International Journal of Zizek Studies Conference
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-04-28 · 1:29:20 · 9,884 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalideologyhistoryconsciousness-mindrevolution-violencescience-physicscinema-art-culturereligion-theology
Žižek argues that Hegel, along with Plato and Descartes, constitutes one of three irreplaceable pillars of Western philosophy, each defined by the negative reactions they provoke. The lecture traces how each of these thinkers harbors a dimension of madness and eventality at their core, the Platonic Idea as traumatic encounter, the Cartesian cogito as evental crack in being, and the Hegelian absolute as the embrace of illusion as constitutive of reality. Žižek then examines what Hegel cannot think, repetition without sublation, the Freudian unconscious, jouissance, mathematics, before arguing that the task today is not to overcome Hegel but to repeat him more radically, using Lacan as the instrument for this repetition in a moment of historical transition.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “evental cogito”
For Žižek, Descartes' cogito is not a thinking substance (res cogitans) but a purely evental entity, a crack in the great chain of being that exists only while the process of thinking is ongoing, with no substantial remainder.
as “suspension of the ethical”
Žižek uses Kierkegaard's term to describe the phenomenology of falling in love: a different dimension of being enters and the ordinary ethical hierarchy is not inverted but simply rendered irrelevant.
Žižek reads the Platonic Idea not as a separate ontological sphere but as a purely evental traumatic encounter, a specter that derails ordinary life and to which one becomes fixated, closer to falling in love than to metaphysical realism.
Žižek invokes Hegel's term for the abyss of pure subjectivity, the darkness or 'negative' at the heart of spirit, which he links to madness, mystical experience, and the positive foundation of negativity.
as “retroactivity of truth”
Žižek's reading of Hegel's temporality: the goal or meaning of a historical event is not teleologically prefigured but constructed retroactively, the right moment only emerges through prior 'premature' attempts.
as “there is no metalanguage”
Žižek invokes Lacan's principle to explain Rosa Luxemburg's argument: the 'right moment' for revolution has no vantage point from which it can be read off in advance; it only emerges through the series of premature attempts.
as “absolute knowing (wissen)”
Žižek defines Hegelian absolute knowing not as a deeper reality beyond objective knowing, but as objective order plus the insight that illusions are constitutive of it, subjectivity included in the objective.
Drawing on Bentham, Lacan, and Hegel, Žižek argues that virtual fictions are not opposed to reality but supplement it, erasing them does not reveal reality, it dissolves it.
as “reconciliation (Hegelian)”
Žižek rejects the standard reading of Hegelian reconciliation as re-appropriation of alienated substance; instead he reads it as an extremely resigned recognition, illustrated by Coetzee's Disgrace, of oneself in the very 'shit' that is destroying you.
as “objet petit a / object a”
Žižek invokes Lacan's object a as 'less than nothing', a pure void that nonetheless has properties and a cost, and draws a formal homology with the Higgs field in quantum physics.
Žižek's signature formulation for the Lacanian object a, something paradoxically below zero, with a positive cost, illustrated by the Hershey bar/price calculus and formally homologous to the Higgs field.
Žižek cites Freud's Signorelli example to illustrate overdetermination, a contingent, rhizomatic network of signifying associations that Hegel's transcendental-universal unconscious cannot think.
Žižek uses Hegel's concept of sublation/idealization, whereby repetition transforms contingency into conceptual necessity, to mark precisely what post-Hegelian thinkers (Kierkegaard, Freud) reveal as absent: blind repetition without idealization.
as “transcendental unconscious (Hegelian)”
Žižek (following Lacan) distinguishes the Hegelian unconscious, a formal, transcendental, universal structure, from the Freudian contingent-particular unconscious of overdetermination.
Žižek lists jouissance as one of the post-Hegelian concepts that Hegel cannot fully accommodate, an excess of truth, irreducible to the Hegelian logic of truth.
as “wahre Unendlichkeit (true infinity)”
Žižek notes that Hegel's concept of true infinity is at odds with post-Hegelian mathematics, yet Hegel's obsessive treatment of infinitesimal calculus symptomatically marks the point where mathematics does what Hegel's system officially cannot allow.
Implied in Žižek's discussion of Hegel and Marx: the Hegelian structure of capital's universe is genuinely Hegelian, but Hegel himself failed to see this, Marx did, revealing the real abstraction operative in commodity logic.
Žižek argues, against Heidegger, that the origin of negativity (metaphysics, destruction) is not a fall into ontic fixation but rather an excess of positive attachment, falling in love as the elementary form of metaphysics.
as “death drive as pure repetition”
Žižek reads the Freudian death drive as the form of repetition that cannot be sublated into higher ideality, the positive foundation of negativity that Hegel approaches but cannot fully absorb.
as “repetition without Aufhebung”
Žižek identifies a post-Hegelian notion of repetition (in Kierkegaard and Freud's compulsion to repeat) that is blind, mechanical, and produces no higher-order idealization, precisely what Hegel's logic of repetition-as-idealization cannot accommodate.
as “Pöbel (rabble/outcasts)”
Žižek cites Hegel's concept of the rabble in the Philosophy of Right, the permanent outcast element that cannot be sublated, as evidence that Hegel himself sensed the limits of dialectical reconciliation.
Žižek (crediting Fredric Jameson) uses this concept to describe how the moment of historical transition becomes invisible once the new order is installed, visible only during the passage itself.
Žižek reads Hegel's deduction of the necessity of monarchy as paradoxically democratic: the king's legitimacy must be purely contingent (lottery-like) precisely to prevent the totalitarian danger of rulers legitimized by their positive properties.
Stories he reaches for 9
Žižek cites Badiou's example of a dating agency advertisement promising to find you love 'without the fall' (tomber amoureux), i.e., a partner who won't disrupt your life. Žižek uses this as an illustration of everyday ideology that tries to strip out the metaphysical dimension of love.
“we will enable you to be in love without the fall... they will choose the partner it will not disturb your life everything will function”
Žižek tells his San Francisco audience that the spiritual gain of their city is that Hitchcock shot Vertigo there, meaning is produced in history through retrospective attribution, however crazy it sounds.
“I told them the spiritual gain of you the city city of San Francisco is that Hitchcock shot Vertigo there.”
Žižek notes that the Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić was a poet, and that in Rwanda a poet had been laying the groundwork for genocide for years, used to argue that poetry, not philosophy, provides the ideological opium enabling ethnic violence.
“the leader of Bosnian Serbs was Karadžić a poet even in Rwanda I looked into it ah-ah there was a poet who was laying the foundation for genocide for years”
Caesar's assassination exemplified Hegelian repetition-as-idealization: the contingent historical individual had to die to return as Caesar the universal title, proving he was not just an accident.
“Caesar had to die to repeat himself to emerge as Caesar the title the universal title. Through this repetition it became clear that you cannot get rid of Caesar”
Žižek quotes Gramsci's famous line, when the old is dying but the new is not yet born, monsters emerge, to characterize the current historical moment and argue that Hegel is par excellence the thinker of such transition.
“when the old is dying but the new is not yet born it's a time when monsters emerge”
Žižek cites Hegel's claim that Thucydides' history is the 'absolute gain' humanity derived from the Peloponnesian War, which he reads naively but profoundly: the war took place so that the book could be written, meaning is constituted retroactively.
“from the standpoint of the world history retroactive constructing a narrative the Peloponnesian War took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it”
Žižek uses the Higgs field paradox, that a completely void field at zero level costs more energy than a field with the Higgs particle, so the Higgs is literally something that costs less than nothing, as a formal homology for the Lacanian object a.
“you have a something which costs less than nothing. To have a certain field at its zero level completely void costs more energy than to have it with something”
Žižek quotes Luxemburg's polemic against revisionist fears of premature revolution: since the proletariat is absolutely obliged to seize power 'too early,' the objection to prematurity is simply an objection to revolution tout court. The right moment only emerges through premature attempts.
“since the proletariat is absolutely obliged to seize power once or several times too early before it can maintain itself in power for good the objection to the premature conquest of power is at bottom nothing more than a general opposition”
Žižek holds up Coetzee's novel (and the Malkovich film) as the best illustration of genuine Hegelian reconciliation, not triumphant re-appropriation but a desperate, resigned acceptance of the very degradation that is undoing you.
“That's reconciliation at its purest. This total despair where the guy accepts... It's something like that that I claim Hegel has in mind with reconciliation.”
Works invoked 17
Vertigo film
Cited as the 'spiritual gain' of San Francisco, illustrating the retroactive constitution of historical meaning.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own 'big fat book', referenced repeatedly throughout the lecture as containing the detailed arguments he can only sketch here: Hegelian reconciliation, Hegel and madness, quantum physics, the Lacanian object a as less than nothing.
Philosophy of Right book
Cited for the description of modern economy and the concept of Pöbel (rabble), and for the deduction of the necessity of monarchy.
Science of Logic book
Žižek singles out the symptomatic chapter on infinitesimal calculus in the Logic of Quantity as the point where mathematics does what Hegel's system officially cannot permit.
Star Wars film
Žižek sides with Anakin/Vader/Emperor against the Jedi (Yoda especially), using it to illustrate how excessive attachment (metaphysics) is human greatness, not a flaw.
The Republic book
Defended against Marxist and liberal critics: Žižek notes it opens all posts to women and contains no slaves, unlike Aristotle.
Quoted for Hegel's judgment on Thucydides as the 'absolute gain' of the Peloponnesian War.
Disgrace (Coetzee) book
Held up as the best illustration of genuine Hegelian reconciliation, the protagonist's resigned, total acceptance of his undoing.
Cited for Lacan's passages on apparition/appearance, Plato on mimesis as competitor to the Idea, and for the argument about Catholic opposition to sexuality.
Referenced as the representative of democratic anti-Platonism that reads Plato as the founder of totalitarianism.
Descartes' Error book
Cited as the representative text of cognitivist anti-Cartesianism.
Praised as a French bestseller; Žižek endorses Badiou's example of the dating-agency ad promising 'love without the fall' as a revealing instance of contemporary ideology.
Žižek cites Heidegger's reading of Anaximander from this text to set up his counter-argument about the origin of metaphysics in excessive positivity.
Cited as the Frankfurt School elaboration of a psychoanalysis/Hegelian dialectics parallel that Žižek wants to reject from both sides.
Noted as a good but untranslated German work drawing parallels between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics.
The paradigm case for Hegelian retroactivity of meaning, Hegel called it 'the absolute gain which humanity has derived from' the war.
Mentioned for the deduction of eight planets and for the section on the philosophy of spirit / madness; Žižek finds the planet-deduction retroactively vindicated by Pluto's demotion.
People invoked 42
Described as 'Kant's madman', Kant's fundamental experience of mystical madness against which critical philosophy defined itself.
Thomas Jefferson positive
Quoted on the necessity of rebellion ('a little rebellion now and then is a good thing...') to push Hegel's case for the metaphysical necessity of war toward a case for inner revolution.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Named as a member of Žižek's 'Slovene gang' working in the same direction on the question of Hegel.
Cited as the Bosnian Serb leader who was also a poet, evidence for Žižek's argument that poetry, not philosophy, provides ideological foundations for ethnic violence.
Robert Pippin negative
Named as a representative of Pittsburgh (liberal) Hegelianism that reduces Hegel's ultimate horizon to mutual recognition, which Žižek finds too narrow.
Mentioned as partly responsible for Marxist anti-Platonism, dismissing Plato as the first idealist opposed to materialist pre-Socratics.
Cited for Libido and Society, a work (untranslated into English) drawing the parallel between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek uses Lacan, objet a, seminar XI on apparition, the declaration 'there is no metalanguage,' reading of Plato on mimesis, as the primary instrument for repeating and completing Hegel.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited for the Hershey bar price-quantity illustration used to explain the concept of 'less than nothing' as homologous to objet petit a.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Quoted approvingly ('my favorite Catholic theologian') for the distinction: 'literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity,' used to support the claim that fiction is constitutive of reality.
Grouped with Nietzsche and Bergson as proponents of vitalist anti-Platonism.
Al Gore negative
Mocked for cheap new-age anti-Cartesianism, blaming Descartes for the ecological crisis; Žižek grudgingly appreciates his self-presentation after losing to Bush as 'the guy who once was the future American president.'
David Bohm negative
Cited as one of several thinkers whose interpretations of quantum physics reinscribe it into ordinary notions of reality, failing to stay at the level of Bohr's paradox.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for cataloguing six forms of anti-Platonism and for the concept of the 'evental' reading of Plato; also for his book In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'amour) and the dating-agency example of love-without-the-fall.
Fredric Jameson positive
Credited with the concept of 'vanishing mediator' that Žižek uses to describe how historical transitions become invisible once new orders are installed.
Cited as the proponent of cognitivist anti-Cartesianism (Descartes' Error, emotions are part of reasoning).
Cited as one of the post-Hegelian figures (alongside Late Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx) who found a 'positive foundation' for the shadow-theater of Hegelian ideas, in Schopenhauer's case, the irrational Will.
Mladen Dolar positive
Named as a member of Žižek's 'Slovene gang' and credited with deep conversations that inform the improvised list of what Hegel cannot think.
Thucydides positive
Cited via Hegel as the paradigm case of retroactive meaning: the Peloponnesian War 'took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it'; his work is the 'absolute gain' of that war.
Grouped with Nietzsche and Deleuze as proponents of vitalist anti-Platonism.
J. M. Coetzee positive
Disgrace is held up as the best illustration of genuine Hegelian reconciliation, not triumphant re-appropriation but resigned recognition of oneself in one's undoing.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for noting that the history of Western philosophy is a history of rejections of Platonism; also compared to Hegel's theory of madness, with Hegel described as 'more Foucaultian than Foucault himself.'
