Home and Radical Evil
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
1994-02-23 · 1:20:37 · 12,291 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsethicsphilosophy-generalfascism-populismsubjectivityeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture arguing that evil is not primarily a property of persons but a topological feature, 'home is evil.' He traces how Kant's moral philosophy inadvertently opened a new domain of a priori, non-pathological evil (illustrated via Poe's 'imp of the perverse' and the Lacanian objet petit a), then develops the thesis that every community is held together not by its public law but by a shared obscene transgression (superego underside), exemplified through the Code Red in A Few Good Men, Ku Klux Klan rituals, skinhead violence, and the Père Joseph paradox. He critiques Althusser's theory of interpellation as missing a prior moment of split between abstract guilt and protested innocence, and proposes over-identification (via the group Laibach) as a subversive strategy that exposes the hidden superego underside and thereby neutralizes it.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek defines objet petit a as a non-pathological, purely formal void, not an empirical object but an a priori self-referential cause of desire, illustrated by the Hershey bar shrinking toward a 'nicely wrapped void' and by the dinosaur claw in Jurassic Park.
Borrowed from Kant and reformulated via Lacan, this denotes motivation entirely independent of empirical/contingent objects, the purely formal, self-referential ground of desire or evil.
Žižek reads Poe's imp of the perverse as the Kantian point of pure freedom, acting solely because it is prohibited, and identifies this as a new domain of a priori evil whose form perfectly matches Kant's formal description of the good.
An object in a film (the dinosaur claw in Jurassic Park, analogous to Hitchcock's MacGuffin) that condenses the libidinal economy of the narrative and whose displacement signals the resolution of the protagonist's trauma.
An entity (E.T. in Spielberg's film) whose function is to enable a structural transformation (reconstitution of the family) and then disappear once it has fulfilled its role.
as “coincidence of opposites (Hegelian)”
Žižek invokes the Hegelian coincidentia oppositorum to describe the skinhead who is simultaneously a brutal attacker of immigrants and a tender family man, not opposed figures but the same libidinal economy in different modalities.
as “pas-tout / non-all”
The Lacanian notion of incompleteness of the symbolic order, public explicit rules are never sufficient (non-all) and must be supplemented by the unwritten obscene code.
as “jouissance / enjoyment”
Žižek uses jouissance to name the foreign body of enjoyment at the heart of the pleasure principle whose expulsion drives racist violence, the 'id evil' structured around the fantasy that the other has stolen our enjoyment.
The founding lie or shared guilt that constitutes communal solidarity, every community's cohesion ultimately rests on a fetishist disavowal of a founding crime rather than on shared truth.
The logic by which community members 'know very well' the founding crime (gulags, lynchings, leader's weakness) yet publicly deny it, this disavowal, not truth, is what holds the group together.
Knowledge that is generally known yet cannot be publicly acknowledged, the obscene underside (Code Red, KKK lynchings, leader's weakness) that functions as the real bond of community precisely because it is not officially recognized.
as “interpellation prior to identification”
Žižek's revision of Althusser: before the subject recognizes itself in the ideological call, there is a prior moment of deadlock, a split between protested innocence and indeterminate Kafkaesque guilt, that Althusser's theory represses.
Žižek's reading of Pascal/Althusser: the external ritual (kneeling, praying) retroactively generates its own ideological foundation, the performance produces the belief it appears to express.
as “che vuoi (what do you want?)”
Lacan's formula for the non-transparency of the Other's desire, Žižek invokes it as the subject's first reaction to interpellation: 'what do you want from me?' before any identification takes place.
as “l'entre-deux-morts (between the two deaths)”
Lacan's concept invoked by Žižek to describe the state of a subject who is alive yet not integrated into the social-symbolic network, 'nobody home.'
as “ego evil”
Evil grounded in selfish rational calculation and disregard for universal ethical principles, the most common, pre-Freudian notion of wrongdoing.
as “traversée du fantasme / going through the fantasy”
Lacan's concept of traversing the fantasy, cited by Žižek as the model for his proposed strategy of over-identification as a way of working through the racist fantasy from within.
Žižek's proposed subversive strategy: instead of ironic distance from the ruling ideology, publicly and sincerely identify with its obscene superego underside, thereby bringing hidden rules into the open and suspending their efficiency.
In this talk Žižek treats superego as the obscene nightly law that necessarily accompanies and supplements the public symbolic law, the unwritten, enjoyment-laden underside that truly holds communities together.
Žižek contrasts ego ideal (the neutral, symbolic, written public law) with superego (the obscene transgressive underside), arguing that ethics grounded in the ego ideal / public good already involves a betrayal of desire.
Lacan's formulation of the fundamental ethical failing, invoked by Žižek to argue that the ethics of the public good (ego ideal) already constitutes a betrayal of desire, making superego the price paid for that compromise.
Stories he reaches for 5
Heydrich, the 'Butcher of Czechoslovakia,' spent each evening with three SS friends playing Beethoven string quartets, the quintessential example of totalitarian evil coexisting with private cultural refinement, illustrating the 'totalitarian version' of the public horror / tender private backside split.
“every evening he gathered with three fellow SS friends and you know what they played Beethoven's string quartets”
Cardinal Richelieu's advisor Père Joseph was simultaneously the most Machiavellian political schemer of the Thirty Years' War (arguably responsible for the parcelling of Germany and thus, mythically, both world wars) and an authentically devout mystic whose spiritual life was spotlessly genuine, Žižek uses this to insist on the impossible conjunction: a person can be a monster and simultaneously have authentic inner experience.
“a person can be a monstrous plotter yet his self-understanding his existential religious experience can be spotlessly authentic”
When an unknown voice asks for 'Mary' on his phone (clearly a wrong number), Žižek is tempted to cause panic by announcing Mary has had an accident, because in that brief moment he is a voice without symbolic identity and therefore free from all responsibility for his words, illustrating the subject prior to subjectivization.
“I'm for a brief moment allowed to speak as it were from a symbolic voice...I'm absolutely free I'm voice without symbolic identity so I can screw things up freely”
A communist in 1930s Soviet Union, confronted with evidence of terror and famine, does not deny the facts but claims his accusers cannot perceive the emergence of the new man, the more reality is miserable, the more he clings to the fetish of socialist construction. This illustrates fetishist disavowal as the founding logic of ideological allegiance.
“a communist knows very well that millions are dying in the camps yet this knowledge only confirms his belief that the sublime true people happily enthusiastically build socialism”
In Rob Reiner's film, the 'Code Red' is an unwritten military rule authorizing clandestine beating of fellow soldiers who violate group ethics, publicly denied yet operative as the real bond of the marines' community, illustrating the split between written law and obscene superego underside.
“such a code must remain under cover of night unacknowledged unutterable not integrated into public symbolic universe”
Works invoked 11
The Birds film
Invoked as the analogue to Jurassic Park: where the dinosaurs materialize the paternal superego fury, the birds in Hitchcock's film materialize the maternal superego.
Schindler's List film
Žižek implies it is critically overrated relative to Jurassic Park, calling the comparison 'obscene' but insisting it is serious.
Dostoevsky's novel, specifically the posthumous sketches showing Alyosha becoming a revolutionary terrorist, is cited as the literary parallel to the Père Joseph paradox.
Grey Eminence book
Huxley's biography of Père Joseph is found 'interesting although ambiguous', Žižek uses it to stage the paradox of the monstrous political plotter with spotlessly authentic mystical interiority, but criticizes Huxley for taking an easy way out.
Cited as a paradigmatic instance of the vanishing mediator enabling reconstitution of the fatherless family, part of Spielberg's recurring trauma-of-fatherhood series.
Jurassic Park film
Žižek argues it is far superior to Schindler's List, a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood structured around objet petit a (the dinosaur claw), dismissed by critics only because the dismissive gaze is itself limited.
A Few Good Men film
Rob Reiner's film is Žižek's central illustration of the split between public military law and the obscene unwritten 'Code Red', the constitutive splitting of ideology.
Minima Moralia book
Adorno's aphoristic work is cited for the anecdote about the wife who holds her husband's coat while exchanging patronizing glances, used to illustrate the structural dependence of shadowy female power on male domination.
Cited alongside Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and E.T. as part of Spielberg's recurring series centered on the trauma of fatherhood.
Althusser's essay is closely read and extended: Žižek finds 'more in the description than the theory gets out of it,' using its interpellation scene to discover a prior moment of split between innocence and abstract guilt.
Žižek reads Poe's stories as the literary discovery of the Kantian/Lacanian non-pathological cause, 'a mobile without motive', and deploys them as the opening theoretical anchor of the talk.
People invoked 22
Ingmar Bergman positive
Paired with Antonioni as the reference for the serious chamber-drama tradition that Jurassic Park exemplifies, with Žižek claiming Spielberg is superior to both.
Rob Reiner positive
Director of A Few Good Men, cited as the film that illustrates the split between public law and obscene superego underside (Code Red).
Briefly cited for her claim that 'human nature changed' around a certain date, used as an analogy for Žižek's thesis that the status of evil underwent a radical change with Kant.
Blaise Pascal positive
Cited (via Althusser) for the formula 'act as if you believe, pray, kneel down, and you shall believe', used to illustrate retroactive autopoietic foundation of ideology.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited in the context of Stalinist texts that admit Lenin used resolute measures and summary executions, yet simultaneously emphasize his love of Beethoven and children, illustrating the 'totalitarian version' of the public horror / tender backside split.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Žižek cites the anecdote from Minima Moralia about the wife holding the coat to illustrate the structural dependence of 'shadowy female power' on male domination.
Edgar Allan Poe positive
Žižek uses Poe's 'imp of the perverse' and 'a mobile without motive' as a literary precursor to the Kantian/Lacanian non-pathological cause, treating Poe as a proto-Lacanian thinker.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek declares himself a 'dogmatic Lacanian,' cites Lacan's objet petit a, che vuoi, traversée du fantasme, l'entre-deux-morts, and ethics of desire extensively; also recounts meeting Lacan and presents his unwavering public persona as an ethical model.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Žižek calls Gould 'a Lacanian biologist if there ever was one' and uses his Hershey bar essay as the perfect illustration of objet petit a.
Louis Althusser positive
Žižek engages closely with Althusser's theory of interpellation and retroactive autopoietic foundation (via Pascal), arguing there is 'more in the description than Althusser gets out of it', a productive critique that extends rather than rejects the framework.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek criticizes Bakhtin's followers (more than Bakhtin himself) for presenting an idealized image of carnivalesque transgression while ignoring lynchings and gang rapes, the very forms that constitute the 'liberating' suspension of hierarchy.
Mentioned as the actor whose character in Jurassic Park uses the dinosaur claw to threaten a child in the opening scene, establishing the paternal trauma that drives the film's libidinal economy.
David Koresh positive
Leader of the Branch Davidians at Waco, cited as a contemporary instantiation of Freud's primordial father of the horde, illustrating the emergence of leader-figures in communities of faith.
Michelangelo Antonioni positive
Invoked as a reference point for the 'chamber drama' genre that Žižek argues Jurassic Park exemplifies, though he says Spielberg is superior.
Reinhard Heydrich positive
Cited as the exemplary case of the totalitarian version of the public horror / tender private backside split, the 'Butcher of Czechoslovakia' who played Beethoven string quartets each evening.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Invoked as the theoretical reference for the 'Hitchcockian object' (the MacGuffin-like bone/claw in Jurassic Park) and for The Birds as an analogue where birds materialize the maternal superego.
Aldous Huxley negative
Žižek finds Huxley's Grey Eminence interesting but criticizes him for taking an 'easy way out', blaming Père Joseph's Christocentrism rather than persisting in the impossible conjunction of authentic mysticism and political monstrosity.
Steven Spielberg positive
Žižek argues Spielberg's films (Jurassic Park, E.T., Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun) are all centered on the trauma of fatherhood; he rates Jurassic Park as far superior to Schindler's List.
Karl Marx positive
Briefly invoked in the Q&A by Žižek to draw an analogy between Marx's structural crises of capital and his own view that communities of faith are an inherent effect of the contradictions of communities of choice.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek draws on Freud's metapsychological writings (ego/id/superego, primordial horde, totem and taboo) and defends Freud's statement about women and the weaker superego as actually pointing toward women's greater ethical capacity in the Lacanian sense.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek draws extensively on Kant's distinction between pathological and non-pathological motivation, but argues Kant 'miscalculated his wager' by inadvertently opening a domain of a priori evil.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Žižek cites the posthumous sketches of Brothers Karamazov (Alyosha as future terrorist) as a literary example of the paradox that the most innocent figure can be the same as the most violent one.
What it argues
home as the site of evilthe splitting of law into public symbolic order and obscene superego undersidecommunity cohesion through shared transgression and collective guiltobjet petit a as non-pathological cause of desireAlthusserian interpellation and its unthought prior moment of splitover-identification as political strategy against racist violenceego/superego/id taxonomy of evil
Dialectical moves 11
“Evil is not a property of persons but a topological determination — evil is home.”
Žižek inverts the common moral intuition (evil persons vs. good domestic space) to argue that the domestic itself is the site and source of evil.
“By cleansing ethics of all pathological motivations, Kant opened up a new domain of evil far more uncanny than the usual empirically conditioned evil.”
The very philosophical move intended to eliminate evil paradoxically creates a purer, a priori form of it.
“What holds a community together is not identification with public law but identification with a specific transgression of the law.”
The apparent foundation of social order (the law) is displaced by its own obscene underside as the true cement of community.
“The sentimental family man in his otherness — he is nothing else than this very family man when his safe heaven is threatened.”
The brutal skinhead is not the opposite of the loving family man but is that same person in a different modality, the two are one.
“Far from posing any threat to the system, cynical distance designates the supreme form of conformism.”
The apparently subversive posture of ironic detachment is actually what the system needs to reproduce itself.
“The most cunning and violent form of racism is not direct denigration but precisely the praising of the infinite wisdom of orientals not accessible to corrupted westernness.”
Apparent respect and elevation of the Other is a more refined form of racist domination than open denigration.
“The idea to bring the shadowy woman's power to light and publicly acknowledge it is the most effective and refined way to succumb to the patriarchal trap.”
Acknowledging and celebrating women's hidden domestic power, far from being feminist, reinforces patriarchal order by keeping power within the domestic-shadowy domain.
“It is not the voice that supplements writing — the voice is the supplement that truncates and completes the field of law while remaining a non-transparent stain.”
Žižek inverts the standard Derridean hierarchy: it is the obscene voice (superego), not writing, that plays the role of the traumatic supplement to the written public law.
