Is it possible to Move Beyond The Transcendental?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-11-01 · 2:15:01 · 17,988 words
with Cathy Newman
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalsubjectivityideologyliberalism-political-correctnesshistorysexuality-gender
This is the second session of Žižek's masterclass 'Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,' in which Žižek develops the Lacanian theory of subjectivity as a self-caused retroactive loop, explores the ontological stakes of Kant's antinomies and the move from Kant to Hegel (including the Lévi-Strauss village-map example), and argues for the philosophical relevance of psychoanalysis against both transcendental philosophical dismissals and clinical reductionism. The session also features a guest lecture by Frank Ruda on his book 'Abolishing Freedom,' which defends a rationalist fatalism against the liberal conception of freedom as capacity, followed by a Q&A touching on Hegel's openness, Jacques-Alain Miller, ordinary psychosis, and the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “subject as retroactive self-causation”
For Žižek following Lacan, the subject is not a pre-given agent but the outcome of its own failure to be a subject, a closed circuit in which the cause is posited retroactively by its own effects.
Žižek deploys it here as the cause-object that is always circular, a trauma or cause that is retroactively posited by the subject rather than objectively given.
as “Hitchcockian point of gaze”
The strange element that sticks out in a scene; Žižek uses it to argue that the subject is precisely this eccentric element, the one looking for the strangeness is himself the strange element.
as “counterfactual network”
The background of possibilities against which an event is what it was; Žižek argues we can change this network (and thus the meaning of the past) even if we cannot change facts.
Not explicitly named but implied in Žižek's discussion of Lacan's axioms and the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutual presupposition.
Žižek insists this axiom does not mean the two sexes are constituted and miss each other; rather, impossibility is immanent to each sex, each sex cannot be constituted in itself.
as “antinomies of pure sexuation”
Žižek's term (developed with Joan Copjec) for Lacan's formulas of sexuation understood as isomorphic with Kant's mathematical and dynamic antinomies of pure reason.
For Žižek, Kant's antinomies of pure reason are not merely epistemic deadlocks but (via Hegel) reveal an ontological incompleteness in reality itself.
as “Aufhebung / reconciliation as retroactive”
Žižek stresses that Hegelian reconciliation is never a forward synthesis but always a retroactive reinterpretation in which what appeared as an obstacle is revealed as its own solution.
Žižek previews a musical argument about how a background (Pachelbel's Canon) becomes a void that needs to be filled by melody (Mozart), tracing a dialectic of background and supplement.
Following Kojève's reading of Hegel: the slave who feels free in thought even while enslaved in reality, a mystification enabled by identifying freedom with a capacity one always already possesses.
as “freedom as capacity (liberum arbitrium indifferentiae)”
Frank Ruda's target: the dominant modern misconception that freedom is a naturally given capacity to choose between A and non-A, which conflates the actuality of possibility with the actuality of actuality.
as “rationalist fatalism”
Frank Ruda's central concept: the assumption of an always-already-determined fate as a precondition for a proper concept of freedom, traced through Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud.
as “inversion of the apocalypse”
Žižek's maneuver (cited by Ruda): treating the apocalypse not as a future event to be feared but as something that has already taken place.
Ruda's minimal formula for fatalism: the catastrophe is not an event in the future but one that has already occurred, and assuming this retroactively may open new possibilities.
as “enlightened doomsaying”
Dupuy's concept (endorsed by Ruda): fully assuming an ecological or social catastrophe as certain and already-determined so that this very assumption retroactively changes the conditions of its occurrence.
Briefly invoked in the context of Lacan borrowing from Marx: when Lacan talks about surplus enjoyment, it is Marx who is the reference.
Attributed to Lacan (not Miller): the ordinary sane person has a psychotic structure; Žižek notes this but defers a full answer.
The feminine formula: not that women are partially outside the symbolic, but that there is no exception to keep the symbolic whole, so women are more fully within the symbolic than men.
Žižek insists against Miller's late reading that the Lacanian Real is not an external chaotic outside-the-law but a purely immanent, formal obstacle or impossibility within the symbolic, like sexual difference.
Stories he reaches for 5
A café customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so he can only offer coffee without milk. The coffee is the same, but the negation, without cream vs. without milk, is different, making it a different object.
“Can I have coffee without cream? Sorry, we have no cream, we only have milk, so I can only give you coffee without milk.”
Adorno shows sociology oscillates irreducibly between individualism (society emerges from individuals) and organicism (individuals emerge from society). Rather than seeking a synthesis, he shows the antinomy itself is the basic feature of modern society, radical individualization alongside impenetrable objective processes.
“The very thing that appeared as a problem, my God we get into an antinomy, becomes its own solution.”
Chesterton's observation that only Christianity has God himself cry 'Father why have you forsaken me', briefly, even God ceases to believe in God. Žižek sees in this the Christian solution: abandonment by God is an effect of God being radically separated from itself.
“We have for a brief moment God himself who no longer believes in God.”
In his Philosophy of History introduction, Hegel says of both America and Russia that it is too early to develop them conceptually because the next century will be theirs, Žižek reads this as evidence of Hegel's genuine openness to contingency.
Members of a tribe draw two irreconcilable maps of their village, one with a circular layout centered on the temple, one divided into two halves. Lévi-Strauss argues the truth about the tribe is precisely this antagonism of the two images, reflecting the tribe's transition from egalitarian to hierarchical society.
“The truth about the tribe is the very antagonism of the two images. This tells you the truth.”
Works invoked 22
Capital book
Marx's work; Ruda cites the Eden passage (freedom, equality, property, Bentham) to show how the signifier freedom is sutured to utilitarian self-interest in capitalism.
Ninotchka film
Source of the 'coffee without cream / coffee without milk' joke that Žižek uses repeatedly to illustrate negation and counterfactuals.
Hegel's work; the subject of Brandom's reading that Žižek polemicizes against in chapter 3 of Disparities.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; he notes it contains a long chapter on brain sciences where he develops the argument about subjectivity requiring a short circuit.
Kant's work; central to Žižek's analysis of mathematical vs. dynamic antinomies and their isomorphism with Lacan's formulas of sexuation, and to Ruda's account of Kant's anti-indifferentism.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own book; cited for the passage where Hegel says reconciliation is always retroactive.
Žižek's own book; he says he reported a dream there about how Hegel's logic should be rewritten today.
Hegel's work; Žižek cites the 1820s passage where Hegel says about America and Russia that next century will be theirs, as evidence of Hegel's genuine openness to contingency.
Disparities book
Žižek's new book at time of talk; he singles out chapter 3 (polemic with Brandom on Phenomenology of Spirit) and chapter 8 (negative theology / 'Is God unconscious, stupid, evil') as the most outstanding.
Pierre Bayard's book; Žižek praises it as a 'serious joke' exemplifying a genuinely Hegelian approach, partial truth is more revealing than exhaustive coverage.
Frank Ruda's book, the subject of his guest lecture; defends rationalist fatalism as a precondition for genuine freedom by tracing Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud.
Kant's work; Žižek cites Kant's explanation that God created a world unknowable to us for ethical reasons, if we knew everything, ethics would become mere calculation.
The Euthanasia of Reason essay
Joan Copjec's pathbreaking essay demonstrating the isomorphism between Kant's antinomies and Lacan's formulas of sexuation; Žižek calls it 'one of the absolute great texts' and laments how totally ignored it is.
Beethoven's overture; Žižek calls it 'one of the greatest pieces of musical kitsch' as a preview of tomorrow's argument that Beethoven is the origin of kitsch, full romantic melodic culmination.
Hitchcock's second version; Žižek uses a scene of James Stewart searching for the eccentric point to illustrate the subject as the strange element it is looking for.
Žižek calls it 'absolute no', an example of the misreading of Lacan's sexuation as the two sexes being constituted but always missing each other, rather than as impossibility immanent to each.
Lévi-Strauss's work; Žižek uses the essay 'Do Dual Organizations Exist?' and its two village-maps example to illustrate Hegel's insight that antagonism between perspectives is the truth of the social formation.
You Only Live Twice film
Described as a 'shitty movie' but Žižek previews its Japanese wedding scene as illustrating a colonialist musical structure: restrained pseudo-oriental music suddenly released into full Western melody.
Hannibal Rising film
Described as the worst of the Hannibal Lecter novels (written just for money as a film treatment), but contains the one line Žižek prizes: 'Nothing happened to him, he happened to the world.'
The Not-Two book
Lorenzo Chiesa's book (MIT) on Lacan's formulas of sexuation, which Žižek helped publish but criticizes for nearly ignoring Joan Copjec's crucial prior work.
Descartes' last published book; Ruda reads it as defending divine predestination as a strategic counter to the misconception of freedom as capacity, via the concept of fate (fatalité) against fortune.
Superman I film
Described as 'nonsense' empirically but used as 'the best natural embodiment of what thinking means', Superman reversing the Earth's rotation illustrates thinking as retroactive symbolic restructuring of the past.
People invoked 36
Ruda invokes Sellars' 'myth of the given' as the framework within which modern rationalism attacks the myth of freedom's givenness.
Briefly mentioned as the Idealist who might naively seem to claim the subject as cause of itself, though Žižek notes even Fichte doesn't mean it in that simple way.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Ruda draws on Dupuy's concept of 'enlightened doomsaying', fully assuming catastrophe as certain and already-determined so that this assumption retroactively changes conditions of its occurrence.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Mentioned as part of the Slovenian philosophical generation with excellent books but no chance of academic jobs; briefly noted as relevant to the Lacan/Kant constellation but underacknowledged in Lorenzo Chiesa's work.
Robert Pippin positive
Žižek credits Pippin for clearly making the point that Hegel's 'owl of Minerva' principle of historical closure applies to Hegel's own philosophy of right, making it a description of its epoch, not a prescriptive model.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Praised as a genius; his analysis of the two irreconcilable village maps in 'Do Dual Organizations Exist?' is used to illustrate the Hegelian insight that antagonism between perspectives can be the truth about a social formation.
Robert Brandom negative
Žižek argues Brandom's reading of Hegel domesticates and eliminates Hegel's radical cut, turning him into a Habermasian avant la lettre preaching unconstrained communication and mutual recognition.
Amartya Sen negative
Mentioned by an audience member as the darling of capability approaches to freedom; Ruda and Žižek briefly suggest the capabilities approach is another version of the Aristotelian freedom-as-capacity problem.
Pierre Bayard positive
Žižek calls Bayard one of the few truly Hegelian essayists today; cites his book 'How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read' as a serious joke proving that the best readings are by those who haven't read every word.
The moderator of the masterclass; Žižek jokingly praises her gentle way of noting his digressiveness from the previous session.
Briefly invoked in the context of historical closure and Hegel's prohibition on teleology that reaches into the future.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Praised for his analysis of society's irreducible antinomy between individualism and holism, and for the insight that this very antinomy IS the fundamental feature of modern society.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout; Žižek develops Lacan's theory of subjectivity, formulas of sexuation, and the Real. Notes that Lacan's anti-philosophical posturing notwithstanding, he made philosophy necessary for psychoanalysis.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited for the observation that only in Christianity does God himself, via Christ's cry on the cross, momentarily cease to believe in God, used to illustrate Žižek's atheist Christianity.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited for the definition of ideology as 'an imaginary relation to the real conditions of one's existence,' used to analyze the slave's self-interpretation as free.
Frank Ruda positive
Žižek invited Ruda to deliver a lecture; praises his books as excellent but laments his inability to get an academic post in Germany; endorses his fatalist project.
Martha Nussbaum negative
Named alongside Sen as an Aristotelian capabilities theorist; Žižek identifies this as the new return of Aristotelianism that Ruda's fatalism aims to overcome.
Author of 'The Not-Two' (MIT), a book on Lacan's formulas of sexuation that Žižek helped publish but criticizes for barely mentioning Joan Copjec.
Ruda invokes Badiou's concept of 'disorientation' to describe the situation where endorsing the signifier 'freedom' leads one to endorse its opposite.
Fredric Jameson positive
Ruda cites the saying attributed to Jameson (though he denies it) that it is easier to imagine the earth hit by a comet than a radical socio-economic transformation.
Alexandre Kojève positive
Invoked for the concept of 'slave ideology', the slave who feels free in thought even while enslaved in reality, used by Frank Ruda to critique freedom-as-capacity.
Samuel Beckett positive
Frank Ruda closes with Beckett's line about three possibilities for not seeing, as an exemplar of the comic fatalist insight that a third option can appear within apparent deadlock.
Cited as part of the 19th-century irrationalist tradition (alongside late Schelling and Hartmann) that predated Freud's theorization of unconscious drives.
Žižek recounts Varoufakis's invitation to co-write an economics book, and Varoufakis's admission that economists don't know what they're doing any more than Žižek does.
Mentioned as an example of the transcendental objection to psychoanalysis (it is an ontic empirical discipline that already presupposes ontological pre-understanding); also briefly in Frank Ruda's discussion of a history of philosophy centered on freedom.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Žižek credits Miller as indispensable, without him he would never have understood Lacan, but criticizes Miller's late re-definition of the Real as postmodern chaotic outside-the-law, his Sarah Palin commentary, and the editorial apparatus he added to Lacan's late seminars.
Joan Copjec positive
Žižek praises her essay 'The Euthanasia of Reason' as a pathbreaking discovery that Lacan's formulas of sexuation exactly map onto Kant's two types of antinomies, and laments how unjustly ignored it is.
Briefly cited by Ruda in the context of contingency and 'may-being' (pouvoir-être), as a contrast to Descartes' strong contingency.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Cited as the canonical example of the transcendental philosophical objection to psychoanalysis (it relies on philosophical presuppositions), and as the dominant occupying force in German academic philosophy.
Eduard von Hartmann negative
Mentioned as an example of 19th-century irrationalism, the 'idiot' who wrote a big book on the unconscious before Freud, used to show that psychoanalysis's discovery of the unconscious has philosophical precedents.
Karl Marx positive
Cited by Ruda for the observation in Capital that freedom is a component of capitalism's self-presentation (freedom, equality, property, and Bentham); also by Žižek for surplus enjoyment as Lacan's borrowing from Marx.
René Descartes positive
Central figure in Frank Ruda's account of rationalist fatalism; Descartes' Passions of the Soul is read as defending the assumption of divine predestination as a precondition for overcoming the erroneous concept of freedom as capacity.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek defends the philosophical relevance of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis against both transcendental philosophical dismissal and clinical reductionism; Freud is treated as part of the rationalist tradition.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure: Žižek develops the move from Kant to Hegel as the key to understanding how antinomies are ontological not merely epistemological, and defends Hegel's genuine radicalism against domestication.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek analyzes Kant's antinomies of pure reason as the starting point for the Hegel/Lacan constellation; praises Kant's radicalism in showing antinomies are constitutive of reason, not contingent failures.
Not directly mentioned but implied in the discussion of analytic philosophy's grip on German academia alongside Habermasians.
What it argues
subjectivity as retroactive self-causation and failureKant's antinomies as ontological rather than merely epistemologicalthe move from Kant to Hegel: obstacle becomes solutionthe philosophical relevance of psychoanalysisfreedom as capacity vs. fatalist freedomcounterfactuals and changing the pastLacan's formulas of sexuation and Kant's antinomies
Dialectical moves 10
“Subject is the outcome of its own failure to be subject — you try to express yourself, you fail, and this failure is subject.”
Subjectivity is not a given entity but a self-referential loop: the self-caused retroactive effect of its own failure to fully constitute itself.
“He is looking for the strange element in the picture but ultimately he is the one — the subject is the strangeness it is looking for.”
The Hitchcockian short-circuit: the seeker of the eccentric point turns out to be the eccentric point itself, illustrating the self-referential loop of subjectivity.
“In thinking, you change the past — not at the level of facts but by rereading it, restructuring it symbolically.”