Martin Heidegger negative
Invoked for both anti-Platonic and anti-Cartesian moves; Žižek uses Heidegger's reading of Anaximander to set up his counter-argument that the origin of negativity is excessive positivity, against Heidegger's reading of the fall into ontic fixation.
Hannah Arendt negative
Grouped with Popper in democratic anti-Platonism that identifies Plato as the first totalitarian thinker.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Mentioned alongside Hegel as a summit of German idealism that openly assumed the night of the world / madness as the core of subjectivity.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for existentialist anti-Platonism, anti-Hegelianism, and above all for the concept of repetition-without-idealization that marks one of Hegel's genuine limits; also for the 'suspension of the ethical.'
Niels Bohr positive
Mentioned approvingly as representing the genuinely paradoxical position on quantum physics that many worlds and Bohm interpretations try to avoid.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Quoted extensively for her argument against revisionist fear of premature revolution, used to illustrate the temporality of truth and the impossibility of a metalanguage.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo cited approvingly as the 'spiritual gain' that San Francisco produced, illustrating retroactive constitution of historical meaning.
Eduard Bernstein negative
Named as the target of Luxemburg's polemic, the revisionist who feared premature revolutionary seizure of power.
Cited for Knowledge and Human Interest, the Frankfurt School tradition of drawing a parallel between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics, which Žižek wants to reject from both sides.
Karl Popper negative
Cited as representative of democratic anti-Platonism that reads Plato as the originator of totalitarianism and closed society.
Antonio Gramsci positive
Quoted for the proposition that 'when the old is dying but the new is not yet born, it's a time when monsters emerge', used to characterize the current historical moment.
Plato positive
Žižek rehabilitates Plato: re-reads the Idea as purely evental/traumatic encounter rather than separate ontological sphere; defends the Republic as more progressive than Aristotle on women and slaves.
Aristotle negative
Žižek repeatedly criticizes 'the good liberal Aristotle' for sexualizing ontology (hyle-morphe/male-female parallel), naturalizing slavery, and opposing Plato's more progressive Republic.
Karl Marx positive
Credited with seeing what Hegel missed: that the structure of capital's universe is genuinely Hegelian. Žižek defends Hegel against Marxist calumnies while crediting Marx for identifying the Hegelian dimension in political economy.
René Descartes positive
Žižek defends Descartes against multiple variants of anti-Cartesianism; reinterprets cogito as purely evental, not as thinking substance; notes Descartes' popularity with early modern women.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked for repetition compulsion, overdetermination (Signorelli example), and the Wo es war formulation; identified as the great post-Hegelian Hegelian whose unconscious, however, is irreducibly non-Hegelian.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The central figure of the talk; Žižek defends Hegel against all six variants of anti-Hegelianism, argues for repeating him more radically, and treats him as the supreme thinker of historical transition.
Mentioned for his critique of Swedenborg as madness (superstitious idealism), and as the proponent of eternal peace that Hegel opposes with the conceptual necessity of war.
Cited as the source of vitalist anti-Platonism ('Plato is the name for a disease') and vitalist anti-Hegelianism.
Cited as the atheist version of existentialist anti-Platonism: 'existence precedes essence.'
What it argues
Hegel, Plato, Descartes as the three indispensable philosophers of the Western traditionMadness and eventality at the core of philosophical subjectivityWhat Hegel cannot think: repetition, the Freudian unconscious, jouissance, mathematicsRetroactivity of truth and the temporality of the right momentFantasy and fiction as constitutive of reality (Hegelian absolute knowing)The necessity of repeating rather than overcoming Hegel todayLacan as instrument for a more radical Hegelianism
Dialectical moves 12
“The true Platonic Idea is not a higher substantial reality but a pure appearance — if you go deep you find shit; idea is an appearance of itself.”
Žižek inverts the standard Platonism: depth yields chaos, not higher being; the Idea's power is its surface spectral quality.
“Descartes immediately mystified his own discovery: cogito is not res cogitans but a purely evental crack — I am nothing as a substance.”
The founder of modern subjectivity sabotaged his own breakthrough by immediately re-substantializing what was purely evental.
“The supreme madness is precisely reason itself — this attempt to control the excess of madness.”
Rationality is not the cure for madness but its most extreme form; the Hegelian system replaces psychotic breakdown with the higher madness of total system.
“What you add to objective to get to the absolute is illusion itself — absolute means objective order plus the insight into how illusions are constitutive of it.”
The Hegelian absolute is not reality minus illusion but reality plus the recognition that illusion is irreducible.
“The right moment only arrives through the series of premature seizures of power — it is only through illusion, through the mistake, that the authentic true moment emerges.”
Truth is temporally mediated by error; there is no position outside the sequence of failures from which the right moment can be directly read off.
“If this is Hegel then Hegel was also not a Hegelian — what Hegel calls reconciliation is not subjective re-appropriation of reality but something much more different.”
Žižek turns the standard psychoanalytic-Hegelian parallel back on itself: Freudian reconciliation is not Hegelian, but neither is the standard reading of Hegel.
“Far from being Hegel's most conservative moment, his deduction of the necessity of monarchy is his most democratic moment.”
Grounding authority in pure contingency (who the king is doesn't matter) is the only safeguard against totalitarian legitimation through positive merit.
“The origin of negativity is precisely an over-affirmation of a limited positivity — I fall in love and everything else does not matter.”
Destructive negativity does not arise from lack or absence but from an excess of attachment to a particular positive thing.
“It's not mankind that dominates nature through Descartes — poetry, not philosophy, provides the ideological foundation for ethnic cleansing.”
Žižek reverses the standard ecological-philosophical blame: abstract thought is not the culprit of violence; mythological-poetic discourse is.
“Catholic opposition to non-procreative sex is not because sex is animal but because the Church correctly senses that human sexuality is metaphysical — and is sexuality's greatest competitor.”
The Church opposes sexuality not because it degrades to the animal level but because sexuality, like religion, interrupts the normal animal flow of life.
“Today it's not Shakespeare the small guy who had to kiss the ass of Queen Elizabeth — today Queen Elizabeth was the queen who had the luck to know about Shakespeare.”
Historical meaning is retroactively constituted: the contingent historical context becomes the instrument of the spiritual event, not vice versa.
“To be Hegelian today means not to simply go over Hegel but to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself.”
True fidelity to Hegel requires pushing past where Hegel stopped, completing rather than transcending his project.
Claims 20
asserts
There are exactly three key philosophers in Western history — Plato, Descartes, and Hegel — whose defining trait is that their entire philosophical posterity is constituted by opposition to them.the structure of the Western philosophical tradition
reframes
The Platonic Idea should be read not as a separately existing ontological sphere but as a purely evental, traumatic encounter — a spectral appearance to which one becomes fixated.Platonic idealism
reframes
Descartes' cogito is not a thinking substance (res cogitans) but a purely evental entity — a crack in the great chain of being — and Descartes immediately mystified his own discovery by interpreting it substantiallly.Cartesian subjectivity
reframes
Hegel's concept of reconciliation is not the triumphant re-appropriation of alienated substance but an extremely resigned recognition of oneself in what is destroying one — as in Coetzee's Disgrace.Hegelian reconciliation / Aufhebung
asserts
The Hegelian absolute knowing is not a deeper reality beyond objectivity but objectivity plus the insight that illusions are constitutive of it — subjectivity included in the objective.Hegelian absolute knowing
asserts
To arrive at truth one must pass through fiction and illusion; you cannot reach the right moment directly but only through premature attempts (Rosa Luxemburg's argument about revolution).temporality of truth / Hegel and Luxemburg
asserts
What Hegel cannot think includes: repetition without sublation, the Freudian contingent-particular unconscious, jouissance, and the mathematical infinite in formal post-Hegelian science.the limits of Hegelian dialectics
asserts
Marx saw something Hegel himself missed: that the structure of capital's universe is genuinely Hegelian — the most Hegelian dimension was precisely where Hegel failed to recognize it.Hegel and Marx / political economy
reframes
The origin of negativity is excessive positivity — becoming over-attached, as in falling in love — not a descent into ontic fixation as Heidegger implies.origin of metaphysics / negativity
asserts
To be Hegelian today means not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat him more radically — to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself.the contemporary relevance of Hegel
asserts
Lacan is ultimately an instrument to repeat Hegel, not an adversary of Hegelianism.the relation of Lacan to Hegel
reframes
Human sexuality is properly metaphysical — a traumatic interruption of the normal flow of animal life — and the Catholic Church opposes it precisely because it recognizes this, not because sex is merely animal.Catholic theology / sexuality
rejects
It is animals, not humans, who copulate for procreation (in seasonal rhythms), while humans are distinguished by the metaphysical surplus in sexuality.Catholic doctrine that procreative sex is properly human
asserts
Poetry and religious-nationalist mythology, not abstract philosophical thinking, provide the ideological opium required to overcome elementary decency and enable ethnic violence.ideology / poetry / ethnic violence
reframes
Hegel's deduction of the necessity of monarchy is his most democratic moment, because it grounds authority in pure contingency (lottery) rather than in the positive properties of rulers, thus avoiding the totalitarian danger.Hegel's political philosophy / monarchy
asserts
The post-Hegelian break has two aspects: the better-known 'positive foundation' critique (Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard finding material/existential grounding for the shadow-theater of ideas) and the more important discovery of blind repetition without idealization.post-Hegelian philosophy
asserts
String theory is probably not the solution to the ontological puzzles of quantum physics.contemporary physics / string theory
rejects
Plato's Republic is more progressive than Aristotle's: it opens all posts to women and contains no slaves, while Aristotle naturalizes both female subordination and slavery.Marxist anti-Platonism / Aristotle as progressive
rejects
The feminist critique that the Cartesian cogito is secretly male is empirically false: Descartes was exceptionally popular with early modern women precisely because the cogito had no sex.feminist anti-Cartesianism
asserts
Hegel is the supreme thinker of historical transitions — moments when the old is dying and the new not yet born — and such moments are precisely when reality becomes visible.Hegel and historical transition
Quotes 17
“The supreme madness is precisely reason itself — this attempt to control the excess of it.”Slavoj Žižek · reason as the highest form of madness
“What you add to objective to get to the absolute is illusion itself. Absolute means objective order plus the insight into how illusions are constitutive of it.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian absolute knowing
“Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.”Slavoj Žižek · fiction as constitutive of reality (Chesterton)
“It's only through illusion through the mistake that the authentic true moment the authentic true moment emerges.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactivity of truth
“Today it's not Shakespeare the small guy who had to kiss the ass of Queen Elizabeth. Today Queen Elizabeth was the queen who had the luck to know about Shakespeare.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of historical meaning
“The truth of Plato for me is purely evental in Alain Badiou's terms. What he describes as idea is a traumatic encounter. You encounter something and you get stuck onto it and your life is ruined as it were.”Slavoj Žižek · evental Platonism
“Cogito is a purely evental entity which as such offers opens up a crack in what we pathetically call the great chain of being.”Slavoj Žižek · evental cogito
“If this is Hegel then Hegel was also not a Hegelian.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel against standard Hegelianism
“No ethnic cleansing without poetry.”Slavoj Žižek · poetry as ideological foundation of violence
“The only real materialists maybe today are theologians.”Slavoj Žižek · theology as materialist (Lacan)
“To be Hegelian today I claim means to not simply to go over Hegel but to think Hegel to read Hegel as an incomplete project and to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself.”Slavoj Žižek · repeating Hegel
“The origin of negativity is precisely a over-affirmation of a limited positivity precisely as you know I fall in love everything else does not matter.”Slavoj Žižek · excessive positivity as origin of negativity
“Plato is in a way more progressive than Aristotle: in his Republic there are no slaves while for Aristotle slaves were something natural.”Slavoj Žižek · Plato vs. Aristotle on slavery and gender
“Can you imagine my totally irrational like intellectually orgasmic pleasure when I read two three years ago news Pluto or which one is not really a planet there are eight. As of course how could Hegel have been wrong.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel vindicated by Pluto demotion
“The task is... to repeat Hegel. He is for me ultimately an instrument to repeat Hegel. He would have denied it of course.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan as instrument for repeating Hegel
“Metaphysic begins when you are overfixated onto something and you say that something matters more than everything else and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · origin of metaphysics in excessive attachment
“Human sexuality is properly metaphysical. Something happens a traumatic encounter which is literally metaphysical. It interrupts your immersion into normal reality.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as metaphysical interruption