“The skinhead does not beat up foreigners in spite of being a model family man at home but for that very reason.”
The domestic virtue and the public brutality are not contradictions but two expressions of the same underlying economy, the home is the very condition of the violence.
“Superego far from being an ethical category is precisely an obscene category — its very existence means you betray your desire.”
The apparent moral conscience (superego) is revealed as the price paid for compromising one's desire, making it anti-ethical rather than ethical.
“The authority figure who winks and says 'don't take me too seriously, I'm human like you' — that is the true point of repression, not its subversion.”
The humanizing, self-deprecating gesture of power is not liberation from authority but its most effective reinstatement.
Claims 16
asserts
Evil is not primarily a property of persons but a topological feature — evil is home itself, the very site of the domestic.the nature of evil
asserts
Kant's moral philosophy, by purging ethics of all pathological motivation, inadvertently opened a new, more uncanny domain of a priori evil whose formal structure perfectly mirrors his description of the good.Kantian ethics
asserts
Poe's 'imp of the perverse' — acting solely because it is prohibited — corresponds to the point of freedom in the strict Kantian sense and exemplifies the Lacanian objet petit a as non-pathological cause of desire.Poe, Kant, Lacan
asserts
What most deeply holds a community together is not identification with the public law but identification with a specific form of transgression of that law — a shared jouissance.community cohesion and ideology
asserts
The public law is always redoubled by an obscene superego underside (unwritten rules, nightly terror, Code Red) that must remain unacknowledged in order to function as the community's real bond.law, ideology, superego
rejects
Carnivalesque transgression (Bakhtin's model) is not liberating but the most effective guarantee of the patriarchal or social order it appears to subvert.Bakhtinian carnival and transgression
asserts
Ironic distance from ideology is not subversive but the dominant form of conformism in post-ideological late capitalism, which actively requires cynical non-identification to reproduce itself.cynicism and ideology
reframes
Althusser's theory of interpellation misses a prior moment — before ideological identification, the subject is split between protestations of innocence and indeterminate Kafkaesque guilt — and it is to escape this deadlock that identification occurs.Althusserian interpellation
asserts
Skinhead violence exemplifies 'id evil' — motivated not by rational selfishness or ideological devotion but by the elementary imbalance between the pleasure principle and the foreign body of jouissance, driven by the fantasy that the Other has stolen our enjoyment.racist violence and libidinal economy
asserts
The most effective political strategy against the obscene superego underside is over-identification — sincerely and publicly identifying with it — which renders it inoperative by exposing what must remain hidden to function.political strategy and subversion
asserts
A community can only be held together by a lie — a shared public secret or founding crime — not by truth; truth cannot serve as the bond of political community.community, truth, and ideology
reframes
The superego is not an ethical category but an obscene one — it is the price paid for compromising one's desire — and therefore Freud's claim that women have a weaker superego points toward women being more ethical in the Lacanian sense.superego, ethics, and gender
asserts
Jurassic Park is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood, far superior to Schindler's List, and the attacking dinosaurs are the objet petit a of paternal superego fury overblown into a resurrected monster.Jurassic Park / Spielberg / cinema
asserts
The apparently humanizing gesture — an authority figure winking and saying 'don't take me too seriously, I'm human like you' — is the true point of repression and the ultimate support of authority, not its subversion.authority and humanization
asserts
The skinhead does not beat up foreigners in spite of being a model family man at home but for that very reason — the domestic warmth and the public brutality are two expressions of the same libidinal economy.skinhead violence and home
rejects
New 'communities of choice' are not an adequate answer to 'communities of fate' because they reproduce an inherent dialectic — behind the apparent freedom of choice lurks a hidden command of faith, and they generate their own leader-figures.communities of choice vs. communities of fate
Quotes 12
“Evil is not primarily a property of persons but evil has to be defined in topological terms evil is a certain place evil is home.”Slavoj Žižek · home as evil — core thesis
“By cleansing the domain of ethics of all pathological motivations Kant of course wanted to extirpate the very possibility of doing evil in the guise of good. What he actually did was to open up a new domain of evil far more uncanny than the usual pathological evil.”Slavoj Žižek · Kant's moral philosophy paradoxically generates a priori evil
“What most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the public law but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the law — in psychoanalytic terms with a specific form of jouissance.”Slavoj Žižek · transgression not law is the cement of community
“To be the true conformist one has precisely to participate in the specific mode of transgression of the law.”Slavoj Žižek · conformism requires transgression
“Ironic distance is automatically something subversive? On the contrary — the dominant attitude of the post-ideological universe is precisely cynical distance towards public values, which far from posing any threat to the system designates the supreme form of conformism.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical distance as conformism, not subversion
“A shared lie is an incomparably more effective bond for a group than the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · communal lies vs. truth as social bond
“In private he was exactly the same never a moment arrived when you could get him like he's human. He was not human as us and this is I think the true ethical position.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's refusal to be 'at home' as ethical stance
“A skinhead does not beat up foreigners in spite of being a model family man at home but for that very reason.”Slavoj Žižek · domestic warmth and public brutality as one libidinal economy
“What bothers us in the other — Jew, Japanese, Pakistani, African, Turk, whatever — is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object that materializes enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · racist fantasy structure: the Other has stolen our enjoyment
“A person can be a monstrous plotter yet his self-understanding his existential religious experience can be spotlessly authentic.”Slavoj Žižek · Père Joseph paradox — impossible conjunction of monstrosity and authentic interiority
“Lacan was never at home to put it this way.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's ethical consistency — never domesticated
“The most cunning and at the same time violent form of racism is not direct denigration of the others but precisely this kind of praising of infinite wisdom of orientals not accessible to ourselves corrupted westernness.”Slavoj Žižek · false elevation as the most refined racism
Transcript 22 turns
Slavoj Žižek
So I hope you will not be disappointed you will not hear a lot about architecture what follows is simply a multitude of variations on a single motive home is evil that is to say evil is not primarily a property of persons but evil has to be defined in topological terms evil is a certain place evil is home that is the underlying thesis so what do I understand by evil let me specify develop this a little bit of course what I have in mind is the modern notion of evil Virginia Woolf wrote that somewhere around human nature changed in the same vein I'm tempted to say that somewhere around with Immanuel Kant's philosophical revolution the status of evil underwent a radical change today we continue to live in the shadows of this change in what precisely did this change consist in two of his well-known stories the black cat and the imp of the perverse Edgar Allan Poe spoke of the so-called spirit of perverseness short quote now of this spirit philosophy takes no account yet I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart who has not a hundred times found himself committing a vile or a stupid action for no other reason than because he knows he should not have we not a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment to violate that which is law merely because we understand it to be such it is in fact a mobile without motive a motive not motiviert a German expression with Poe through its promptings we act without comprehensible object through its promptings we act for the reason that we should not now it is deeply significant that these formulas of Edgar Allan Poe a mobile without motive a motive not motiviert and so on immediately recall Kant's determinations of the aesthetic experience purposelessness without purpose and so on what we must not overlook here is the crucial fact that this command you must be precisely because you are not permitted that is to say a purely negative grounding of an act accomplished only because it is prohibited that this command is only possible within the differential symbolic order in which negative determination as such has a positive dimension that is to say in which the absence of a feature itself functions as a positive feature Edgar Allan Poe's imp of the perverse therefore marks the point at which the motivation of an act as it were cuts off its external link to empirical objects and grounds and grounds itself solely in the immanent circle of self-reference in short Poe's imp of the perverse corresponds to the point of freedom in the strict Kantian sense this reference to Kant is far from accidental according to Kant the faculty of desiring does not possess a transcendental status since it depends wholly upon pathological objects and motivations pathological in the Kantian sense of empirical contingent Jacques Lacan aims on the contrary to demonstrate the transcendental status of this faculty of desiring that is to say the possibility of formulating a motivation for our desire totally independent of pathology again in the Kantian sense of empirical contingent motives motivations such a non-pathological object cause of desire is the Lacanian objet petit a object small a so I think it's crucial to bear in mind this let's say transcendental background that this is precisely an object which is not a contingent pathological object but let's say a purely negative a priori self-referential object Edgar Allan Poe's imp of the perverse offers us an immediate example of such a pure transcendental a priori motivation when I accomplish an act only because it is prohibited as it were to defy the prohibition I remain within the universal symbolic domain without reference to any empirical contingent object that is to say I accomplish what is strictly a non-pathological act here then I think Kant miscalculated his wager by cleansing the domain of ethics of all pathological motivations Kant of course wanted to extirpate the very possibility of doing evil in the guise of good what he actually did was to open up a new domain of evil far more uncanny than the usual pathological empirical contingent empirical contingently conditioned evil so my point is that what Edgar Allan Poe produces here is precisely in this paradoxical imp of the perverse an act which is committed for the sole reason that it is prohibited is a kind of a priori evil in other words an evil which perfectly fits the Kantian description of the good of the notion of the good so again we saw that this a priori cause of this ambiguous act evil whose form is that of good is object small a so again next I will try to answer to clarify at least this enigma what is this famous objet petit a object small a well let me take another popular the first okay example from popular culture in one of his brilliant essays Stephen Jay Gould I think a Lacanian biologist if there ever was a one extrapolates ad absurdum the long-term tendency in the relationship between price and quantity of Hershey chocolate bars you know that horrible American chocolate for some time that's the long-term tendency no that for some time the price stays the same while the quantity gradually diminishes then all of a sudden the price goes up and with it the quantity yet the new quantity is still less than what we had gained with the previous rise no so that's the tendency price stayed the same you get less then price goes up quantity also goes up but not the same as before so with price going up the tendency of quantity goes like this so the quantity of chocolate bar over a temporal span thus follows a zigzag it gradually declines then it suddenly jumps up then again it gradually declines and so on with the long-term tendency of course towards decline now here is Stephen Jay Gould's Lacanian move by extrapolating this tendency to the extreme we can calculate not only the exact moment when the quantity will reach zero that is to say when we will get a nicely wrapped void but also exactly how much this void will cost and this I think this nicely this void this nothingness which nonetheless is nicely packed and has a definite price this is I think the perfect metaphor for Lacanian objet petit a cause of desire this non-pathological doesn't non-pathological non-empirical object a void but still it is kind of teleologically defined cause of desire so and an exemplary case of such object which brings us now to the motive of home is permit me another vulgar example is offered by I think a very interesting film far better I think this may sound obscene to you but I think in a minute seriously I'm not kidding far superior to Schindler's List is Spielberg's Jurassic Park Jurassic Park was dismissed by most critics as a kind of kitsch technospectacle whose sole interest resides in its special effects whereas so it was usually said the intersubjective relations between characters remain wholly flat and undeveloped is however this really the case what if here also evil resides in the very gaze that perceives evil that is to say what if the dismissal of Jurassic Park as a kind of technokitsch spectacle does not express so much the quality of the film as rather the limitation of the critical gaze itself namely the first feature that should make us more attentive is the unusually static character of the film the action soon as it were gets stuck in one place with the repeated attacks of the dinosaurs if then Jurassic Park is a spectacle it represents the paradox of a kind of chamber spectacle that is to say my thesis is that Jurassic Park is a kind of chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of an early Antonioni or Bergman superior to them of course this dimension becomes visible the moment we direct our attention to the Hitchcockian object in the film namely the tiny bone a claw I think of a dinosaur used by the character played by Sam Neill in the very first scene of the film to strengthen his verbal bashing against of a kid who annoys him with questions now this claw this bone in its role of a Hitchcockian object and by the way you can buy it for one pound or two a replica of it in Natural History Museum you can buy the objet petit a if you want this bone condenses Neill's parenthood trauma his refusal to assume the parental function and what are the attacking dinosaurs if not this same object overblown into a resuscitated monster that materializes the parental superego that is to say father's destructive fury directed at his offspring homologous to Hitchcock's birds in which the birds materialize the maternal superego for that reason the other key scene of the film occurs when after the fight with the evil meat-eating carnivorous dinosaurs Neill and the two children take refuge in a huge tree tree up there in the safe haven of the branches Neill becomes reconciled with them and accepts his paternal function his symbolic role of a father the conversion signaled by the fact that once the three of them fall asleep the tiny bone the claw the evil object falls from his pocket to the ground and is lost to their view no wonder then that the next morning the atmosphere miraculously changes into one of a blissful peace the dinosaurs that now approach the tree in the morning are good herbivores since the paternal fury has passed away as to its symbolic intersubjective economy the film I think is now over all that follows is an inconsistent mixture of fragments from different genre that lacks any coherent let us say libidinal impact it is not difficult I think to establish the link with Spielberg's other films most of them from Empire of the Sun up to the Schindler's List are centered precisely precisely on this trauma of fatherhood of this kind of ambiguous half-evil paternal figure which then turns into good saves the children Jews or whoever E.T. for example what is E.T. itself the small creature if not a kind of vanishing mediator that enables the fatherless family to reconstitute itself into a complete family because what we must keep in mind bear in mind is that E.T. shows up at the beginning of the film in a family deserted by the father who eloped to Mexico with another woman at the film's end the good scientist clearly assumes the role of the future father he already holds the mother around her shoulders so I think that's really the function of E.T. it's a kind of vanishing mediator enabling enabling the reconstitution of the family so my result thus far is that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are the backside the inherent obverse of home of the family heaven we encounter this same splitting in the case let me now use another example from recent political developments in the case of skinheads who attack foreigners here in England in Germany and so on it is becoming fashionable today to interview skinheads at home demonstrating how in their home environment they are normal people like us caring members of the family tender husbands or sons and so on that's the idea if they if they can be so good at home are they are they really evil then but I think my point is here that precisely we have to endure this contradiction a person can brutally beat immigrants yet in his home circle he can be the loving husband taking care of his old mother-in-law or whatever we are dealing here with an exemplary case of Hegelian coincidence of the opposites a brutal skinhead is not the external opposition to or the other of the sentimental family man but to use this Hegelian phrasing this very sentimental family man in his otherness that is to say he presents the brutal reaction of this same man when his safe family heaven is threatened in other words the skinhead who gets into a fury and starts to beat up them foreigners and so on without any deeper rational or ideological motivation simply because it makes him feel good is nothing else than the narcissistic individual of the so-called society of consumption in a different modality the line that separates them is extremely thin it consists of a purely formal conversion since we are dealing with one and the same fundamental attitude inscribed either inside or outside the ideological framework of what is socially permissible how then is this splitting reflected in the domain of the law in so far as law is by definition impersonal blind abstract cold ignorant of our particularity is there something that's now my question is there something like the law at home the law which functions as its opposite the law which is not abstract but penetrated with particular enjoyment I think there is the psychoanalytic name for such a law let us say the law at home is simply superego the domain of law is always split into the public abstract neutral symbolic law the guarantee of law and order and the superego that is to say the obscene nightly law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies as its shadow the public law permit me to take another example from popular culture because I think that this constitutive inherent splitting in the domain of the law is the subject of recent film Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men a court martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers the military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called code red an unwritten rule of military community life which authorizes the clandestine nighttime beating of a soldier of