Thinking operates retroactively, not by altering events but by changing the counterfactual network that constitutes their meaning.
“Coffee without cream is not the same as coffee without milk — the same object is different depending on the negation applied to it.”
Negation is not merely the absence of a positive content; different negations constitute different objects, opening the possibility of changing the past through counterfactual re-framing.
“The very antinomy which appeared as the obstacle IS its own solution — the deadlock is not a failure to grasp reality but a point of contact with reality itself.”
Hegel's move against Kant: what appeared to separate us from reality (the antinomy) is precisely what includes us in the very core of reality.
“The truth about the tribe is the very antagonism of the two maps — the contradiction between images tells you the truth, not any single image.”
Following Lévi-Strauss: the split between two irreconcilable perspectives on the village is not a cognitive error but the truth about the social antagonism of the tribe.
“Far from God abandoning us being a sign of distance, at the very moment we feel abandoned by God we identify with Christ on the cross, who himself no longer believes in God.”
The Christian solution is not overcoming abandonment by God but recognizing that even God undergoes self-abandonment, the distance from God is internal to God.
“The proper dialectical view is the opposite of the usual wisdom: while you are engaged in action you follow necessity, but retrospectively you can see all the possibilities you missed.”
Žižek inverts the standard anti-communist argument (freedom now, necessity retrospectively) to show that retrospection should reveal missed possibilities rather than confirm necessity.
“Freedom can only be thought if one assumes that it is constitutively always already lost.”
Ruda's fatalist inversion: one cannot think genuine freedom by presupposing its givenness; only by assuming its prior loss can a proper concept of freedom be unfolded.
“The worst always already happened — not in the future but in the past, and assuming this may retroactively change its conditions of possibility.”
Ruda's core fatalist axiom: treating catastrophe as already accomplished rather than impending is the precondition for imagining genuine transformation.
Claims 20
asserts
The subject is the outcome of its own failure to be a subject — a short circuit in which the cause is retroactively posited by its effects.Lacanian theory of subjectivity
asserts
Changing the past is possible not at the level of facts but at the level of the counterfactual network — the symbolic background that gives events their meaning.counterfactuals and retroactive re-signification
reframes
Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship' is not about the two sexes missing each other but about an impossibility immanent to each sex that cannot be constituted in itself.Lacanian formula of sexuation
asserts
Subjectivity can only arise in a reality that is ontologically incomplete, traversed by an impossibility.ontological preconditions of subjectivity
rejects
Psychoanalysis is not merely an empirical discipline that relies on prior philosophical presuppositions; Lacan's axiom 'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel' has radical ontological implications.transcendental philosophical objection to psychoanalysis
asserts
Kant's antinomies are not merely signs of the limitation of our knowledge but reveal an ontological antagonism in reality itself.Kantian epistemology vs. Hegelian ontology
asserts
Hegel does not resolve Kantian antinomies through synthesis; he reinterprets the obstacle as its own solution.Hegel's dialectics
rejects
Hegel is not a thinker of reconciliation in the naïve sense but a thinker who moves from antinomy to antinomy, failure to failure.standard readings of Hegelian reconciliation
rejects
Brandom's reading of Hegel domesticates and eliminates Hegel's radical cut, turning him into a Habermasian avant la lettre.Robert Brandom's reading of Hegel
asserts
Joan Copjec's insight that Kant's mathematical and dynamic antinomies map exactly onto Lacan's formulas of sexuation is one of the great breakthroughs in Lacanian theory.Copjec's reading of Lacan and Kant
asserts
The Lacanian Real is not an external chaotic outside-the-law but an immanent, purely formal obstacle or impossibility within the symbolic.Lacanian Real
rejects
Miller's late re-definition of the Real as a postmodern chaotic outside-the-law buys too much into capitalism's own self-ideology.Jacques-Alain Miller's late Lacan interpretation
asserts
The freedom-as-capacity understanding leads people to feel free even when they are not, functioning as a slave ideology.liberal conception of freedom · Frank Ruda
asserts
Fatalism — the assumption that the worst has always already happened — is a precondition for a proper concept of freedom, not its opposite.freedom and fatalism · Frank Ruda
asserts
The history of modern rationalist philosophy (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Freud) is constitutively anti-Aristotelian and consistently attacks the myth of the givenness of freedom.history of philosophy and freedom · Frank Ruda
asserts
Marx's mature work (Critique of Political Economy) steps out of the Young Marx's Aristotelianism, which treated human essential capacities as potentials.Marx's development
asserts
Hegel's 'owl of Minerva' — that a social order can be comprehended only when its time is past — applies to Hegel's own philosophy of right, making it a description of its time, not a model.Hegel's philosophy of right and historical closure
reframes
A proper dialectical view reverses the usual wisdom: not that we think we have a choice but retroactively discover we didn't, but that while acting under necessity we miss all the possibilities that were in fact open.freedom, necessity, and retrospective interpretation
asserts
Adorno's antinomy of society — irreducible split between individualism and holism — is not a failure of social theory but accurately captures the fundamental real feature of modern society.Adorno's theory of society
asserts
In Christianity alone does God himself, at the moment of Christ's abandonment on the cross, cease to believe in God — this is the Christian 'solution' to the problem of being abandoned.Christian theology and atheism
Quotes 15
“Nothing happened to him, he happened to the world.”Slavoj Žižek · subject as active self-causation, not passive trauma-recipient
“In thinking, you change the past. In thinking, you can do this. Not really going back and saving but totally rereading it.”Slavoj Žižek · thinking as retroactive symbolic restructuring of the past
“Coffee which is just coffee is not the same as coffee without cream, it's not the same as coffee without milk. Negation, and that we can change.”Slavoj Žižek · negation constitutes difference; counterfactuals change meaning of events
“The very thing that appeared as a problem, my God we get into an antinomy, becomes its own solution.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian move: obstacle becomes solution
“Without getting this you don't get anything in Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · the obstacle-as-solution is the key to Hegel
“We have for a brief moment God himself who no longer believes in God. You know, this is the Christian solution.”Slavoj Žižek · atheist Christianity; God's self-abandonment as the core of Christianity
“Hegel goes from antinomy to antinomy, from a failure to a failure. But it's not just a limitation of our knowledge.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's dialectics as ontological, not merely epistemological
“Subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier — subject is represented, you fail, and this failure is subject.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian subject as constituted by failure
“Freedom can only be thought if one assumes that it is constitutively always already lost.”Frank Ruda · fatalist precondition for genuine freedom
“The worst always already happened.”Frank Ruda · Ruda's minimal fatalist formula
“I see nothing. It's because there is nothing or it's because I have no eyes. Or both. That makes three possibilities to choose from.”Frank Ruda · comic fatalism; third option opening from within apparent deadlock
“Without Miller I would simply not be in Lacan, I would not ever understand Lacan.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's personal debt to Jacques-Alain Miller despite intellectual disagreements
“It's a much more intricate relationship. There is a gap but a redoubled gap: a gap in philosophy and a gap in the sense of self-obliteration in psychoanalysis itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the philosophy/psychoanalysis relationship as double gap, not simple opposition
“Lacanian real is a kind of a purely formal obstacle, impossibility... Real is not outside symbolic. Real is an internal obstacle, twist whatever within the symbolic itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the Lacanian Real as immanent formal obstacle, not external chaos
“People today who do not find a long-term employment — this is presented to them as a chance to explore ever new options, be creative.”Frank Ruda · precarious labor ideologically repackaged as freedom
Transcript 53 turns
Cathy Newman
So welcome everybody, welcome to the second session of Žižek's masterclass course on between philosophy and psychoanalysis. We got a little way into it yesterday I think with the discussion of surplus pleasure and so on, but even so there were many other things which intervened, mainly Trump and Clinton
So welcome everybody, welcome to the second session of Žižek's masterclass course on between philosophy and psychoanalysis. We got a little way into it yesterday I think with the discussion of surplus pleasure and so on, but even so there were many other things which intervened, mainly Trump and Clinton
Slavoj Žižek
and so on, but I will stop. I love you for this. You are the best example of what I know, that you like to criticize inside people but in the form of praising. Now you said in a nice way I was confused jumping here and there but you said it in such a beautiful polite way. It was such a wealthy dog here and there. Just expressing my love for you, sorry, let’s go
and so on, but I will stop. I love you for this. You are the best example of what I know, that you like to criticize inside people but in the form of praising. Now you said in a nice way I was confused jumping here and there but you said it in such a beautiful polite way. It was such a wealthy dog here and there. Just expressing my love for you, sorry, let’s go
Cathy Newman
on.
on.
Slavoj Žižek
Was that the same thing? Sorry? Was that the same thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Too deeply within analyze. Today we
Was that the same thing? Sorry? Was that the same thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Too deeply within analyze. Today we
Cathy Newman
have more, more from Slavoj. Even more,
have more, more from Slavoj. Even more,
Slavoj Žižek
yeah. Even more, thankfully.
yeah. Even more, thankfully.
Cathy Newman
Also we have half an hour of Frank Ruda who Žižek has invited to come and explore some of his ideas. I won't say much about Frank but he's a fantastic philosopher from Germany and
Also we have half an hour of Frank Ruda who Žižek has invited to come and explore some of his ideas. I won't say much about Frank but he's a fantastic philosopher from Germany and
Slavoj Žižek
I'm not kidding, sorry, it's really a tragedy. He published excellent books in German, in English translated. I'm sorry if I mention this, it's a bit sentimental but, no what do I say now, but he's trying for long years from when I know him to just get a simple modest job. No way. In philosophy, we are totally out. The academia in Germany is occupied by either this new version of Gehirn, how do you call it, brain sciences blah blah, or whatever remains beyond this is brutally occupied by Habermasians. And now you even get the combination of the two. This is why, as you told me yesterday, in Germany a figure like Robert Brandom is so popular because he somehow bridges these two lines, analytic thinking and even some kind of Hegelianism together. I mean, and the situation in Germany is now close to that of Slovenia where we have now for some ten years a wonderful generation, some of their books already translated, Alenka Zupančič, then we have now seven, eight guys like that, books already in print, none of them has even a chance to get a job. So you know when I talk about this precarious work and so on, it's reality for us philosophers. I mean, sorry, I'm really sorry. Anyway, a bit of context. So Žižek will speak for up to an hour, then Frank will
I'm not kidding, sorry, it's really a tragedy. He published excellent books in German, in English translated. I'm sorry if I mention this, it's a bit sentimental but, no what do I say now, but he's trying for long years from when I know him to just get a simple modest job. No way. In philosophy, we are totally out. The academia in Germany is occupied by either this new version of Gehirn, how do you call it, brain sciences blah blah, or whatever remains beyond this is brutally occupied by Habermasians. And now you even get the combination of the two. This is why, as you told me yesterday, in Germany a figure like Robert Brandom is so popular because he somehow bridges these two lines, analytic thinking and even some kind of Hegelianism together. I mean, and the situation in Germany is now close to that of Slovenia where we have now for some ten years a wonderful generation, some of their books already translated, Alenka Zupančič, then we have now seven, eight guys like that, books already in print, none of them has even a chance to get a job. So you know when I talk about this precarious work and so on, it's reality for us philosophers. I mean, sorry, I'm really sorry. Anyway, a bit of context. So Žižek will speak for up to an hour, then Frank will
Cathy Newman
talk for thirty minutes, and then we hope there will be time for discussion before we finish. So, thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, she already explained the, how should I put it, not
talk for thirty minutes, and then we hope there will be time for discussion before we finish. So, thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, she already explained the, how should I put it, not
Slavoj Žižek
the five-year plan but the two-hour plan. Modest Stalinism, like small is beautiful Stalinism, let’s begin with small plans and so on. So I will try to do today, maybe tomorrow we will get a little bit more fun, but today I will try to do something a little bit more connected to philosophy, precisely what you, the kind guy with the red carnation and the mustache. Actually, it’s a poppy. Ah, it's a poppy. Are you from Venezuela, from Colombia, FARC, those drug-dealing, drug-dealing Marxist revolutionaries? Wrong plant. Sorry? Wrong plant. I know they don’t do this, yeah, yeah, okay, but poppy is a symbol. You know that I'm the only idiot of my generation that I know who has never even tried a drug, not even a very soft drug and so on. And I love this so much because regularly some pseudo-clinicians attack me claiming that it's obvious from all my gestures that I must be on cocaine or whatever. And I, did I tell you the story why I never take drugs? Because of my inner Stalinism. Like my idea is, you take drugs, you get kind, you want to dance, all the world is a flower, and then the enemy attacks and you are not ready. I am totally fanatical here. Okay, but let's go on. So today it is more, I hope you will be able to follow it somehow on what you, sir, the poppy, the drug-dealer guy, what you provoked me into some more philosophy. I will begin with the, what I already hinted at yesterday. For Lacan, for all this stuff about the decentered subject, subject is caused by the signifying chain and so on, but it's not that simple as that. If you read Lacan closely, he says some things which sound almost Hegelian, some kind of absolute. For example, the late Lacan, he says somewhere that the subject is ultimately a cause of itself. He of course doesn't mean it in a naive Fichtean idealist way, although Fichte himself again doesn't mean it in this way. But there is a certain structure which I will try to illustrate with two totally stupid, well-known, simple movie clips. What characterizes subjectivity? And it's interesting how, I think I developed this in my, in the long chapter on brain sciences in my *Parallax View* book, is even they, the most positivist, but not stupid, intelligent cognitive scientists admit that for having the effect of subjectivity, a certain short circuit should occur. That in the causal chain you have cause-effect, but then you have a paradoxical cause which is nothing but a retroactive effect of its own effects. And here failure intervenes. And it's this circularity which is for Lacan defining of subjectivity. What is a subject? Subject is something as we know from Lacan a signifier represents etcetera. So subject is represented, or let's put it in a totally naive way, pre-Lacanian, you are a subject, you want to articulate creatively what you are, express yourself, you fail. And this failure is subject. So subject is, you see this closed circuit, subject is the outcome of its own failure to be subject. Now I will try to explain this through two, three examples. The one is my favorite line from Hannibal Lecter novels. I think it's even from the last one which I think it's the worst one. For this very reason that I was talking about. The last one, *Hannibal Rising*, I think. I mean it's, he wrote it, the author Thomas Harris, just for money and so on, it basically was just a treatment to make a movie. But there is one nice phrase, I think it is in this novel. Some psychiatrists try to analyze Hannibal's monstrosity, they try to depict the unfortunate circumstances, traumas, and then there is a wonderful line in the novel claiming that it's wrong to ask what happened to him. The line is, nothing happened to him, he happened to the world. You know, this is a subject. Of course, things happen to you, traumas and so on. But nothing is objectively a trauma. It's always a circle. You have a cause, objet petit a, a trauma is a cause, but this cause is always circular, is posited by the subject. Now, sorry, I almost wanted, but I still, I'm becoming a feminist, if you were not to be a woman but a man, I would have said where is my slave and so on, but sorry. Okay, the first, *The Man Who Knew Too Much*. Just look attentively at this very stupid one-minute scene from second version of *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, Hitchcock. The guy, you know, whose son is kidnapped, misunderstood some news and thinks that in Ambrose Chapel a taxidermist is looking for him, that that's where they held his son. And he just, he's perplexed, is there something wrong here. Okay, next one but give me a minute will be Superman, yeah. No, it's an extremely simple point, I hope you got it. He walks along the street, James Stewart, and he is looking for what we call that, the Hitchcockian point of gaze. Some weird moment that sticks out and so on. But you get the point. What is the real eccentric point that sticks out? He himself. He is the strange element, you know, he is looking for the strange element in the picture but ultimately he is the one. And this short circuit defines subjectivity. Now I will show you another clip, even more ridiculous, but I think it works. Let's just do it because it causes me such anxiety if something will not function so that I want to, it's from *Superman* I, when Superman arrives too late and his girlfriend is killed and then, okay, you probably know what he will do. Okay, sorry for this nonsense, but I wanted to give a very simple reading of this movie. Of course, what this scene depicts is nonsense physically, empirically. But this is the best natural embodiment of what thinking means. In thinking, you do exactly this. In thinking, you change the past. In thinking, you can do this. Not really going back and saving but totally rereading it. You are literally changing the past in thinking. Because the past is not just what really happened but the way we structure symbolically the past. And that's what I wanted to tell you, that this short circuit of changing the past, not of course at the level of facts but at, and again I will be making a little bit of cheap propaganda, in chapter I in my new book *Disparities*, I don't know if I already mentioned this, I maybe mentioned the book, but this, that I consider two chapters a little bit outstanding, worthy of reading. One is the third chapter where I go in detail into polemics, probably I'm even afraid to think what will happen, how I will be attacked and so on, a detailed debate with Robert Brandom's, which is available online, reading of *Phenomenology of Spirit*, which is I think a beautiful in the sense of very consequent, the guy is not an idiot, reading, but I think it's a totally wrong full domestication of Hegel. All the radical cut of Hegel disappears and Hegel becomes a kind of Habermasian avant la lettre preaching some kind of unconstrained communication, mutual recognition and so on and so on. The second chapter that it's worth reading I think is the eighth one before the last where I go into this, what I call negative theology, and the title I like, you know, of the chapter like, is God unconscious, stupid, evil, or, and there I introduce but I already talked widely about it here, the notion of counterfactuals. How things are what they are, you cannot change that. What you can change is the counterfactual network against the background of which a thing is what it is or was what it was. I'm sorry to repeat a joke but just to make it clear, which I think I already used in this room, I would say maybe not ten times but five, six times. You know, oh my god I'm afraid to say that scene from *Ninochka*, you know, a joke told in *Ninochka*, a guy goes to a cafeteria, can I have coffee without cream? The waiter says, sorry, we have no cream, we only have milk, so I can only give you coffee without milk. And it's a deeply Hegelian correct joke. The point is that the coffee is the same in both times. You will say, oh, it's coffee is coffee, it's just coffee. No, but coffee which is just coffee is not the same as coffee without cream, it's not the same as coffee without milk. Negation, and that we can change. For example, if you, let me give you a simple historical example. Something happened, happened, which was very bad for you, a big defeat. And you think it was predestined, like there was no choice, it had to happen. Wouldn't it change all your perspective if you retroactively discovered that you blew it up, that it would have been very easy for you to prevent it. Or to put it in the terms of that joke, in this way a coffee which is just coffee, the catastrophe, would be changed into a coffee without milk, which means there could have been milk but of course not. In this sense again we can change the past. But also in the in the opposite direction. You think