Transcript 3 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much to begin with let me just say that it’s me who is really honored to be here and my sincere apology for not being able for extremely stupid medical reason diabetic crisis and so on I don't take care of myself properly to spend more time here with you. I’m really sorry I feel ashamed for this. Next thing because of because I take you very seriously here I decided to renounce the usual retelling you know all those boring boring jokes that I repeated already thirty times you remember there was a guy who thought he is a grain of corn and he encounters a chicken and then how the Montenegro people masturbate or all that no I’ve decided to take you seriously and I will do I hope it will not be too much of you a little bit over one hour of a pure more or less pure philosophy focusing on this crucial problem why Hegel can we still be Hegelians what to do with Hegel today. This is part of a work in progress it’s not finished with my big fat book because also the two members of my Slovene gang Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar are working in the same direction it is as if we were postponing till now this key questioning in our idolatry of Hegel. But can we really be simply fully Hegelian today. How or rather our answer is yes but precisely of course by not simply doing the same thing as Hegel so how to displace transform Hegel to be a Hegelian today. So my apologies in advance if to some of you this will be boring but this is where my heart is I’m getting a little bit tired also with all those jokes of well specifically tasteless jokes. Let me begin. There are three I claim and only three key philosophers in the history of Western philosophy Plato Descartes Hegel. The proof of their privileged status is their extraordinary outside the series position in the series of philosophers. Each of the three not only designates a clear break with the past but also casts his long shadow on the thinkers who follow him. These three philosophers can all be conceived as defining their posterity as a series of negations or oppositions to their own position. It was already Michel Foucault who noted that the entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections of Platonism. The problem for practically everyone after Plato was how to reject Plato. In a homologous way all the modern philosophy can be conceived as the history of rejections of Descartes. Everyone even today usually begins with some kind of anti-Cartesian statement and not even to mention Hegel where entire post-Hegelian philosophy is how to overcome Hegel. So let me begin with Plato. Alain Badiou already enumerated in his non-published seminar six main partially intertwined forms of the 20th century anti-Platonism. First we have the vitalist anti-Platonism Nietzsche Bergson Deleuze. The idea is that one should assert the real of life becoming the flux process of life becoming against the intellectual sterility of Platonic idealism. As Nietzsche already put it Plato is the name for a disease. Then we have the empiricist analytic anti-Platonism. Plato believed in the independent existence of ideas but as Aristotle already knew ideas do not exist independently of sensuous things whose forms they are. So the main counter-Platonic thesis of analytic empiricism is that all truths are either analytic or empirical. Then we have the Marxist anti-Platonism for which Lenin is also to blame. The dismissal of Plato as the first idealist opposed to pre-Socratic materialists as well as to the more progressive empirically oriented Aristotle. In this view Plato was the main ideologist of the class of slave owners. Of course I totally oppose to this. I mean if you know a minimum of history of philosophy you know at least two things can be said about Plato’s Republic. A he explicitly states there that in his ideal Republic all posts are open to women as well as to men that it’s just a historical contingency that in the existing society women are suppressed. He insists on this point while Aristotle the good liberal Aristotle as you know sexualizes ontology itself positing a parallel between woman man and hyle-morphe matter form. As to slaves again did you notice if you maybe read Plato that there is no there are no slaves in his Republic while for Aristotle again the good liberal slaves were something natural. You may even remember Aristotle’s definition of slave as a talking talking instrument. Then let me go on. We have the existentialist anti-Platonism. Plato denies the uniqueness of singular existence he subordinates the singular to the universal. This anti-Platonism has a Christian version Kierkegaard like Socrates versus Christ and an atheist one Sartre existence precedes essence. Then we have the Heideggerian anti-Platonism Plato as the founding figure of Western metaphysics. The key moment in the historical process of forgetting of being. The starting point of the process which culminates in today’s technological nihilism. As some leftists like to say when I was young from Plato to NATO one line. Then finally we have the democratic anti-Platonism of political philosophy from Popper to Hannah Arendt. Plato as the originator of closed society the first thinker who elaborated in detail the project of totalitarianism. This is how things stand with Plato. Again even immediately you have first Aristotle opposing Plato and then much more interesting Stoic opposition and even I think the Neo-Platonist mystics basically oppose Plato claiming that logos or thinking articulated thinking cannot be the access to higher reality you can only do it through some mystical unity with the nameless one and so on and so on. Then let me go on to Descartes. It’s the same. We have also five six versions of anti-Cartesianism. First ecological. Your own ex-vice president or the way he defined himself after his defeat I quite appreciated that you know that after his defeat to George Bush okay very contested defeat I know you know that Al Gore liked to present himself as the guy who once was the future American president. This shows a good Hegelian spirit but nonetheless unfortunately Al Gore likes to refer to kind of a very cheap new age anti-Cartesianism claiming that the Judeo-Christian tradition speaks about mankind’s dominion over the earth but it also charges mankind with stewardship of nature but that with Descartes only domination remains no stewardship so Descartes becomes the main metaphysical culprit of our ecological crisis. Incidentally I don't have time to go into it but I’m a little bit tired of this game of how the root of political totalitarianism is philosophy abstract conceptual thinking. I think and here I’m decidedly on the side of Plato maybe it’s time to turn around the cards and to start blaming poetry. Speaking about 20th century experience I’m more and more tempted to say no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Why. No I’m not first not all poets. I mean I’m absolutely for authentic poetry. But you know there is one problem. The problem is that we are relatively decent human beings relatively. What do I mean by this. If somebody were to tell me let me take a knife and pick out your eyes or whatever I would have some trouble let’s say I hope. So you know what I mean. This was the great problem of so-called totalitarian regimes. You need something some kind of ideological opium I’m very traditional here to that is strong enough to make you overcome your let’s call it naively why not elementary decency. And this can be delivered precisely by some kind of a religious poetic mythology. Which is why it’s not a chance that for example the leader of Bosnian Serbs was Karadžić a poet even in Rwanda I looked into it ah-ah there was a poet who was laying the foundation for for genocide for years and so on and so on. So again maybe poetry should also lose its innocence. Let me go on. So we have first ecological no sorry with Descartes yeah back to Descartes we have first the ecological anti-Cartesianism then we have the Heideggerian anti-Cartesianism Descartes as the first moment as the founder founding figure of modern subjectivity which again culminates in today’s nihilism and so on. Then we have new age anti-Cartesianism Descartes abstract reasoning we lose all that bullshit you know the holistic relation to earth as our mother and so on. Then we have more interesting cognitivist anti-Cartesianism Damasio for example Damasio’s Descartes’ Error claiming Descartes opposes reasoning to emotions no we should see how emotions are part of our reasoning itself. Then we have feminist anti-Cartesianism cogito is secretly although not explicitly male which I think incidentally is totally not true empirically it can be to put it in analytic terms empirically satisfied sorry refuted in the sense that do you know that Descartes was at his time extremely popular with women who noted the point who said it’s the first time that we have cogito which has no sex. He was simply perceived as the break-through of this sexualized pre-modern universe where yes women had their place but it was down there beneath men. Then Marxist anti-Cartesianism Descartes’ rationalism as the expression of new capitalist mentality then existentialist anti-rationalist anti-Cartesianism vitalist anti-Cartesianism and so on and so on. With Hegel as you can imagine it’s even worse. Hegel is the ultimate bête noire. We have the irrationalist philosophy of life anti-Hegelianism Hegel the crazy absolute idealist who thought he can deduce all reality from the self-movement of the notion what about the irrational foundation the living force of life totally blind to Hegelian sterility then Kierkegaardian existentialist anti-Hegelianism the uniqueness of existence that escapes Hegelian movement then materialist anti-Hegelianism as Marx liked to say Hegel turned dialectics on its head it’s not idea which self-reproduces itself ideas are just an effect of and expression of actual material beings people humanity working producing then historicist anti-teleological relativists who claim Hegel thought we can reach absolute no all that we can reach is a historically specified very limited knowledge and there is no teleology history is an open contingent process then of course analytic philosophers who are anti-Hegelian for obvious reasons Marxist anti-Hegelians liberal anti-Hegelians whose claim is Hegel celebrated the state as the untouchable totality which incidentally today is counter-acted by precisely and this is an interesting phenomenon the latest tendency liberal Hegelians Pittsburgh Hegelians Pippin and so on the the the mark of recognition of liberal Hegelians is to focus on the topic precisely of recognition as if the ultimate horizon of Hegel is how can we live in a society where we are all mutually recognized. And then of course empiricist anti-Hegelians who attack Hegel’s universal logic Hegel is elevated into some kind of a comic ridiculous figure that crazy guy who thought he can deduce all reality and that he can as it were read the mind of God. Okay. Each of these three philosophers Plato Descartes Hegel stands not only for an event the shattering encounter of an idea in Plato the emergence of a purely evental cogito a crack in the great chain of being in Descartes the absolute itself as evental self-deployment as the result of its own activity. Each of the three philosophers also stands for a moment of negativity cut the normal flow of things is interrupted another dimension breaks in. And even more importantly each of the three philosophers stands for the moment of madness. The madness of being captivated by an idea like falling in love like Socrates under the spell of his daemon the madness at the heart of cogito and of course the ultimate madness of the Hegelian system. What do I mean by this. Let me now try just to briefly indicate how one can read from our today’s perspective each of these three thinkers against this standard image that we all attack as each of the three thinkers as instigators or authors of an immense breakthrough. What is so great in Plato. How is it for example from a Platonic view to find oneself passionately in love. Is it not a kind of permanent state of exceptions. Once you fall in love all proper balances of your daily life are disturbed. Everything you do is colored by the underlying thought of that of the beloved. The situation is properly beyond good and evil. You feel a weird indifference towards your moral obligations with regard to your parents children friends even if you continue to meet them you do it in a mechanical way. Everything pales with regard to your passionate attachment. In this sense falling in love is like the striking that hit Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. A kind of religious suspension of the ethical to use Kierkegaard’s terms. An absolute intervenes which derails the standard run of our affairs. It is not so much that the standard hierarchy of values is inverted but more radically another dimension enters the scene a different level of being. And I think this is how we should read Plato today. Forget about all his ontologization of ideas as if there is separately from our ordinary reality some sphere where idea exists. This is just the way Plato himself misread his own discovery. The truth of Plato for me is purely evental in Alain Badiou’s terms. What he describes is as idea is a traumatic encounter. You are part of your what Badiou would have called animal life suddenly there is an encounter. You encounter something and you get stuck onto it and your life is ruined as it were. And again the idea here is in a way if we want to be true Platonists it’s not more substantial than reality it’s a pure appearance which is why I cannot develop this now you find it in the big thick book in detail which is why I claim and in late Plato you can see this very clearly that idea is not some deeper reality no if you go deep you find shit I mean all this primordial abyss confusion idea is an appearance of itself. You just see something an appearance a specter. You are not sure does it exist or not it doesn't matter your life is ruined you are stuck onto that. Let me go on Descartes. In Descartes this link with madness is even more direct. We know that in modern philosophy cogito the Cartesian I think madness and religion are closely interlinked. First the idea is that cogito emerges through differentiation from madness. From Descartes you know his mental experiment even if I am totally mad even if all reality is a dream manipulated by an evil spirit nonetheless it’s true that I think. That is to say to arrive at cogito you have to go through madness. So it’s an immanent part. Then even historically and this idea incidentally persists you find it in Descartes you find it in Kant. You know Kant’s fundamental experience was Swedenborg’s mysticism. Swedenborg was Kant’s madman. And the whole Kant’s criticism was madness is for Kant this superstitious idealism where you project ideas onto reality. It’s a kind of not transcendental idealism but the substantial direct idealism. So again it’s only through differentiation from madness that cogito emerges. And up to the end philosophy itself cogito remains a point of madness. It’s interesting again I don't have time to go through this here but how cogito is for this reason not a thinking substance. Here again in the same way as Plato Descartes also obfuscated immediately mystified his own discovery you know when he interpreted cogito as res cogitans a thinking substance. No cogito is purely evental. I am only insofar as the process of thinking goes on. I am nothing as a substance. Cogito is an purely evental entity which as such offers opens up a crack in what we pathetically call the great chain of being. So and it would be interesting to notice how this madness was then openly assumed at the summit of German idealism by Schelling by Hegel where they both implicitly even referring to a certain mostly German mystical tradition see the core of subjectivity not in bright idea but in what they call again resuscitating a mystical terms the night of the world the abyss the darkness. This is so you know this is important when you read Descartes that when he speaks about cogito suspending belief in reality what if only my what if nothing exists blah blah you shouldn't read this just as a mental experiment. It’s an existential position to use this old fashioned term. It’s something that you have to go through usually even in moment of psychotic madness or moment of some either clinical breakdown or mystical experience here again I don't have time to do it you find it in the big big fat book here I go through Hegel’s theory of madness. Hegel is extraordinary more Foucaultian than Michel Foucault himself when he develops at the beginning of his philosophy of spirit part three of encyclopedia how you cannot pass directly from animal to human sphere. That in between is a moment of madness at least a threat of madness nature derailed. And then what we call human symbolic universe of thinking and so on is constitutively transcendentally an attempt to control this excess of madness. So as Hegel said as clear as Foucault he said this doesn't mean we should all be mad but that the only way to understand our normal so-called normal mode of being of us humans is in order to understand it we have to refer to madness. It’s a kind of a defense formation against madness in the very core of our being. Of course again I don't want to talk too long it’s a very big ethical endeavor to me. So let me move here fast into how from a proper Hegelian standpoint it’s not enough to say how we have this excessive point of madness mystical night of the world and then reason comes and intervenes and controls it gentrifies it whatever. No that the supreme madness is precisely reason itself this attempt to control the excess of it. And again many people would have agreed claiming but this is precisely Hegel’s madness. Many people would have accepted moment a yeah maybe why not we all have to go through madness but then the whole point is to achieve some kind of normality while Hegelian Hegel is in his excessive normality if by normality we mean overcoming our madness with a rational system that Hegel as it were replaces psychotic madness this breakdown mystical abyss with an even higher madness of a total system of thinking and so on and so on. There are some moments of truth in this. Namely but I think I would like to defend Hegel here. You know let me take Hegel at its most crazy and apparently the most insensitive to human suffering. His idea of how can we understand an epoch of history. What remains of history. Here is what Hegel writes in his philosophy of history about Thucydides Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. I quote from Hegel in the Peloponnesian War the struggle was essentially between Athens and Sparta Thucydides has left us the history of the greater part of it and his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the content end of quote. Are you aware what Hegel is saying here. One should read this judgment in all its naivete in a way Hegel is saying that from the standpoint of the world history retroactive constructing a narrative the Peloponnesian War took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it. The term absolute should be given all its weight here. From the relative point of our finite human interests numerous real tragedies of the Peloponnesian War suffering devastation are of course infinitely more important than a stupid book written afterwards. But nonetheless once it’s over so-called living history are we not all close to Hegel’s position. Let me take another example which may not be so problematic for you. Wouldn't you find relatively acceptable I certainly would to say that what is to quote Hegel the that the the absolute gain which humanity has derived from Elizabethan England are Shakespeare’s plays I claim. Let’s be frank that’s what remained. Today it’s not Shakespeare the small guy who had to kiss the ass of Queen Elizabeth to be able to perform. Today Queen Elizabeth was the queen who had the luck to know about Shakespeare. And I’m even I think we shouldn't be afraid of this crazy reasoning like a week ago I was in San Francisco and of course I’m an opportunist to flatter them and so on I told them the spiritual gain of you the city city of San Francisco is that Hitchcock shot Vertigo there. No you had to build