a fellow soldier who in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer has broken the ethical code of the community of the marines now the function of this code red as it is called in the film is extremely interesting it condones an act of transgression illegal beating punishment of a fellow soldier yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group that is to say it calls for an act of supreme identification with so-called group values now what is crucial with this code red is that such a code must remain under cover of night unacknowledged unutterable not integrated into public symbolic universe let us say in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it or even actively denies its existence it represents the so-called spirit of community in its purest exerting the strongest pressure on the individual the pressure to comply with its mandate of group identification yet simultaneously it violates the explicit rules of community life where does this splitting of the law into the written public law and its underside the unwritten obscene secret code come from from the incomplete let us say in Lacanian terms pas-tout non-all character of the public law explicit public rules are not sufficient so they have to be supplemented by a clandestine unwritten code aimed at those who although they violate no public rules maintain a kind of inner distance and do not truly identify with the so-called spirit of community so this I think is crucial also for the analysis of ideology that the public law law and order that regulates law and order is always redoubled accompanied by this kind of clandestine obscene regulation unwritten rules which precisely are the key point of social identification the ultimate guarantee of cohesion but precisely as such must not be publicly acknowledged we thus have again the splitting of the field of law into law as in Freudian terms a ich-ideal ego-ideal a symbolic order which regulates social life which maintains social peace and its obscene superego obverse as has been shown by numerous analyses from Mikhail Bakhtin onwards periodic transgressions of the public law are inherent to the social order they function as a condition of social stability I think that the mistake of Bakhtin or rather not of Bakhtin himself as of some of his followers was to present an idealized image of these transgressions while passing in silence over lynching parties gang rapes and so on as the crucial form of the so-called carnivalesque suspension of social hierarchy so again what bothers me at least with some followers of Bakhtin is that is that they only see the so-called liberating effect of this kind of suspension of of social hierarchy etc but I think that precisely beating of the foreigners anti-semitic anti-semitic acts and so on and so on this is this famous carnivalesque suspension of social hierarchy namely this here is my thesis what most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the public law with the law that regulates the community's normal everyday circuit but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the law of the law's suspension in psychoanalytic terms with a specific form of jouissance enjoyment let us recall a somewhat mythical example a small-town white community in the American South of the 1920s where the reign of the official public law was accompanied by its shadowy double the nightly terror of Ku Klux Klan with its lynchings of powerless blacks and so on my point is the following one a white man was easily forgiven minor infractions of the law especially when they can be justified by a so-called code of honor the community still recognized him as one of us yet he will be effectively excommunicated no longer perceived as one of us the moment he disowns the specific form of transgression that pertains to the community say the moment he refuses to participate in the ritual lynchings by Ku Klux Klan or even reports them to the law and so on and it can be shown that also the Nazi community relied on the same solidarity in guilt induced by the participation in a common transgression and so on and so on I could give you here examples from my own personal experience in ex-socialist Yugoslavia and so on my point being what that again what truly holds together a certain community is not its explicit public law but the specific form of transgression of the law to be the true conformist one has to precisely to participate in the specific mode of transgression of the law so again I think that which is why I am deeply I am deeply pessimistic deeply deeply confused when one uses all the metaphorics of transgression of transgressing law the law etc as as if one is doing something truly subversive I think quite on the contrary again each system involves implies a specific form of transgression which is its ultimate let's say force point of stabilization let me specify this a little bit when as a consequence of the rise to power of the bourgeois egalitarian ideology the public space loses its direct patriarchal character this relationship this tension between the public law and its obscene superego obverse underside also undergoes a radical change namely in the traditional patriarchal society the inherent transgression of the law assumes the form of a carnivalesque reversal of authority the king becomes a beggar madness poses as wisdom and so on and so on an exemplary case of this reversal is a custom practiced in the villages of Northern Greece up to the middle of our century for one day women took over men had to stay at home and look after children whereas women gathered in the local inn drank to excess organized mock trials of men and so on now I hope you got my point my point is there is absolutely nothing subversive in this that this kind of false transgressive liberation is the most horrifying anti-feminist anti-feminist guarantee of anti-feminist patriarchal order because what breaks out in this carnivalesque transgression suspension of the ruling ruling patriarchal law is the fantasy of the feminine power now when Lacan draws attention to the fact that in everyday French one of the designations for the wife is la bourgeoise that is to say the one who beneath the semblance of male domination actually pulls the strings this can in no way be reduced to a version of the standard male chauvinist wise cracking on how after all patriarchal domination is not so bad for women since at least in the close circle of home they run the show and so on the problem I think runs deeper one of the consequences of the fact that master according to Lacan master is always an impostor is the duplication of the master the agency of the master is always perceived as a semblance concealing another true master let us recall a nice anecdote from Adorno's Minima Moralia about a wife who apparently subordinates to her husband and when they are about to leave a party obediently holds his coat yet while doing this behind his back holding his coat she exchanges ironic patronizing glances with the fellow guests glances that deliver the message poor weakling let him think he is the master now this opposition of male and female power is thus immediately naively perceived as the opposition of semblance and actual power man is an impostor condemned to performing empty symbolic ritualistic gestures whereas the actual responsibility falls to women however the point not to be missed here is that this specter of women's power structurally depends on male domination it remains its shadowy double its retroactive effect and as such its inherent moment for that reason the idea to bring the shadowy woman's power to light to acknowledge publicly its central position is the most effective the most refined way to succumb to the patriarchal trap so again I think that with women it's the same as with the myth of orientalism I think that the most the most cunning and at the same time violent form of racism is not direct denigration of the others but precisely this kind of praising of infinite wisdom of orientals not accessible to ourselves corrupted westernness etc it's the same with women I think there's a kind of false elevation of women which is the most cunning way of of guaranteeing patriarchal so-called patriarchal domination now once the public law with bourgeois revolution casts off its direct patriarchal dress and presents itself as neutral egalitarian the character of its obscene double also undergoes a radical shift what now erupts in the so-called carnivalesque suspension of the egalitarian public law is precisely the authoritarian patriarchal logic that continues to determine our attitudes although its direct public expression is no longer permitted carnival thus becomes the outlet for the repressed social jouissance enjoyment Jew-baiting riots gang rapes and so on and so on this difference between law and superego also coincides with that between writing and voice public law is essentially written precisely and only because it is written our ignorance of law you know this is the basic a priori rule of norm legal norm our ignorance of law cannot serve as an excuse it does not exculpate us in the eyes of the law we can never say I didn't know this is this is the law I didn't simply know that I'm breaking any rules why precisely because it is written the public law in contrast to it the status of the superego is that of a traumatic voice it's not written it's a voice an intruder persecuting us disturbing our psychic balance what I found interesting here is that the standard Derridean relationship of voice and writing is here inverted it is the voice that supplements the writing it is the voice that functions as a non-transparent stain that truncates the field of law while being necessary for its completion so it's the voice which is the supplement here this voice is exhibited for example by the custom at least the rumor abounds that there is a very interesting custom of the power elite in the United States the rumor goes as follows each year I mean when I was in San Francisco year ago it was every in the society where I moved everybody was talking about this that each year for about two weeks the entire power elite of the United States top politicians managers military journalists the wealthiest etc they gather in a closed resort guarded by FBI and so on south of San Francisco in order to socialize now what do they do there even if it's not true it's nice fantasy what they actually do there is for the most part they indulge in obscene games that precisely suspend the dignity of social rituals hard drinking dancing singing vulgar vulgar songs in women's clothes telling dirty stories etc so that's that was persistent fantasy that for once a year they meet all of all of them from Reagan to Clinton they dress as women exchange obscene gestures they dance etc I found this politically correct very theoretically correct if not politically correct fantasy of how power really works because okay this will be my central thesis also at the end that you know for example that this apparently liberating gesture when an authority figure after delivering his official bombastic speech like makes a wink at you and tells okay listen don't take too seriously I'm really human as you that's the true point of repression of authority and my point would be that precisely the only way to undermine that these so-called humanizing gestures are precisely the ultimate support of authority so that the way to undermine authority is precisely paradoxically to resist in it to the end and if I may improvise a little bit which is why I found okay I mean I do I am a dogmatic Lacanian I admit it but at least I have good reasons for it one of these is that for example I met Lacan a couple of times okay he was already half beyond consciousness so he didn't know who I am but the point is that as everybody knows and I learned it Lacan was always he played a certain assumed a certain public role you know eccentric behavior it was impossible to speak with him normally this kind of specifically French mixture of of almost excessive charm and sudden cruelty impossible demands etc you feel overwhelm overwhelmed by his kindness at the same time attacked and guilty all the time so the idea and the myth among Lacanians was okay this is his public persona mask but how is he as a real man namely the desire was to discover that little bit of human warmth no that behind this mask there must be with his family etc a normal person who is kind of you know puts off the mask and behaves normally now the point is that with all the people that I've spoken and I've so with lots who knew them in private sorry who knew him in private I got from all of them the same answer in private he was exactly the same never a moment arrived and you can get him you know like he's human no he was not human as us and this is I think the true ethical position but okay let's go on so we could also say that this let's return to this nightly so precisely Lacan that's my point was never at home to put it this way okay let's go on so this nightly obscene law we could also say that it consists of proton pseudos the primordial lie that founds a community that is to say identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt or more precisely upon a fetishist disavowal of this guilt when for example to use the kind of standard example a communist in the Soviet Union of the thirties answers the reproach that the communist regime is terrorist beyond all comparison that thousands are condemned shot without proven guilt that the entire agriculture is in ruins the actual strategy of the communist's response does not consist in a direct denial of these facts but rather in claiming that the authors of these reproaches are unable to penetrate the essence of what is going on to perceive the emergence of a new man of classless solidarity and so on so a communist knows very well that millions are dying in the camps yet this knowledge only confirms his belief that the sublime true people happily enthusiastically build socialism and so on the more reality is miserable and depressive the more a true Stalinist communist clings to his fetish every allegiance to some community eventually involves such a fetish that functions as the disavowal of its founding crime is America not the fetish of an infinitely open space enabling every individual to pursue happiness in his or her own way the nature of this solidarity in guilt can also be much more specific when for example the leader is caught as you put it with his pants down the solidarity of the group is strengthened by the subjects' common disavowal of the misfortune that laid open the leader's failure or impotence a shared lie is an incomparably more effective bond for a group than the truth and I mean this quite literally for example with a lot of close groups okay starting with Lacanian communities that I was able to observe there was always a kind of internal half-private rumor shared secret of you know of knowledge how the leader the boss whoever the master is really weak of the weakness but this not only did not undermine the authority but the denial in public the public denial of this secret knowledge of master's weakness is what holds the group together that's my point that you cannot build a community on truth to put it in somewhat bombastic terms you need a lie you need a lie the only thing that holds together a political community is a lie some lie which then functions as this kind of public secret and so on now this tension between public law and its obscene superego obverse enables us also to approach in a new way the classical used overused Louis Althusser's notion of ideological interpolation Althusserian theory of ideological state apparatuses and interpellation I think is more complex than it may appear than it may appear for example when Althusser repeats again and again after Blaise Pascal act as if you believe pray kneel down and you shall believe faith will arrive by itself he delineates an intricate reflective mechanism of what can be called retroactive autopoietic foundation namely what is the mechanism here it's not simply that it's not what Althusser aims at with this notion I think is not simply a kind of reductionist assertion that inner belief depends on on external behavior I think Althusser's reasoning is more refined here the implicit logic of his argument is kneel down and you shall believe what kneel down and you shall believe that you kneeled down because of your belief that your following the ritual is an expression of your inner belief in short the external ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation this so it's kind of more complicated self-referential logic but things are even more interesting I think in the case of interpellation my thesis here is that Althusser's example what he calls little theoretical theater contains more than his own theorization gets out of it as you probably know it's standard piece of reading in theory of ideology Althusser evokes an individual who while carelessly walking down the street is suddenly addressed by a policeman hey you there by answering the call that is to say by stopping and turning around towards the policeman the individual recognizes and at the same time constitutes himself as the subject of power of the big other in the Althusserian sense the big other as the big other of power the ideological big other the author of interpellation the one who addresses you permit me not too long a brief quote from Althusser assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street the hailed interpellated individual will turn around by this mere degrees physical conversion he becomes a subject why because he has recognized that the hail was really addressed to him that it was really him who was hailed it is a strange phenomenon and one which cannot be explained solely by guilt feelings despite the large numbers who have something on their conscience naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theater I have had to present things in the form of a temporal succession there are individuals walking along somewhere behind them the hail rings out hey you there one individual turns around believing suspecting knowing that it is for him but in reality these things happen without any succession the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects into subjects are one and the same thing end of quote now again my thesis is that there is more in this description in this example than what Althusser gets out of it in his theory of act of interpellation namely I think that the crucial feature of this quoted passage is the double denial at work in it the denial of the explanation of interpellative recognition by means of a guilt feeling as well as the denial of the temporality of the process of interpellation individuals as Althusser puts it do not become subject they always already are subject my thesis is that this double denial is to be read as a Freudian denial verneinung what the timeless character of interpellation renders invisible is a kind of atemporal sequentiality that is far more complex than the theoretical theater staged by Althusser this repressed sequence concerns precisely a guilt feeling but and we are back at Kant now a guilt feeling of a purely formal non-pathological in the Kantian sense again non-pathological nature a guilt that for that very reason weighs most heavily upon those individuals who have nothing on their conscience that is to say let's make a quite naive empirical thought experiment in what precisely consists the individual's first reaction to the policeman's hey you there that's my experiment here just imagine quite naively you are walking down the street you hear behind you a policeman hey you there my idea is that your first reaction is not yes and then with this recognition you constitute yourself as subject of ideology subject of law of legal power my quite naive notion is that the first reaction is more complex is an inconsistent but necessary it's still a kind of a priori necessary reaction inconsistent mixture of two elements your first reaction to hey you there is why me what does this idiot want from me I'm innocent I was just walking along why me this kind of surprise why me what did I do I didn't do anything that's all even if you my point is that even if you are guilty your first reaction when an a person of authority addresses you is always this why me what did I do what does the idiot want from me but at the same time there is the exactly the opposite reaction namely this perplexed protestation of innocence is always accompanied by an indeterminate let us say almost Kafkaesque feeling of abstract guilt a feeling that in the eyes of power I am a priori terribly guilty of something although it is not possible for me to know what precisely I am guilty of and for that