the five-year plan but the two-hour plan. Modest Stalinism, like small is beautiful Stalinism, let’s begin with small plans and so on. So I will try to do today, maybe tomorrow we will get a little bit more fun, but today I will try to do something a little bit more connected to philosophy, precisely what you, the kind guy with the red carnation and the mustache. Actually, it’s a poppy. Ah, it's a poppy. Are you from Venezuela, from Colombia, FARC, those drug-dealing, drug-dealing Marxist revolutionaries? Wrong plant. Sorry? Wrong plant. I know they don’t do this, yeah, yeah, okay, but poppy is a symbol. You know that I'm the only idiot of my generation that I know who has never even tried a drug, not even a very soft drug and so on. And I love this so much because regularly some pseudo-clinicians attack me claiming that it's obvious from all my gestures that I must be on cocaine or whatever. And I, did I tell you the story why I never take drugs? Because of my inner Stalinism. Like my idea is, you take drugs, you get kind, you want to dance, all the world is a flower, and then the enemy attacks and you are not ready. I am totally fanatical here. Okay, but let's go on. So today it is more, I hope you will be able to follow it somehow on what you, sir, the poppy, the drug-dealer guy, what you provoked me into some more philosophy. I will begin with the, what I already hinted at yesterday. For Lacan, for all this stuff about the decentered subject, subject is caused by the signifying chain and so on, but it's not that simple as that. If you read Lacan closely, he says some things which sound almost Hegelian, some kind of absolute. For example, the late Lacan, he says somewhere that the subject is ultimately a cause of itself. He of course doesn't mean it in a naive Fichtean idealist way, although Fichte himself again doesn't mean it in this way. But there is a certain structure which I will try to illustrate with two totally stupid, well-known, simple movie clips. What characterizes subjectivity? And it's interesting how, I think I developed this in my, in the long chapter on brain sciences in my *Parallax View* book, is even they, the most positivist, but not stupid, intelligent cognitive scientists admit that for having the effect of subjectivity, a certain short circuit should occur. That in the causal chain you have cause-effect, but then you have a paradoxical cause which is nothing but a retroactive effect of its own effects. And here failure intervenes. And it's this circularity which is for Lacan defining of subjectivity. What is a subject? Subject is something as we know from Lacan a signifier represents etcetera. So subject is represented, or let's put it in a totally naive way, pre-Lacanian, you are a subject, you want to articulate creatively what you are, express yourself, you fail. And this failure is subject. So subject is, you see this closed circuit, subject is the outcome of its own failure to be subject. Now I will try to explain this through two, three examples. The one is my favorite line from Hannibal Lecter novels. I think it's even from the last one which I think it's the worst one. For this very reason that I was talking about. The last one, *Hannibal Rising*, I think. I mean it's, he wrote it, the author Thomas Harris, just for money and so on, it basically was just a treatment to make a movie. But there is one nice phrase, I think it is in this novel. Some psychiatrists try to analyze Hannibal's monstrosity, they try to depict the unfortunate circumstances, traumas, and then there is a wonderful line in the novel claiming that it's wrong to ask what happened to him. The line is, nothing happened to him, he happened to the world. You know, this is a subject. Of course, things happen to you, traumas and so on. But nothing is objectively a trauma. It's always a circle. You have a cause, objet petit a, a trauma is a cause, but this cause is always circular, is posited by the subject. Now, sorry, I almost wanted, but I still, I'm becoming a feminist, if you were not to be a woman but a man, I would have said where is my slave and so on, but sorry. Okay, the first, *The Man Who Knew Too Much*. Just look attentively at this very stupid one-minute scene from second version of *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, Hitchcock. The guy, you know, whose son is kidnapped, misunderstood some news and thinks that in Ambrose Chapel a taxidermist is looking for him, that that's where they held his son. And he just, he's perplexed, is there something wrong here. Okay, next one but give me a minute will be Superman, yeah. No, it's an extremely simple point, I hope you got it. He walks along the street, James Stewart, and he is looking for what we call that, the Hitchcockian point of gaze. Some weird moment that sticks out and so on. But you get the point. What is the real eccentric point that sticks out? He himself. He is the strange element, you know, he is looking for the strange element in the picture but ultimately he is the one. And this short circuit defines subjectivity. Now I will show you another clip, even more ridiculous, but I think it works. Let's just do it because it causes me such anxiety if something will not function so that I want to, it's from *Superman* I, when Superman arrives too late and his girlfriend is killed and then, okay, you probably know what he will do. Okay, sorry for this nonsense, but I wanted to give a very simple reading of this movie. Of course, what this scene depicts is nonsense physically, empirically. But this is the best natural embodiment of what thinking means. In thinking, you do exactly this. In thinking, you change the past. In thinking, you can do this. Not really going back and saving but totally rereading it. You are literally changing the past in thinking. Because the past is not just what really happened but the way we structure symbolically the past. And that's what I wanted to tell you, that this short circuit of changing the past, not of course at the level of facts but at, and again I will be making a little bit of cheap propaganda, in chapter I in my new book *Disparities*, I don't know if I already mentioned this, I maybe mentioned the book, but this, that I consider two chapters a little bit outstanding, worthy of reading. One is the third chapter where I go in detail into polemics, probably I'm even afraid to think what will happen, how I will be attacked and so on, a detailed debate with Robert Brandom's, which is available online, reading of *Phenomenology of Spirit*, which is I think a beautiful in the sense of very consequent, the guy is not an idiot, reading, but I think it's a totally wrong full domestication of Hegel. All the radical cut of Hegel disappears and Hegel becomes a kind of Habermasian avant la lettre preaching some kind of unconstrained communication, mutual recognition and so on and so on. The second chapter that it's worth reading I think is the eighth one before the last where I go into this, what I call negative theology, and the title I like, you know, of the chapter like, is God unconscious, stupid, evil, or, and there I introduce but I already talked widely about it here, the notion of counterfactuals. How things are what they are, you cannot change that. What you can change is the counterfactual network against the background of which a thing is what it is or was what it was. I'm sorry to repeat a joke but just to make it clear, which I think I already used in this room, I would say maybe not ten times but five, six times. You know, oh my god I'm afraid to say that scene from *Ninochka*, you know, a joke told in *Ninochka*, a guy goes to a cafeteria, can I have coffee without cream? The waiter says, sorry, we have no cream, we only have milk, so I can only give you coffee without milk. And it's a deeply Hegelian correct joke. The point is that the coffee is the same in both times. You will say, oh, it's coffee is coffee, it's just coffee. No, but coffee which is just coffee is not the same as coffee without cream, it's not the same as coffee without milk. Negation, and that we can change. For example, if you, let me give you a simple historical example. Something happened, happened, which was very bad for you, a big defeat. And you think it was predestined, like there was no choice, it had to happen. Wouldn't it change all your perspective if you retroactively discovered that you blew it up, that it would have been very easy for you to prevent it. Or to put it in the terms of that joke, in this way a coffee which is just coffee, the catastrophe, would be changed into a coffee without milk, which means there could have been milk but of course not. In this sense again we can change the past. But also in the in the opposite direction. You think
unknown
you have a, you think you have a choice, but retroactively you discover you didn't really have a choice. And here again connecting to what Frank will talk about, I think that we should precisely reverse the usual wisdom which is, while we are engaged in some activity we think we have a choice. You can do this or that but retroactively from a historical perspective we discover that we really didn't have a choice. For example, this would be a typical anti-communist critical reading of October Revolution. Those idiots acting at that time thought but my God, we blew it up, we should liquidate Stalin early enough, whatever, as if there were alternatives. But as wise reactionaries like to point out, now retroactively when we see the entire image, it is clear that there had to be Stalinism, that it was a necessary outcome. I don't agree with this, just to give you a certain logic. The idea is again afterwards you see there was not a choice. I claim that a much more dialectical view would have been exactly the opposite one. That while you are engaged in something, you just act and react following a certain necessity. My God, to survive I have to do this, I have to do that. And that precisely a proper dialectical view is not to dispel this illusion of freedom and to demonstrate how oh, it has had to happen, but to bring out all the possibilities, all again the counterfactuals that were there but while you were caught into
you have a, you think you have a choice, but retroactively you discover you didn't really have a choice. And here again connecting to what Frank will talk about, I think that we should precisely reverse the usual wisdom which is, while we are engaged in some activity we think we have a choice. You can do this or that but retroactively from a historical perspective we discover that we really didn't have a choice. For example, this would be a typical anti-communist critical reading of October Revolution. Those idiots acting at that time thought but my God, we blew it up, we should liquidate Stalin early enough, whatever, as if there were alternatives. But as wise reactionaries like to point out, now retroactively when we see the entire image, it is clear that there had to be Stalinism, that it was a necessary outcome. I don't agree with this, just to give you a certain logic. The idea is again afterwards you see there was not a choice. I claim that a much more dialectical view would have been exactly the opposite one. That while you are engaged in something, you just act and react following a certain necessity. My God, to survive I have to do this, I have to do that. And that precisely a proper dialectical view is not to dispel this illusion of freedom and to demonstrate how oh, it has had to happen, but to bring out all the possibilities, all again the counterfactuals that were there but while you were caught into
Slavoj Žižek
action you missed them. This is also all connected with the topic of predestination and so on and so on. Okay, we don't have time to go, to go into this now because now I will go into what I promised you. I will begin with a short reflection on, and please again more than ever I mean it this time, interrupt me if anything is not clear. I will simply try to articulate my answer in very simple terms to the basic problem which is a common-sense problem but a naive question but I think it's crucial. It deserves an answer. Why do we, by we I mean vaguely let's call it Lacanians, people who are engaged with psychoanalysis, why do we deal with philosophy, precisely what you asked me before? Is this a secondary application? Is there a necessary link? Because again as you know we get regularly attacked from both sides. A standard philosophical argument is the transcendental one. Which means you find it in Habermas, in Heidegger already in a different way. The idea is that in spite of all restrained qualifications, psychoanalysis is simply an ontic specific empirical procedure dealing with a very specific phenomenon psychic troubles. Okay, it provides a certain image of human psyche but as such not only it cannot have any direct philosophical relevance but it even always already has to rely on a certain philosophical pre-understanding. For example, don't underestimate this logic. It has a certain immanent necessity in it. For example, isn't it true that when Freud analyzed the psyche he had to rely on a certain set of notions, preconception of causes, effects and so on. Studies are written on how Freudian theory of libido, libido, relies on this mechanistic notion of energy, conservation of energy and so on and so on. So this is the classical philosophical argument against the autonomy of sciences. That for example even quantum physics to do its job, it has already to presuppose a certain conceptual network. And you cannot be a radical empiricist and say no, no, no, it’s through studying, doing its experiments, exploring its matter that it discovers new notions of causality and so on and so on. It does, but nonetheless in its basic approach to reality it has already to rely on certain concepts of what is causality and so on and so on. And you cannot get out of this circle. You are never at a zero level where you just look at, at reality. So again we have the philosophical reproach to psychoanalysis. It might be interesting, it might even have some secondary philosophical consequences but mostly when philosophers recognize this, they take it in a very naive way. They claim okay, what does psychoanalysis prove, that we are not just pure rational beings, you know that stupid metaphor that I think should be prohibited, of how the iceberg and the unconscious is the bigger part of the iceberg that we don't see, we see just the ego and so on. But then every philosopher will tell you what’s so new about it. You have long tradition in the 19th century of irrationalism from late Schelling, Schopenhauer, even the term *unbewusste*, wasn't it who was that idiot, no Hartmann or who wrote a big book on unconscious in the middle of Hartmann, yeah, on 19th century. So again well before, before Freud you have a wide reflection on how you know human being, our reason is just a puppet of some unconscious drives and so on and so on. So you can show, although I totally reject it, but it's easy to show in an immanent philosophical way that for Freud to do his job many things already had to happen in our basic pre-understanding of what is reality, certain notion of irrationality, of the limitation of our reason and so on and so on all that. So Lacan, this is one target of psychoanalysis. That it's not simply strong enough, it may be interesting but it has to rely on certain philosophical presuppositions, preconceptions that it cannot ground out of itself. Then we have the opposite approach from some Lacanians, clinicians, that the only, the real in psychoanalysis, the only real is clinic, patients and so on, and that what we are doing, by we I mean people who are not clinicians, we are simply ultimately playing cultural games, applying psychoanalysis and so on and so on, but these are only after-effects, cultural games, maybe an interesting things, but irrelevant if it's not directly grounded in clinical experience. Against both these, I'm sorry that my Stalinism will explode again, this right-wing and left-wing deviation I think that the correct, Stalinist Lacanian, my god, way is that from the Lacanian standpoint Lacan's axiom *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship, is not an axiom which only underlies human sexuality determining it as fundamentally antagonistic. And incidentally even here Lacan is often misread, even Jacques-Alain Miller sometimes I think gets lost. For example when he says that *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel* can also be read as the they are out of sync the two sexes, that for example it's once he even uses this for me very vulgar totally inappropriate metaphor that like masculine sex is like a key but you don't ever fight the find the what do you trust the key into, lock, how do you call it, keyhole. Yes, the keyhole never fits it which for me it's a little bit too vulgar to to go and because I think, I think it's totally wrong. You know, as proper Lacanians demonstrate this reading of the two sexes as always in a permanent conflict, never harmony and so on and so on. This is not at all what Lacan means, this to use the horrible terrifyingly bad bestseller *Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus*. This is absolute, no the whole point of Lacan is not that we have the two sexes as constituted and then they always miss each other and so on, but that each of the two sexes cannot be constituted in itself. Woman cannot be a woman, man cannot be a woman. The the gap, the impossibility is not between the two sexes but it's immanent inherent in each of the sexes. So again Lacan's there is no sexual relationship is an axiom with radical ontological implication. An axiom which posits the antagonistic, incomplete, flawed, whatever, character of reality itself, the impossibility to grasp it as a whole. And subjectivity can only arise in a reality which is ontologically incomplete, traversed by an impossibility. This also means for Lacan, I will try to demonstrate this, now I'm just positing the axioms, that subject is immanently constitutively sexed. It's not enough to say that subject emerges when substance is non-all antagonistic inconsistent. The mediating term is here sexuality. In order to have subject, the antagonism, impossibility that cuts across reality has to acquire a form of sexuality, of the impossibility of the sexual, of the sexual relationship. So how do I, how do I develop this? What do I mean by this? Let's begin with