. But what I okay I already developed this I would not go into it the idea is here the following one. Let's go step by step. That Dupuy's solution is, I already developed this here I'll just recapitulating is that this is a wrong way. We cannot simply say either a necessity or it depended on that person. Yes history is contingent but once it happens it as it were changes the past. Not factually but counterfactually in the sense that it grounds its own necessity. To give you a very naive I used it here many times already example of love: you fall in love contingently but once you are in, it appears to you as if you know all your life was a preparation for this moment and so on. Okay the great example that Dupuy uses is of course Julius Caesar, Rubicon. No, Caesar was free there. He may have not crossed the Rubicon. But the moment he did, it was his fate. So again the beauty is that something happens contingently but once it happens it becomes retroactively necessary. There is Dupuy quotes, I quote it three-four times in my book, a wonderful passage from some short political commentary some ten years ago of French elections when one of the candidates was Edouard Balladur who was under Chirac in some the same I don't know whom Prime Minister for some time. And *Le Monde* put it in this way: if, this were still these how do you call them pre-elections or whatever, not yet proper. If at this pre-elections whatever Monsieur Balladur will win, his victory will be necessary. It's a beautiful formulation. You know again the idea is that once you do something but the moment you do it it becomes necessary. Now I will give you I think one I already did, two others I didn't, some other examples of this. The point is asymmetry. The choice is not what Dupuy tries to argue against, he argues against this common sense notion that you know we are at a threshold, you either make this choice or that choice. No, the choice is always asymmetrical. In what sense? Again first the example I know just to remind you just I immediately I want to repeat it to make this point clear, this asymmetry. Let's say we are in the middle of a political of a seduction process. One of the partners makes a pass, explicitly declaring his desire. This as we all know is always a risky point. You can be rejected, even basically you risk being accused of harassment. Where here the asymmetry? It's here and I take this example from Dupuy's himself. Okay, sorry, I will then again be accused of whatever, but let's say I'm the guy, there is a woman, I tell her, I will not be vulgar, whatever, I want to do you know what. Okay. If she says "no," I can be accused of harassment. But now comes the catch. So there is an obstacle I have to overcome. If she says "yes," we cannot simply say that I successfully overcome the obstacle. No, the proper way to say that I established that there was no obstacle at all. So you see the paradox: either there is, either we fail, the obstacle prevents us to
unknown
succeed,
succeed,
Slavoj Žižek
or there is no obstacle at all. And I'll give you another example which is beautiful: John, John's Gospel. Otherwise I hate it, it's the first Gnostic anti-Semitic Gospel but there is you know after Jesus make all that shouting about how I came here not to judge you but to save you, to redeem you. Then he gives, my god, people didn't notice this, he formulates exactly the same paradox. Where he says those who believe in me will not be judged because they are saved. Those who don't believe me will also not be judged because they are already judged, condemned. You see the nice asymmetry? It's not I will judge you, believe or not, but either you are not judged or not you will be judged, but you will just realize that you were fucked up from the beginning, already judged. And okay we don't have time to go into the finesse of how this is how Hegel argues. When you have the moment of tension, alienation, you don't overcome it, but you establish that you always already did overcome it. It's a much more complex process. So okay, not to repeat old old examples, I will just because epistemologically now I come to my central point: epistemologically the paradox here is the following one. This is the point I want to make. The paradox is that, to make it clear, yes, how does this concern that crucial relation the relationship between, I already said I'm just recapitulating, truth and lie. This topic of counterfactuality. The point is not that we can then that the path towards truth goes through a lie. But you remember I already, I think listed here this examples, for example of of the stupid movie but not so stupid maybe, Polanski after the novel of Robert Harris about Tony Blair basically, *The Ghost Writer*. Where we discover at the end crazy thesis that Tony Blair was was was planted by CIA from the very beginning to the Labour Party to have a Labour Prime Minister who will be pro-American. Now as a reviewer of this novel in Observer I think wrote years ago: it's wonderful, we know that this is not true, but if it were to be true it would explain everything. You know this paradox, it's not true but, but it explains everything. Like my point