reason since I don't know what I'm guilty of I'm even more guilty now that's the other reaction I must have done something I don't know what but it's even worse this is what I'm guilty of so the idea being that this very ignorance of mine it is in very the very ignorance of mine that consists my true guilt I feel guilty precisely because I don't even know what I'm guilty of so my idea is that before yes I'm the subject of power comes this contradictory antagonistic response so what we have here is the entire Lacanian dispositive of the subject split between innocence and abstract a protestation of innocence and an abstract indeterminate guilt when he is confronted with a kind of non-transparent call emanating from the other this call hey you there a call where it is not clear to the subject what the other actually wants from him so the subject reaction is precisely that Lacan's che vuoi what do you want what do you want from me the this non-transparency impenetrability of the desire of the other in short what we encounter here to put it in Althusserian terms I think is precisely interpellation you are addressed by the other but interpellation prior to identification interpellation where you don't yet have identification so prior to the recognition in the call of the other by means of which I constitute myself as always already subject I'm obliged to acknowledge this timeless instant of a deadlock in which innocence coincides with indeterminate guilt the ideological identification by means of which I assume a symbolic mandate I recognize myself as the subject of power takes place already as an answer to this deadlock my point is that this deadlock again is not an empirical notion contingent it's necessary the first reaction to the call of the power is this kind of contradictory response which which articulates a certain deadlock why me I must be guilty of something and so on and it is precisely in order to elude to escape this deadlock that I assume a certain public symbolic identity so again what remains unthought in Althusser's theory of interpellation is the fact that prior to ideological identification recognition we have an intermediate moment of obscene impenetrable interpellation without identification and in short the unthought of Althusser is that there is already an uncanny subject that precedes the gesture of subjectivization subjectivization because through ideological identification this is subjectivization I become subject in Althusserian sense of legal identity etc but prior to that there is a status of subject which is not yet this ideological subject in the Althusserian sense now probably you will ask me is this subject prior to subjectivization is this not a pure theoretical construction of no use for a concrete social analysis I think that the first evidence to the contrary is offered by the syntagm that recurs regularly when social workers attempt to render their experience of the so-called antisocial adolescent criminal who lacks what we ideologically refer to as the elementary sense of compassion moral responsibility namely what I was struck with that in America in England in Germany all the time they use the same expression when you are confronted with this horrible mythological I mean they are as almost as evil I think that for you in England now the central person of evil is the the single mother I think no that's the true source of all evil no because they then breed violent young men etc but another figure is I think this kind of violent adolescent the the metaphor which recurs all around I've met encountered it again this metaphor in US in England in Germany in France is that when you look into his eyes it seems as if again we have home as if there is nobody home this is always as if you know there is void there is nobody home no person behind no and so a similar case of this state what Lacan would have called l'entre-deux-morts between the two deaths where the subject is alive yet not at home not integrated into the social symbolic network is provided by a very vulgar personal unfortunately of me everyday experience of precisely when you can experience this strange status of being subject but not yet subjectivization in the sense of having a symbolic identity namely this will be rather personal very vulgar when I answer the phone and it probably must happen also to you and an unknown voice says for example Mary are you there but there is no Mary in your apartment so you know it's obvious case of wrong number I am always tempted to do something what well I don't actually do it yet as you probably know it was already Plato who said that there are two kinds of people those who actually do nasty things and those who only dream of about doing them well I am the so my immediate temptation is to answer something that would cause panic on the other end like don't you know she had an Mary had an accident she had just been taken away in an ambulance or she just left in the arms of Robert etc like you know the idea is what the idea is that in cases like this I'm for a brief moment allowed to speak as it were from a symbolic voice since in Europe at least the list of numbers you called is not attached to the phone bill so nobody will be able to trace me to identify me so I'm free for all responsibility of my words no I'm absolutely free I'm voice without symbolic identity so I can screw things up freely this would be this notion of subject prior to symbolic prior to symbolic identity but however our contemporary experience compels us to complicate further this picture that is to say what strikes the eye in the recent wave of anti-immigrant violence is let us say the primitive level of the underlying libidinal economy primitive not in the sense of kind of regression to some archaic level but in the sense of the utmost elementary nature of the relationship between pleasure and jouissance enjoyment between the closed circle of pleasure principle that strives for balance for the reproduction of its closed circuit and the foreign body of enjoyment in its heart that is to say the libidinal economy that sustains the infamous battlecry foreigners out or in German Ausländer raus can be exemplified precisely by the relationship between Ich the ego and Lust the pleasure where the non-pleasure Unlust is defined in the terms of non-assimilation of as Lacan puts it as what remains irreducible unassimilable to the pleasure principle the terms used by Freud and Lacan to describe the relationship of this primordial Ich ego and jouissance enjoyment perfectly fit the metaphorics of the racist attitude towards foreigners this is what struck me when I was recently reading these metapsychological writings of Freud the whole set of terms is the same as those used by these anti-immigrant violence skinheads and so on the problems are those of assimilation resistance to assimilation expulsion of a foreign body disturbed balance and so on these are fundamental topological terms so in order to locate this type of evil with regard to the usual types of evil one is tempted to use as the principle of classification the Freudian triad of ego superego and id that's my very simple basic thesis the most common kind of evil is let's call it the ego evil the behavior we do evil things why because simply we are led by selfish calculation greed by the disregard for universal ethical principles that's the ego evil if we define ego of course in the naive pre-Lacanian even pre-Freudian sense of the agency of rational utilitarian behavior and so on then this is the ego evil so simple selfish calculation greed pleasure etc then we have the evil attributed to the so-called wrongly so-called fundamentalist fanatics here we have what we might call superego evil evil accomplished in the name of fanatic devotion to some ideological cause and so on but in the skinhead skinhead beating of up foreigners one can discern neither a clear selfish calculation nor a clear ideological identification all the talk about foreigners stealing work from us about the threat they represent to our western values should not deceive us under a closer closer examination it soon becomes clear that this talk provides rather superficial secondary rationalization the answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat the foreigners that their presence disturbs him etc so what we encounter here is the let us say id evil the evil structured motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between ego and jouissance enjoyment by the tension between the pleasure pleasure principle and the foreign body of enjoyment in the very heart of it the id evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire what bothers us in the other Jew Japanese Pakistani African Turk whatever is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object object that materializes enjoyment the other either possesses the object treasure having snatched it away from us or he poses a threat to our possession of the object now how are we to combat effectively this id evil which on account of its elementary nature remains impervious to any rational or even purely rhetorical argumentation that is to say racism is always grounded in a particular fantasy of cosa nostra of our ethnic thing menaced by them and so on which this particular fantasy by definition resists universalization the translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us this insensitivity of the racist fantasy to rational symbolic argumentation means that to use Wittgensteinian opposition that fantasy can only be shown not spoken out so what can we do here my point of course is not that we can that we can do nothing because I think that precisely the whole wager of psychoanalysis is that the real of enjoyment of jouissance can be changed with that with the means of symbolic order of signifier we can intervene into the real of jouissance but how what I am tempted to propose is namely as a model for a strategy able to incorporate what Lacan called going through fantasy la traversée du fantasme I propose a strategy of over-identification namely a procedure which takes into account the fact that the obscene superego the basic support of the public law is operative as I already developed at the beginning is operative only insofar as it remains unacknowledged hidden to the public eye that is to say what if when we are opposed to this kind of racist violence whatever what if instead of critical dissection irony and so on which always reveal their impotence before the face of racism's phantasmatic kernel what if we proceed a contrario and publicly identify with the obscene superego now this is again not an abstract intellectual construction I have a precise empirical if you want verification here my example is maybe you've heard about it because it's moderately they are moderately known even here I think the Slovene let's call them post-punk group the Slovene group musical group Laibach German name from for Ljubljana they staged an in the last years of socialism in Slovenia they staged an aggressive inconsistent mixture of Stalinism Nazism Blut und Boden that is to say earth and blood ideology and so on now the first reaction of the enlightened leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as an ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals and so on however their support of the enlightened leftist intellectuals of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling what if they really mean it what if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual that's very nice how this ambiguous effect of Laibach no everybody supported them but it was always with this with this limit of minimum of anxiety what if they what if somebody takes them seriously what if they really mean it are they really just mocking imitating it or do they really mean it a more cunning version of this anxiety of this distance of this uneasiness was transferring one's own doubt onto the other this version went like this what if Laibach overestimates their public what if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine now this uneasy feeling I think is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically something subversive but what if on the contrary the dominant attitude of the contemporary so-called post-ideological wrongly so-called universe is precisely the cynical distance towards public values what if this distance far from posing any threat to the system designates the supreme form of conformism since the normal functioning of the system requires cynical distance because that's my basic thesis that it's not only that today as it's usually said that for the late capitalism in order to reproduce itself you don't doesn't anybody any anymore requires strict ideological adherence identification my point is that it's even the reverse it actively requires non-identification cynical distance in this case the strategy of Laibach I think appears in a new light it frustrates the system let's say the ruling ideology precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation but over-identification with it by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system over-identification suspends its efficiency again imagine like the universe of Ku Klux Klan or of A Few Good Men where precisely that what must remain hidden the secret unwritten rule if that is brought to the light of the day if you over-identify with it if you publicly identify with what must remain in order to be operative kind of generally known but still non-acknowledged public secret this way I think you suspend its efficiency now in order to clarify this procedure let us recall a somehow homologous phenomenon in the sphere of individual experience each of us has some private ritual phrase nickname etc or gesture used only at home within the most intimate circle of closest friends relatives you know for example you were called something by your uncle by by father by friend etc when these rituals are rendered public for example when you meet I don't know an old friend from youth in another society and this friend uses that special nickname I mean is there anything more embarrassing than that I mean and my idea is that what Laibach this group did was to do precisely this by disclosing this unwritten secret it ruined its efficiency so now permit me slowly to conclude with my last example from English culture which concerns precisely this relationship between fantasy and let's say political ethics a very interesting although ambiguous book Aldous Huxley's the Grey Eminence as you probably know the biography of Père Joseph Father Joseph who was the political advisor of Cardinal Richelieu why is this book interesting I think if in a fictional reconstruction of the modern European history one wishes to isolate the episode that derailed the normal course of events and introduced the imbalance whose final consequence was the two world wars in our century the main candidate for this role undoubtedly is the parcelling of the German Reich in the Thirty Years' War in the first half of the 17th century on account of this parcelling the assertion of Germany as a nation state was retarded so again I hope you got my point if mythically this purely mythical mental experiment if we look for the moment where did it went wrong why the two world wars etc it's that no Thirty Years' War thirty years war and this retard of Germany and so on now again if there is a person who within this fictitious reconstruction can be made responsible for this catastrophic result again the main candidate for this role is Père Joseph Father Joseph who through his phenomenal capacity for intrigue succeeded in introducing a rupture in the Protestant camp concluding a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden and thus shifting the center of war to German territory so again if you are looking for a person saying he is guilty of all of it Hitler whatever it's Père Joseph the ultimate embodiment of the plotting Machiavellian politician ready to sacrifice thousands of lives resort to spy spying lies murder extortion etc but and this was the feature that fascinated Huxley but there is another side to this same Father Joseph he was not only a priest but a mystic of the utmost authentic kind every evening at home after a day full of torturous diplomatic intrigues he plunged into deep meditations his mystic vision bears witness to an authenticity worthy of Saint Teresa John of the Cross and so on he corresponded regularly with the sisters of a small French convent always found time to advise them on their spiritual distress and so on how are we to think these two sides together at this crucial point Huxley avoids the true paradox and opts for an easy way out by putting the blame on the alleged weak point of Father Joseph's mythical experience sorry mystic experience itself its excessive Christocentrism its obsession with Christ's suffering on the way of the cross is made responsible by Huxley for rendering possible the reckless manipulation with other people's suffering and so on for that reason as you know Huxley turned away from Christianity and sought for spiritual salvation in the eastern wisdom what we must do however I think is precisely to persist in this seemingly impossible conjunction a person can be a monstrous plotter yet his self-understanding his existential religious experience can be spotlessly authentic my point is that it is possible for Father Joseph at the same time to be the very origin of modern European evil whatever at the same time we have his mystic experience can be totally authentic blameless whatever you want the literary example of this paradox is Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov as we know now from posthumously published sketches it is Alyosha this model of innocent humble spirituality who in the unwritten continuation of the novel was to become revolutionary terrorist now what I want to draw your attention to now in my conclusion is the strict homology between Father Joseph and the poor skinhead who while at home behaves as the best family man it is not difficult to discern how these two examples differ from other previously mentioned examples of the constitutive splitting of ideology into public law and the obscene hidden underside Code Red Ku Klux Klan and so on the example of the skinhead almost symmetrically inverts the previous examples of Code Red from A Few Good Men of Ku Klux Klan and so on in it Code Red Ku Klux Klan the surface sorry in the case of the skinhead the surface itself gets besmirched the skinhead performs in full public view what the two soldiers in A Few Good Men or members of Ku Klux Klan do under the cover of night whereas the honest human side recedes into the privacy of home notwithstanding the cruelty of his public deeds the skinhead is privately a warm person like ourselves who loves his mother and so on so instead of the public law and order front with an obscene backside as was in the case of Ku Klux Klan Code Red and so on we obtain a horrifying front concealing a tender honest human backside something similar was at work in the Stalinist writings of Lenin the Stalinist texts openly admit that in his effort to fulfill historical necessity Lenin was forced to resort to resolute measures to violate many a gentle bourgeois moral norms to order summary executions of a great number of people and so on yet as it is always pointed out in Stalinist texts notwithstanding all this Lenin was deeply steered by Beethoven's piano sonatas he liked children and cats and so on so that's my point that either way either we have the the Ku Klux Klan version public law and order and then the written sorry the unwritten obscene underside or let us say naively let's call it naively the totalitarian version public horror but behind it this kind of homely homely warm human backside so to conclude my final point is simply that a skinhead does not beat up foreigners in spite of being a model family man at home but for that very reason thank you very much if anyone wants to do it we see if there's a could be a few minutes if anyone wants to ask a question but obviously some of the issues might return this afternoon just a small point about what you said towards the end I wanted to ask you the way you might articulate the word almost symmetrical the point being a purely symmetrical thing this reversal of roles then oh you mean this classical bourgeois where you have the the point almost it's actually not almost ah the almost it is the almost because I in so-called so-called totalitarian regimes I think you have the combination of the two strategies because although in Hitler in the case of Hitler's Germany you have this logic of you do publicly horrible things but privately you are a nice person and and I give you very nice horrifying examples of this for example you know