Kant. From Kant to Hegel. Why is for Lacan Kant at the beginning of it all? I'm of course here relying on the pathbreaking study and it's very strange how totally ignored it is by Joan Copjec, *The Euthanasia of Reason*, which is typical how I organized in publishing the book *The Not-Two* by Lorenzo Chiesa, who is also recently it appeared by MIT, who is also a polemic by me and so on. He mentions a little bit Alenka Zupančič but it's so strange, it's a book which is all about Lacan's formula of sexuation and Joan Copjec I think it's not even mentioned there. It's in a very weird way how her text, which is for me one of the absolute great texts, is ignored. So let me do, let me try to develop this. In the predominant perception, Kant is perceived as someone who openly admitted the failure of general ontology, an ontology which aims at grasping the whole of reality. This is Kant's big revolution. You know, if you know a little bit of Kant, we don't have time to go into details now, Kant's basic hypothesis is that, axiom even, that when our mind tries to grasp all of reality, not just limited experience that we have, temporal experience, but if we try to extrapolate from what we see here, from what we can test, how all of reality is structured, we not only fail, but we get caught into what Kant calls antinomies. And there is no primitive Hegelian dialectics in it. It's not that it's this and that, let's do a synthesis. For Kant, these are radical antinomies in the sense of like is there a free will or is all of reality totally determined by natural laws. Kant's position is a radical antinomy. We can logically prove with impeccable reasoning both versions. And then I will not give I mean, just Google Kant's concepts or whatever, Kant lexicon, you get this explained in a simple way better than I can emphasize how all the big like is does the world the universe reality that in which we dwell, does it have a temporal beginning or a limit in space or not. Again Kant's point is the moment we overstep our empirical experience and try to think reality as totality, as an all, we necessarily get caught into contradictions. And all other, so freedom of the will, all also the elements like is reality divisible ad infinitum or do we arrive at some minimal parts, atoms. Again Kant's point is antinomy. Now comes, I’m just trying to reconstruct for you, this will not be proofs, the reasoning that’s behind what I perceive as philosophical relevance of psychoanalysis. First so we have this Kantian situation, antinomies. Kant distinguishes two types of antinomies, so-called mathematical antinomies which are the antinomies of of quantitative antinomies when we are dealing with too much excessive quantities, quantities which are beyond our perception, and so-called qualitative or dynamic antinomies which are concerned with qualitative difference like I don't know is there a free will, is there God or whatever. And the shock of Joan Copjec was to discover that these two antinomies, quantitative antinomies, dynamic antinomies and mathematical antinomies exactly fit, and it's shocking that Lacan never writes this was not afraid sorry was not aware of it, exactly fit Lacan's formulas of sexuation. In other words, what are for Kant mathematical antinomies, all or non-all is everything are structured like what Lacan calls the deadlock, antagonism of feminine sexuality. What Kant calls dynamic antinomies which are structured exactly like what Lacan calls masculine antagonism, which is universality and its constitutive exception and so on and so on. So that's again, that's the big breakthrough of Joan Copjec. Just to establish this link. That exactly that Kant was struggling for years, if you look seminars which which come before *Encore*, before the he was struggling for years trying to formulate precisely these formulas of sexuation, but what he arrived at the end is exactly Kant's antinomies of pure reason. Which is why in my new book that I'm just finishing, there is a chapter of Antinomies of Pure Sexuation, because this is what Lacan is doing. Okay, so what’s then the problem with Kant? Here I think what is crucial is to accomplish a passage from Kant to Hegel. Because Kant, for Kant the ultimate deadlock is an epistemological one concerning knowledge. Antinomies are for Kant just antinomies of our knowledge. Kant posits a reality in itself which cannot be antinomic. Things are what they are out there, but we cannot get to know them. Antinomy we when we try to understand all of it we get with our limited human mind we get necessarily caught into antinomies. Which is for Kant a proof that reality is unknowable to us. And things get here with regard to ethics incredibly interesting. Because then Kant asks the question, I often quoted this passage, he asks the question in his *Critique of Practical Reason*, but why, why did God create the world in such a stupid way that we cannot get to know external reality the way it really is. And Kant gives an extremely radical interesting answer, for ethical reasons. If we were to be able to know how reality really is, ethics would not have been possible. Because we would simply know how things are and if there is God we would act ethically, but not really because for Kant as you know a real ethical act is when you do it just for the sake of duty. But if we were to know reality then we would have known, if I act well I will be maybe not punished but rewarded by and so acting ethically would really become would simply become a matter of calculation. I do I act ethically because I know I will be punished in my afterlife. So again but let's go a step further here to see all the shocking dimension. So Kant remains antinomian at the epistemological level. As Hegel puts it so nicely, Kant shows too much tenderness for the for the things, for reality. If for Kant if there is an antinomy, it means we don't know how things really are. Antinomies are always a sign of the limitation of our reason. In other words to return, if you can prove that the universe is at the same time unlimited and finite, or if you can prove that there is universal determinism but at the same time there is free will, this means that simply there is something wrong in your logic. Wrong in the sense that in the sense that it doesn't fit reality, that we are unable to understand the way things really are. Now the greatness of Kant here he is very radical is that for him this is not just a limitation of certain class, epoch, whatever, but antinomies are for Kant constitutive of human reason as such. Now the move from Kant to Hegel is a very radical one. It's not a return to naive ontology like no, no, we can get to know the way things really are in themselves. Hegel's gesture is a very crazy radical one. And that's why incidentally I don't like, although it's beautifully written, Brandom's analysis. Because I think his entire effort is to domesticate Hegel. To he takes Hegel's most daring paradoxical statements and domesticates them. It's really as if showing, don't be afraid, Hegel is not really such a bad guy, we can read it as I think this is even the subtitle of the first subchapter I think in my that in defense of Hegel's madness, you know. Like you have all these crazy statements in Hegel, not necessary to repeat them, and Brandom's effort is to say don't worry, we can translate all that into our ordinary language and we see and so on. But okay. Hegel's view, I'm sorry if I will repeat old stuff here. I will repeat two old stories, each of them I already repeated in this room again, these ones maybe even ten times but, but just to make it clear because now I'm dealing with really the very focus of what I'm trying to do. Hegel's move is not simply to claim no we can move over Kant and know reality. Hegel's claim is much more radical one, it's that the antinomy which for Kant in Kant's view prevents our contact with reality is the very point where we can touch the real outside. Let me give you two examples that I used, the first one fifteen times I would say in my books but it's so clear, I'm sorry if many of you know it. This would be a clear-cut case. Adorno in his text on notion of society, I think, claims, but just forget about the example, think about the logic, he claims how any notion of society in our world oscillates between in sociology he means Adorno between the two extremes. Either we are individualists and try to develop how society emerges as a spectra objectified reified phantom out of concrete interaction of individuals. Or we are more Durk- Durkheimian organicists and we try to develop how society comes first as objective field of social interactions and how individuals emerge in a specific epoch of social life out out so either you are individualist or you are how should I call it organicist, holist. And Adorno first radicalizes this into an antinomy. He says there is no synthesis here, you know Adorno is here nonetheless bright. He is totally opposed to this pseudo-dialectical idea no this is one extreme there is another extreme but what about a dialectical interaction where there is society but nonetheless this society as objective field involves individuals or whatever, he doesn't buy this bullshit. He says the antinomy is irreducible. There is no way to include two extremes individualist and holist where each of them would have its place. No, his idea is no, we will we always fail to construct a unified notion of society, we always get caught into an antinomy. But and it's so simple, I'm sorry if you know it, Adorno's solution is you know what, it is but this very antinomy is the basic feature of today's society. Today's modern society is characterized, just think about our world, on the one hand we are individualized again and again, the whole ideological machinery individualizes us because it's part of the moralization of the existing social order. For example I think I often use this example, take ecology, how does ideology work in ecology, to tell you don't criticize society, think about your part in it, did you recycle all the coke cans, did you put aside, you know this false super-ego individualization. Also did you notice how the more our society is global and impenetrable chaotic in its economic processes and so on, the more we are addressed as radically responsible like we are condemned to freedom, this is all the second modernity Giddens stuff and so on, you know the story I'm often repeating it no, like you complain I cannot give even get a permanent job and then you are immediately accused of being afraid of freedom, can't you see that the inability to get a permanent job means that a new freedom is open to you, a freedom to reinvent yourself creatively every year again and again. So intelligent sociologists get this how this extreme hedonist individualism today is strictly the obverse of the fact that global social process or economic is becoming more and more totally impenetrable. Just think about crisis, apart from some, there were some, leftist but even some intelligent rightist economists, it was a mega shock for the majority, nobody saw it coming. It's incredible how little, I really think it's not an exaggeration that economists today, especially macro-economists, are basically magicians, this is return to magical thinking I mean, they don't know what I remember how I learned this, Varoufakis invited me three years ago, now probably he is too high, I appreciate him, I don't despise him that's my bad joke. Before he became Varoufakis the media person, he invited me he told me why don't we write a book together on economy. I said I told him but listen, whatever I write about economy I bluff, I don't have any idea of it. And Varoufakis answered, but yes but do you think that we economists know what we are doing? No, we are doing exactly the same, nobody knows it no. So again, you see the beauty don't disappear soon you will have a duty. Ah, now I will play Donald Trump to, where are you going to the toilet disgusting what are you doing you know, I mentioned this yesterday Donald Trump to you are my Hillary now yeah. Okay, sorry, let's go on. But you see the beauty of Adorno's solution. The very thing that appeared as a problem, my God we get into an antinomy, becomes its own solution. Because this antinomy, this radical never reconciled split into extreme individualism and impenetrable objectivity is the fundamental real feature of society today. This is the proper how should I put it step from Kant to Hegel. Hegel does not resolve Kantian antinomies. There is no step further into a higher dialectical synthesis or whatever. He just reinterprets the obstacle, what appears as the obstacle as its own solution. Without getting this you don't get anything in Hegel. For example that's why Hegel is not a thinker of reconciliation in the thanks sense that things looks back but then ooh through some wonder they get reconciled. No, it's a crucial passage, I quoted it already in my previous book *Absolute Recoil*, where Hegel says that the reconciliation is always a retroactive movement. The Hegelian reconciliation is not a Frank, if you are back now, if you want me to shake your hands I cannot resist did you wash your hands afterwards so that I can you see the no, when a my formula this one, when we fight for communism there are no moralist limits or limits of bourgeois taste we should go to the sorry but let me go on and then I will give you the most beautiful example did you I which I repeat in just five six of my books but just to make a point and then conclude and give the word to Genosse Ruda. That eternal example that I've written you must even know the graph just to so that you get the point you know my favorite Levi-Strauss in structural anthropology volume *Do Dual Organizations Exist?* I think this is breathtaking. Levi-Strauss don't dismiss him as an early stupid structuralist, he was a genius. It's such a simple story, I'm sorry if you know it, but just again to get the point. He visited certain stupid tribe, I don't know where, and he there asked them to draw the map of their village. And he noticed how he got from half of the tribe one image and from the other half another image. Some members of the tribe draw the image like this: here in the center is the central temple and then houses in a circle around. The other half wrote a totally different image, it's as if cut divided by a line. The temple is here on the one side with some important houses, ordinary small houses huts on the other side. Now of course the question is but there must be a real disposition of houses, how are the houses really disposed and so what do you see when you hire a helicopter and take a photo from above? The result is neither of the two, some mixture and so on. But then Levi-Strauss does something wonderful. He says that this very contradiction, half of the people see the houses like this the other half like that, it's wrong to compare it with reality and to say you see they exaggerate in one sense the others in another sense but the real disposition of houses is somewhere in the middle. No, Levi-Strauss sees the element of truth about this tribe in this very caricature opposition because he says in a very beautiful analysis he shows how this tribe was in the middle of passing from egalitarian pre-class society into already first forms of hierarchy. And then he demonstrated how those who were losing on the lower side perceived the class struggle, they gave the mapping where on the one side are the privileged priests and so on, we the poor suckers are on the other side. Of course as is always the case the case the rich the new ruling class perceived itself of course as we are the harmonious center which and so on. So you see Levi-Strauss then makes a wonderful point that it's wrong to ask about the two images, two maps, which is the true one. The truth about the tribe is the very antagonism of the two images. This tells you the truth. So the very problem, the very antinomy brings you close is gives you the in- so you got here the basic point. So again let's go on so to conclude briefly obviously we will have to do much more philosophy tomorrow. But I I promise you something I will keep my word, you still have the the emails of the guys here. I will do my usual I will give you my usual word which at least there I usually was not lying no, I will send you tomorrow some files so that the what I will not be able to deliver here you will you can get them if you want the text because as always you know fuck you I never prepare classes for you, I use the stuff from my new book no so you can get it. Okay, let's go on. So that's then the idea of Lacan that in the same way that Hegel draws the ontological consequences of Kantian antinomies which means that it's not only that our epistemology, our knowledge of reality gets caught into antinomies, but it reproduces an antinomy which is in the very core of what is reality. Reality is profoundly antinomic. Antinomic in precisely the sense that philosophy which wants to be traditional ontology depicting all of reality with such fundamental and so on some fundamental always by definition fails, which is why that’s my problem with Lacan's terminology when he says *je m'insurge contre la*, I raise myself against philosophy. Well fuck you, all the philosophy is doing this from Kant onward, you know like Kant already refuses for what he is doing the term philosophy. He says it's just prolegomena, transcendental preparation of philosophy. Fichte, Schelling in the same way. Hegel, he said it's not philosophy, it's Wissenschaft, it's knowledge. Marx, Nietzsche, no philosopher after Kant wants to be a philosopher except new ontology new materialism now and so on. It's quite incredible how philosophy after Kant inclusive of Kant is defined as anti-philosophy. In no way can you take Hegel as a positive ontologist. Hegel is not an ultra-rationalist who paints some rational structure harmonious of the universe, no what Hegel does is just going from antinomy to antinomy from a failure to a failure. But it's not just a limitation of our knowledge. The crazy thesis again is that the absolutely crucial moment here again is this passage from epistemology to ontology. You get caught into an epistemological deadlock and then the properly dialectical solution is not to overcome the deadlock but to demonstrate how what you thought separates you from reality, this deadlock, is precisely what includes you into the very what includes you into the very core of reality. And as I repeatedly try to develop in my books, this and only this is the reason why I consider myself of course a an atheist Christian. Because as Chesterton put it so nicely, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, in every religion you have atheists, every religion admits there are people who don't believe in God. Maybe he is wrong but I'm just reporting his position. Only in Christianity we have that famous *Eli Eli lama sabachthani*, father why have you forsaken me. We have for a brief moment God himself who no longer believes in God. You know, this is the Christian solution. In a traditional religion, now you will see the link with what I was saying, in a traditional religion we are abandoned by God. And then through some I don't know God's grace or from our side hard work we try to fill in the gap. Christian message is totally different. It is yes, we are abandoned by God but at that very point when we feel totally abandoned by God we identify with Christ on the cross who feels abandoned. The very abandonment by God being abandoned by God is just an effect of God being radically separated from itself. Okay, I will be honest, I hope this was not too confused. Tomorrow I will draw some more consequences from this and then I will do something totally crazy, I hope you will swallow it. I will try to give you a simple musical example of this logic of void supplement. I will follow the dialectic, very simple, of background and melody. Pachelbel's Canon, then what happens in Mozart, you know how something that for Pachelbel was already a musical piece in itself all of a sudden with Mozart starts to function as a background and needs to be filled in with melody. And then I will go into this gap which you wonderfully fill in Mozart between main melodic one line which is in Mozart always thwarted, blocked, but the beautiful effect is that’s why at the end of a piece typically in Mozart it's as if what was thwarted explodes in an unexpected excessive finale. While I will try to prove the ultimate origin of kitsch is Beethoven. Because he goes into this full romantic horror of bringing the melody out to its full culmination. For example, one of the greatest pieces of musical kitsch for me if you know it is Beethoven's the most famous overture *Leonore No. the third Leonore overture to *Fidelio*, no it's kitsch and then I will go it's something