this city and you know it may sound crazy but that’s how meaning is produced in history. And what Hegel offers now I go a step further what Hegel offers here is a a non-teleological reading of this. It’s not that when history takes place it’s already in a secret way motivated or by this goal. No this goal is spiritual goal is totally contingent and it renders history readable retroactively. With retroactivity we are now back at something which was I think the unique achievement of Hegel. Hegel was the first to reintroduce temporality into a process of truth. What do I mean by this temporality. Let me give you a surprising example. Rosa Luxemburg her famous attack on social democratic revisionism directed against Eduard Bernstein the big figure of German revisionism from around In her polemics Rosa Luxemburg provides a series of arguments against the revisionist fear that proletariat will take power prematurely before the consequences are ripe. You know this is the fear of revisionists. Okay you want rebellion but objective conditions are not yet mature. Be patient we have to wait. Here is Rosa Luxemburg’s answer since the proletariat is not in the position to seize power in other way than prematurely since the proletariat is absolutely obliged to seize power once or several times too early before it can maintain itself in power for good the objection to the premature conquest of power is at bottom nothing more than a general opposition to the aspiration of the proletariat to possess itself of state power. So what does this mean. Something very precise and paradoxical. It means what Jacques Lacan called there is no metalanguage. That is to say of course the moment is immature you got it but if you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Why. Because the right moment only arrives when the to put it very simply when the agent to do the revolution is mature enough. But the only way as it were to form yourself educate is through premature attempts. In other words let’s look at it from a purely temporal logical way. There is a right moment but you cannot say let’s but the right moment only emerges through the series of premature seizures of power. Like you cannot wait for it. It’s only through illusion through the mistake that the authentic true moment the that the authentic true moment emerges. Now it will be the only case where I will repeat an old joke from my first book because it gives you the structure in its clearest form. I you don't have to laugh I know you know it. It’s the joke from Yugoslav army my favorite trauma about a conscript who pleaded he wanted to plead insanity to avoid serving the army no. I tried the same it may amuse you how I failed. We all tried it. I over or to paraphrase the wonderful slip of tongue of your ex-president I I mis-overestimated or underestimated the the medical doctors army doctors I thought my idea was this one that I thought look at me now I mean look like with all my ticks crazy I thought that if I exaggerate this then the best strategy would be to argue that I want to go to the army. But to do it in such a crazy way excessive that they would say look the way this guy argues to the army clearly makes him an idiot. And but unfortunately it didn't work. They said you want to go to the army okay go we’ll probably help you I was desperate you know. Okay but what I’m saying is that in this other joke it’s purely logical it couldn't have happened. The joke is that there was a guy who again played insanity and his symptom was that wherever he found himself he looked for papers looked at each paper and said that’s not it that’s not it that’s not it. Okay he found himself in front of the committee medical committee looked at all the papers even in the trash bin on the table that’s not it that’s not it. Of course they decided this guy is clearly a lunatic and they wrote a they wrote the how do you call it the opinion that he should be released of army service. He looked at it and said that’s it no. Okay so but you see at its most elementary the logic that’s it you have to go through that’s not it to pro why okay now again you have this explained much more in detail in the big fat book. I just want to draw your attention to one thing here how for Hegel and we can here link Hegel to psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to to Marxian commodity fetishism and so on. The crucial point here is and again you find this much more in detail in the book is this temporality of truth. Hegel does not confuse truth and fiction. He is not a postmodern relativist. The only thing he insists is that you arrive at truth only through fiction. Which is why where you have temporality. For example crucial here Hegel’s judgment on French Revolution which is usually misread as some kind of conservative corporatist rejection like revolutionaries wanted this abstract equality all people are immediately equal and of course it was terror murderous fury but we have the state of reason organized corporate society that’s okay and so on. But Hegel is not saying this. Hegel is saying something much more interesting that the first choice is between ancien régime and Jacobin terror. Jacobin terror is a mistake in the formal sense it necessarily ends in terror and so on. But it’s only once you choose make the wrong choice terror that the true choice opens up. You cannot say no no we will jump through Jacobin terror let’s build directly the new organic proto-fascist order whatever is usually attributed to Hegel. It’s you know that even the choice the logical choice has a temporary dimension. Choice is always redoubled. First choice is wrong choice. Once you are in the wrong choice you get the real choice. To arrive at truth which means again again it’s much more in detail explained in the book but the point is this one. When we have this triad of subjective objective absolute knowing we should be precise Hegel speaks about wissen knowing not knowledge but Hegel what is this absolute knowledge. It can be defined in a very simple way. The opposition of subjective and objective knowing let’s call it simply doxa and episteme is a simple one. The way we just imagine things to be and the way things objectively really are. Now comes Hegel’s crucial point. You get from objective to absolute not by reaching some even deeper reality but by including subjective into objective. What you add to objective to get to the absolute is illusion itself. Absolute means objective order plus the insight into how illusions are constitutive of it. What does this mean. This means to jump a little bit quickly that if we are to experience reality as consistent reality has to be supplemented with virtual fictions. Or as Gilbert Keith Chesterton my favorite Catholic theologian wonderfully put it literature and fiction are two entirely different things literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity. That is to say as another well-known British Hegelian called Jeremiah Bentham as Lacan knew it knew very well it’s easy to distinguish reality and fictions the problem is that when you when you erase fictions you lose reality itself. What does this mean. Now a precise Hegelian claim I think about fantasy. I remember years ago in a German daily newspaper some more than years ago even they wanted to make fun of dirty male sexual fantasies. So they published photos of five men dreaming no asking they are all asked the same question what would you like to do this summer. And you have beneath the image their official answers for example one of one of them is saying oh I would like to read in peace a good book. Another one to visit a faraway country. Another one to rest on a sunny beach or whatever. But then each image is accompanied by this like in comics cloud which allegedly shows what they were really thinking about. Yeah yeah yeah of course in each of them is a naked woman you know so I think this is strictly theoretically wrong. The whole point of psychoanalysis is that if anything it’s the exact truth which is which holds. That is to say if they were to be honest male chauvinists which some of us are they would of course immediately say oh I want to f- three points like crazy and so on all the time. But the true question as you know of psychoanalytic fantasy is not ah do you always think about that sex but what do you think when you do make love no. And here I think that the truth would be this one they’d say I want to screw my lover’s brain out whatever. But then how. One of them would be I want to do it on a sunny beach. The other one on a on a in a faraway country. The third one why not it’s a nice dream I had it once. The reading a book. The lady should read a book a tergo and you do it from behind so that you know the unity of intellectual and sensuous life whatever. You see my point that you cannot just do sex you must have you must have fantasy with it. What does this you know what I wanted to develop here something which I will skip over about the link of psychoanalysis and Hegel just to give you a brief resume you also find this in the big fat book my idea was to oppose the standard philosophically very well elaborated in Frankfurt School tradition the young Habermas knowledge and human interest and later Helmut Dahmer a very good book not translated into English libido and society parallel between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics to put it very simply the idea is that Freud was the great post-Hegelian Hegelian that de facto if you look at psychoanalytic process Freud transposed Hegelian dialectic into it. In the sense that symptoms are signs of the subject’s self-alienation something that is really part of you you don't recognize yourself in it it appears to you as some foreign irrational agency as it were bombarding you and that the work of psychoanalysis consists precisely in the reconciliation between your subjectivity and your alienated substantial content the unconscious in which you are not able to recognize yourself so that at the end of the psychoanalytic treatment you recognize yourself in your symptoms. In the same way that Hegel says allegedly that in reconciliation the subject re-appropriates the intellectual substance the Freudian goal that’s how they read this famous Wo es war, soll ich werden where it was I should arrive I should re-appropriate the alienated substance. What I wanted to do but don't have time to do now is to show how one should reject this parallel but not in the usual way which is unfortunately still Lacan’s way which is to say no Freud was really not a Hegelian. This only holds for Hegel. I claim that if this is Hegel then Hegel was also not a Hegelian. That what Hegel calls reconciliation overcoming of alienation is not this kind of subjective re-appropriation of reality but something much more different it’s even like okay I want to arouse your interest a little bit in the big fat book so I will just tell you to maybe arouse your interest which book I analyze okay I wouldn't say in detail five six pages which is a lot for me you know that I’m a madman jumping from one book to the other to give you an idea of what is Hegelian reconciliation. Can some of you help me primitive barbarian coming from Balkan you know I don't know who is the I’ll ask you like this who is the South African author internationally known and not Nadine Gordimer? Ah-ah yeah yeah this yeah yeah okay I not never sure how to pronounce the name without appearing an idiot okay did you read his Disgrace? That’s reconciliation at its purest. This total despair where the guy accepts and did you see the movie which is not so bad incidentally by John Malkovich plays the hero. It’s something like that that I claim Hegel has in mind with reconciliation. It’s not this arrogance of I eat the whole world you know. It’s nonetheless an extremely resigned recognition how you should recognize yourself in the very shit that is screwing you or however I should put it no. Okay but read the book. Now I want to do something for which we are here a little bit more radical. I want to point this that the structure that I describe of reality supplemented being supplemented by fantasy involves what Lacan calls object small a this pure void or even that’s the title of my book incidentally this less than nothing. Something which is paradoxically less than nothing and in a chapter which is maybe a little bit crazy but I like it it’s my favorite chapter in the book the last one I try in a very risky move I admit it to develop some kind of formal homology between this Lacanian object a as less than nothing and what in quantum physics is called Higgs field you know. You know this paradox if I understood it correctly okay I did I’m an idiot but I think I got one idea clearly that the basic paradox and for me it’s mind boggling it’s incredible of Higgs field is that you know that you have a something which costs less than nothing. To have a certain field at its zero level completely void costs more energy than to have it with something and that something is Higgs field which is literally something which costs less than nothing. I want to give you here a wonderful metaphor the second time that I repeat my own old stuff but it’s a beautiful example because I’m here pro-American I prefer your Hershey bar to that European Zohar bullshit or whatever. Stephen Jay Gould in one of his early books you know has a wonderful illustration of the logic of evolution with the relation between price and quantity of a Hershey bar. He describes the tendency which is let’s say at a certain moment the Hershey bar costs so much let’s say cents and has a certain quantity you get a certain then he says for some time the company tries to maintain the same price but the chocolate bar gets a little bit smaller all then when it gets too absurd the price goes up and the quantity goes up but the quantity does not reach the quantity at the beginning. It’s like if it was at the beginning here it goes down with the same price then the price goes up and but here no and it goes on like this. And now you can guess where he is aiming. It’s that you can in this way although it cannot empirically arrive construct a final point where the quant not only will the quantity be nothing but you can exactly calculate how much this nothing will cost if you go with the price no. And this is as good as you can guess I claim to Lacanian object small a it’s a nothing which nonetheless has some properties has a cost and so on and so on. Can Hegel think this. So in a very naive way I do it much more in detail in the big fat book let me now approach this problem. Here I rely here to a deep conversations with my good friend Mladen Dolar. Here is an improvised list of what Hegel cannot think or so it appears. A series of concepts mostly elaborated by psychoanalysis and Marxism. It looks that Hegel cannot think repetition unconscious overdetermination object a letter in the sense of matheme formal sciences antagonism class struggle sexual difference. It’s more ambiguous with Hegel but nonetheless a case can be made. First repetition. Let me be clear here. Of course Hegel can think repetition. He even has as we all know a beautiful theory of repetition. Repetition as the movement of idealization. The first time it’s contingency just raw empirical stuff through repetition contingency is idealized into conceptual necessity. You must know Hegel’s two great examples Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Julius Caesar works especially well because you have literally a passage from contingent name to concept. Caesar had to die to repeat himself to emerge as Caesar the title the universal title. Through this repetition it became clear that you cannot get rid of Caesar that he wasn't just a historical contingency. Even if the plot succeeded Caesar returned as a title no longer a personal name that guy Caesar but as a title. Hegel makes a similar remark about Napoleon that this is why Napoleon had to lose twice sorry and He had to lose twice to as it were to make his point. Okay what Hegel here obviously cannot think is repetition in okay it’s tautological in post-Hegelian sense. By this I mean two authors which are very strange bedfellows. Kierkegaard and Freud. Kierkegaard repetition and Freudian compulsion to repeat where is the difference that precisely in these two cases we do have repetition but without Aufhebung sublation or idealization. It’s just a blind repetition. Second thing. Hegel has problem with thinking unconscious. Again he can think it but it is as Lacan makes it clear in one of his late seminars it is a formal transcendental unconscious. Hegelian unconscious is the unconscious of transcendental formal universal form. The idea is that for example when we speak we are fascinated by concrete content we forget the universal form. And Hegel is very nice here I mean in the sense of goes very far when he emphasizes again and again how how when there is a split between what we say and what we mean to say the truth is always on the side of what we say. Hegel never plays what we say against some deeper meaning. If there is a gap the truth is on surface. But for Hegel the unconscious is this universal conceptual transcendental structure. What Hegel cannot think is the contingency of the particular Freudian unconscious which would have been precisely something like the structure of overdetermination. Think about Freud’s famous we all know it example of Signorelli. You know Freud can’t recall the name Signorelli of the painter of from Orvieto and he substitutes two other painters Botticelli Boltraffio. And then Freud in the analysis establishes a whole network of signifying associations. The Italian village Trafoi where Freud received the message of the suicide of one of his patients. Herr the German word for mister Signor is linked to a trip to Herzegovina part of Bosnia where an old Muslim told Freud that after you cannot make love after you are too old for sex there is no reason to go on living and so on and so on. So here