another German Hitler's personification of evil Heydrich you know what Heydrich did in private you know Heydrich the butcher of Czechoslovakia etc you know that every evening he gathered with three fellow SS friends and you know what they played Beethoven's string quartets I mean if there is a piece of music which is the ultimate so but my point is that at the same time you have also the other side it is as if this second version somehow is inherently not it's not possible to to articulate it to the end because at the same time German fascism did also work in this way of public law and order private dirty secrets no for example Holocaust himself they did this was their point of of of private obscenity it was not publicly it was not publicly acknowledged namely people are usually misled today when they think that everything was publicly said okay Jews were despised publicly of course anti-semitic texts were written but still Holocaust as such and a lot of other things these were definitely not part of the public discourse this was a kind of still a kind of secret so I simply refer to this it is as if this second let's call it naively totalitarian logic cannot work cannot function to the end there is an inherent limit in it oh I mostly just wanted some clarification at the end you and I was interested in the fact the person who asked the first question held you accountable to the precise use of language which maybe I shouldn't do but you said you were at you were tempted to propose the following solution you actually were willing to propose it sorry which solution are we at the very end you spoke about what is the possible what is the action that can be taken ah yeah sorry yes I know yes yes so you were sort of tempted to propose and I was sort of interested in the desire to sort of non quite point of view propose but I want to no it's it was simply my to put it in Stalinist terms my petit bourgeois reluctance because the the strategy of Laibach was very risky but let me refer to this how did it actually work I think it worked but I mean your proposal is something like this there is a public law and an obverse private law which are co-constructed which are actually dialectic they need each other yeah yeah in a certain sense to rein the second in the check we have to carry the first we have to exhaust the first one to extreme is that something like the which is the first one no the public public law yeah I mean is that something like the idea I I'm not sure I really want to get a sense of what your the ending is no no my idea is rather that no my idea was very naive my idea was that the usual strategy is this kind of against public law and order my idea is that at this level against public law and order you can be very subversive etc aggressive but it's always a great danger that you actually even reassert this level of this let's say level of underside superego and so on but my idea is that what if we try it was as simple as that what if we try the obverse strategy it is that by that the whole efficiency of this obscene underside is that it is operative only insofar as it's the same as with emperor is naked of course everybody knows about it but not the big other that is to say it's not publicly recognized so isn't it then one strategy to precisely not to undermine to do nothing critical but precisely to over-identify in the precise sense of bringing to the light of the day this obscene underside that this way you not only render it inefficient but you also truly subvert the public law and order insofar as the public law and order itself needs this hidden underside as its as its support so where do you see the but but what what definitely was you know sort of asking was the strategy which you implied by referring to the ceaselessly public character of Lacan as a way of kind of gradually eradicating the obscene privacy yeah the conclusion the inexorable conclusion of your talk for me can't end in exactly what you've said because you basically construct a dialectic pre-temporal dialectic between two forms of law in what sense pre-temporal sorry in the sense that there is not a public
So I hope you will not be disappointed you will not hear a lot about architecture what follows is simply a multitude of variations on a single motive home is evil that is to say evil is not primarily a property of persons but evil has to be defined in topological terms evil is a certain place evil is home that is the underlying thesis so what do I understand by evil let me specify develop this a little bit of course what I have in mind is the modern notion of evil Virginia Woolf wrote that somewhere around human nature changed in the same vein I'm tempted to say that somewhere around with Immanuel Kant's philosophical revolution the status of evil underwent a radical change today we continue to live in the shadows of this change in what precisely did this change consist in two of his well-known stories the black cat and the imp of the perverse Edgar Allan Poe spoke of the so-called spirit of perverseness short quote now of this spirit philosophy takes no account yet I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart who has not a hundred times found himself committing a vile or a stupid action for no other reason than because he knows he should not have we not a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgment to violate that which is law merely because we understand it to be such it is in fact a mobile without motive a motive not motiviert a German expression with Poe through its promptings we act without comprehensible object through its promptings we act for the reason that we should not now it is deeply significant that these formulas of Edgar Allan Poe a mobile without motive a motive not motiviert and so on immediately recall Kant's determinations of the aesthetic experience purposelessness without purpose and so on what we must not overlook here is the crucial fact that this command you must be precisely because you are not permitted that is to say a purely negative grounding of an act accomplished only because it is prohibited that this command is only possible within the differential symbolic order in which negative determination as such has a positive dimension that is to say in which the absence of a feature itself functions as a positive feature Edgar Allan Poe's imp of the perverse therefore marks the point at which the motivation of an act as it were cuts off its external link to empirical objects and grounds and grounds itself solely in the immanent circle of self-reference in short Poe's imp of the perverse corresponds to the point of freedom in the strict Kantian sense this reference to Kant is far from accidental according to Kant the faculty of desiring does not possess a transcendental status since it depends wholly upon pathological objects and motivations pathological in the Kantian sense of empirical contingent Jacques Lacan aims on the contrary to demonstrate the transcendental status of this faculty of desiring that is to say the possibility of formulating a motivation for our desire totally independent of pathology again in the Kantian sense of empirical contingent motives motivations such a non-pathological object cause of desire is the Lacanian objet petit a object small a so I think it's crucial to bear in mind this let's say transcendental background that this is precisely an object which is not a contingent pathological object but let's say a purely negative a priori self-referential object Edgar Allan Poe's imp of the perverse offers us an immediate example of such a pure transcendental a priori motivation when I accomplish an act only because it is prohibited as it were to defy the prohibition I remain within the universal symbolic domain without reference to any empirical contingent object that is to say I accomplish what is strictly a non-pathological act here then I think Kant miscalculated his wager by cleansing the domain of ethics of all pathological motivations Kant of course wanted to extirpate the very possibility of doing evil in the guise of good what he actually did was to open up a new domain of evil far more uncanny than the usual pathological empirical contingent empirical contingently conditioned evil so my point is that what Edgar Allan Poe produces here is precisely in this paradoxical imp of the perverse an act which is committed for the sole reason that it is prohibited is a kind of a priori evil in other words an evil which perfectly fits the Kantian description of the good of the notion of the good so again we saw that this a priori cause of this ambiguous act evil whose form is that of good is object small a so again next I will try to answer to clarify at least this enigma what is this famous objet petit a object small a well let me take another popular the first okay example from popular culture in one of his brilliant essays Stephen Jay Gould I think a Lacanian biologist if there ever was a one extrapolates ad absurdum the long-term tendency in the relationship between price and quantity of Hershey chocolate bars you know that horrible American chocolate for some time that's the long-term tendency no that for some time the price stays the same while the quantity gradually diminishes then all of a sudden the price goes up and with it the quantity yet the new quantity is still less than what we had gained with the previous rise no so that's the tendency price stayed the same you get less then price goes up quantity also goes up but not the same as before so with price going up the tendency of quantity goes like this so the quantity of chocolate bar over a temporal span thus follows a zigzag it gradually declines then it suddenly jumps up then again it gradually declines and so on with the long-term tendency of course towards decline now here is Stephen Jay Gould's Lacanian move by extrapolating this tendency to the extreme we can calculate not only the exact moment when the quantity will reach zero that is to say when we will get a nicely wrapped void but also exactly how much this void will cost and this I think this nicely this void this nothingness which nonetheless is nicely packed and has a definite price this is I think the perfect metaphor for Lacanian objet petit a cause of desire this non-pathological doesn't non-pathological non-empirical object a void but still it is kind of teleologically defined cause of desire so and an exemplary case of such object which brings us now to the motive of home is permit me another vulgar example is offered by I think a very interesting film far better I think this may sound obscene to you but I think in a minute seriously I'm not kidding far superior to Schindler's List is Spielberg's Jurassic Park Jurassic Park was dismissed by most critics as a kind of kitsch technospectacle whose sole interest resides in its special effects whereas so it was usually said the intersubjective relations between characters remain wholly flat and undeveloped is however this really the case what if here also evil resides in the very gaze that perceives evil that is to say what if the dismissal of Jurassic Park as a kind of technokitsch spectacle does not express so much the quality of the film as rather the limitation of the critical gaze itself namely the first feature that should make us more attentive is the unusually static character of the film the action soon as it were gets stuck in one place with the repeated attacks of the dinosaurs if then Jurassic Park is a spectacle it represents the paradox of a kind of chamber spectacle that is to say my thesis is that Jurassic Park is a kind of chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of an early Antonioni or Bergman superior to them of course this dimension becomes visible the moment we direct our attention to the Hitchcockian object in the film namely the tiny bone a claw I think of a dinosaur used by the character played by Sam Neill in the very first scene of the film to strengthen his verbal bashing against of a kid who annoys him with questions now this claw this bone in its role of a Hitchcockian object and by the way you can buy it for one pound or two a replica of it in Natural History Museum you can buy the objet petit a if you want this bone condenses Neill's parenthood trauma his refusal to assume the parental function and what are the attacking dinosaurs if not this same object overblown into a resuscitated monster that materializes the parental superego that is to say father's destructive fury directed at his offspring homologous to Hitchcock's birds in which the birds materialize the maternal superego for that reason the other key scene of the film occurs when after the fight with the evil meat-eating carnivorous dinosaurs Neill and the two children take refuge in a huge tree tree up there in the safe haven of the branches Neill becomes reconciled with them and accepts his paternal function his symbolic role of a father the conversion signaled by the fact that once the three of them fall asleep the tiny bone the claw the evil object falls from his pocket to the ground and is lost to their view no wonder then that the next morning the atmosphere miraculously changes into one of a blissful peace the dinosaurs that now approach the tree in the morning are good herbivores since the paternal fury has passed away as to its symbolic intersubjective economy the film I think is now over all that follows is an inconsistent mixture of fragments from different genre that lacks any coherent let us say libidinal impact it is not difficult I think to establish the link with Spielberg's other films most of them from Empire of the Sun up to the Schindler's List are centered precisely precisely on this trauma of fatherhood of this kind of ambiguous half-evil paternal figure which then turns into good saves the children Jews or whoever E.T. for example what is E.T. itself the small creature if not a kind of vanishing mediator that enables the fatherless family to reconstitute itself into a complete family because what we must keep in mind bear in mind is that E.T. shows up at the beginning of the film in a family deserted by the father who eloped to Mexico with another woman at the film's end the good scientist clearly assumes the role of the future father he already holds the mother around her shoulders so I think that's really the function of E.T. it's a kind of vanishing mediator enabling enabling the reconstitution of the family so my result thus far is that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are the backside the inherent obverse of home of the family heaven we encounter this same splitting in the case let me now use another example from recent political developments in the case of skinheads who attack foreigners here in England in Germany and so on it is becoming fashionable today to interview skinheads at home demonstrating how in their home environment they are normal people like us caring members of the family tender husbands or sons and so on that's the idea if they if they can be so good at home are they are they really evil then but I think my point is here that precisely we have to endure this contradiction a person can brutally beat immigrants yet in his home circle he can be the loving husband taking care of his old mother-in-law or whatever we are dealing here with an exemplary case of Hegelian coincidence of the opposites a brutal skinhead is not the external opposition to or the other of the sentimental family man but to use this Hegelian phrasing this very sentimental family man in his otherness that is to say he presents the brutal reaction of this same man when his safe family heaven is threatened in other words the skinhead who gets into a fury and starts to beat up them foreigners and so on without any deeper rational or ideological motivation simply because it makes him feel good is nothing else than the narcissistic individual of the so-called society of consumption in a different modality the line that separates them is extremely thin it consists of a purely formal conversion since we are dealing with one and the same fundamental attitude inscribed either inside or outside the ideological framework of what is socially permissible how then is this splitting reflected in the domain of the law in so far as law is by definition impersonal blind abstract cold ignorant of our particularity is there something that's now my question is there something like the law at home the law which functions as its opposite the law which is not abstract but penetrated with particular enjoyment I think there is the psychoanalytic name for such a law let us say the law at home is simply superego the domain of law is always split into the public abstract neutral symbolic law the guarantee of law and order and the superego that is to say the obscene nightly law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies as its shadow the public law permit me to take another example from popular culture because I think that this constitutive inherent splitting in the domain of the law is the subject of recent film Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men a court martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers the military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called code red an unwritten rule of military community life which authorizes the clandestine nighttime beating of a soldier of a fellow soldier who in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer has broken the ethical code of the community of the marines now the function of this code red as it is called in the film is extremely interesting it condones an act of transgression illegal beating punishment of a fellow soldier yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group that is to say it calls for an act of supreme identification with so-called group values now what is crucial with this code red is that such a code must remain under cover of night unacknowledged unutterable not integrated into public symbolic universe let us say in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it or even actively denies its existence it represents the so-called spirit of community in its purest exerting the strongest pressure on the individual the pressure to comply with its mandate of group identification yet simultaneously it violates the explicit rules of community life where does this splitting of the law into the written public law and its underside the unwritten obscene secret code come from from the incomplete let us say in Lacanian terms pas-tout non-all character of the public law explicit public rules are not sufficient so they have to be supplemented by a clandestine unwritten code aimed at those who although they violate no public rules maintain a kind of inner distance and do not truly identify with the so-called spirit of community so this I think is crucial also for the analysis of ideology that the public law law and order that regulates law and order is always redoubled accompanied by this kind of clandestine obscene regulation unwritten rules which precisely are the key point of social identification the ultimate guarantee of cohesion but precisely as such must not be publicly acknowledged we thus have again the splitting of the field of law into law as in Freudian terms a ich-ideal ego-ideal a symbolic order which regulates social life which maintains social peace and its obscene superego obverse as has been shown by numerous analyses from Mikhail Bakhtin onwards periodic transgressions of the public law are inherent to the social order they function as a condition of social stability I think that the mistake of Bakhtin or rather not of Bakhtin himself as of some of his followers was to present an idealized image of these transgressions while passing in silence over lynching parties gang rapes and so on as the crucial form of the so-called carnivalesque suspension of social hierarchy so again what bothers me at least with some followers of Bakhtin is that is that they only see the so-called liberating effect of this kind of suspension of of social hierarchy etc but I think that precisely beating of the foreigners anti-semitic anti-semitic acts and so on and so on this is this famous carnivalesque suspension of social hierarchy namely this here is my thesis what most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the public law with the law that regulates the community's normal everyday circuit but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the law of the law's suspension in psychoanalytic terms with a specific form of jouissance enjoyment let us recall a somewhat mythical example a small-town white community in the American South of the 1920s where the reign of the official public law was accompanied by its shadowy double the nightly terror of Ku Klux Klan with its lynchings of powerless blacks