here being and that's the beauty of it that this is the proper dialectics of truth and lie: that sometimes precisely in a dialectical process you need a lie, a counterfactual element, to see the truth. And you cannot say, okay let's discard the lie let's go directly at the truth. If you do this you lose the truth itself. You have to add a lie, only viewed through a lie the truth appears. So you can discard a lie, but after you use it. And I claim in my historical pessimism that unfortunately the same goes for at least the way Marx and others imagined it: communism. It is an instrument which enables us to see clearly what's wrong, alienated in bourgeois society, but is basically a lie, a lie in the sense of an impossible ideological dream. Which I... I just was a commenting "destructive entitlement" is such a concept in... Which one? Destructive entitlement is such a concept in... I'm stupid, can you explain me? Who... no, no, I'm serious... yeah, yeah, it's a concept in existential, it's a concept in existential family therapy by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy which talks about this transgenerational transmission of trauma and how following generations are paying the debt of the traumatic kernel of their previous generation that was not... This is an interesting topic, I don't have time it's already half past to go into it now. But in my, this is the best part of my otherwise slightly confused book *Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?*, where I develop and I think in a quite nice way I found three examples of how in of course western mythology, for a beautiful woman you need three generations. You need grandparents with some sin, they did something wrong. Then you need a crippled, failed father. And the third generation is the beautiful woman. You know this like Oedipus: parents did something wrong, Oedipus crippled and then third generation Antigone. And I found I was shocked exactly the same structure in that beautiful French, a little bit kitsch but nice, novel. It was made into a movie which was a moderate hit some years ago, *Jean de Florette* and *Manon des Sources*. French passions in the countryside in the south. But okay, *Manon des Sources* is a beautiful girl in the movie played by Emmanuelle Béart, and you are allowed to dream about her. I was told this by French Maoists because I love this part, "C'est vous", they're still there. You are allowed in this leftist circles to dream about sexually women or or men, but and I love this, but you know you should check it up, are these the good guys about whom you are allowed to politically correctly dream? And I was told them that who is the one who plays, my god, in *Juliette Binoche* and *Emmanuelle Béart* are okay to have dirty dreams because they are very much to the left, they are also on anti-racist demonstrations, blah blah. Among actors it's interesting, the leftist myth in England is that the Irish guys are okay if you are a lady to dream about: Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, okay fine they are Irish, oppressed, good and so on you know. Like it's interesting, even McGregor was good years ago when he began with that training... *Trainspotting* and so on, but when he become a Jedi and moved into "ah don't dream about him you lose your status." But so again of course this is not reality but it's a myth about... and I agree with you, even Lacan has somewhere precisely this theory that even one death is not enough. For example Lacan says this not about women but about psychotic. He says somewhere that to
or there is no obstacle at all. And I'll give you another example which is beautiful: John, John's Gospel. Otherwise I hate it, it's the first Gnostic anti-Semitic Gospel but there is you know after Jesus make all that shouting about how I came here not to judge you but to save you, to redeem you. Then he gives, my god, people didn't notice this, he formulates exactly the same paradox. Where he says those who believe in me will not be judged because they are saved. Those who don't believe me will also not be judged because they are already judged, condemned. You see the nice asymmetry? It's not I will judge you, believe or not, but either you are not judged or not you will be judged, but you will just realize that you were fucked up from the beginning, already judged. And okay we don't have time to go into the finesse of how this is how Hegel argues. When you have the moment of tension, alienation, you don't overcome it, but you establish that you always already did overcome it. It's a much more complex process. So okay, not to repeat old old examples, I will just because epistemologically now I come to my central point: epistemologically the paradox here is the following one. This is the point I want to make. The paradox is that, to make it clear, yes, how does this concern that crucial relation the relationship between, I already said I'm just recapitulating, truth and lie. This topic of counterfactuality. The point is not that we can then that the path towards truth goes through a lie. But you remember I already, I think listed here this examples, for example of of the stupid