so simple I will try just to I will shock you to give you now a how do you call it a teaser for joy. My basic point will be did you see, it's shitty movie, the scene did you see *You Only Live Twice*, the fourth or fifth James Bond movie, the fifth. Okay, in Japan there is a wedding scene there which perfectly encapsulates this typical western moment of first you have this restrained pseudo-oriental music and then you have big release, full melody with violins and so on and it's I think a wonderful the most colonialist moment in music that I can imagine. And I will so I hope you will be able to swallow that but now enough of this, *Deutschland nimmt über*, Germany takes over now, please. First of all, I want to thank Slavoj for making this possible and for the endorsement which started years ago and I'm sure he has from the very beginning regretted, regretted it, I wanted to say that. Also, yesterday you proposed an honorary membership, maybe not a job, an honorary membership in the Slovenian gang. I heard that my last name in Slovenian has something to do with mining, so maybe there's a proletarian position open, I would apply. And thanks for bearing with me as a committed fatalist and I want to argue that you should be too. I expect this is a huge disappointment already so I mean it can only get better. So I was supposed to say something about my new book which is called *Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism*, and it's a book on freedom but why give it such an unappealing title. *Abolishing Freedom* does not sound very charming or even more so like a very defensible program at all. The basic argumentative move of the book is fourfold. First it starts from a very trivial observation, namely that the signifier freedom does not at all necessarily and always mean what it seems to say. To put it trivially, not every time someone refers to freedom for justifying what he or she does, one actually encounters freedom in a meaningful, meaningful way in in the consequence. Let me give you a stupid empirical yet quite I think telling telling recent example, namely what happened more or less recently with the American company Virgin Enterprise. They claimed that having a prescribed number of vacation days, annual vacation days, is ultimately somehow unproductive and very repressive for their employees. They themselves should freely decide how often they think they need a leave, freeing them from all external constraints, authoritarian and pre-given rules and so forth. This was also presented as being very much up-to-date, I quote their website: "Flexible working has revolutionized how, where and when we all do our jobs. So if working 9-to-5 no longer applies, then why should strict annual leave vacation policies?" And one could note that this would also work as a slogan for working from 9-to-9 and abolishing vacation altogether I think but nonetheless. Of course there was a condition that came along with this project: holidays can only be taken when the work is done. And the employees are considered to be the ones to know when that is. When that happened, what then happened was that the number of taken holidays effectively got lower than ever in the company's history. They emerged, there emerged immediately an internal super-egoic pressure of self-control which proved more oppressive than the prior external regulations. This was an effect of the employees supposedly freely deciding about when and how much holiday they need, and the effect was that the competition among the employees kicked in even harsher when external administration was suspended. So freedom, their freedom to decide about their own vacation, did actually lead into the into even more determination which was even less likely to be influenced. One may also think of examples analyzed and just referred to by our master Slavoj Žižek, people these days, and if you work in a university I mean he just referred to that, you know what I'm talking about, do not find a long-term employment and this is presented to them as a chance to explore ever new options, be creative and things like that. Or think of what the conservatives in the US articulated as one argument against universal health insurance, namely that the freedom of not being obliged to have a state-guaranteed one was presented as freedom from state control, etc. So the first intuition behind the book is that at least the signifier freedom can function in a way that effectively leads to un-freedom or non-freedom. And this may lead to a particular form of what Alain Badiou calls disorientation. Disorientation because one may be all for freedom and effectively endorse something that has nothing to do with freedom whatsoever. But this is the starting question of the book: what if and what to do when the signifier freedom becomes a synonym of oppression even though a perfidious one. Because how could one not be for freedom, even against better insight freedom is nothing anyone would like to give up, not even when it's de facto already gone. This is where its disorienting and I think oppressive quality becomes apparent. And it's a not very let's say attractive position to say that freedom as such has an oppressive quality. I know that. And it also works somehow like the holy cow of western civilizations, maybe with democracy, and the prospect of criticizing it or even giving it up seems highly unattractive. But I think at least today it's not enough to constantly appeal to its true meaning, which is at the same time and by far not undisputed I guess. Already Marx noted that freedom is a crucial component of the functioning and dynamics of capital. Just think of what he writes in *Capital*, namely that within the Eden that is the legal framework on which capital's forms of production rely, I quote: "there alone rule freedom, equality, property, and Bentham." Freedom is for Marx part of a series of signifiers which gains its ultimate consistency by adding to it another term of a fundamentally different quality, namely Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher. And this adding, this supplement, this suturing is crucial. It is his name on which the consistency of the series hinges and which starts to determine what the respective concepts de facto mean. Freedom then does in this context, for example, not only frame the free exchange between two equals, the laborer and the capitalist, the former freely selling his labor power, the latter freely buying it, and both are presented as if they are determined by their equally free wills only, but Marx by adding Bentham to the series of concepts also marks that their free will is determined by that which Bentham stands for: pure calculating self-interest. This is what holds together in a certain sense and determines the series of terms. So in this example it seems one is dealing with an actualization of freedom, but ultimately this only obfuscates the fact that there is a straightforward determination that models and frames the very way in which freedom is actualized and also what can count as an actualization of freedom. Effectively it's not freedom that Marx is talking about, right. So when and if freedom effectively functions as a disorienting instrument of oppression, freedom is not something that one should endorse no matter what. This is the starting reflection somehow. But that this seems so difficult if not impossible to do shows that it's a peculiar I would say contemporary fetish, something that one should better not touch. So my question was how to problematize an oppressive function of something you better should not touch. This leads me to my second point and this is if you wish another trivial observation, namely that one can find in the history of modern rationalist philosophy, maybe even before but beginning at least with Descartes and going through thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx and others, a fundamental problematization of misleading and inconsistent notions of freedom. And the one that stands out, the one that is sort of the most problematic and at the ground of most if not all misconception is the understanding of freedom in terms of and as being a capacity. When freedom is taken to be a capacity that we as human beings or whatever the agent is have, it is usually taken to be a capacity to choose or as fashionable to say these days to determine oneself, which means to choose what one thinks, what one wants to do and be. But this is ultimately, and today a version of this is called inferentialism, is to choose A or B, coke or diet coke. But if one thinks that freedom is a capacity, this has conceptual implications. The first is that if freedom is taken to be a capacity, one cannot but assume that there is someone, human beings in general or whoever, who has this capacity. This means that freedom is a kind of possession substantially determining the agent. We're naturally free creatures because we have the capacity to choose or to determine ourselves and our lives. Understanding freedom in terms of a capacity thus leads to the assumption that we're free by nature and thus it has also a certain naturalizing effect on freedom even if we do not need to give naturalistic explanations but right if it's in our nature there's a naturalizing aspect to this account. But if freedom is considered to be a capacity that we have, this can have quite I think a calming and assuring effect. If you always already are free because you're endowed with this capacity, you may need to defend it, but you do not need to strive for it. One feels free even in situations in which one is not free, say when you freely decide that working for Virgin is so much fun that you simply do not need to take time off. This is what Alexandre Kojève once called in commenting on Hegel's discussion of the Stoic slave who feels free even when he's forced to work, the slave ideology. The slave ideology of freedom is a way that allows to avoid confronting the actual situation of un-freedom. Right, the slave constantly thinks I'm free in my thoughts and stuff like that although he is a slave in reality. It is to refer to Althusser's famous definition of ideology, an imaginary relation to the real conditions of one's existence. He is free even though he is a slave, that's his own self-interpretation the slave's. And Hegel criticizes the slave mentality, to put it like that, slave mentality for allowing the slave to still assume that he is free and thus for adapting because of this ideology of freedom to the situation by not fully assuming its reality. Right it's a way of escaping confronting the real conditions of of his existence. But why does this work? This is to my mind a direct effect of identifying freedom with a capacity. For a capacity can of course be actualized or non-actualized, but it already has a certain kind of actuality even when not actualized. We're able to eat even when we're not eating, we're able to think even when we're not thinking, if that ever occurs. To take freedom to be a capacity means to assume that there is an actuality and a reality of freedom before the becoming actual and real of freedom, an actuality of a potentiality or of a possibility. But here things I think get problematic. For if freedom is taken to be already real and realized in the form of a capacity, one conflates the reality and actuality of freedom with its possibility, or more precisely, one conflates the actuality of a possibility, that is freedom as capacity, with the actuality of actuality, that is freedom realized. Or put differently, one conflates the existence of a choice, the having of a choice so to speak, with the act of choosing. The mere existence of a choice is then taken to be already the realization or a realization of freedom, a realization of freedom that precedes any real realizations of freedom, and I think this redoubling is important. This leads to the weird conclusion that we're free even when we're not free. As long as I can choose I'm free even when I do not choose because I always could. In the modern rationalist tradition of western philosophy this understanding that's usually referred to as the *liberum arbitrium indifferentiae* was frequently criticized for this very conflation of actuality and possibility of freedom. Because if freedom is identified with such an indifferent capacity, with a capacity to indifferently choose between A and non-A, what happens is that one separates the concept of freedom from the concept of decision or resolve, from the becoming active of freedom. Freedom becomes identified with the existence of a choice from which any actual choice, any act of choosing is spirited away, subtracted somehow. For Descartes, for example, this very understanding stands at the ground of all errors that I can make in judgment. That’s Descartes' basically basic claim. Why? Because as soon as I conceive of my freedom as an always already realized as already realized in the mere existence of a choice, I already made an error, namely an error in my understanding of freedom, conflating actuality of possibility and the actuality of actuality. And this error will subsequently and consequently never stop to determine whatever I infer from it, whatever I do or judge. Right, I make this basic error and then somehow this is a determination I cannot get rid of. Because if I take freedom to be indifferently realized in either side of a given choice, the mere existence of the choice is enough, it's already a realization of freedom, the choice starts determining me because I do not only identify freedom with an indifferent capacity, but because I also become indifferent to the very realization of freedom. Right, either choice is okay. You don't have diet coke, I take the coke. In this way this understanding of freedom becomes something like an erroneous transcendental of all my future choices and
action you missed them. This is also all connected with the topic of predestination and so on and so on. Okay, we don't have time to go, to go into this now because now I will go into what I promised you. I will begin with a short reflection on, and please again more than ever I mean it this time, interrupt me if anything is not clear. I will simply try to articulate my answer in very simple terms to the basic problem which is a common-sense problem but a naive question but I think it's crucial. It deserves an answer. Why do we, by we I mean vaguely let's call it Lacanians, people who are engaged with psychoanalysis, why do we deal with philosophy, precisely what you asked me before? Is this a secondary application? Is there a necessary link? Because again as you know we get regularly attacked from both sides. A standard philosophical argument is the transcendental one. Which means you find it in Habermas, in Heidegger already in a different way. The idea is that in spite of all restrained qualifications, psychoanalysis is simply an ontic specific empirical procedure dealing with a very specific phenomenon psychic troubles. Okay, it provides a certain image of human psyche but as such not only it cannot have any direct philosophical relevance but it even always already has to rely on a certain philosophical pre-understanding. For example, don't underestimate this logic. It has a certain immanent necessity in it. For example, isn't it true that when Freud analyzed the psyche he had to rely on a certain set of notions, preconception of causes, effects and so on. Studies are written on how Freudian theory of libido, libido, relies on this mechanistic notion of energy, conservation of energy and so on and so on. So this is the classical philosophical argument against the autonomy of sciences. That for example even quantum physics to do its job, it has already to presuppose a certain conceptual network. And you cannot be a radical empiricist and say no, no, no, it’s through studying, doing its experiments, exploring its matter that it discovers new notions of causality and so on and so on. It does, but nonetheless in its basic approach to reality it has already to rely on certain concepts of what is causality and so on and so on. And you cannot get out of this circle. You are never at a zero level where you just look at, at reality. So again we have the philosophical reproach to psychoanalysis. It might be interesting, it might even have some secondary philosophical consequences but mostly when philosophers recognize this, they take it in a very naive way. They claim okay, what does psychoanalysis prove, that we are not just pure rational beings, you know that stupid metaphor that I think should be prohibited, of how the iceberg and the unconscious is the bigger part of the iceberg that we don't see, we see just the ego and so on. But then every philosopher will tell you what’s so new about it. You have long tradition in the 19th century of irrationalism from late Schelling, Schopenhauer, even the term *unbewusste*, wasn't it who was that idiot, no Hartmann or who wrote a big book on unconscious in the middle of Hartmann, yeah, on 19th century. So again well before, before Freud you have a wide reflection on how you know human being, our reason is just a puppet of some unconscious drives and so on and so on. So you can show, although I totally reject it, but it's easy to show in an immanent philosophical way that for Freud to do his job many things already had to happen in our basic pre-understanding of what is reality, certain notion of irrationality, of the limitation of our reason and so on and so on all that. So Lacan, this is one target of psychoanalysis. That it's not simply strong enough, it may be interesting but it has to rely on certain philosophical presuppositions, preconceptions that it cannot ground out of itself. Then we have the opposite approach from some Lacanians, clinicians, that the only, the real in psychoanalysis, the only real is clinic, patients and so on, and that what we are doing, by we I mean people who are not clinicians, we are simply ultimately playing cultural games, applying psychoanalysis and so on and so on, but these are only after-effects, cultural games, maybe an interesting things, but irrelevant if it's not directly grounded in clinical experience. Against both these, I'm sorry that my Stalinism will explode again, this right-wing and left-wing deviation I think that the correct, Stalinist Lacanian, my god, way is that from the Lacanian standpoint Lacan's axiom *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship, is not an axiom which only underlies human sexuality determining it as fundamentally antagonistic. And incidentally even here Lacan is often misread, even Jacques-Alain Miller sometimes I think gets lost. For example when he says that *il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel* can also be read as the they are out of sync the two sexes, that for example it's once he even uses this for me very vulgar totally inappropriate metaphor that like masculine sex is like a key but you don't ever fight the find the what do you trust the key into, lock, how do you call it, keyhole. Yes, the keyhole never fits it which for me it's a little bit too vulgar to to go and because I think, I think it's totally wrong. You know, as proper Lacanians demonstrate this reading of the two sexes as always in a permanent conflict, never harmony and so on and so on. This is not at all what Lacan means, this to use the horrible terrifyingly bad bestseller *Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus*. This is absolute, no the whole point of Lacan is not that we have the two sexes as constituted and then they always miss each other and so on, but that each of the two sexes cannot be constituted in itself. Woman cannot be a woman, man cannot be a woman. The the gap, the impossibility is not between the two sexes but it's immanent inherent in each of the sexes. So again Lacan's there is no sexual relationship is an axiom with radical ontological implication. An axiom which posits the antagonistic, incomplete, flawed, whatever, character of reality itself, the impossibility to grasp it as a whole. And subjectivity can only arise in a reality which is ontologically incomplete, traversed by an impossibility. This also means for Lacan, I will try to demonstrate this, now I'm just positing the axioms, that subject is immanently constitutively sexed. It's not enough to say that subject emerges when substance is non-all antagonistic inconsistent. The mediating term is here sexuality. In order to have subject, the antagonism, impossibility that cuts across reality has to acquire a form of sexuality, of the impossibility of the sexual, of the sexual relationship. So how do I, how do I develop this? What do I mean by this? Let's begin with Kant. From Kant to Hegel. Why is for Lacan Kant at the beginning of it all? I'm of course here relying on the pathbreaking study and it's very strange how totally ignored it is