and so on my point is the following one a white man was easily forgiven minor infractions of the law especially when they can be justified by a so-called code of honor the community still recognized him as one of us yet he will be effectively excommunicated no longer perceived as one of us the moment he disowns the specific form of transgression that pertains to the community say the moment he refuses to participate in the ritual lynchings by Ku Klux Klan or even reports them to the law and so on and it can be shown that also the Nazi community relied on the same solidarity in guilt induced by the participation in a common transgression and so on and so on I could give you here examples from my own personal experience in ex-socialist Yugoslavia and so on my point being what that again what truly holds together a certain community is not its explicit public law but the specific form of transgression of the law to be the true conformist one has to precisely to participate in the specific mode of transgression of the law so again I think that which is why I am deeply I am deeply pessimistic deeply deeply confused when one uses all the metaphorics of transgression of transgressing law the law etc as as if one is doing something truly subversive I think quite on the contrary again each system involves implies a specific form of transgression which is its ultimate let's say force point of stabilization let me specify this a little bit when as a consequence of the rise to power of the bourgeois egalitarian ideology the public space loses its direct patriarchal character this relationship this tension between the public law and its obscene superego obverse underside also undergoes a radical change namely in the traditional patriarchal society the inherent transgression of the law assumes the form of a carnivalesque reversal of authority the king becomes a beggar madness poses as wisdom and so on and so on an exemplary case of this reversal is a custom practiced in the villages of Northern Greece up to the middle of our century for one day women took over men had to stay at home and look after children whereas women gathered in the local inn drank to excess organized mock trials of men and so on now I hope you got my point my point is there is absolutely nothing subversive in this that this kind of false transgressive liberation is the most horrifying anti-feminist anti-feminist guarantee of anti-feminist patriarchal order because what breaks out in this carnivalesque transgression suspension of the ruling ruling patriarchal law is the fantasy of the feminine power now when Lacan draws attention to the fact that in everyday French one of the designations for the wife is la bourgeoise that is to say the one who beneath the semblance of male domination actually pulls the strings this can in no way be reduced to a version of the standard male chauvinist wise cracking on how after all patriarchal domination is not so bad for women since at least in the close circle of home they run the show and so on the problem I think runs deeper one of the consequences of the fact that master according to Lacan master is always an impostor is the duplication of the master the agency of the master is always perceived as a semblance concealing another true master let us recall a nice anecdote from Adorno's Minima Moralia about a wife who apparently subordinates to her husband and when they are about to leave a party obediently holds his coat yet while doing this behind his back holding his coat she exchanges ironic patronizing glances with the fellow guests glances that deliver the message poor weakling let him think he is the master now this opposition of male and female power is thus immediately naively perceived as the opposition of semblance and actual power man is an impostor condemned to performing empty symbolic ritualistic gestures whereas the actual responsibility falls to women however the point not to be missed here is that this specter of women's power structurally depends on male domination it remains its shadowy double its retroactive effect and as such its inherent moment for that reason the idea to bring the shadowy woman's power to light to acknowledge publicly its central position is the most effective the most refined way to succumb to the patriarchal trap so again I think that with women it's the same as with the myth of orientalism I think that the most the most cunning and at the same time violent form of racism is not direct denigration of the others but precisely this kind of praising of infinite wisdom of orientals not accessible to ourselves corrupted westernness etc it's the same with women I think there's a kind of false elevation of women which is the most cunning way of of guaranteeing patriarchal so-called patriarchal domination now once the public law with bourgeois revolution casts off its direct patriarchal dress and presents itself as neutral egalitarian the character of its obscene double also undergoes a radical shift what now erupts in the so-called carnivalesque suspension of the egalitarian public law is precisely the authoritarian patriarchal logic that continues to determine our attitudes although its direct public expression is no longer permitted carnival thus becomes the outlet for the repressed social jouissance enjoyment Jew-baiting riots gang rapes and so on and so on this difference between law and superego also coincides with that between writing and voice public law is essentially written precisely and only because it is written our ignorance of law you know this is the basic a priori rule of norm legal norm our ignorance of law cannot serve as an excuse it does not exculpate us in the eyes of the law we can never say I didn't know this is this is the law I didn't simply know that I'm breaking any rules why precisely because it is written the public law in contrast to it the status of the superego is that of a traumatic voice it's not written it's a voice an intruder persecuting us disturbing our psychic balance what I found interesting here is that the standard Derridean relationship of voice and writing is here inverted it is the voice that supplements the writing it is the voice that functions as a non-transparent stain that truncates the field of law while being necessary for its completion so it's the voice which is the supplement here this voice is exhibited for example by the custom at least the rumor abounds that there is a very interesting custom of the power elite in the United States the rumor goes as follows each year I mean when I was in San Francisco year ago it was every in the society where I moved everybody was talking about this that each year for about two weeks the entire power elite of the United States top politicians managers military journalists the wealthiest etc they gather in a closed resort guarded by FBI and so on south of San Francisco in order to socialize now what do they do there even if it's not true it's nice fantasy what they actually do there is for the most part they indulge in obscene games that precisely suspend the dignity of social rituals hard drinking dancing singing vulgar vulgar songs in women's clothes telling dirty stories etc so that's that was persistent fantasy that for once a year they meet all of all of them from Reagan to Clinton they dress as women exchange obscene gestures they dance etc I found this politically correct very theoretically correct if not politically correct fantasy of how power really works because okay this will be my central thesis also at the end that you know for example that this apparently liberating gesture when an authority figure after delivering his official bombastic speech like makes a wink at you and tells okay listen don't take too seriously I'm really human as you that's the true point of repression of authority and my point would be that precisely the only way to undermine that these so-called humanizing gestures are precisely the ultimate support of authority so that the way to undermine authority is precisely paradoxically to resist in it to the end and if I may improvise a little bit which is why I found okay I mean I do I am a dogmatic Lacanian I admit it but at least I have good reasons for it one of these is that for example I met Lacan a couple of times okay he was already half beyond consciousness so he didn't know who I am but the point is that as everybody knows and I learned it Lacan was always he played a certain assumed a certain public role you know eccentric behavior it was impossible to speak with him normally this kind of specifically French mixture of of almost excessive charm and sudden cruelty impossible demands etc you feel overwhelm overwhelmed by his kindness at the same time attacked and guilty all the time so the idea and the myth among Lacanians was okay this is his public persona mask but how is he as a real man namely the desire was to discover that little bit of human warmth no that behind this mask there must be with his family etc a normal person who is kind of you know puts off the mask and behaves normally now the point is that with all the people that I've spoken and I've so with lots who knew them in private sorry who knew him in private I got from all of them the same answer in private he was exactly the same never a moment arrived and you can get him you know like he's human no he was not human as us and this is I think the true ethical position but okay let's go on so we could also say that this let's return to this nightly so precisely Lacan that's my point was never at home to put it this way okay let's go on so this nightly obscene law we could also say that it consists of proton pseudos the primordial lie that founds a community that is to say identification with community is ultimately always based upon some shared guilt or more precisely upon a fetishist disavowal of this guilt when for example to use the kind of standard example a communist in the Soviet Union of the thirties answers the reproach that the communist regime is terrorist beyond all comparison that thousands are condemned shot without proven guilt that the entire agriculture is in ruins the actual strategy of the communist's response does not consist in a direct denial of these facts but rather in claiming that the authors of these reproaches are unable to penetrate the essence of what is going on to perceive the emergence of a new man of classless solidarity and so on so a communist knows very well that millions are dying in the camps yet this knowledge only confirms his belief that the sublime true people happily enthusiastically build socialism and so on the more reality is miserable and depressive the more a true Stalinist communist clings to his fetish every allegiance to some community eventually involves such a fetish that functions as the disavowal of its founding crime is America not the fetish of an infinitely open space enabling every individual to pursue happiness in his or her own way the nature of this solidarity in guilt can also be much more specific when for example the leader is caught as you put it with his pants down the solidarity of the group is strengthened by the subjects' common disavowal of the misfortune that laid open the leader's failure or impotence a shared lie is an incomparably more effective bond for a group than the truth and I mean this quite literally for example with a lot of close groups okay starting with Lacanian communities that I was able to observe there was always a kind of internal half-private rumor shared secret of you know of knowledge how the leader the boss whoever the master is really weak of the weakness but this not only did not undermine the authority but the denial in public the public denial of this secret knowledge of master's weakness is what holds the group together that's my point that you cannot build a community on truth to put it in somewhat bombastic terms you need a lie you need a lie the only thing that holds together a political community is a lie some lie which then functions as this kind of public secret and so on now this tension between public law and its obscene superego obverse enables us also to approach in a new way the classical used overused Louis Althusser's notion of ideological interpolation Althusserian theory of ideological state apparatuses and interpellation I think is more complex than it may appear than it may appear for example when Althusser repeats again and again after Blaise Pascal act as if you believe pray kneel down and you shall believe faith will arrive by itself he delineates an intricate reflective mechanism of what can be called retroactive autopoietic foundation namely what is the mechanism here it's not simply that it's not what Althusser aims at with this notion I think is not simply a kind of reductionist assertion that inner belief depends on on external behavior I think Althusser's reasoning is more refined here the implicit logic of his argument is kneel down and you shall believe what kneel down and you shall believe that you kneeled down because of your belief that your following the ritual is an expression of your inner belief in short the external ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation this so it's kind of more complicated self-referential logic but things are even more interesting I think in the case of interpellation my thesis here is that Althusser's example what he calls little theoretical theater contains more than his own theorization gets out of it as you probably know it's standard piece of reading in theory of ideology Althusser evokes an individual who while carelessly walking down the street is suddenly addressed by a policeman hey you there by answering the call that is to say by stopping and turning around towards the policeman the individual recognizes and at the same time constitutes himself as the subject of power of the big other in the Althusserian sense the big other as the big other of power the ideological big other the author of interpellation the one who addresses you permit me not too long a brief quote from Althusser assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street the hailed interpellated individual will turn around by this mere degrees physical conversion he becomes a subject why because he has recognized that the hail was really addressed to him that it was really him who was hailed it is a strange phenomenon and one which cannot be explained solely by guilt feelings despite the large numbers who have something on their conscience naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theater I have had to present things in the form of a temporal succession there are individuals walking along somewhere behind them the hail rings out hey you there one individual turns around believing suspecting knowing that it is for him but in reality these things happen without any succession the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects into subjects are one and the same thing end of quote now again my thesis is that there is more in this description in this example than what Althusser gets out of it in his theory of act of interpellation namely I think that the crucial feature of this quoted passage is the double denial at work in it the denial of the explanation of interpellative recognition by means of a guilt feeling as well as the denial of the temporality of the process of interpellation individuals as Althusser puts it do not become subject they always already are subject my thesis is that this double denial is to be read as a Freudian denial verneinung what the timeless character of interpellation renders invisible is a kind of atemporal sequentiality that is far more complex than the theoretical theater staged by Althusser this repressed sequence concerns precisely a guilt feeling but and we are back at Kant now a guilt feeling of a purely formal non-pathological in the Kantian sense again non-pathological nature a guilt that for that very reason weighs most heavily upon those individuals who have nothing on their conscience that is to say let's make a quite naive empirical thought experiment in what precisely consists the individual's first reaction to the policeman's hey you there that's my experiment here just imagine quite naively you are walking down the street you hear behind you a policeman hey you there my idea is that your first reaction is not yes and then with this recognition you constitute yourself as subject of ideology subject of law of legal power my quite naive notion is that the first reaction is more complex is an inconsistent but necessary it's still a kind of a priori necessary reaction inconsistent mixture of two elements your first reaction to hey you there is why me what does this idiot want from me I'm innocent I was just walking along why me this kind of surprise why me what did I do I didn't do anything that's all even if you my point is that even if you are guilty your first reaction when an a person of authority addresses you is always this why me what did I do what does the idiot want from me but at the same time there is the exactly the opposite reaction namely this perplexed protestation of innocence is always accompanied by an indeterminate let us say almost Kafkaesque feeling of abstract guilt a feeling that in the eyes of power I am a priori terribly guilty of something although it is not possible for me to know what precisely I am guilty of and for that reason since I don't know what I'm guilty of I'm even more guilty now that's the other reaction I must have done something I don't know what but it's even worse this is what I'm guilty of so the idea being that this very ignorance of mine it is in very the very ignorance of mine that consists my true guilt I feel guilty precisely because I don't even know what I'm guilty of so my idea is that before yes I'm the subject of power comes this contradictory antagonistic response so what we have here is the entire Lacanian dispositive of the subject split between innocence and abstract a protestation of innocence and an abstract indeterminate guilt when he is confronted with a kind of non-transparent call emanating from the other this call hey you there a call where it is not clear to the subject what the other actually wants from him so the subject reaction is precisely that Lacan's che vuoi what do you want what do you want from me the this non-transparency impenetrability of the desire of the other in short what we encounter here to put it in Althusserian terms I think is precisely interpellation you are addressed by the other but interpellation prior to identification interpellation where you don't yet have identification so prior to the recognition in the call of the other by means of which I constitute myself as always already subject I'm obliged to acknowledge this timeless instant of a deadlock in which innocence coincides with indeterminate guilt the ideological identification by means of which I assume a symbolic mandate I recognize myself as the subject of power takes place already as an answer to this deadlock my point is that this deadlock again is not an empirical notion contingent it's necessary the first reaction to the call of the power is this kind of contradictory response which which articulates a certain deadlock why me I must be guilty of something and so on and it is precisely in order to elude to escape this deadlock that I assume a certain public symbolic identity so again what remains unthought in Althusser's theory of interpellation is the fact that prior to ideological identification recognition we have an intermediate moment of obscene impenetrable interpellation without identification and in short the unthought of Althusser is that there is already an uncanny subject that precedes the gesture of subjectivization subjectivization because through ideological identification this is subjectivization I become subject in Althusserian sense of legal identity etc but prior to that there is a status of subject which is not yet this ideological subject in the Althusserian sense now probably you will ask me is this subject prior to subjectivization is this not a pure theoretical construction of no use for a concrete social analysis I think that the first evidence to the contrary is offered by the syntagm that recurs regularly when social workers attempt to render their experience of the so-called antisocial adolescent criminal who lacks what we ideologically refer to as the elementary sense of compassion moral responsibility namely what I was struck with that in America in England in Germany all the time they use the same expression when you are confronted with this horrible mythological I mean they are as almost as evil I think that for you in England now the central person of evil is the the single mother I think no that's the true source of all evil no because they then