we have a kind of a totally contingent dispersal without any great dominant negation or whatever. It’s just a rhizomatic confusion. Then okay I will not go on too much the problem of jouissance as in excess of truth irreducible to truth and so on and so on. The problem of mathematics. It’s clear that Hegel reduced mathematics to what he calls understanding Verstand abstract reasoning which is unable to confront what Hegel calls wahre Unendlichkeit the true infinity. As always with Hegel that’s why he is a genius of course things are more ambiguous. For example if you don't believe me it’s really the symptomatic point of Hegel’s Logic. Look into the last chapter of the first part of Hegel’s Logic Logic of Being no sorry it’s the even the second part on quantity towards the end Hegel deals with infinitesimal calculus. And it’s mad it’s like pages it sticks out it’s like a tiny development longer than the entire part because obviously there mathematics does something precisely processing to true infinity which is for Hegel when you no longer have elements who relate but you know in infinitesimal calculus relation as such is abstracted and becomes in itself the topic. This officially for official Hegelian philosophy this shouldn't have happened this shouldn't have happened in mathematics. So yes we should also say that unfortunately for Hegel the post-Hegelian science formalized and so on there is no place for it in Hegel. Now where things get really interesting is how Hegel often again in a chapter on Hegel and Marx of course defending Hegel against Marx Marxist calumnies and so on nonetheless I make it clear how the situation is most tragic in all those places where Hegel when he doesn't see something it’s not some trans-Hegelian dimension it’s the Hegelian dimension itself. For example when Hegel describes in his philosophy of right modern economy. And here we get the greatness of Marx. What Hegel didn't yet see is how the structure of capital’s universe is really totally Hegelian. This is what Marx saw. But Hegel describes it in much more naive way okay we can say because of objective social circumstances whatever but you know Hegel didn't see the Hegelian dimension itself there. So now this brings me now to the next just a couple of concluding remarks. First so the post-Hegelian break has two aspects. First we have this I think less important although predominant idea that Hegel is the deadlock of absolute idealism and that the insight of all great post-Hegelian figures Late Schelling Kierkegaard Schopenhauer Marx is that the self-movement of idea is just a theater of shadows specters ideas that we need a kind of a positive foundation of being for Marx so that what enters here is the entire logic of representation in the sense that the sphere of ideas is perceived as a shadow theater and we have to find its true productive foundation like for Marx you know ideology a shadow real productive life of individuals where things really happen. For Schopenhauer similar the will the irrational will. For Kierkegaard the uniqueness of individual and his belief. But I think there is another aspect which I already mentioned which is more important repetition blind mechanic repetition. Repetition which cannot be cannot be economized in the sense of producing a higher order in the sense of the movement of idealization. In this sense paradoxically although Hegel is a thinker of negativity in a way what he was not able to see is precisely the positive foundation of negativity. What do I mean by this. Let me make a brief exercise which may surprise you into Heidegger and Freud. I know Heidegger’s very low opinion of Freud. But in his reading of Anaximander in Holzwege Heidegger gives Heidegger has a very interesting passage where he tries to locate almost in an ahistorical way the origins of metaphysics. Metaphysics being conceived as the forgetting of being and positive entities again obliterating the dimension proper of being. And he locates the origin of metaphysics into our fixation on a certain entity. The idea is this one things are running normally you know all this bullshit of like The Lion King bullshit big cycle of life lions eat zebras but lions turn to shit feed the grass and grass is eaten by zebras zebras this idea of a normal flow of things and then here I quote Heidegger that which lingers persists beharrt in its presencing in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while. While is here a substantive like Beharren. It stiffens as if this were the only way to linger and aims solely for continuance and subsistence and so on. So it’s as if the origin of evil if I put it pathetically is this kind of excessive attachment which makes you fixated on some particular entity and its now my point here is that the link between this and falling in love the way I described it is purely intentional. That that here I am on the side of Plato against Heidegger if you want. I claim that what Hegel didn't see is that the origin of negativity in this profound Hegelian way is its opposite is excessive positivity. How do I become destructive. So that instead of maintaining this good Jedi this is why I am in Star Wars always on the side of Anakin Skywalker my dream is to remake Star Wars celebrating Emperor and Darth Vader as good democratic centralists squashing dirty feudalist old rebellions and so on and so on like new Jacobins or whatever. But okay let me go on. You know all that bullshit that Anakin is fed upon by yo my God don't mention me Yoda. With Yoda I imagine myself in boots squashing that person no one okay what I’m being serious what I’m saying is that this for me is as it were the origin of metaphysics precisely what in this pseudo-Buddhist universe they describe as getting too attached getting too much attached onto. But this is human greatness. Animals just everything flows life death I eat you I eat tomorrow that. Metaphysic begins when you are overfixated onto something and you say that something matters more than everything everything else and so on and so on. So in paradoxically the origin of negativity is precisely a over-affirmation of a limited positivity precisely as you know I fall in love everything else does not matter. This is why again I agree here with my friend here what elsewhere you will find I know that in a couple of weeks I will get an angry letter from Alain Badiou how could I write this and so on attacking him but here I agree with him when he praises love precisely as the fall falling in love. Namely but you noticed something very nicely in his book which is a bestseller in France maybe it will be here I don't know if it already appeared Éloge de l'amour in praise of love where he found something wonderful example of everyday ideology a publicity for one of these dating or marriage agencies where they say very briefly concisely we will enable you to be in love without the fall. Playing on this expression which you have also in French tomber to fall in love. What does it mean. That simply they will choose the partner it will not disturb your life everything will function. There will not be this magic metaphysical moment of oh my God it’s the encounter of the thing itself and so on and so on. But the paradox is that instead of opposing metaphysics and fall as even Heidegger is still doing usually it’s you fall into ontic reality metaphysics is the fall. What do I mean by this now really to conclude did you ask yourself here Lacan is right in Seminar XI why is especially the Catholic Church so opposed to sexuality. I mean how stupid is their argumentation and when I say stupid I’m not bluffing I’m not saying all theologians are stupid they are the top. Lacan is right to say that the only real materialists maybe today are theologians. But nonetheless what strikes me as stupid is when they claim this is please the official doxa of the Catholic Church when they claim that if copulation making love is done only for pleasure it’s animal. Why if you do it for procreation it’s properly human. Well I never got it. And I asked many priests bishops in Vienna I never got a good answer to this simple question. But isn't it exactly the opposite sorry. It’s the animals who do it for procreation which is why they do it only in this annual rhythms you know it’s the season for mating we do it. What humans for this is difference between animal sexuality is part of the normal flow of life. Human sexuality is properly metaphysical. Something in something happens a traumatic encounter which is re- literally metaphysical. It interrupts your immersion into normal reality and so on and so on. So here Lacan has some wonderful precise passages in Seminar XI he refers to apparition appearance I think it should refer also to reality where again Lacan says that about Plato he says that Plato opposes mimesis appearance so much not because it’s opposed to true idea but because it’s its greatest competitor. And I think the same goes for Catholicism. It opposes sexuality because it’s well aware that sexuality precisely is not animal but it’s as it were the elementary form of not in idealist sense metaphysics. In the sense of the normal cycle of life animal flow being interrupted cut by the brutal entry of another metaphysical dimension of death drive love passion and so on and so on. So I think rereading Hegel in this way we don't have time to do it now it would have been wonderful that’s again what I try to do in the big fat book to to show how at many crucial moments of Hegelian system he does confront this excessive dimension of death drive as pure repetition which cannot be sublated Aufhebung into higher ideality but cannot fully accept the innermost result of his own thought. Where sexuality he doesn't do it there but he does for example a propos madness where he clearly claims that madness is not just a point of passage like there is a threat of madness then we sublate it idealize it. He says explicitly the threat of madness remains here all the time and explodes from time to time. Then another point would have been for example we don't have time to go with into his political philosophy the notion of rebel Pöbel the outcasts. He again says it’s not something we can get rid of it’s the eternal threat to social edifice. And finally my favorite example but I will try to read it in a positive way where Hegel is usually attacked against Immanuel Kant Kant’s idea of eternal peace Hegel insists on the conceptual necessity of war. And his foundation is purely metaphysical not empirical. His idea is that insofar as we live in peace we are part of a certain organic order and we lose our sense of mission. We become simply involved in our small daily affairs and so on and so on. That the function of the war is to remind us of the negativity the radical dimension of our subjectivity and so on and so on. Now you will say oooh this is bullshit this is a mystified reassertion of of militarism. No I think that again to get at what Hegel is aiming here we just have to push him a little bit further and read Hegel maybe with Thomas Jefferson. You know when Jefferson wrote I quote him that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing it is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants and so on and so on. What Hegel didn't do is just to push things further and replace war external negation with inner revolution and so on and so on. And so again we could have gone on here indefinitely the time is to end. What I want to emphasize at the end is that in all this topic the point is not simply to go beyond Hegel but maybe precisely to repeat Hegel. To be Hegelian today I claim means to not simply to go over Hegel but to think Hegel to read Hegel as an incomplete project and to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself. This is what I claim our unique constellation today which is of course the end as Badiou put it openly also the end of a certain historical epoch of the left this standard Marxist left which believed in its own teleology of history and so on and so on. I think that our situation is pretty close to the situation of Hegel today. Hegel was also a thinker of a moment of passage an old world was dying a new world was emerging it wasn't yet clear what this new world will be. And you must know my God this wonderful proposition by Antonio Gramsci when he says when the old is dying but the new is not yet born it’s a time when monsters emerge and so on and so on. So I claim that Hegel is par excellence the thinker of this transition. It’s only at such moments when you can really see things. Because once the new order is installed it’s then this transition becomes what I following Fred Jameson call the vanishing mediator. Like it’s no longer visible. It’s in moments of tradition sorry transition that you can see it. And it’s incredible to what extent also you find this haha in my big fat book Hegel even when he is appears to be at his most conservative how much he saw. For example here I get the definitive pages analysis of his deduction of the necessity of monarchy. I think I’m not kidding it’s his most democratic moment. Why. Because his reasoning is not eternal right of the king no no what he clearly saw is the let’s call it in modern terms the totalitarian danger of basing founding grounding the right of those who rule to their rule in their properties abilities and so on and so on. There has to be contingency for Hegel for historical reasons here we have to think further of course what is crucial about thing is that a king is that he is a nobody it’s totally contingent who will be the king. And Hegel sensed very well that if you have the rule which is legitimized by positive properties of those who rule you end up with some kind of a Stalinist leader who really claims Stalin knew everything and so on and so on. He Hegel basically knew something that even old ancient democrats knew ancient Greeks and so on that there has to be a aspect of lottery
Thanks very much to begin with let me just say that it’s me who is really honored to be here and my sincere apology for not being able for extremely stupid medical reason diabetic crisis and so on I don't take care of myself properly to spend more time here with you. I’m really sorry I feel ashamed for this. Next thing because of because I take you very seriously here I decided to renounce the usual retelling you know all those boring boring jokes that I repeated already thirty times you remember there was a guy who thought he is a grain of corn and he encounters a chicken and then how the Montenegro people masturbate or all that no I’ve decided to take you seriously and I will do I hope it will not be too much of you a little bit over one hour of a pure more or less pure philosophy focusing on this crucial problem why Hegel can we still be Hegelians what to do with Hegel today. This is part of a work in progress it’s not finished with my big fat book because also the two members of my Slovene gang Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar are working in the same direction it is as if we were postponing till now this key questioning in our idolatry of Hegel. But can we really be simply fully Hegelian today. How or rather our answer is yes but precisely of course by not simply doing the same thing as Hegel so how to displace transform Hegel to be a Hegelian today. So my apologies in advance if to some of you this will be boring but this is where my heart is I’m getting a little bit tired also with all those jokes of well specifically tasteless jokes. Let me begin. There are three I claim and only three key philosophers in the history of Western philosophy Plato Descartes Hegel. The proof of their privileged status is their extraordinary outside the series position in the series of philosophers. Each of the three not only designates a clear break with the past but also casts his long shadow on the thinkers who follow him. These three philosophers can all be conceived as defining their posterity as a series of negations or oppositions to their own position. It was already Michel Foucault who noted that the entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections of Platonism. The problem for practically everyone after Plato was how to reject Plato. In a homologous way all the modern philosophy can be conceived as the history of rejections of Descartes. Everyone even today usually begins with some kind of anti-Cartesian statement and not even to mention Hegel where entire post-Hegelian philosophy is how to overcome Hegel. So let me begin with Plato. Alain Badiou already enumerated in his non-published seminar six main partially intertwined forms of the 20th century anti-Platonism. First we have the vitalist anti-Platonism Nietzsche Bergson Deleuze. The idea is that one should assert the real of life becoming the flux process of life becoming against the intellectual sterility of Platonic idealism. As Nietzsche already put it Plato is the name for a disease. Then we have the empiricist analytic anti-Platonism. Plato believed in the independent existence of ideas but as Aristotle already knew ideas do not exist independently of sensuous things whose forms they are. So the main counter-Platonic thesis of analytic empiricism is that all truths are either analytic or empirical. Then we have the Marxist anti-Platonism for which Lenin is also to blame. The dismissal of Plato as the first idealist opposed to pre-Socratic materialists as well as to the more progressive empirically oriented Aristotle. In this view Plato was the main ideologist of the class of slave owners. Of course I totally oppose to this. I mean if you know a minimum of history of philosophy you know at least two things can be said about Plato’s Republic. A he explicitly states there that in his ideal Republic all posts are open to women as well as to men that it’s just a historical contingency that in the existing society women are suppressed. He insists on this point while Aristotle the good liberal Aristotle as you know sexualizes ontology itself positing