by Joan Copjec, *The Euthanasia of Reason*, which is typical how I organized in publishing the book *The Not-Two* by Lorenzo Chiesa, who is also recently it appeared by MIT, who is also a polemic by me and so on. He mentions a little bit Alenka Zupančič but it's so strange, it's a book which is all about Lacan's formula of sexuation and Joan Copjec I think it's not even mentioned there. It's in a very weird way how her text, which is for me one of the absolute great texts, is ignored. So let me do, let me try to develop this. In the predominant perception, Kant is perceived as someone who openly admitted the failure of general ontology, an ontology which aims at grasping the whole of reality. This is Kant's big revolution. You know, if you know a little bit of Kant, we don't have time to go into details now, Kant's basic hypothesis is that, axiom even, that when our mind tries to grasp all of reality, not just limited experience that we have, temporal experience, but if we try to extrapolate from what we see here, from what we can test, how all of reality is structured, we not only fail, but we get caught into what Kant calls antinomies. And there is no primitive Hegelian dialectics in it. It's not that it's this and that, let's do a synthesis. For Kant, these are radical antinomies in the sense of like is there a free will or is all of reality totally determined by natural laws. Kant's position is a radical antinomy. We can logically prove with impeccable reasoning both versions. And then I will not give I mean, just Google Kant's concepts or whatever, Kant lexicon, you get this explained in a simple way better than I can emphasize how all the big like is does the world the universe reality that in which we dwell, does it have a temporal beginning or a limit in space or not. Again Kant's point is the moment we overstep our empirical experience and try to think reality as totality, as an all, we necessarily get caught into contradictions. And all other, so freedom of the will, all also the elements like is reality divisible ad infinitum or do we arrive at some minimal parts, atoms. Again Kant's point is antinomy. Now comes, I’m just trying to reconstruct for you, this will not be proofs, the reasoning that’s behind what I perceive as philosophical relevance of psychoanalysis. First so we have this Kantian situation, antinomies. Kant distinguishes two types of antinomies, so-called mathematical antinomies which are the antinomies of of quantitative antinomies when we are dealing with too much excessive quantities, quantities which are beyond our perception, and so-called qualitative or dynamic antinomies which are concerned with qualitative difference like I don't know is there a free will, is there God or whatever. And the shock of Joan Copjec was to discover that these two antinomies, quantitative antinomies, dynamic antinomies and mathematical antinomies exactly fit, and it's shocking that Lacan never writes this was not afraid sorry was not aware of it, exactly fit Lacan's formulas of sexuation. In other words, what are for Kant mathematical antinomies, all or non-all is everything are structured like what Lacan calls the deadlock, antagonism of feminine sexuality. What Kant calls dynamic antinomies which are structured exactly like what Lacan calls masculine antagonism, which is universality and its constitutive exception and so on and so on. So that's again, that's the big breakthrough of Joan Copjec. Just to establish this link. That exactly that Kant was struggling for years, if you look seminars which which come before *Encore*, before the he was struggling for years trying to formulate precisely these formulas of sexuation, but what he arrived at the end is exactly Kant's antinomies of pure reason. Which is why in my new book that I'm just finishing, there is a chapter of Antinomies of Pure Sexuation, because this is what Lacan is doing. Okay, so what’s then the problem with Kant? Here I think what is crucial is to accomplish a passage from Kant to Hegel. Because Kant, for Kant the ultimate deadlock is an epistemological one concerning knowledge. Antinomies are for Kant just antinomies of our knowledge. Kant posits a reality in itself which cannot be antinomic. Things are what they are out there, but we cannot get to know them. Antinomy we when we try to understand all of it we get with our limited human mind we get necessarily caught into antinomies. Which is for Kant a proof that reality is unknowable to us. And things get here with regard to ethics incredibly interesting. Because then Kant asks the question, I often quoted this passage, he asks the question in his *Critique of Practical Reason*, but why, why did God create the world in such a stupid way that we cannot get to know external reality the way it really is. And Kant gives an extremely radical interesting answer, for ethical reasons. If we were to be able to know how reality really is, ethics would not have been possible. Because we would simply know how things are and if there is God we would act ethically, but not really because for Kant as you know a real ethical act is when you do it just for the sake of duty. But if we were to know reality then we would have known, if I act well I will be maybe not punished but rewarded by and so acting ethically would really become would simply become a matter of calculation. I do I act ethically because I know I will be punished in my afterlife. So again but let's go a step further here to see all the shocking dimension. So Kant remains antinomian at the epistemological level. As Hegel puts it so nicely, Kant shows too much tenderness for the for the things, for reality. If for Kant if there is an antinomy, it means we don't know how things really are. Antinomies are always a sign of the limitation of our reason. In other words to return, if you can prove that the universe is at the same time unlimited and finite, or if you can prove that there is universal determinism but at the same time there is free will, this means that simply there is something wrong in your logic. Wrong in the sense that in the sense that it doesn't fit reality, that we are unable to understand the way things really are. Now the greatness of Kant here he is very radical is that for him this is not just a limitation of certain class, epoch, whatever, but antinomies are for Kant constitutive of human reason as such. Now the move from Kant to Hegel is a very radical one. It's not a return to naive ontology like no, no, we can get to know the way things really are in themselves. Hegel's gesture is a very crazy radical one. And that's why incidentally I don't like, although it's beautifully written, Brandom's analysis. Because I think his entire effort is to domesticate Hegel. To he takes Hegel's most daring paradoxical statements and domesticates them. It's really as if showing, don't be afraid, Hegel is not really such a bad guy, we can read it as I think this is even the subtitle of the first subchapter I think in my that in defense of Hegel's madness, you know. Like you have all these crazy statements in Hegel, not necessary to repeat them, and Brandom's effort is to say don't worry, we can translate all that into our ordinary language and we see and so on. But okay. Hegel's view, I'm sorry if I will repeat old stuff here. I will repeat two old stories, each of them I already repeated in this room again, these ones maybe even ten times but, but just to make it clear because now I'm dealing with really the very focus of what I'm trying to do. Hegel's move is not simply to claim no we can move over Kant and know reality. Hegel's claim is much more radical one, it's that the antinomy which for Kant in Kant's view prevents our contact with reality is the very point where we can touch the real outside. Let me give you two examples that I used, the first one fifteen times I would say in my books but it's so clear, I'm sorry if many of you know it. This would be a clear-cut case. Adorno in his text on notion of society, I think, claims, but just forget about the example, think about the logic, he claims how any notion of society in our world oscillates between in sociology he means Adorno between the two extremes. Either we are individualists and try to develop how society emerges as a spectra objectified reified phantom out of concrete interaction of individuals. Or we are more Durk- Durkheimian organicists and we try to develop how society comes first as objective field of social interactions and how individuals emerge in a specific epoch of social life out out so either you are individualist or you are how should I call it organicist, holist. And Adorno first radicalizes this into an antinomy. He says there is no synthesis here, you know Adorno is here nonetheless bright. He is totally opposed to this pseudo-dialectical idea no this is one extreme there is another extreme but what about a dialectical interaction where there is society but nonetheless this society as objective field involves individuals or whatever, he doesn't buy this bullshit. He says the antinomy is irreducible. There is no way to include two extremes individualist and holist where each of them would have its place. No, his idea is no, we will we always fail to construct a unified notion of society, we always get caught into an antinomy. But and it's so simple, I'm sorry if you know it, Adorno's solution is you know what, it is but this very antinomy is the basic feature of today's society. Today's modern society is characterized, just think about our world, on the one hand we are individualized again and again, the whole ideological machinery individualizes us because it's part of the moralization of the existing social order. For example I think I often use this example, take ecology, how does ideology work in ecology, to tell you don't criticize society, think about your part in it, did you recycle all the coke cans, did you put aside, you know this false super-ego individualization. Also did you notice how the more our society is global and impenetrable chaotic in its economic processes and so on, the more we are addressed as radically responsible like we are condemned to freedom, this is all the second modernity Giddens stuff and so on, you know the story I'm often repeating it no, like you complain I cannot give even get a permanent job and then you are immediately accused of being afraid of freedom, can't you see that the inability to get a permanent job means that a new freedom is open to you, a freedom to reinvent yourself creatively every year again and again. So intelligent sociologists get this how this extreme hedonist individualism today is strictly the obverse of the fact that global social process or economic is becoming more and more totally impenetrable. Just think about crisis, apart from some, there were some, leftist but even some intelligent rightist economists, it was a mega shock for the majority, nobody saw it coming. It's incredible how little, I really think it's not an exaggeration that economists today, especially macro-economists, are basically magicians, this is return to magical thinking I mean, they don't know what I remember how I learned this, Varoufakis invited me three years ago, now probably he is too high, I appreciate him, I don't despise him that's my bad joke. Before he became Varoufakis the media person, he invited me he told me why don't we write a book together on economy. I said I told him but listen, whatever I write about economy I bluff, I don't have any idea of it. And Varoufakis answered, but yes but do you think that we economists know what we are doing? No, we are doing exactly the same, nobody knows it no. So again, you see the beauty don't disappear soon you will have a duty. Ah, now I will play Donald Trump to, where are you going to the toilet disgusting what are you doing you know, I mentioned this yesterday Donald Trump to you are my Hillary now yeah. Okay, sorry, let's go on. But you see the beauty of Adorno's solution. The very thing that appeared as a problem, my God we get into an antinomy, becomes its own solution. Because this antinomy, this radical never reconciled split into extreme individualism and impenetrable objectivity is the fundamental real feature of society today. This is the proper how should I put it step from Kant to Hegel. Hegel does not resolve Kantian antinomies. There is no step further into a higher dialectical synthesis or whatever. He just reinterprets the obstacle, what appears as the obstacle as its own solution. Without getting this you don't get anything in Hegel. For example that's why Hegel is not a thinker of reconciliation in the thanks sense that things looks back but then ooh through some wonder they get reconciled. No, it's a crucial passage, I quoted it already in my previous book *Absolute Recoil*, where Hegel says that the reconciliation is always a retroactive movement. The Hegelian reconciliation is not a Frank, if you are back now, if you want me to shake your hands I cannot resist did you wash your hands afterwards so that I can you see the no, when a my formula this one, when we fight for communism there are no moralist limits or limits of bourgeois taste we should go to the sorry but let me go on and then I will give you the most beautiful example did you I which I repeat in just five six of my books but just to make a point and then conclude and give the word to Genosse Ruda. That eternal example that I've written you must even know the graph just to so that you get the point you know my favorite Levi-Strauss in structural anthropology volume *Do Dual Organizations Exist?* I think this is breathtaking. Levi-Strauss don't dismiss him as an early stupid structuralist, he was a genius. It's such a simple story, I'm sorry if you know it, but just again to get the point. He visited certain stupid tribe, I don't know where, and he there asked them to draw the map of their village. And he noticed how he got from half of the tribe one image and from the other half another image. Some members of the tribe draw the image like this: here in the center is the central temple and then houses in a circle around. The other half wrote a totally different image, it's as if cut divided by a line. The temple is here on the one side with some important houses, ordinary small houses huts on the other side. Now of course the question is but there must be a real disposition of houses, how are the houses really disposed and so what do you see when you hire a helicopter and take a photo from above? The result is neither of the two, some mixture and so on. But then Levi-Strauss does something wonderful. He says that this very contradiction, half of the people see the houses like this the other half like that, it's wrong to compare it with reality and to say you see they exaggerate in one sense the others in another sense but the real disposition of houses is somewhere in the middle. No, Levi-Strauss sees the element of truth about this tribe in this very caricature opposition because he says in a very beautiful analysis he shows how this tribe was in the middle of passing from egalitarian pre-class society into already first forms of hierarchy. And then he demonstrated how those who were losing on the lower side perceived the class struggle, they gave the mapping where on the one side are the privileged priests and so on, we the poor suckers are on the other side. Of course as is always the case the case the rich the new ruling class perceived itself of course as we are the harmonious center which and so on. So you see Levi-Strauss then makes a wonderful point that it's wrong to ask about the two images, two maps, which is the true one. The truth about the tribe is the very antagonism of the two images. This tells you the truth. So the very problem, the very antinomy brings you close is gives you the in- so you got here the basic point. So again let's go on so to conclude briefly obviously we will have to do much more philosophy tomorrow. But I I promise you something I will keep my word, you still have the the emails of the guys here. I will do my usual I will give you my usual word which at least there I usually was not lying no, I will send you tomorrow some files so that the what I will not be able to deliver here you will you can get them if you want the text because as always you know fuck you I never prepare classes for you, I use the stuff from my new book no so you can get it. Okay, let's go on. So that's then the idea of Lacan that in the same way that Hegel draws the ontological consequences of Kantian antinomies which means that it's not only that our epistemology, our knowledge of reality gets caught into antinomies, but it reproduces an antinomy which is in the very core of what is reality. Reality is profoundly antinomic. Antinomic in precisely the sense that philosophy which wants to be traditional ontology depicting all of reality with such fundamental and so on some fundamental always by definition fails, which is why that’s my problem with Lacan's terminology when he says *je m'insurge contre la*, I raise myself against philosophy. Well fuck you, all the philosophy is doing this from Kant onward, you know like Kant already refuses for what he is doing the term philosophy. He says it's just prolegomena, transcendental preparation of philosophy. Fichte, Schelling in the same way. Hegel, he said it's not philosophy, it's Wissenschaft, it's knowledge. Marx, Nietzsche, no philosopher after Kant wants to be a philosopher except new ontology new materialism now and so on. It's quite incredible how philosophy after Kant inclusive of Kant is defined as anti-philosophy. In no way can you take Hegel as a positive ontologist. Hegel is not an ultra-rationalist who paints some rational structure harmonious of the universe, no what Hegel does is just going from antinomy to antinomy from a failure to a failure. But it's not just a limitation of our knowledge. The crazy thesis again is that the absolutely crucial moment here again is this passage from epistemology to ontology. You get caught into an epistemological deadlock and then the properly dialectical solution is not to overcome the deadlock but to demonstrate how what you thought separates you from reality, this deadlock, is precisely what includes you into the very what includes you into the very core of reality. And as I repeatedly try to develop in my books, this and only this is the reason why I consider myself of course a an atheist Christian. Because as Chesterton put it so nicely, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, in every religion you have atheists, every religion admits there are people who don't believe in God. Maybe he is wrong but I'm just reporting his position. Only in Christianity we have that famous *Eli Eli lama sabachthani*, father why have you forsaken me. We have for a brief moment God himself who no longer believes in God. You know, this is the Christian solution. In a traditional religion, now you will see the link with what I was saying, in a traditional religion we are abandoned by God. And then through some I don't know God's grace or from our side hard work we try to fill in the gap. Christian message is totally different. It is yes, we are abandoned by God but at that very point when we feel totally abandoned by God we identify with Christ on the cross who feels abandoned. The very abandonment by God being abandoned by God is just an effect of God being radically separated from itself. Okay, I will be honest, I hope this was not too confused. Tomorrow I will draw some more consequences from this and then I will do something totally crazy, I hope you will swallow it. I will try to give you a simple musical example of this logic of void supplement. I will follow the dialectic, very simple, of background and melody. Pachelbel's Canon, then what happens in Mozart, you know how something that for Pachelbel was already a musical piece in itself all of a sudden with Mozart starts to function as a background and needs to be filled in with melody. And then I will go into this gap which you wonderfully fill in Mozart between main melodic one line which is in Mozart always thwarted, blocked, but the beautiful effect is that’s why at the end of a piece typically in Mozart it's as if what was thwarted explodes in an unexpected excessive finale. While I will try to prove the ultimate origin of kitsch is Beethoven. Because he goes into this full romantic horror of bringing the melody out to its full culmination. For example, one of the greatest pieces of musical kitsch for me if you know it is Beethoven's the most famous overture *Leonore No. the third Leonore overture to *Fidelio*, no it's kitsch and then I will go it's something so simple I will try just to I will shock you to give you now a how do you call it a teaser for joy. My basic point will be did you see, it's shitty movie, the scene did you