breed violent young men etc but another figure is I think this kind of violent adolescent the the metaphor which recurs all around I've met encountered it again this metaphor in US in England in Germany in France is that when you look into his eyes it seems as if again we have home as if there is nobody home this is always as if you know there is void there is nobody home no person behind no and so a similar case of this state what Lacan would have called l'entre-deux-morts between the two deaths where the subject is alive yet not at home not integrated into the social symbolic network is provided by a very vulgar personal unfortunately of me everyday experience of precisely when you can experience this strange status of being subject but not yet subjectivization in the sense of having a symbolic identity namely this will be rather personal very vulgar when I answer the phone and it probably must happen also to you and an unknown voice says for example Mary are you there but there is no Mary in your apartment so you know it's obvious case of wrong number I am always tempted to do something what well I don't actually do it yet as you probably know it was already Plato who said that there are two kinds of people those who actually do nasty things and those who only dream of about doing them well I am the so my immediate temptation is to answer something that would cause panic on the other end like don't you know she had an Mary had an accident she had just been taken away in an ambulance or she just left in the arms of Robert etc like you know the idea is what the idea is that in cases like this I'm for a brief moment allowed to speak as it were from a symbolic voice since in Europe at least the list of numbers you called is not attached to the phone bill so nobody will be able to trace me to identify me so I'm free for all responsibility of my words no I'm absolutely free I'm voice without symbolic identity so I can screw things up freely this would be this notion of subject prior to symbolic prior to symbolic identity but however our contemporary experience compels us to complicate further this picture that is to say what strikes the eye in the recent wave of anti-immigrant violence is let us say the primitive level of the underlying libidinal economy primitive not in the sense of kind of regression to some archaic level but in the sense of the utmost elementary nature of the relationship between pleasure and jouissance enjoyment between the closed circle of pleasure principle that strives for balance for the reproduction of its closed circuit and the foreign body of enjoyment in its heart that is to say the libidinal economy that sustains the infamous battlecry foreigners out or in German Ausländer raus can be exemplified precisely by the relationship between Ich the ego and Lust the pleasure where the non-pleasure Unlust is defined in the terms of non-assimilation of as Lacan puts it as what remains irreducible unassimilable to the pleasure principle the terms used by Freud and Lacan to describe the relationship of this primordial Ich ego and jouissance enjoyment perfectly fit the metaphorics of the racist attitude towards foreigners this is what struck me when I was recently reading these metapsychological writings of Freud the whole set of terms is the same as those used by these anti-immigrant violence skinheads and so on the problems are those of assimilation resistance to assimilation expulsion of a foreign body disturbed balance and so on these are fundamental topological terms so in order to locate this type of evil with regard to the usual types of evil one is tempted to use as the principle of classification the Freudian triad of ego superego and id that's my very simple basic thesis the most common kind of evil is let's call it the ego evil the behavior we do evil things why because simply we are led by selfish calculation greed by the disregard for universal ethical principles that's the ego evil if we define ego of course in the naive pre-Lacanian even pre-Freudian sense of the agency of rational utilitarian behavior and so on then this is the ego evil so simple selfish calculation greed pleasure etc then we have the evil attributed to the so-called wrongly so-called fundamentalist fanatics here we have what we might call superego evil evil accomplished in the name of fanatic devotion to some ideological cause and so on but in the skinhead skinhead beating of up foreigners one can discern neither a clear selfish calculation nor a clear ideological identification all the talk about foreigners stealing work from us about the threat they represent to our western values should not deceive us under a closer closer examination it soon becomes clear that this talk provides rather superficial secondary rationalization the answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat the foreigners that their presence disturbs him etc so what we encounter here is the let us say id evil the evil structured motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between ego and jouissance enjoyment by the tension between the pleasure pleasure principle and the foreign body of enjoyment in the very heart of it the id evil thus stages the most elementary short circuit in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object cause of his desire what bothers us in the other Jew Japanese Pakistani African Turk whatever is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object object that materializes enjoyment the other either possesses the object treasure having snatched it away from us or he poses a threat to our possession of the object now how are we to combat effectively this id evil which on account of its elementary nature remains impervious to any rational or even purely rhetorical argumentation that is to say racism is always grounded in a particular fantasy of cosa nostra of our ethnic thing menaced by them and so on which this particular fantasy by definition resists universalization the translation of the racist fantasy into the universal medium of symbolic intersubjectivity in no way weakens the hold of the racist fantasy upon us this insensitivity of the racist fantasy to rational symbolic argumentation means that to use Wittgensteinian opposition that fantasy can only be shown not spoken out so what can we do here my point of course is not that we can that we can do nothing because I think that precisely the whole wager of psychoanalysis is that the real of enjoyment of jouissance can be changed with that with the means of symbolic order of signifier we can intervene into the real of jouissance but how what I am tempted to propose is namely as a model for a strategy able to incorporate what Lacan called going through fantasy la traversée du fantasme I propose a strategy of over-identification namely a procedure which takes into account the fact that the obscene superego the basic support of the public law is operative as I already developed at the beginning is operative only insofar as it remains unacknowledged hidden to the public eye that is to say what if when we are opposed to this kind of racist violence whatever what if instead of critical dissection irony and so on which always reveal their impotence before the face of racism's phantasmatic kernel what if we proceed a contrario and publicly identify with the obscene superego now this is again not an abstract intellectual construction I have a precise empirical if you want verification here my example is maybe you've heard about it because it's moderately they are moderately known even here I think the Slovene let's call them post-punk group the Slovene group musical group Laibach German name from for Ljubljana they staged an in the last years of socialism in Slovenia they staged an aggressive inconsistent mixture of Stalinism Nazism Blut und Boden that is to say earth and blood ideology and so on now the first reaction of the enlightened leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as an ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals and so on however their support of the enlightened leftist intellectuals of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling what if they really mean it what if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual that's very nice how this ambiguous effect of Laibach no everybody supported them but it was always with this with this limit of minimum of anxiety what if they what if somebody takes them seriously what if they really mean it are they really just mocking imitating it or do they really mean it a more cunning version of this anxiety of this distance of this uneasiness was transferring one's own doubt onto the other this version went like this what if Laibach overestimates their public what if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine now this uneasy feeling I think is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically something subversive but what if on the contrary the dominant attitude of the contemporary so-called post-ideological wrongly so-called universe is precisely the cynical distance towards public values what if this distance far from posing any threat to the system designates the supreme form of conformism since the normal functioning of the system requires cynical distance because that's my basic thesis that it's not only that today as it's usually said that for the late capitalism in order to reproduce itself you don't doesn't anybody any anymore requires strict ideological adherence identification my point is that it's even the reverse it actively requires non-identification cynical distance in this case the strategy of Laibach I think appears in a new light it frustrates the system let's say the ruling ideology precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation but over-identification with it by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system over-identification suspends its efficiency again imagine like the universe of Ku Klux Klan or of A Few Good Men where precisely that what must remain hidden the secret unwritten rule if that is brought to the light of the day if you over-identify with it if you publicly identify with what must remain in order to be operative kind of generally known but still non-acknowledged public secret this way I think you suspend its efficiency now in order to clarify this procedure let us recall a somehow homologous phenomenon in the sphere of individual experience each of us has some private ritual phrase nickname etc or gesture used only at home within the most intimate circle of closest friends relatives you know for example you were called something by your uncle by by father by friend etc when these rituals are rendered public for example when you meet I don't know an old friend from youth in another society and this friend uses that special nickname I mean is there anything more embarrassing than that I mean and my idea is that what Laibach this group did was to do precisely this by disclosing this unwritten secret it ruined its efficiency so now permit me slowly to conclude with my last example from English culture which concerns precisely this relationship between fantasy and let's say political ethics a very interesting although ambiguous book Aldous Huxley's the Grey Eminence as you probably know the biography of Père Joseph Father Joseph who was the political advisor of Cardinal Richelieu why is this book interesting I think if in a fictional reconstruction of the modern European history one wishes to isolate the episode that derailed the normal course of events and introduced the imbalance whose final consequence was the two world wars in our century the main candidate for this role undoubtedly is the parcelling of the German Reich in the Thirty Years' War in the first half of the 17th century on account of this parcelling the assertion of Germany as a nation state was retarded so again I hope you got my point if mythically this purely mythical mental experiment if we look for the moment where did it went wrong why the two world wars etc it's that no Thirty Years' War thirty years war and this retard of Germany and so on now again if there is a person who within this fictitious reconstruction can be made responsible for this catastrophic result again the main candidate for this role is Père Joseph Father Joseph who through his phenomenal capacity for intrigue succeeded in introducing a rupture in the Protestant camp concluding a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden and thus shifting the center of war to German territory so again if you are looking for a person saying he is guilty of all of it Hitler whatever it's Père Joseph the ultimate embodiment of the plotting Machiavellian politician ready to sacrifice thousands of lives resort to spy spying lies murder extortion etc but and this was the feature that fascinated Huxley but there is another side to this same Father Joseph he was not only a priest but a mystic of the utmost authentic kind every evening at home after a day full of torturous diplomatic intrigues he plunged into deep meditations his mystic vision bears witness to an authenticity worthy of Saint Teresa John of the Cross and so on he corresponded regularly with the sisters of a small French convent always found time to advise them on their spiritual distress and so on how are we to think these two sides together at this crucial point Huxley avoids the true paradox and opts for an easy way out by putting the blame on the alleged weak point of Father Joseph's mythical experience sorry mystic experience itself its excessive Christocentrism its obsession with Christ's suffering on the way of the cross is made responsible by Huxley for rendering possible the reckless manipulation with other people's suffering and so on for that reason as you know Huxley turned away from Christianity and sought for spiritual salvation in the eastern wisdom what we must do however I think is precisely to persist in this seemingly impossible conjunction a person can be a monstrous plotter yet his self-understanding his existential religious experience can be spotlessly authentic my point is that it is possible for Father Joseph at the same time to be the very origin of modern European evil whatever at the same time we have his mystic experience can be totally authentic blameless whatever you want the literary example of this paradox is Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov as we know now from posthumously published sketches it is Alyosha this model of innocent humble spirituality who in the unwritten continuation of the novel was to become revolutionary terrorist now what I want to draw your attention to now in my conclusion is the strict homology between Father Joseph and the poor skinhead who while at home behaves as the best family man it is not difficult to discern how these two examples differ from other previously mentioned examples of the constitutive splitting of ideology into public law and the obscene hidden underside Code Red Ku Klux Klan and so on the example of the skinhead almost symmetrically inverts the previous examples of Code Red from A Few Good Men of Ku Klux Klan and so on in it Code Red Ku Klux Klan the surface sorry in the case of the skinhead the surface itself gets besmirched the skinhead performs in full public view what the two soldiers in A Few Good Men or members of Ku Klux Klan do under the cover of night whereas the honest human side recedes into the privacy of home notwithstanding the cruelty of his public deeds the skinhead is privately a warm person like ourselves who loves his mother and so on so instead of the public law and order front with an obscene backside as was in the case of Ku Klux Klan Code Red and so on we obtain a horrifying front concealing a tender honest human backside something similar was at work in the Stalinist writings of Lenin the Stalinist texts openly admit that in his effort to fulfill historical necessity Lenin was forced to resort to resolute measures to violate many a gentle bourgeois moral norms to order summary executions of a great number of people and so on yet as it is always pointed out in Stalinist texts notwithstanding all this Lenin was deeply steered by Beethoven's piano sonatas he liked children and cats and so on so that's my point that either way either we have the the Ku Klux Klan version public law and order and then the written sorry the unwritten obscene underside or let us say naively let's call it naively the totalitarian version public horror but behind it this kind of homely homely warm human backside so to conclude my final point is simply that a skinhead does not beat up foreigners in spite of being a model family man at home but for that very reason thank you very much if anyone wants to do it we see if there's a could be a few minutes if anyone wants to ask a question but obviously some of the issues might return this afternoon just a small point about what you said towards the end I wanted to ask you the way you might articulate the word almost symmetrical the point being a purely symmetrical thing this reversal of roles then oh you mean this classical bourgeois where you have the the point almost it's actually not almost ah the almost it is the almost because I in so-called so-called totalitarian regimes I think you have the combination of the two strategies because although in Hitler in the case of Hitler's Germany you have this logic of you do publicly horrible things but privately you are a nice person and and I give you very nice horrifying examples of this for example you know another German Hitler's personification of evil Heydrich you know what Heydrich did in private you know Heydrich the butcher of Czechoslovakia etc you know that every evening he gathered with three fellow SS friends and you know what they played Beethoven's string quartets I mean if there is a piece of music which is the ultimate so but my point is that at the same time you have also the other side it is as if this second version somehow is inherently not it's not possible to to articulate it to the end because at the same time German fascism did also work in this way of public law and order private dirty secrets no for example Holocaust himself they did this was their point of of of private obscenity it was not publicly it was not publicly acknowledged namely people are usually misled today when they think that everything was publicly said okay Jews were despised publicly of course anti-semitic texts were written but still Holocaust as such and a lot of other things these were definitely not part of the public discourse this was a kind of still a kind of secret so I simply refer to this it is as if this second let's call it naively totalitarian logic cannot work cannot function to the end there is an inherent limit in it oh I mostly just wanted some clarification at the end you and I was interested in the fact the person who asked the first question held you accountable to the precise use of language which maybe I shouldn't do but you said you were at you were tempted to propose the following solution you actually were willing to propose it sorry which solution are we at the very end you spoke about what is the possible what is the action that can be taken ah yeah sorry yes I know yes yes so you were sort of tempted to propose and I was sort of interested in the desire to sort of non quite point of view propose but I want to no it's it was simply my to put it in Stalinist terms my petit bourgeois reluctance because the the strategy of Laibach was very risky but let me refer to this how did it actually work I think it worked but I mean your proposal is something like this there is a public law and an obverse private law which are co-constructed which are actually dialectic they need each other yeah yeah in a certain sense to rein the second in the check we have to carry the first we have to exhaust the first one to extreme is that something like the which is the first one no the public public law yeah I mean is that something like the idea I I'm not sure I really want to get a sense of what your the ending is no no my idea is rather that no my idea was very naive my idea was that the usual strategy is this kind of against public law and order my idea is that at this level against public law and order you can be very subversive etc aggressive but it's always a great danger that you actually even reassert this level of this let's say level of underside superego and so on but my idea is that what if we try it was as simple as that what if we try the obverse strategy it is that by that the whole efficiency of this obscene underside is that it is operative only insofar as it's the same as with emperor is naked of course everybody knows about it but not the big other that is to say it's not publicly recognized so isn't it then one strategy to precisely not to undermine to do nothing critical but precisely to over-identify in the precise sense of bringing to the light of the day this obscene underside that this way you not only render it inefficient but you also truly subvert the public law and order insofar as the public law and order itself needs this hidden underside as its as its support so where do you see the but but what what definitely was you know sort of asking was the strategy which you implied by referring to the ceaselessly public character of Lacan as a way of kind of gradually eradicating the obscene privacy yeah the conclusion the inexorable conclusion of your talk for me can't end in exactly what you've said because you basically construct a dialectic pre-temporal dialectic between two forms of law in what sense pre-temporal sorry in the sense that there is not a public