a parallel between woman man and hyle-morphe matter form. As to slaves again did you notice if you maybe read Plato that there is no there are no slaves in his Republic while for Aristotle again the good liberal slaves were something natural. You may even remember Aristotle’s definition of slave as a talking talking instrument. Then let me go on. We have the existentialist anti-Platonism. Plato denies the uniqueness of singular existence he subordinates the singular to the universal. This anti-Platonism has a Christian version Kierkegaard like Socrates versus Christ and an atheist one Sartre existence precedes essence. Then we have the Heideggerian anti-Platonism Plato as the founding figure of Western metaphysics. The key moment in the historical process of forgetting of being. The starting point of the process which culminates in today’s technological nihilism. As some leftists like to say when I was young from Plato to NATO one line. Then finally we have the democratic anti-Platonism of political philosophy from Popper to Hannah Arendt. Plato as the originator of closed society the first thinker who elaborated in detail the project of totalitarianism. This is how things stand with Plato. Again even immediately you have first Aristotle opposing Plato and then much more interesting Stoic opposition and even I think the Neo-Platonist mystics basically oppose Plato claiming that logos or thinking articulated thinking cannot be the access to higher reality you can only do it through some mystical unity with the nameless one and so on and so on. Then let me go on to Descartes. It’s the same. We have also five six versions of anti-Cartesianism. First ecological. Your own ex-vice president or the way he defined himself after his defeat I quite appreciated that you know that after his defeat to George Bush okay very contested defeat I know you know that Al Gore liked to present himself as the guy who once was the future American president. This shows a good Hegelian spirit but nonetheless unfortunately Al Gore likes to refer to kind of a very cheap new age anti-Cartesianism claiming that the Judeo-Christian tradition speaks about mankind’s dominion over the earth but it also charges mankind with stewardship of nature but that with Descartes only domination remains no stewardship so Descartes becomes the main metaphysical culprit of our ecological crisis. Incidentally I don't have time to go into it but I’m a little bit tired of this game of how the root of political totalitarianism is philosophy abstract conceptual thinking. I think and here I’m decidedly on the side of Plato maybe it’s time to turn around the cards and to start blaming poetry. Speaking about 20th century experience I’m more and more tempted to say no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Why. No I’m not first not all poets. I mean I’m absolutely for authentic poetry. But you know there is one problem. The problem is that we are relatively decent human beings relatively. What do I mean by this. If somebody were to tell me let me take a knife and pick out your eyes or whatever I would have some trouble let’s say I hope. So you know what I mean. This was the great problem of so-called totalitarian regimes. You need something some kind of ideological opium I’m very traditional here to that is strong enough to make you overcome your let’s call it naively why not elementary decency. And this can be delivered precisely by some kind of a religious poetic mythology. Which is why it’s not a chance that for example the leader of Bosnian Serbs was Karadžić a poet even in Rwanda I looked into it ah-ah there was a poet who was laying the foundation for for genocide for years and so on and so on. So again maybe poetry should also lose its innocence. Let me go on. So we have first ecological no sorry with Descartes yeah back to Descartes we have first the ecological anti-Cartesianism then we have the Heideggerian anti-Cartesianism Descartes as the first moment as the founder founding figure of modern subjectivity which again culminates in today’s nihilism and so on. Then we have new age anti-Cartesianism Descartes abstract reasoning we lose all that bullshit you know the holistic relation to earth as our mother and so on. Then we have more interesting cognitivist anti-Cartesianism Damasio for example Damasio’s Descartes’ Error claiming Descartes opposes reasoning to emotions no we should see how emotions are part of our reasoning itself. Then we have feminist anti-Cartesianism cogito is secretly although not explicitly male which I think incidentally is totally not true empirically it can be to put it in analytic terms empirically satisfied sorry refuted in the sense that do you know that Descartes was at his time extremely popular with women who noted the point who said it’s the first time that we have cogito which has no sex. He was simply perceived as the break-through of this sexualized pre-modern universe where yes women had their place but it was down there beneath men. Then Marxist anti-Cartesianism Descartes’ rationalism as the expression of new capitalist mentality then existentialist anti-rationalist anti-Cartesianism vitalist anti-Cartesianism and so on and so on. With Hegel as you can imagine it’s even worse. Hegel is the ultimate bête noire. We have the irrationalist philosophy of life anti-Hegelianism Hegel the crazy absolute idealist who thought he can deduce all reality from the self-movement of the notion what about the irrational foundation the living force of life totally blind to Hegelian sterility then Kierkegaardian existentialist anti-Hegelianism the uniqueness of existence that escapes Hegelian movement then materialist anti-Hegelianism as Marx liked to say Hegel turned dialectics on its head it’s not idea which self-reproduces itself ideas are just an effect of and expression of actual material beings people humanity working producing then historicist anti-teleological relativists who claim Hegel thought we can reach absolute no all that we can reach is a historically specified very limited knowledge and there is no teleology history is an open contingent process then of course analytic philosophers who are anti-Hegelian for obvious reasons Marxist anti-Hegelians liberal anti-Hegelians whose claim is Hegel celebrated the state as the untouchable totality which incidentally today is counter-acted by precisely and this is an interesting phenomenon the latest tendency liberal Hegelians Pittsburgh Hegelians Pippin and so on the the the mark of recognition of liberal Hegelians is to focus on the topic precisely of recognition as if the ultimate horizon of Hegel is how can we live in a society where we are all mutually recognized. And then of course empiricist anti-Hegelians who attack Hegel’s universal logic Hegel is elevated into some kind of a comic ridiculous figure that crazy guy who thought he can deduce all reality and that he can as it were read the mind of God. Okay. Each of these three philosophers Plato Descartes Hegel stands not only for an event the shattering encounter of an idea in Plato the emergence of a purely evental cogito a crack in the great chain of being in Descartes the absolute itself as evental self-deployment as the result of its own activity. Each of the three philosophers also stands for a moment of negativity cut the normal flow of things is interrupted another dimension breaks in. And even more importantly each of the three philosophers stands for the moment of madness. The madness of being captivated by an idea like falling in love like Socrates under the spell of his daemon the madness at the heart of cogito and of course the ultimate madness of the Hegelian system. What do I mean by this. Let me now try just to briefly indicate how one can read from our today’s perspective each of these three thinkers against this standard image that we all attack as each of the three thinkers as instigators or authors of an immense breakthrough. What is so great in Plato. How is it for example from a Platonic view to find oneself passionately in love. Is it not a kind of permanent state of exceptions. Once you fall in love all proper balances of your daily life are disturbed. Everything you do is colored by the underlying thought of that of the beloved. The situation is properly beyond good and evil. You feel a weird indifference towards your moral obligations with regard to your parents children friends even if you continue to meet them you do it in a mechanical way. Everything pales with regard to your passionate attachment. In this sense falling in love is like the striking that hit Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. A kind of religious suspension of the ethical to use Kierkegaard’s terms. An absolute intervenes which derails the standard run of our affairs. It is not so much that the standard hierarchy of values is inverted but more radically another dimension enters the scene a different level of being. And I think this is how we should read Plato today. Forget about all his ontologization of ideas as if there is separately from our ordinary reality some sphere where idea exists. This is just the way Plato himself misread his own discovery. The truth of Plato for me is purely evental in Alain Badiou’s terms. What he describes is as idea is a traumatic encounter. You are part of your what Badiou would have called animal life suddenly there is an encounter. You encounter something and you get stuck onto it and your life is ruined as it were. And again the idea here is in a way if we want to be true Platonists it’s not more substantial than reality it’s a pure appearance which is why I cannot develop this now you find it in the big thick book in detail which is why I claim and in late Plato you can see this very clearly that idea is not some deeper reality no if you go deep you find shit I mean all this primordial abyss confusion idea is an appearance of itself. You just see something an appearance a specter. You are not sure does it exist or not it doesn't matter your life is ruined you are stuck onto that. Let me go on Descartes. In Descartes this link with madness is even more direct. We know that in modern philosophy cogito the Cartesian I think madness and religion are closely interlinked. First the idea is that cogito emerges through differentiation from madness. From Descartes you know his mental experiment even if I am totally mad even if all reality is a dream manipulated by an evil spirit nonetheless it’s true that I think. That is to say to arrive at cogito you have to go through madness. So it’s an immanent part. Then even historically and this idea incidentally persists you find it in Descartes you find it in Kant. You know Kant’s fundamental experience was Swedenborg’s mysticism. Swedenborg was Kant’s madman. And the whole Kant’s criticism was madness is for Kant this superstitious idealism where you project ideas onto reality. It’s a kind of not transcendental idealism but the substantial direct idealism. So again it’s only through differentiation from madness that cogito emerges. And up to the end philosophy itself cogito remains a point of madness. It’s interesting again I don't have time to go through this here but how cogito is for this reason not a thinking substance. Here again in the same way as Plato Descartes also obfuscated immediately mystified his own discovery you know when he interpreted cogito as res cogitans a thinking substance. No cogito is purely evental. I am only insofar as the process of thinking goes on. I am nothing as a substance. Cogito is an purely evental entity which as such offers opens up a crack in what we pathetically call the great chain of being. So and it would be interesting to notice how this madness was then openly assumed at the summit of German idealism by Schelling by Hegel where they both implicitly even referring to a certain mostly German mystical tradition see the core of subjectivity not in bright idea but in what they call again resuscitating a mystical terms the night of the world the abyss the darkness. This is so you know this is important when you read Descartes that when he speaks about cogito suspending belief in reality what if only my what if nothing exists blah blah you shouldn't read this just as a mental experiment. It’s an existential position to use this old fashioned term. It’s something that you have to go through usually even in moment of psychotic madness or moment of some either clinical breakdown or mystical experience here again I don't have time to do it you find it in the big big fat book here I go through Hegel’s theory of madness. Hegel is extraordinary more Foucaultian than Michel Foucault himself when he develops at the beginning of his philosophy of spirit part three of encyclopedia how you cannot pass directly from animal to human sphere. That in between is a moment of madness at least a threat of madness nature derailed. And then what we call human symbolic universe of thinking and so on is constitutively transcendentally an attempt to control this excess of madness. So as Hegel said as clear as Foucault he said this doesn't mean we should all be mad but that the only way to understand our normal so-called normal mode of being of us humans is in order to understand it we have to refer to madness. It’s a kind of a defense formation against madness in the very core of our being. Of course again I don't want to talk too long it’s a very big ethical endeavor to me. So let me move here fast into how from a proper Hegelian standpoint it’s not enough to say how we have this excessive point of madness mystical night of the world and then reason comes and intervenes and controls it gentrifies it whatever. No that the supreme madness is precisely reason itself this attempt to control the excess of it. And again many people would have agreed claiming but this is precisely Hegel’s madness. Many people would have accepted moment a yeah maybe why not we all have to go through madness but then the whole point is to achieve some kind of normality while Hegelian Hegel is in his excessive normality if by normality we mean overcoming our madness with a rational system that Hegel as it were replaces psychotic madness this breakdown mystical abyss with an even higher madness of a total system of thinking and so on and so on. There are some moments of truth in this. Namely but I think I would like to defend Hegel here. You know let me take Hegel at its most crazy and apparently the most insensitive to human suffering. His idea of how can we understand an epoch of history. What remains of history. Here is what Hegel writes in his philosophy of history about Thucydides Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. I quote from Hegel in the Peloponnesian War the struggle was essentially between Athens and Sparta Thucydides has left us the history of the greater part of it and his immortal work is the absolute gain which humanity has derived from the content end of quote. Are you aware what Hegel is saying here. One should read this judgment in all its naivete in a way Hegel is saying that from the standpoint of the world history retroactive constructing a narrative the Peloponnesian War took place so that Thucydides could write a book on it. The term absolute should be given all its weight here. From the relative point of our finite human interests numerous real tragedies of the Peloponnesian War suffering devastation are of course infinitely more important than a stupid book written afterwards. But nonetheless once it’s over so-called living history are we not all close to Hegel’s position. Let me take another example which may not be so problematic for you. Wouldn't you find relatively acceptable I certainly would to say that what is to quote Hegel the that the the absolute gain which humanity has derived from Elizabethan England are Shakespeare’s plays I claim. Let’s be frank that’s what remained. Today it’s not Shakespeare the small guy who had to kiss the ass of Queen Elizabeth to be able to perform. Today Queen Elizabeth was the queen who had the luck to know about Shakespeare. And I’m even I think we shouldn't be afraid of this crazy reasoning like a week ago I was in San Francisco and of course I’m an opportunist to flatter them and so on I told them the spiritual gain of you the city city of San Francisco is that Hitchcock shot Vertigo there. No you had to build this city and you know it may sound crazy but that’s how meaning is produced in history. And what Hegel offers now I go a step further what Hegel offers here is a a non-teleological reading of this. It’s not that when history takes place it’s already in a secret way motivated or by this goal. No this goal is spiritual goal is totally contingent and it renders history readable retroactively. With retroactivity we are now back at something which was I think the unique achievement of Hegel. Hegel was the first to reintroduce temporality into a process of truth. What do I mean by this temporality. Let me give you a surprising example. Rosa Luxemburg her famous attack on social democratic revisionism directed against Eduard Bernstein the big figure of German revisionism from around In her polemics Rosa Luxemburg provides a series of arguments against the revisionist fear that proletariat will take power prematurely before the consequences are ripe. You know this is the fear of revisionists. Okay you want rebellion but objective conditions are not yet mature. Be patient we have to wait. Here is Rosa Luxemburg’s answer since the proletariat is not in the position to seize power in other way than prematurely since the proletariat is absolutely obliged to seize power once or several times too early before it can maintain itself in power for good the objection to the premature conquest of power is at bottom nothing more than a general opposition to the aspiration of the proletariat to possess itself of state power. So what does this mean. Something very precise and paradoxical. It means what Jacques Lacan called there is no metalanguage. That