movie but not so stupid maybe, Polanski after the novel of Robert Harris about Tony Blair basically, *The Ghost Writer*. Where we discover at the end crazy thesis that Tony Blair was was was planted by CIA from the very beginning to the Labour Party to have a Labour Prime Minister who will be pro-American. Now as a reviewer of this novel in Observer I think wrote years ago: it's wonderful, we know that this is not true, but if it were to be true it would explain everything. You know this paradox, it's not true but, but it explains everything. Like my point here being and that's the beauty of it that this is the proper dialectics of truth and lie: that sometimes precisely in a dialectical process you need a lie, a counterfactual element, to see the truth. And you cannot say, okay let's discard the lie let's go directly at the truth. If you do this you lose the truth itself. You have to add a lie, only viewed through a lie the truth appears. So you can discard a lie, but after you use it. And I claim in my historical pessimism that unfortunately the same goes for at least the way Marx and others imagined it: communism. It is an instrument which enables us to see clearly what's wrong, alienated in bourgeois society, but is basically a lie, a lie in the sense of an impossible ideological dream. Which I... I just was a commenting "destructive entitlement" is such a concept in... Which one? Destructive entitlement is such a concept in... I'm stupid, can you explain me? Who... no, no, I'm serious... yeah, yeah, it's a concept in existential, it's a concept in existential family therapy by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy which talks about this transgenerational transmission of trauma and how following generations are paying the debt of the traumatic kernel of their previous generation that was not... This is an interesting topic, I don't have time it's already half past to go into it now. But in my, this is the best part of my otherwise slightly confused book *Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?*, where I develop and I think in a quite nice way I found three examples of how in of course western mythology, for a beautiful woman you need three generations. You need grandparents with some sin, they did something wrong. Then you need a crippled, failed father. And the third generation is the beautiful woman. You know this like Oedipus: parents did something wrong, Oedipus crippled and then third generation Antigone. And I found I was shocked exactly the same structure in that beautiful French, a little bit kitsch but nice, novel. It was made into a movie which was a moderate hit some years ago, *Jean de Florette* and *Manon des Sources*. French passions in the countryside in the south. But okay, *Manon des Sources* is a beautiful girl in the movie played by Emmanuelle Béart, and you are allowed to dream about her. I was told this by French Maoists because I love this part, "C'est vous", they're still there. You are allowed in this leftist circles to dream about sexually women or or men, but and I love this, but you know you should check it up, are these the good guys about whom you are allowed to politically correctly dream? And I was told them that who is the one who plays, my god, in *Juliette Binoche* and *Emmanuelle Béart* are okay to have dirty dreams because they are very much to the left, they are also on anti-racist demonstrations, blah blah. Among actors it's interesting, the leftist myth in England is that the Irish guys are okay if you are a lady to dream about: Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, okay fine they are Irish, oppressed, good and so on you know. Like it's interesting, even McGregor was good years ago when he began with that training... *Trainspotting* and so on, but when he become a Jedi and moved into "ah don't dream about him you lose your status." But so again of course this is not reality but it's a myth about... and I agree with you, even Lacan has somewhere precisely this theory that even one death is not enough. For example Lacan says this not about women but about psychotic. He says somewhere that to
unknown
produce a really good psychotic you need at least two generations. Two generations
produce a really good psychotic you need at least two generations. Two generations
Slavoj Žižek
should be screwed up in a normal hysterical way, then finally if you work really hard you get a psychotic grandson or whatever. That's the clinical psychosis. Okay, on Monday we will go into more difficult theology again next week and then Wednesday it's Sydney Opera House. That is to say the Tristan trilogy, no? Sniff you, fuck you. Did I sniff? Yes or no? No. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good. Good.
should be screwed up in a normal hysterical way, then finally if you work really hard you get a psychotic grandson or whatever. That's the clinical psychosis. Okay, on Monday we will go into more difficult theology again next week and then Wednesday it's Sydney Opera House. That is to say the Tristan trilogy, no? Sniff you, fuck you. Did I sniff? Yes or no? No. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good. Good.