see *You Only Live Twice*, the fourth or fifth James Bond movie, the fifth. Okay, in Japan there is a wedding scene there which perfectly encapsulates this typical western moment of first you have this restrained pseudo-oriental music and then you have big release, full melody with violins and so on and it's I think a wonderful the most colonialist moment in music that I can imagine. And I will so I hope you will be able to swallow that but now enough of this, *Deutschland nimmt über*, Germany takes over now, please. First of all, I want to thank Slavoj for making this possible and for the endorsement which started years ago and I'm sure he has from the very beginning regretted, regretted it, I wanted to say that. Also, yesterday you proposed an honorary membership, maybe not a job, an honorary membership in the Slovenian gang. I heard that my last name in Slovenian has something to do with mining, so maybe there's a proletarian position open, I would apply. And thanks for bearing with me as a committed fatalist and I want to argue that you should be too. I expect this is a huge disappointment already so I mean it can only get better. So I was supposed to say something about my new book which is called *Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism*, and it's a book on freedom but why give it such an unappealing title. *Abolishing Freedom* does not sound very charming or even more so like a very defensible program at all. The basic argumentative move of the book is fourfold. First it starts from a very trivial observation, namely that the signifier freedom does not at all necessarily and always mean what it seems to say. To put it trivially, not every time someone refers to freedom for justifying what he or she does, one actually encounters freedom in a meaningful, meaningful way in in the consequence. Let me give you a stupid empirical yet quite I think telling telling recent example, namely what happened more or less recently with the American company Virgin Enterprise. They claimed that having a prescribed number of vacation days, annual vacation days, is ultimately somehow unproductive and very repressive for their employees. They themselves should freely decide how often they think they need a leave, freeing them from all external constraints, authoritarian and pre-given rules and so forth. This was also presented as being very much up-to-date, I quote their website: "Flexible working has revolutionized how, where and when we all do our jobs. So if working 9-to-5 no longer applies, then why should strict annual leave vacation policies?" And one could note that this would also work as a slogan for working from 9-to-9 and abolishing vacation altogether I think but nonetheless. Of course there was a condition that came along with this project: holidays can only be taken when the work is done. And the employees are considered to be the ones to know when that is. When that happened, what then happened was that the number of taken holidays effectively got lower than ever in the company's history. They emerged, there emerged immediately an internal super-egoic pressure of self-control which proved more oppressive than the prior external regulations. This was an effect of the employees supposedly freely deciding about when and how much holiday they need, and the effect was that the competition among the employees kicked in even harsher when external administration was suspended. So freedom, their freedom to decide about their own vacation, did actually lead into the into even more determination which was even less likely to be influenced. One may also think of examples analyzed and just referred to by our master Slavoj Žižek, people these days, and if you work in a university I mean he just referred to that, you know what I'm talking about, do not find a long-term employment and this is presented to them as a chance to explore ever new options, be creative and things like that. Or think of what the conservatives in the US articulated as one argument against universal health insurance, namely that the freedom of not being obliged to have a state-guaranteed one was presented as freedom from state control, etc. So the first intuition behind the book is that at least the signifier freedom can function in a way that effectively leads to un-freedom or non-freedom. And this may lead to a particular form of what Alain Badiou calls disorientation. Disorientation because one may be all for freedom and effectively endorse something that has nothing to do with freedom whatsoever. But this is the starting question of the book: what if and what to do when the signifier freedom becomes a synonym of oppression even though a perfidious one. Because how could one not be for freedom, even against better insight freedom is nothing anyone would like to give up, not even when it's de facto already gone. This is where its disorienting and I think oppressive quality becomes apparent. And it's a not very let's say attractive position to say that freedom as such has an oppressive quality. I know that. And it also works somehow like the holy cow of western civilizations, maybe with democracy, and the prospect of criticizing it or even giving it up seems highly unattractive. But I think at least today it's not enough to constantly appeal to its true meaning, which is at the same time and by far not undisputed I guess. Already Marx noted that freedom is a crucial component of the functioning and dynamics of capital. Just think of what he writes in *Capital*, namely that within the Eden that is the legal framework on which capital's forms of production rely, I quote: "there alone rule freedom, equality, property, and Bentham." Freedom is for Marx part of a series of signifiers which gains its ultimate consistency by adding to it another term of a fundamentally different quality, namely Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher. And this adding, this supplement, this suturing is crucial. It is his name on which the consistency of the series hinges and which starts to determine what the respective concepts de facto mean. Freedom then does in this context, for example, not only frame the free exchange between two equals, the laborer and the capitalist, the former freely selling his labor power, the latter freely buying it, and both are presented as if they are determined by their equally free wills only, but Marx by adding Bentham to the series of concepts also marks that their free will is determined by that which Bentham stands for: pure calculating self-interest. This is what holds together in a certain sense and determines the series of terms. So in this example it seems one is dealing with an actualization of freedom, but ultimately this only obfuscates the fact that there is a straightforward determination that models and frames the very way in which freedom is actualized and also what can count as an actualization of freedom. Effectively it's not freedom that Marx is talking about, right. So when and if freedom effectively functions as a disorienting instrument of oppression, freedom is not something that one should endorse no matter what. This is the starting reflection somehow. But that this seems so difficult if not impossible to do shows that it's a peculiar I would say contemporary fetish, something that one should better not touch. So my question was how to problematize an oppressive function of something you better should not touch. This leads me to my second point and this is if you wish another trivial observation, namely that one can find in the history of modern rationalist philosophy, maybe even before but beginning at least with Descartes and going through thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx and others, a fundamental problematization of misleading and inconsistent notions of freedom. And the one that stands out, the one that is sort of the most problematic and at the ground of most if not all misconception is the understanding of freedom in terms of and as being a capacity. When freedom is taken to be a capacity that we as human beings or whatever the agent is have, it is usually taken to be a capacity to choose or as fashionable to say these days to determine oneself, which means to choose what one thinks, what one wants to do and be. But this is ultimately, and today a version of this is called inferentialism, is to choose A or B, coke or diet coke. But if one thinks that freedom is a capacity, this has conceptual implications. The first is that if freedom is taken to be a capacity, one cannot but assume that there is someone, human beings in general or whoever, who has this capacity. This means that freedom is a kind of possession substantially determining the agent. We're naturally free creatures because we have the capacity to choose or to determine ourselves and our lives. Understanding freedom in terms of a capacity thus leads to the assumption that we're free by nature and thus it has also a certain naturalizing effect on freedom even if we do not need to give naturalistic explanations but right if it's in our nature there's a naturalizing aspect to this account. But if freedom is considered to be a capacity that we have, this can have quite I think a calming and assuring effect. If you always already are free because you're endowed with this capacity, you may need to defend it, but you do not need to strive for it. One feels free even in situations in which one is not free, say when you freely decide that working for Virgin is so much fun that you simply do not need to take time off. This is what Alexandre Kojève once called in commenting on Hegel's discussion of the Stoic slave who feels free even when he's forced to work, the slave ideology. The slave ideology of freedom is a way that allows to avoid confronting the actual situation of un-freedom. Right, the slave constantly thinks I'm free in my thoughts and stuff like that although he is a slave in reality. It is to refer to Althusser's famous definition of ideology, an imaginary relation to the real conditions of one's existence. He is free even though he is a slave, that's his own self-interpretation the slave's. And Hegel criticizes the slave mentality, to put it like that, slave mentality for allowing the slave to still assume that he is free and thus for adapting because of this ideology of freedom to the situation by not fully assuming its reality. Right it's a way of escaping confronting the real conditions of of his existence. But why does this work? This is to my mind a direct effect of identifying freedom with a capacity. For a capacity can of course be actualized or non-actualized, but it already has a certain kind of actuality even when not actualized. We're able to eat even when we're not eating, we're able to think even when we're not thinking, if that ever occurs. To take freedom to be a capacity means to assume that there is an actuality and a reality of freedom before the becoming actual and real of freedom, an actuality of a potentiality or of a possibility. But here things I think get problematic. For if freedom is taken to be already real and realized in the form of a capacity, one conflates the reality and actuality of freedom with its possibility, or more precisely, one conflates the actuality of a possibility, that is freedom as capacity, with the actuality of actuality, that is freedom realized. Or put differently, one conflates the existence of a choice, the having of a choice so to speak, with the act of choosing. The mere existence of a choice is then taken to be already the realization or a realization of freedom, a realization of freedom that precedes any real realizations of freedom, and I think this redoubling is important. This leads to the weird conclusion that we're free even when we're not free. As long as I can choose I'm free even when I do not choose because I always could. In the modern rationalist tradition of western philosophy this understanding that's usually referred to as the *liberum arbitrium indifferentiae* was frequently criticized for this very conflation of actuality and possibility of freedom. Because if freedom is identified with such an indifferent capacity, with a capacity to indifferently choose between A and non-A, what happens is that one separates the concept of freedom from the concept of decision or resolve, from the becoming active of freedom. Freedom becomes identified with the existence of a choice from which any actual choice, any act of choosing is spirited away, subtracted somehow. For Descartes, for example, this very understanding stands at the ground of all errors that I can make in judgment. That’s Descartes' basically basic claim. Why? Because as soon as I conceive of my freedom as an always already realized as already realized in the mere existence of a choice, I already made an error, namely an error in my understanding of freedom, conflating actuality of possibility and the actuality of actuality. And this error will subsequently and consequently never stop to determine whatever I infer from it, whatever I do or judge. Right, I make this basic error and then somehow this is a determination I cannot get rid of. Because if I take freedom to be indifferently realized in either side of a given choice, the mere existence of the choice is enough, it's already a realization of freedom, the choice starts determining me because I do not only identify freedom with an indifferent capacity, but because I also become indifferent to the very realization of freedom. Right, either choice is okay. You don't have diet coke, I take the coke. In this way this understanding of freedom becomes something like an erroneous transcendental of all my future choices and
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judgments. And one can clearly see why this is a problem of subtracting the act of choosing from the choice that freedom is supposed to be, while this problem is still prominent today as notions of resolve, decision and so forth have quite a bad press I think and somehow smell of decisionism and all the stuff that one doesn't like no. In any case, the history of western rationalist philosophy presents a series of very fundamental criticisms of this idea of freedom that are mostly presented under the label of a critique of indifference, which is the Latin rendering of the Greek term *adiaphora*, which designates things that are in between, that are either X or non-X or both at the same time. Stuff you don't care about, right I mean you're indifferent about stuff that you don't care about. That is, rationalist philosophy criticizes the idea of taking freedom to be an indifferent capacity to choose A or non-A and identifying the existence of this capacity, the existence of a choice, with the actuality of freedom. This is the target of the critique. You can find this not only in Descartes, but also for example in the very beginning of the *Critique of Pure Reason* where Kant explicitly states that reason is a peculiar entity because on one side it cannot but behave like a small or little child constantly asking why, why, why, and is never satisfied with whatever answer it gets and is thereby driven into what Kant calls the realm of principles. But that it is driven into this realm shows for Kant, and you can find this literally I think on page of the preface to the first edition of the *Critique of Pure Reason*, that reason can never be indifferent to these questions. Reason cannot be indifferent, that’s impossible. This is to say reason cannot be indifferent and thus cannot be satisfied with the idea that things could be either way: A or non-A etc. This is to say that Kant starts his whole project against what he refers to, also page preface *Critique of Pure Reason*, as the indifferentists who claim that after all failed attempts to establish a rational metaphysics, we should simply stop caring and not give a fuck about God, the order of the world, freedom and all these difficult questions, right, that we cannot answer anyway. So Kant starts his whole project by trying to reject the idea that rational creatures could be defined by something that is indifferent and this includes freedom. To give you one last paradigmatic example from the history of philosophy, there's a kind of anecdote or thought experiment that is usually attributed to a guy called Johannes Buridan, a scholastic philosopher actually, even though to the best of my knowledge he never used it so I don't know how that happened and is mostly referred to under the name Buridan's ass, not the body part the animal. Buridan imagines an ass that is super hungry and in equidistance from him there are two bales of hay. But because the ass cannot decide for which bale to go, he starves to death. In a certain sense, the history of modern rationalist philosophy
judgments. And one can clearly see why this is a problem of subtracting the act of choosing from the choice that freedom is supposed to be, while this problem is still prominent today as notions of resolve, decision and so forth have quite a bad press I think and somehow smell of decisionism and all the stuff that one doesn't like no. In any case, the history of western rationalist philosophy presents a series of very fundamental criticisms of this idea of freedom that are mostly presented under the label of a critique of indifference, which is the Latin rendering of the Greek term *adiaphora*, which designates things that are in between, that are either X or non-X or both at the same time. Stuff you don't care about, right I mean you're indifferent about stuff that you don't care about. That is, rationalist philosophy criticizes the idea of taking freedom to be an indifferent capacity to choose A or non-A and identifying the existence of this capacity, the existence of a choice, with the actuality of freedom. This is the target of the critique. You can find this not only in Descartes, but also for example in the very beginning of the *Critique of Pure Reason* where Kant explicitly states that reason is a peculiar entity because on one side it cannot but behave like a small or little child constantly asking why, why, why, and is never satisfied with whatever answer it gets and is thereby driven into what Kant calls the realm of principles. But that it is driven into this realm shows for Kant, and you can find this literally I think on page of the preface to the first edition of the *Critique of Pure Reason*, that reason can never be indifferent to these questions. Reason cannot be indifferent, that’s impossible. This is to say reason cannot be indifferent and thus cannot be satisfied with the idea that things could be either way: A or non-A etc. This is to say that Kant starts his whole project against what he refers to, also page preface *Critique of Pure Reason*, as the indifferentists who claim that after all failed attempts to establish a rational metaphysics, we should simply stop caring and not give a fuck about God, the order of the world, freedom and all these difficult questions, right, that we cannot answer anyway. So Kant starts his whole project by trying to reject the idea that rational creatures could be defined by something that is indifferent and this includes freedom. To give you one last paradigmatic example from the history of philosophy, there's a kind of anecdote or thought experiment that is usually attributed to a guy called Johannes Buridan, a scholastic philosopher actually, even though to the best of my knowledge he never used it so I don't know how that happened and is mostly referred to under the name Buridan's ass, not the body part the animal. Buridan imagines an ass that is super hungry and in equidistance from him there are two bales of hay. But because the ass cannot decide for which bale to go, he starves to death. In a certain sense, the history of modern rationalist philosophy