is to say of course the moment is immature you got it but if you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Why. Because the right moment only arrives when the to put it very simply when the agent to do the revolution is mature enough. But the only way as it were to form yourself educate is through premature attempts. In other words let’s look at it from a purely temporal logical way. There is a right moment but you cannot say let’s but the right moment only emerges through the series of premature seizures of power. Like you cannot wait for it. It’s only through illusion through the mistake that the authentic true moment the that the authentic true moment emerges. Now it will be the only case where I will repeat an old joke from my first book because it gives you the structure in its clearest form. I you don't have to laugh I know you know it. It’s the joke from Yugoslav army my favorite trauma about a conscript who pleaded he wanted to plead insanity to avoid serving the army no. I tried the same it may amuse you how I failed. We all tried it. I over or to paraphrase the wonderful slip of tongue of your ex-president I I mis-overestimated or underestimated the the medical doctors army doctors I thought my idea was this one that I thought look at me now I mean look like with all my ticks crazy I thought that if I exaggerate this then the best strategy would be to argue that I want to go to the army. But to do it in such a crazy way excessive that they would say look the way this guy argues to the army clearly makes him an idiot. And but unfortunately it didn't work. They said you want to go to the army okay go we’ll probably help you I was desperate you know. Okay but what I’m saying is that in this other joke it’s purely logical it couldn't have happened. The joke is that there was a guy who again played insanity and his symptom was that wherever he found himself he looked for papers looked at each paper and said that’s not it that’s not it that’s not it. Okay he found himself in front of the committee medical committee looked at all the papers even in the trash bin on the table that’s not it that’s not it. Of course they decided this guy is clearly a lunatic and they wrote a they wrote the how do you call it the opinion that he should be released of army service. He looked at it and said that’s it no. Okay so but you see at its most elementary the logic that’s it you have to go through that’s not it to pro why okay now again you have this explained much more in detail in the big fat book. I just want to draw your attention to one thing here how for Hegel and we can here link Hegel to psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to to Marxian commodity fetishism and so on. The crucial point here is and again you find this much more in detail in the book is this temporality of truth. Hegel does not confuse truth and fiction. He is not a postmodern relativist. The only thing he insists is that you arrive at truth only through fiction. Which is why where you have temporality. For example crucial here Hegel’s judgment on French Revolution which is usually misread as some kind of conservative corporatist rejection like revolutionaries wanted this abstract equality all people are immediately equal and of course it was terror murderous fury but we have the state of reason organized corporate society that’s okay and so on. But Hegel is not saying this. Hegel is saying something much more interesting that the first choice is between ancien régime and Jacobin terror. Jacobin terror is a mistake in the formal sense it necessarily ends in terror and so on. But it’s only once you choose make the wrong choice terror that the true choice opens up. You cannot say no no we will jump through Jacobin terror let’s build directly the new organic proto-fascist order whatever is usually attributed to Hegel. It’s you know that even the choice the logical choice has a temporary dimension. Choice is always redoubled. First choice is wrong choice. Once you are in the wrong choice you get the real choice. To arrive at truth which means again again it’s much more in detail explained in the book but the point is this one. When we have this triad of subjective objective absolute knowing we should be precise Hegel speaks about wissen knowing not knowledge but Hegel what is this absolute knowledge. It can be defined in a very simple way. The opposition of subjective and objective knowing let’s call it simply doxa and episteme is a simple one. The way we just imagine things to be and the way things objectively really are. Now comes Hegel’s crucial point. You get from objective to absolute not by reaching some even deeper reality but by including subjective into objective. What you add to objective to get to the absolute is illusion itself. Absolute means objective order plus the insight into how illusions are constitutive of it. What does this mean. This means to jump a little bit quickly that if we are to experience reality as consistent reality has to be supplemented with virtual fictions. Or as Gilbert Keith Chesterton my favorite Catholic theologian wonderfully put it literature and fiction are two entirely different things literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity. That is to say as another well-known British Hegelian called Jeremiah Bentham as Lacan knew it knew very well it’s easy to distinguish reality and fictions the problem is that when you when you erase fictions you lose reality itself. What does this mean. Now a precise Hegelian claim I think about fantasy. I remember years ago in a German daily newspaper some more than years ago even they wanted to make fun of dirty male sexual fantasies. So they published photos of five men dreaming no asking they are all asked the same question what would you like to do this summer. And you have beneath the image their official answers for example one of one of them is saying oh I would like to read in peace a good book. Another one to visit a faraway country. Another one to rest on a sunny beach or whatever. But then each image is accompanied by this like in comics cloud which allegedly shows what they were really thinking about. Yeah yeah yeah of course in each of them is a naked woman you know so I think this is strictly theoretically wrong. The whole point of psychoanalysis is that if anything it’s the exact truth which is which holds. That is to say if they were to be honest male chauvinists which some of us are they would of course immediately say oh I want to f- three points like crazy and so on all the time. But the true question as you know of psychoanalytic fantasy is not ah do you always think about that sex but what do you think when you do make love no. And here I think that the truth would be this one they’d say I want to screw my lover’s brain out whatever. But then how. One of them would be I want to do it on a sunny beach. The other one on a on a in a faraway country. The third one why not it’s a nice dream I had it once. The reading a book. The lady should read a book a tergo and you do it from behind so that you know the unity of intellectual and sensuous life whatever. You see my point that you cannot just do sex you must have you must have fantasy with it. What does this you know what I wanted to develop here something which I will skip over about the link of psychoanalysis and Hegel just to give you a brief resume you also find this in the big fat book my idea was to oppose the standard philosophically very well elaborated in Frankfurt School tradition the young Habermas knowledge and human interest and later Helmut Dahmer a very good book not translated into English libido and society parallel between psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics to put it very simply the idea is that Freud was the great post-Hegelian Hegelian that de facto if you look at psychoanalytic process Freud transposed Hegelian dialectic into it. In the sense that symptoms are signs of the subject’s self-alienation something that is really part of you you don't recognize yourself in it it appears to you as some foreign irrational agency as it were bombarding you and that the work of psychoanalysis consists precisely in the reconciliation between your subjectivity and your alienated substantial content the unconscious in which you are not able to recognize yourself so that at the end of the psychoanalytic treatment you recognize yourself in your symptoms. In the same way that Hegel says allegedly that in reconciliation the subject re-appropriates the intellectual substance the Freudian goal that’s how they read this famous Wo es war, soll ich werden where it was I should arrive I should re-appropriate the alienated substance. What I wanted to do but don't have time to do now is to show how one should reject this parallel but not in the usual way which is unfortunately still Lacan’s way which is to say no Freud was really not a Hegelian. This only holds for Hegel. I claim that if this is Hegel then Hegel was also not a Hegelian. That what Hegel calls reconciliation overcoming of alienation is not this kind of subjective re-appropriation of reality but something much more different it’s even like okay I want to arouse your interest a little bit in the big fat book so I will just tell you to maybe arouse your interest which book I analyze okay I wouldn't say in detail five six pages which is a lot for me you know that I’m a madman jumping from one book to the other to give you an idea of what is Hegelian reconciliation. Can some of you help me primitive barbarian coming from Balkan you know I don't know who is the I’ll ask you like this who is the South African author internationally known and not Nadine Gordimer? Ah-ah yeah yeah this yeah yeah okay I not never sure how to pronounce the name without appearing an idiot okay did you read his Disgrace? That’s reconciliation at its purest. This total despair where the guy accepts and did you see the movie which is not so bad incidentally by John Malkovich plays the hero. It’s something like that that I claim Hegel has in mind with reconciliation. It’s not this arrogance of I eat the whole world you know. It’s nonetheless an extremely resigned recognition how you should recognize yourself in the very shit that is screwing you or however I should put it no. Okay but read the book. Now I want to do something for which we are here a little bit more radical. I want to point this that the structure that I describe of reality supplemented being supplemented by fantasy involves what Lacan calls object small a this pure void or even that’s the title of my book incidentally this less than nothing. Something which is paradoxically less than nothing and in a chapter which is maybe a little bit crazy but I like it it’s my favorite chapter in the book the last one I try in a very risky move I admit it to develop some kind of formal homology between this Lacanian object a as less than nothing and what in quantum physics is called Higgs field you know. You know this paradox if I understood it correctly okay I did I’m an idiot but I think I got one idea clearly that the basic paradox and for me it’s mind boggling it’s incredible of Higgs field is that you know that you have a something which costs less than nothing. To have a certain field at its zero level completely void costs more energy than to have it with something and that something is Higgs field which is literally something which costs less than nothing. I want to give you here a wonderful metaphor the second time that I repeat my own old stuff but it’s a beautiful example because I’m here pro-American I prefer your Hershey bar to that European Zohar bullshit or whatever. Stephen Jay Gould in one of his early books you know has a wonderful illustration of the logic of evolution with the relation between price and quantity of a Hershey bar. He describes the tendency which is let’s say at a certain moment the Hershey bar costs so much let’s say cents and has a certain quantity you get a certain then he says for some time the company tries to maintain the same price but the chocolate bar gets a little bit smaller all then when it gets too absurd the price goes up and the quantity goes up but the quantity does not reach the quantity at the beginning. It’s like if it was at the beginning here it goes down with the same price then the price goes up and but here no and it goes on like this. And now you can guess where he is aiming. It’s that you can in this way although it cannot empirically arrive construct a final point where the quant not only will the quantity be nothing but you can exactly calculate how much this nothing will cost if you go with the price no. And this is as good as you can guess I claim to Lacanian object small a it’s a nothing which nonetheless has some properties has a cost and so on and so on. Can Hegel think this. So in a very naive way I do it much more in detail in the big fat book let me now approach this problem. Here I rely here to a deep conversations with my good friend Mladen Dolar. Here is an improvised list of what Hegel cannot think or so it appears. A series of concepts mostly elaborated by psychoanalysis and Marxism. It looks that Hegel cannot think repetition unconscious overdetermination object a letter in the sense of matheme formal sciences antagonism class struggle sexual difference. It’s more ambiguous with Hegel but nonetheless a case can be made. First repetition. Let me be clear here. Of course Hegel can think repetition. He even has as we all know a beautiful theory of repetition. Repetition as the movement of idealization. The first time it’s contingency just raw empirical stuff through repetition contingency is idealized into conceptual necessity. You must know Hegel’s two great examples Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Julius Caesar works especially well because you have literally a passage from contingent name to concept. Caesar had to die to repeat himself to emerge as Caesar the title the universal title. Through this repetition it became clear that you cannot get rid of Caesar that he wasn't just a historical contingency. Even if the plot succeeded Caesar returned as a title no longer a personal name that guy Caesar but as a title. Hegel makes a similar remark about Napoleon that this is why Napoleon had to lose twice sorry and He had to lose twice to as it were to make his point. Okay what Hegel here obviously cannot think is repetition in okay it’s tautological in post-Hegelian sense. By this I mean two authors which are very strange bedfellows. Kierkegaard and Freud. Kierkegaard repetition and Freudian compulsion to repeat where is the difference that precisely in these two cases we do have repetition but without Aufhebung sublation or idealization. It’s just a blind repetition. Second thing. Hegel has problem with thinking unconscious. Again he can think it but it is as Lacan makes it clear in one of his late seminars it is a formal transcendental unconscious. Hegelian unconscious is the unconscious of transcendental formal universal form. The idea is that for example when we speak we are fascinated by concrete content we forget the universal form. And Hegel is very nice here I mean in the sense of goes very far when he emphasizes again and again how how when there is a split between what we say and what we mean to say the truth is always on the side of what we say. Hegel never plays what we say against some deeper meaning. If there is a gap the truth is on surface. But for Hegel the unconscious is this universal conceptual transcendental structure. What Hegel cannot think is the contingency of the particular Freudian unconscious which would have been precisely something like the structure of overdetermination. Think about Freud’s famous we all know it example of Signorelli. You know Freud can’t recall the name Signorelli of the painter of from Orvieto and he substitutes two other painters Botticelli Boltraffio. And then Freud in the analysis establishes a whole network of signifying associations. The Italian village Trafoi where Freud received the message of the suicide of one of his patients. Herr the German word for mister Signor is linked to a trip to Herzegovina part of Bosnia where an old Muslim told Freud that after you cannot make love after you are too old for sex there is no reason to go on living and so on and so on. So here we have a kind of a totally contingent dispersal without any great dominant negation or whatever. It’s just a rhizomatic confusion. Then okay I will not go on too much the problem of jouissance as in excess of truth irreducible to truth and so on and so on. The problem of mathematics. It’s clear that Hegel reduced mathematics to what he calls understanding Verstand abstract reasoning which is unable to confront what Hegel calls wahre Unendlichkeit the true infinity. As always with Hegel that’s why he is a genius of course things are more ambiguous. For example if you don't believe me it’s really the symptomatic point of Hegel’s Logic. Look into the last chapter of the first part of Hegel’s Logic Logic of Being no sorry it’s the even the second part on quantity towards the end Hegel deals with infinitesimal calculus. And it’s mad it’s like pages it sticks out it’s like a tiny development longer than the entire part because obviously there mathematics does something precisely processing to true infinity which is for Hegel when you no longer have elements who relate but you know in infinitesimal calculus relation as such is abstracted and becomes in itself the topic. This officially for official Hegelian philosophy this shouldn't have happened this shouldn't have happened in mathematics. So yes we should also say that unfortunately for Hegel the post-Hegelian science formalized and so on there is no place for it in Hegel. Now where things get really interesting is how Hegel often again in a chapter on Hegel and Marx of course defending Hegel against Marx Marxist calumnies and so on nonetheless I make it clear how the situation is