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law first and then obverse private law which comes afterwards and supports it but in fact that they are co-constructed yeah it's not just that the public law is sustained by the private law yeah sorry yeah but it's also that the private law is
law first and then obverse private law which comes afterwards and supports it but in fact that they are co-constructed yeah it's not just that the public law is sustained by the private law yeah sorry yeah but it's also that the private law is
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sustained by its relationship
sustained by its relationship
Slavoj Žižek
to the public law in a way yes in a way yes in order that it cannot be the correct operating strategy from my point of view to try to make the private law public what you actually have to do is step outside of that in a kind of caricature of both which is what I thought you were describing with Althusser or Lacan you can't take a kind of activist Hegelianism in the sense that I can now end the obverse by constantly exposing it because all I will always do is reconstruct a new obverse law okay I got your point sorry now sorry I was a little bit what is the nice term for stupid a little bit slow or what I got it now sorry sorry ah no I think no I'm not such a pessimist here my my reference to Laibach was a very precise reference I see your point but no this I spoke almost as a kind of political activist if you want my point was simply this is a crucial problem for example I know a lot of people my friends in West Germany old leftists and so on and so they are desperate with this neo-Nazis beating up foreigners etc what to do practically what to do there and a lot of them now advocate this is very ironic how now in West Germany and even in some ex-socialist East European countries it's interesting how the roles are almost reversed now right-wingers are for more populist public social social society sorry civil society authenticity where leftists are for alienated state law and order and so on because they see in this the only way to counteract it but I think
to the public law in a way yes in a way yes in order that it cannot be the correct operating strategy from my point of view to try to make the private law public what you actually have to do is step outside of that in a kind of caricature of both which is what I thought you were describing with Althusser or Lacan you can't take a kind of activist Hegelianism in the sense that I can now end the obverse by constantly exposing it because all I will always do is reconstruct a new obverse law okay I got your point sorry now sorry I was a little bit what is the nice term for stupid a little bit slow or what I got it now sorry sorry ah no I think no I'm not such a pessimist here my my reference to Laibach was a very precise reference I see your point but no this I spoke almost as a kind of political activist if you want my point was simply this is a crucial problem for example I know a lot of people my friends in West Germany old leftists and so on and so they are desperate with this neo-Nazis beating up foreigners etc what to do practically what to do there and a lot of them now advocate this is very ironic how now in West Germany and even in some ex-socialist East European countries it's interesting how the roles are almost reversed now right-wingers are for more populist public social social society sorry civil society authenticity where leftists are for alienated state law and order and so on because they see in this the only way to counteract it but I think
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that
that
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this there I see at least three strategies I'm not definitely not saying that Laibach is the universal answer to this kind of thing I'm only saying that in the specific situation this kind of over-identification at least renders it inoperative Lacan's
this there I see at least three strategies I'm not definitely not saying that Laibach is the universal answer to this kind of thing I'm only saying that in the specific situation this kind of over-identification at least renders it inoperative Lacan's
Slavoj Žižek
strategy the example okay of Lacan the strategy
strategy the example okay of Lacan the strategy
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implied in it is again a different one there is
implied in it is again a different one there is
Slavoj Žižek
even a third strategy and here this is the
even a third strategy and here this is the
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central part of my argument it is that
central part of my argument it is that
Slavoj Žižek
namely this opposition between let us say public law and order and this private superego is to put it in political psychoanalytic terms the opposition between ego ideal
namely this opposition between let us say public law and order and this private superego is to put it in political psychoanalytic terms the opposition between ego ideal
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as symbolic law and superego and I think that the whole point of Lacanian ethics is that and here I could have but I will not now not to spend too much of your time develop this opposition that this opposition according to Lacan is not an opposition that covers all of the field of ethics so for Lacan
as symbolic law and superego and I think that the whole point of Lacanian ethics is that and here I could have but I will not now not to spend too much of your time develop this opposition that this opposition according to Lacan is not an opposition that covers all of the field of ethics so for Lacan
Slavoj Žižek
to put it very simply the the logic of this public law and order is the logic of the public good of the supreme good of the of the social good of the of the good of all of social life but for Lacan precisely when we evoke the public good which is always on which is always based the the ego ideal the moment we do this we already okay to refer to Lacan céder sur son désir we already compromise our desire and as we know for Lacan the ethics the fundamental ethical rule of psychoanalysis precisely do not give way do not compromise your desire do not give way as to your desire so for Lacan the movement is such that this public law and order ethics the ethics of the ego ideal the ethics of the public common good is precisely a betrayal let us say of the true
to put it very simply the the logic of this public law and order is the logic of the public good of the supreme good of the of the social good of the of the good of all of social life but for Lacan precisely when we evoke the public good which is always on which is always based the the ego ideal the moment we do this we already okay to refer to Lacan céder sur son désir we already compromise our desire and as we know for Lacan the ethics the fundamental ethical rule of psychoanalysis precisely do not give way do not compromise your desire do not give way as to your desire so for Lacan the movement is such that this public law and order ethics the ethics of the ego ideal the ethics of the public common good is precisely a betrayal let us say of the true
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ethical stance and superego is the price we pay for it and this is how it can be very nicely explained the fundamental paradox of superego which is what as you probably know
ethical stance and superego is the price we pay for it and this is how it can be very nicely explained the fundamental paradox of superego which is what as you probably know
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it's this kind of closed circle superego orders commands you something but the more you follow the command the command of the superego injunction the more you are guilty precisely because you are guilty superego is the price we pay for compromising our desire and I think this is the whole point of Lacan's reading of Antigone that Antigone in her act is not is neither the figure of public law and order nor the figure of superego as the true ethical choice so there is definitely a third position and by the way this is I think one nice way to save Freud which is why when Freud
it's this kind of closed circle superego orders commands you something but the more you follow the command the command of the superego injunction the more you are guilty precisely because you are guilty superego is the price we pay for compromising our desire and I think this is the whole point of Lacan's reading of Antigone that Antigone in her act is not is neither the figure of public law and order nor the figure of superego as the true ethical choice so there is definitely a third position and by the way this is I think one nice way to save Freud which is why when Freud
Slavoj Žižek
says namely
says namely
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I'm referring to Freud's infamous statement that you know women has a weaker superego precisely because they are more ethical because for Lacan precisely superego far from being an ethical category superego is precisely an obscene category which the very existence of superego
I'm referring to Freud's infamous statement that you know women has a weaker superego precisely because they are more ethical because for Lacan precisely superego far from being an ethical category superego is precisely an obscene category which the very existence of superego
Slavoj Žižek
means that you betray your desire so again far from being a kind of anti-feminist statement this statement that women has a weaker superego it's if something points precisely towards the fact that they are less prone to compromise their desire and so on and so on okay I didn't answer your question but to use the old no again to repeat my old joke immediately you know how you can immediately recognize a Marxist book from the seventies you know from the seventies it was always the title was never let's say theory of ideology but notes towards a future possible theory of ideology you know like the object stay we are not so I hope I gave you notes for a future possible answer to your question sorry you're going to get the same question in another way round okay your complicit rituals in a group are precisely designed to make it a community effect sorry to make community a community effect you can't believe it yeah okay people can't hear you no sorry your complicit rituals that are below the public below the state are designed to make the community a community effect yeah yeah now you are proposing as it were strategies at the psychoanalytic level or at sort of shall we say politics of symbols yeah there's also a straight politics of institutions which is to build communities of choice from which people can exit and make communities of fate more difficult to construct now I happen to think that sociologically that is what is happening in other words precisely you're talking about groups like skinheads precisely because communities of fate are increasingly communities of the failed and the rejected now you then have a sociological problem with that it is a part-way problem of public order but it isn't a general problem of the community the great danger talking of the community as if we are actually all involved in communities where there is complicity in that sense because I think sociologically it isn't true right yeah I see your point I hope I see it but I still think that for example this new community so-called new communities of faith but aren't they are sorry faith like believing you mean this sorry fate fate like destiny not exactly the same but in that direction okay sorry no what I think is that but still is not I'm a little bit more pessimistic in the precise sense that these communities of choice but are we not still are we not obliged to read these new communities of faith as an I'm almost tempted to say that you will probably not agree with me I will sound as an old-fashioned Marxist that in the same way as Marx says that that Marx says that that that that that crisis these negative etc are you know an inherent effect of the structural imbalance whatever of capital in the same sense I'm inclined to see these new communities of faith as an inherent okay to use old-fashioned terminology again an effect of inherent contradictions of communities of choice and I can I will okay I will not to take too much time just to give you one hint I think that in the Freudian because this community of faith can be defined by a very special feature by a re-emergence of a certain figure of the leader they always have the leader and my thesis here is the following one with Freud we have as everybody knows or should have known the opposition of two fathers that's the myth we have two
means that you betray your desire so again far from being a kind of anti-feminist statement this statement that women has a weaker superego it's if something points precisely towards the fact that they are less prone to compromise their desire and so on and so on okay I didn't answer your question but to use the old no again to repeat my old joke immediately you know how you can immediately recognize a Marxist book from the seventies you know from the seventies it was always the title was never let's say theory of ideology but notes towards a future possible theory of ideology you know like the object stay we are not so I hope I gave you notes for a future possible answer to your question sorry you're going to get the same question in another way round okay your complicit rituals in a group are precisely designed to make it a community effect sorry to make community a community effect you can't believe it yeah okay people can't hear you no sorry your complicit rituals that are below the public below the state are designed to make the community a community effect yeah yeah now you are proposing as it were strategies at the psychoanalytic level or at sort of shall we say politics of symbols yeah there's also a straight politics of institutions which is to build communities of choice from which people can exit and make communities of fate more difficult to construct now I happen to think that sociologically that is what is happening in other words precisely you're talking about groups like skinheads precisely because communities of fate are increasingly communities of the failed and the rejected now you then have a sociological problem with that it is a part-way problem of public order but it isn't a general problem of the community the great danger talking of the community as if we are actually all involved in communities where there is complicity in that sense because I think sociologically it isn't true right yeah I see your point I hope I see it but I still think that for example this new community so-called new communities of faith but aren't they are sorry faith like believing you mean this sorry fate fate like destiny not exactly the same but in that direction okay sorry no what I think is that but still is not I'm a little bit more pessimistic in the precise sense that these communities of choice but are we not still are we not obliged to read these new communities of faith as an I'm almost tempted to say that you will probably not agree with me I will sound as an old-fashioned Marxist that in the same way as Marx says that that Marx says that that that that that crisis these negative etc are you know an inherent effect of the structural imbalance whatever of capital in the same sense I'm inclined to see these new communities of faith as an inherent okay to use old-fashioned terminology again an effect of inherent contradictions of communities of choice and I can I will okay I will not to take too much time just to give you one hint I think that in the Freudian because this community of faith can be defined by a very special feature by a re-emergence of a certain figure of the leader they always have the leader and my thesis here is the following one with Freud we have as everybody knows or should have known the opposition of two fathers that's the myth we have two
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fathers with Freud we have Oedipal father public law and order father and the obscene totem and taboo primordial father what I think Freud did there was that he was a kind of victim of a kind of of a kind of perspective illusion that this so-called primordial father is really a postmodern phenomenon I think that that what Freud perceived as a prehistorical phenomenon this primordial father who has the demon is really misperception of the of the modern leader which is not anymore leader of traditional
fathers with Freud we have Oedipal father public law and order father and the obscene totem and taboo primordial father what I think Freud did there was that he was a kind of victim of a kind of of a kind of perspective illusion that this so-called primordial father is really a postmodern phenomenon I think that that what Freud perceived as a prehistorical phenomenon this primordial father who has the demon is really misperception of the of the modern leader which is not anymore leader of traditional
Slavoj Žižek
symbolic authority for example what struck my mind is clear example of this community of faith the how do you call that Branch Davidian sect they were killed in Waco Texas did you notice okay anecdotal detail but it's significant enough that the way that community was organized the leader David Koresh the basic rule was that he had all the women only sexual relationship was permitted all that's to say it was a kind of ironic mocking but still almost exact copy of Freud's primordial horde so again where okay I basically agree with you the problem only the problem I see is that I what I consider a little bit illusory is to have to simply to say that we need more communities of choice and less communities of faith I think that there is a kind of inherent dialectic there at work and I'm not so optimistic about these communities of choice what I am more sensitive to is that I'm rather a pessimist in the sense that I think that behind this choice I like I always think it's possible to discern a kind of hidden command of faith behind it I'm not so optimistic about these communities of choice to put it this way okay I think we should break for lunch now we're going to meet back at two prompt but before we go to lunch on your behalf I'd like to thank Slavoj very much don't applaud too
symbolic authority for example what struck my mind is clear example of this community of faith the how do you call that Branch Davidian sect they were killed in Waco Texas did you notice okay anecdotal detail but it's significant enough that the way that community was organized the leader David Koresh the basic rule was that he had all the women only sexual relationship was permitted all that's to say it was a kind of ironic mocking but still almost exact copy of Freud's primordial horde so again where okay I basically agree with you the problem only the problem I see is that I what I consider a little bit illusory is to have to simply to say that we need more communities of choice and less communities of faith I think that there is a kind of inherent dialectic there at work and I'm not so optimistic about these communities of choice what I am more sensitive to is that I'm rather a pessimist in the sense that I think that behind this choice I like I always think it's possible to discern a kind of hidden command of faith behind it I'm not so optimistic about these communities of choice to put it this way okay I think we should break for lunch now we're going to meet back at two prompt but before we go to lunch on your behalf I'd like to thank Slavoj very much don't applaud too
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much I feel
much I feel
Slavoj Žižek
like in the old times being at the Communist Party Congress so sorry
like in the old times being at the Communist Party Congress so sorry