most tragic in all those places where Hegel when he doesn't see something it’s not some trans-Hegelian dimension it’s the Hegelian dimension itself. For example when Hegel describes in his philosophy of right modern economy. And here we get the greatness of Marx. What Hegel didn't yet see is how the structure of capital’s universe is really totally Hegelian. This is what Marx saw. But Hegel describes it in much more naive way okay we can say because of objective social circumstances whatever but you know Hegel didn't see the Hegelian dimension itself there. So now this brings me now to the next just a couple of concluding remarks. First so the post-Hegelian break has two aspects. First we have this I think less important although predominant idea that Hegel is the deadlock of absolute idealism and that the insight of all great post-Hegelian figures Late Schelling Kierkegaard Schopenhauer Marx is that the self-movement of idea is just a theater of shadows specters ideas that we need a kind of a positive foundation of being for Marx so that what enters here is the entire logic of representation in the sense that the sphere of ideas is perceived as a shadow theater and we have to find its true productive foundation like for Marx you know ideology a shadow real productive life of individuals where things really happen. For Schopenhauer similar the will the irrational will. For Kierkegaard the uniqueness of individual and his belief. But I think there is another aspect which I already mentioned which is more important repetition blind mechanic repetition. Repetition which cannot be cannot be economized in the sense of producing a higher order in the sense of the movement of idealization. In this sense paradoxically although Hegel is a thinker of negativity in a way what he was not able to see is precisely the positive foundation of negativity. What do I mean by this. Let me make a brief exercise which may surprise you into Heidegger and Freud. I know Heidegger’s very low opinion of Freud. But in his reading of Anaximander in Holzwege Heidegger gives Heidegger has a very interesting passage where he tries to locate almost in an ahistorical way the origins of metaphysics. Metaphysics being conceived as the forgetting of being and positive entities again obliterating the dimension proper of being. And he locates the origin of metaphysics into our fixation on a certain entity. The idea is this one things are running normally you know all this bullshit of like The Lion King bullshit big cycle of life lions eat zebras but lions turn to shit feed the grass and grass is eaten by zebras zebras this idea of a normal flow of things and then here I quote Heidegger that which lingers persists beharrt in its presencing in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while. While is here a substantive like Beharren. It stiffens as if this were the only way to linger and aims solely for continuance and subsistence and so on. So it’s as if the origin of evil if I put it pathetically is this kind of excessive attachment which makes you fixated on some particular entity and its now my point here is that the link between this and falling in love the way I described it is purely intentional. That that here I am on the side of Plato against Heidegger if you want. I claim that what Hegel didn't see is that the origin of negativity in this profound Hegelian way is its opposite is excessive positivity. How do I become destructive. So that instead of maintaining this good Jedi this is why I am in Star Wars always on the side of Anakin Skywalker my dream is to remake Star Wars celebrating Emperor and Darth Vader as good democratic centralists squashing dirty feudalist old rebellions and so on and so on like new Jacobins or whatever. But okay let me go on. You know all that bullshit that Anakin is fed upon by yo my God don't mention me Yoda. With Yoda I imagine myself in boots squashing that person no one okay what I’m being serious what I’m saying is that this for me is as it were the origin of metaphysics precisely what in this pseudo-Buddhist universe they describe as getting too attached getting too much attached onto. But this is human greatness. Animals just everything flows life death I eat you I eat tomorrow that. Metaphysic begins when you are overfixated onto something and you say that something matters more than everything everything else and so on and so on. So in paradoxically the origin of negativity is precisely a over-affirmation of a limited positivity precisely as you know I fall in love everything else does not matter. This is why again I agree here with my friend here what elsewhere you will find I know that in a couple of weeks I will get an angry letter from Alain Badiou how could I write this and so on attacking him but here I agree with him when he praises love precisely as the fall falling in love. Namely but you noticed something very nicely in his book which is a bestseller in France maybe it will be here I don't know if it already appeared Éloge de l'amour in praise of love where he found something wonderful example of everyday ideology a publicity for one of these dating or marriage agencies where they say very briefly concisely we will enable you to be in love without the fall. Playing on this expression which you have also in French tomber to fall in love. What does it mean. That simply they will choose the partner it will not disturb your life everything will function. There will not be this magic metaphysical moment of oh my God it’s the encounter of the thing itself and so on and so on. But the paradox is that instead of opposing metaphysics and fall as even Heidegger is still doing usually it’s you fall into ontic reality metaphysics is the fall. What do I mean by this now really to conclude did you ask yourself here Lacan is right in Seminar XI why is especially the Catholic Church so opposed to sexuality. I mean how stupid is their argumentation and when I say stupid I’m not bluffing I’m not saying all theologians are stupid they are the top. Lacan is right to say that the only real materialists maybe today are theologians. But nonetheless what strikes me as stupid is when they claim this is please the official doxa of the Catholic Church when they claim that if copulation making love is done only for pleasure it’s animal. Why if you do it for procreation it’s properly human. Well I never got it. And I asked many priests bishops in Vienna I never got a good answer to this simple question. But isn't it exactly the opposite sorry. It’s the animals who do it for procreation which is why they do it only in this annual rhythms you know it’s the season for mating we do it. What humans for this is difference between animal sexuality is part of the normal flow of life. Human sexuality is properly metaphysical. Something in something happens a traumatic encounter which is re- literally metaphysical. It interrupts your immersion into normal reality and so on and so on. So here Lacan has some wonderful precise passages in Seminar XI he refers to apparition appearance I think it should refer also to reality where again Lacan says that about Plato he says that Plato opposes mimesis appearance so much not because it’s opposed to true idea but because it’s its greatest competitor. And I think the same goes for Catholicism. It opposes sexuality because it’s well aware that sexuality precisely is not animal but it’s as it were the elementary form of not in idealist sense metaphysics. In the sense of the normal cycle of life animal flow being interrupted cut by the brutal entry of another metaphysical dimension of death drive love passion and so on and so on. So I think rereading Hegel in this way we don't have time to do it now it would have been wonderful that’s again what I try to do in the big fat book to to show how at many crucial moments of Hegelian system he does confront this excessive dimension of death drive as pure repetition which cannot be sublated Aufhebung into higher ideality but cannot fully accept the innermost result of his own thought. Where sexuality he doesn't do it there but he does for example a propos madness where he clearly claims that madness is not just a point of passage like there is a threat of madness then we sublate it idealize it. He says explicitly the threat of madness remains here all the time and explodes from time to time. Then another point would have been for example we don't have time to go with into his political philosophy the notion of rebel Pöbel the outcasts. He again says it’s not something we can get rid of it’s the eternal threat to social edifice. And finally my favorite example but I will try to read it in a positive way where Hegel is usually attacked against Immanuel Kant Kant’s idea of eternal peace Hegel insists on the conceptual necessity of war. And his foundation is purely metaphysical not empirical. His idea is that insofar as we live in peace we are part of a certain organic order and we lose our sense of mission. We become simply involved in our small daily affairs and so on and so on. That the function of the war is to remind us of the negativity the radical dimension of our subjectivity and so on and so on. Now you will say oooh this is bullshit this is a mystified reassertion of of militarism. No I think that again to get at what Hegel is aiming here we just have to push him a little bit further and read Hegel maybe with Thomas Jefferson. You know when Jefferson wrote I quote him that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing it is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants and so on and so on. What Hegel didn't do is just to push things further and replace war external negation with inner revolution and so on and so on. And so again we could have gone on here indefinitely the time is to end. What I want to emphasize at the end is that in all this topic the point is not simply to go beyond Hegel but maybe precisely to repeat Hegel. To be Hegelian today I claim means to not simply to go over Hegel but to think Hegel to read Hegel as an incomplete project and to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself. This is what I claim our unique constellation today which is of course the end as Badiou put it openly also the end of a certain historical epoch of the left this standard Marxist left which believed in its own teleology of history and so on and so on. I think that our situation is pretty close to the situation of Hegel today. Hegel was also a thinker of a moment of passage an old world was dying a new world was emerging it wasn't yet clear what this new world will be. And you must know my God this wonderful proposition by Antonio Gramsci when he says when the old is dying but the new is not yet born it’s a time when monsters emerge and so on and so on. So I claim that Hegel is par excellence the thinker of this transition. It’s only at such moments when you can really see things. Because once the new order is installed it’s then this transition becomes what I following Fred Jameson call the vanishing mediator. Like it’s no longer visible. It’s in moments of tradition sorry transition that you can see it. And it’s incredible to what extent also you find this haha in my big fat book Hegel even when he is appears to be at his most conservative how much he saw. For example here I get the definitive pages analysis of his deduction of the necessity of monarchy. I think I’m not kidding it’s his most democratic moment. Why. Because his reasoning is not eternal right of the king no no what he clearly saw is the let’s call it in modern terms the totalitarian danger of basing founding grounding the right of those who rule to their rule in their properties abilities and so on and so on. There has to be contingency for Hegel for historical reasons here we have to think further of course what is crucial about thing is that a king is that he is a nobody it’s totally contingent who will be the king. And Hegel sensed very well that if you have the rule which is legitimized by positive properties of those who rule you end up with some kind of a Stalinist leader who really claims Stalin knew everything and so on and so on. He Hegel basically knew something that even old ancient democrats knew ancient Greeks and so on that there has to be a aspect of lottery
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contingency in selecting those who will
contingency in selecting those who will
Slavoj Žižek
rule us. And today especially this is very actual my God you know what is happening today in Europe as the result of this crisis again the idea of even directly non-democratically legitimized expert rule is reasserting itself. So again back to my point what I’m saying is that Hegel as a thinker of tradition should be repeated today when it is clear that we are in a mega epoch of tradition. A certain epoch at least of capitalism is coming to an end. We don't know with what to replace it. We have a whole series of problems from ecology to biogenetics which will probably redefine our very notion of what is a human of what means to be a human being and so on and so on. And in here again the repetition of what Hegel did is necessary. And this is why I stick to Jacques Lacan. He is for me ultimately an instrument to repeat Hegel. He would have denied it of course I am well aware of it no and in this sense I think one should from this perspective of repeating Hegel one should do many wonderful things. For example I with this to really finish I would like again to mention the very last chapter of the book where I try to do this totally crazy thing of rereading quantum physics. You know what’s happening today the so-called ontological question how do we read ontological consequences of quantum physics. This was for a long time ignored they said it doesn't matter just that mathematics works. Then there is a series of attempts many worlds interpretation David Bohm many others which I claim are precisely attempts to reinscribe quantum physics into our ordinary notion of reality. We are still not at the level of Niels Bohr’s paradox. And the task is today to again I yeah I am very modest here but from my limited knowledge I tend to agree I hope I’m wrong but unfortunately I tend to agree with those who claim that string theory is not the solution. You know it looked that this will be the next so again the task is and I think Hegel can really be of help here not literally Hegel but although in Hegel you find miracles let me conclude with a wonderful joke which was total contingency I know I’m not a superstitious idiot but [unintelligible] I was surprised. You know that use the way usually to make fun of Hegel is to quote as his greatest stupidity how in his the early version of his philosophy of nature he deduces why there is a conceptual necessity that there are eight planets around the sun. He simply didn't know that the ninth one which is Pluto or Neptune I never know is already discovered so idiot he deduced the necessity of eight. Can you imagine my totally irrational like intellectually orgasmic pleasure when I read two three years ago news Pluto or which one is not really a planet there are eight. As of course how could Hegel have been wrong. Thank you very much.
rule us. And today especially this is very actual my God you know what is happening today in Europe as the result of this crisis again the idea of even directly non-democratically legitimized expert rule is reasserting itself. So again back to my point what I’m saying is that Hegel as a thinker of tradition should be repeated today when it is clear that we are in a mega epoch of tradition. A certain epoch at least of capitalism is coming to an end. We don't know with what to replace it. We have a whole series of problems from ecology to biogenetics which will probably redefine our very notion of what is a human of what means to be a human being and so on and so on. And in here again the repetition of what Hegel did is necessary. And this is why I stick to Jacques Lacan. He is for me ultimately an instrument to repeat Hegel. He would have denied it of course I am well aware of it no and in this sense I think one should from this perspective of repeating Hegel one should do many wonderful things. For example I with this to really finish I would like again to mention the very last chapter of the book where I try to do this totally crazy thing of rereading quantum physics. You know what’s happening today the so-called ontological question how do we read ontological consequences of quantum physics. This was for a long time ignored they said it doesn't matter just that mathematics works. Then there is a series of attempts many worlds interpretation David Bohm many others which I claim are precisely attempts to reinscribe quantum physics into our ordinary notion of reality. We are still not at the level of Niels Bohr’s paradox. And the task is today to again I yeah I am very modest here but from my limited knowledge I tend to agree I hope I’m wrong but unfortunately I tend to agree with those who claim that string theory is not the solution. You know it looked that this will be the next so again the task is and I think Hegel can really be of help here not literally Hegel but although in Hegel you find miracles let me conclude with a wonderful joke which was total contingency I know I’m not a superstitious idiot but [unintelligible] I was surprised. You know that use the way usually to make fun of Hegel is to quote as his greatest stupidity how in his the early version of his philosophy of nature he deduces why there is a conceptual necessity that there are eight planets around the sun. He simply didn't know that the ninth one which is Pluto or Neptune I never know is already discovered so idiot he deduced the necessity of eight. Can you imagine my totally irrational like intellectually orgasmic pleasure when I read two three years ago news Pluto or which one is not really a planet there are eight. As of course how could Hegel have been wrong. Thank you very much.