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attacks what I would call the aesthetization, if that is a word, it's not a word I know but the aesthetization of freedom in this Buridanian sense because in the end and ultimately it has a mortifying aspect or effect on freedom. And its germ cell is the identification of freedom with a capacity. So this leads me to my third point in my my main argumentative thread of the book and why I try to read and defend the history of modern philosophical rationalism as a consistent and increasingly getting worse elaboration of what I call a rationalist fatalism, which as I will explain in the end just like very briefly has a for me very constitutive comic dimension. So I'm not a full-blown I'm a full-blown fatalist but a comic comic one. You will see why. So why should fatalism be the answer of the problem that I tried to depict. And if freedom is taken to be an always already given if freedom is taken to be an always already given capacity, freedom is simply considered to be a given. And modern rationalist philosophy is rationalist because it tries to overcome what Wilfrid Sellars, of whom I'm otherwise not the biggest fan, once called the myth of the given. More specifically, modern rationalist philosophy constitutes itself as philosophy through the attack on what I call would call the myth of the givenness of freedom. The criticism of any mythic conception of freedom makes modern rationalism into rationalism. And in a sense what I'm trying to do in the book is an attempt to mimic the history of philosophy that Heidegger wrote, only that in my version it's not Plato who is the truly bad guy which keeps resurging although he has been killed many times, but somehow Aristotle, with whom to modify Heidegger I think for the first time freedom came under the yoke of capacity. So I try to argue that modern rationalist philosophy somehow in its essence is constitutively anti-Aristotelian in this sense. But how to overcome the myth of the givenness of freedom via fatalism? I here take my cue from again one trivial observation which at the same time went almost unnoticed, Slavoj just mentioned that briefly, by many readers, namely that all great modern thinkers of freedom, and in the book I discuss Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud, with a short pre-history concerning Luther, but Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud are not only attempting to unfold a specific concept of freedom, but they also all somehow defend something like divine predestination. You find that even in Freud who explicitly claims several times that there is no such thing as psychic freedom I think this is literally Freud but only utter psychic determinism. Descartes, for example, writes explicitly that there is only one thing guiding him, that is God's predestined plan in a letter to Mersenne, and you find in Hegel the claim that for example the whole philosophy of history has no other job to do than to justify God's predestined plan. Right, I mean how how to bring the this together that the thinkers of freedom are at the same time completely embracing and endorsing predestination, a predetermined fate. And because and why what I call fatalism is the assumption of this concept of fate, this is the first element of it. So what I
attacks what I would call the aesthetization, if that is a word, it's not a word I know but the aesthetization of freedom in this Buridanian sense because in the end and ultimately it has a mortifying aspect or effect on freedom. And its germ cell is the identification of freedom with a capacity. So this leads me to my third point in my my main argumentative thread of the book and why I try to read and defend the history of modern philosophical rationalism as a consistent and increasingly getting worse elaboration of what I call a rationalist fatalism, which as I will explain in the end just like very briefly has a for me very constitutive comic dimension. So I'm not a full-blown I'm a full-blown fatalist but a comic comic one. You will see why. So why should fatalism be the answer of the problem that I tried to depict. And if freedom is taken to be an always already given if freedom is taken to be an always already given capacity, freedom is simply considered to be a given. And modern rationalist philosophy is rationalist because it tries to overcome what Wilfrid Sellars, of whom I'm otherwise not the biggest fan, once called the myth of the given. More specifically, modern rationalist philosophy constitutes itself as philosophy through the attack on what I call would call the myth of the givenness of freedom. The criticism of any mythic conception of freedom makes modern rationalism into rationalism. And in a sense what I'm trying to do in the book is an attempt to mimic the history of philosophy that Heidegger wrote, only that in my version it's not Plato who is the truly bad guy which keeps resurging although he has been killed many times, but somehow Aristotle, with whom to modify Heidegger I think for the first time freedom came under the yoke of capacity. So I try to argue that modern rationalist philosophy somehow in its essence is constitutively anti-Aristotelian in this sense. But how to overcome the myth of the givenness of freedom via fatalism? I here take my cue from again one trivial observation which at the same time went almost unnoticed, Slavoj just mentioned that briefly, by many readers, namely that all great modern thinkers of freedom, and in the book I discuss Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud, with a short pre-history concerning Luther, but Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Freud are not only attempting to unfold a specific concept of freedom, but they also all somehow defend something like divine predestination. You find that even in Freud who explicitly claims several times that there is no such thing as psychic freedom I think this is literally Freud but only utter psychic determinism. Descartes, for example, writes explicitly that there is only one thing guiding him, that is God's predestined plan in a letter to Mersenne, and you find in Hegel the claim that for example the whole philosophy of history has no other job to do than to justify God's predestined plan. Right, I mean how how to bring the this together that the thinkers of freedom are at the same time completely embracing and endorsing predestination, a predetermined fate. And because and why what I call fatalism is the assumption of this concept of fate, this is the first element of it. So what I
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call fatalism is the claim that it's fully rationalist to assume a kind of always already predetermined fate, and I argue that this kind of fatalism is a precondition for unfolding a proper concept of freedom. So what you do not get in the book if you ever I don't know someone forces you to read it is a concept of freedom not at all, but what you get in the book is what the modern rationalist tradition considers to be the precondition for overcoming the myth of the givenness of freedom and this is directly linked to the assumption of specific form of fatalism embracing a specific form of fate and I'm gonna say just like a quick word about that. The argument I'm developing resembles to some extent what the French theorist of catastrophe Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls enlightened doomsaying. Dupuy argues that what might seem impossible today, namely a final for example ecological catastrophe that would end the present order of things, is nonetheless absolutely certain if we continue the way we do. Assuming that this catastrophe is our destiny and fully assuming it now might then retroactively change the conditions of possibility of this very destiny. It may retroactively make it possible to change what cannot but appear to us as our fate. Otherwise if we don't assume that, that’s Dupuy, we keep postponing and postponing until a tipping point is reached and the catastrophe is therefore in this sense already here because we assume that this way of handling things will not bring about the catastrophe. So the catastrophe is not to see that our way of treating things is the catastrophe. Right, we're generating the catastrophe and the super catastrophe is that we don't understand that we're the ones generating and not preventing the catastrophe. My argument also bears a strong similarity to what Slavoj Žižek calls the inversion of the apocalypse, a maneuver that does not take the apocalypse as something that will that we will have to face in the future but as something that already took place. So in a sense what I try to suggest and I will briefly now tell you why I think that this is a consistent and rationalist position is that one has to start from the assumption that the worst always already happened. I mean that's my my minimal formula. It will not happen in the future, it already happened in the past and precisely by creating a different relation as Slavoj just indicated to the past this might generate a difference even in and for the future. In short, I argue in the book that the history of modern rationalism can be read as a series of articulations of this very idea that the worst always already happened, that is in a sense as a history of worsening. So I begin with Descartes who somehow makes the makes this claim and the worst of them all is Hegel, but then comes Freud. One can make a preliminary sense of this I think by referring to the well-known saying often attributed to Fredric Jameson although he denies that he ever said that, I don't know, namely that people today can more easily imagine the earth being hit by a common by a comet from
call fatalism is the claim that it's fully rationalist to assume a kind of always already predetermined fate, and I argue that this kind of fatalism is a precondition for unfolding a proper concept of freedom. So what you do not get in the book if you ever I don't know someone forces you to read it is a concept of freedom not at all, but what you get in the book is what the modern rationalist tradition considers to be the precondition for overcoming the myth of the givenness of freedom and this is directly linked to the assumption of specific form of fatalism embracing a specific form of fate and I'm gonna say just like a quick word about that. The argument I'm developing resembles to some extent what the French theorist of catastrophe Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls enlightened doomsaying. Dupuy argues that what might seem impossible today, namely a final for example ecological catastrophe that would end the present order of things, is nonetheless absolutely certain if we continue the way we do. Assuming that this catastrophe is our destiny and fully assuming it now might then retroactively change the conditions of possibility of this very destiny. It may retroactively make it possible to change what cannot but appear to us as our fate. Otherwise if we don't assume that, that’s Dupuy, we keep postponing and postponing until a tipping point is reached and the catastrophe is therefore in this sense already here because we assume that this way of handling things will not bring about the catastrophe. So the catastrophe is not to see that our way of treating things is the catastrophe. Right, we're generating the catastrophe and the super catastrophe is that we don't understand that we're the ones generating and not preventing the catastrophe. My argument also bears a strong similarity to what Slavoj Žižek calls the inversion of the apocalypse, a maneuver that does not take the apocalypse as something that will that we will have to face in the future but as something that already took place. So in a sense what I try to suggest and I will briefly now tell you why I think that this is a consistent and rationalist position is that one has to start from the assumption that the worst always already happened. I mean that's my my minimal formula. It will not happen in the future, it already happened in the past and precisely by creating a different relation as Slavoj just indicated to the past this might generate a difference even in and for the future. In short, I argue in the book that the history of modern rationalism can be read as a series of articulations of this very idea that the worst always already happened, that is in a sense as a history of worsening. So I begin with Descartes who somehow makes the makes this claim and the worst of them all is Hegel, but then comes Freud. One can make a preliminary sense of this I think by referring to the well-known saying often attributed to Fredric Jameson although he denies that he ever said that, I don't know, namely that people today can more easily imagine the earth being hit by a common by a comet from
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outer space than a radical transformation of the fundamental socio-political but also economic coordinates of our daily life. We somehow know as Jameson suggests that we believe that it's rather a comet comets coming from the outside than anything happening on the inside that might possibly induce a transformation of the way things are. But as this saying implies we act as if we do not know that we know this. That is, we still act as if we hope for the world to change from within. Although we know that we believe that it's only the comet and not a fundamental transformation here. So what I aim to do in the book is to highlight a crucial aspect of the history of rationalism that served as a means to assume in a certain sense to assume the knowledge that one does not know one has, and you may know that this is the minimal definition that Freud gives of the unconscious, right the unconscious is a knowledge that you don't know that you have. In short, it tries what I try to do is to imagine the very comet that may devastate the earth the earth not by imagining it as coming from outer space sometime in the future but as an event that although unacknowledged has already occurred. With such an inversion, that is the center idea, one may then be able not only to imagine other forms of transformation but also another form of freedom. Yet to do so, I think, this is why it's a precondition, the first preliminary step is to abolish freedom in any mythic sense of the term, in any any kind of givenness and embrace, to do so one needs to embrace catastrophe, disaster and the apocalypse. Sense yeah. But how to do this? And why should precisely fatalism, the assumption of the worst fate imaginable, not just be another version of the myth of the given that I said needs to be overcome not to fall into a problematic conception of freedom. I said that the problem with the mythic conception of freedom, freedom as capacity, is that it leads me to act and think as if I were free although I'm not because my specific understanding of freedom starts to determine me. The fatalist move is now to invert this this idea. Freedom can only be thought if one assumes that it is constitutively always already lost. Right, that it's not something that we have or that is a given. It argues, this is what one can find in Descartes, that a crucial precondition for conceiving of freedom in an adequate way is to act as if one was not always always already free. Why should this be any better? Let me briefly refer to Descartes' last published book, *The Passions of the Soul*, which unfortunately is rarely read today to the best of my knowledge as it is in this very book that Descartes argues for this peculiar and still quite astoundingly intricate idea of the pineal gland connecting as a material connection soul and body. To counter the confusion that is implied in the misconception of freedom, Descartes in this book introduces the following conceptual strategy: I quote, "We should reflect upon the fact
outer space than a radical transformation of the fundamental socio-political but also economic coordinates of our daily life. We somehow know as Jameson suggests that we believe that it's rather a comet comets coming from the outside than anything happening on the inside that might possibly induce a transformation of the way things are. But as this saying implies we act as if we do not know that we know this. That is, we still act as if we hope for the world to change from within. Although we know that we believe that it's only the comet and not a fundamental transformation here. So what I aim to do in the book is to highlight a crucial aspect of the history of rationalism that served as a means to assume in a certain sense to assume the knowledge that one does not know one has, and you may know that this is the minimal definition that Freud gives of the unconscious, right the unconscious is a knowledge that you don't know that you have. In short, it tries what I try to do is to imagine the very comet that may devastate the earth the earth not by imagining it as coming from outer space sometime in the future but as an event that although unacknowledged has already occurred. With such an inversion, that is the center idea, one may then be able not only to imagine other forms of transformation but also another form of freedom. Yet to do so, I think, this is why it's a precondition, the first preliminary step is to abolish freedom in any mythic sense of the term, in any any kind of givenness and embrace, to do so one needs to embrace catastrophe, disaster and the apocalypse. Sense yeah. But how to do this? And why should precisely fatalism, the assumption of the worst fate imaginable, not just be another version of the myth of the given that I said needs to be overcome not to fall into a problematic conception of freedom. I said that the problem with the mythic conception of freedom, freedom as capacity, is that it leads me to act and think as if I were free although I'm not because my specific understanding of freedom starts to determine me. The fatalist move is now to invert this this idea. Freedom can only be thought if one assumes that it is constitutively always already lost. Right, that it's not something that we have or that is a given. It argues, this is what one can find in Descartes, that a crucial precondition for conceiving of freedom in an adequate way is to act as if one was not always always already free. Why should this be any better? Let me briefly refer to Descartes' last published book, *The Passions of the Soul*, which unfortunately is rarely read today to the best of my knowledge as it is in this very book that Descartes argues for this peculiar and still quite astoundingly intricate idea of the pineal gland connecting as a material connection soul and body. To counter the confusion that is implied in the misconception of freedom, Descartes in this book introduces the following conceptual strategy: I quote, "We should reflect upon the fact
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that nothing can possibly happen other than as providence has determined from all eternity. Providence is so to speak a fate, une fatalité, or immutable necessity which we must set against fortune and for for Descartes this is that we have the way of things in our hands or things just happen contingently." So we must set fate une fatalité against fortune in order to expose the latter as a chimera which solely arise from an error of our intellect, the erroneous transcendental I referred to before. Descartes' point is here that a fatalist assumption is necessary to counter the wrong conception of freedom. But fatalism cannot simply be reduced to mechanistic determinism, rather it is characterized as a belief in divine providence and immutable necessity. At first sight Descartes' claim may seem to be paradoxical. If we seek to avoid given determinations of freedom, how can the remedy lie in assuming that everything is predetermined by God's providence. Right, it seems like we're simply replacing the one for the other. Believing in fortune, I emphasize, in good luck in a sense, I emphasize the possibility or the may-being, to speak with Meillassoux, of things that are out of my hands. I may win the lottery and I may not. I do not have the knowledge of how things may go, which is one of the reasons why they're out of my hands. The outcome depends on causes external to that of my will, causes of which I do not know enough. Therefore, attaining knowledge about the outcome depends on time, most precisely on the future. The future will show if my desire for the millions I can win in the lottery will be satisfied. This conceptual concatenation turns the future into something that I cannot predict in advance and that is therefore beyond the scope of my action and will. Right, the future will tell if I bought the the lottery ticket and for a reason. One problem arises at this point, namely that I thereby attain for Descartes a weak concept of contingency. If things can go either way but the choice is not mine, I identify contingency with arbitrariness such that the future outcomes of choices depend on good or bad luck. As soon as I do so, my will is determined neither by my knowledge nor by the rigidity of my judgments, but by an arbitrary outcome that is out of my hands. But a will that is determined arbitrarily is not free in its actions. The defense of immutable necessity, and so what Descartes tries to do is we should give up the idea of good or bad luck. *The Passions of the Soul* is so refreshing because he has a super brutal criticism of hope. He thinks it's one of the most reactionary affects ever invented. Okay, not fashionable I see but I mean it's interesting. Okay, the defense of immutable necessity as a step to overcome this problematic concept of contingency, namely contingency as arbitrariness that determines my will and with it the state of un-freedom that results from it. This defense therefore does not work simply by playing out one externality, one determination against another, but by
that nothing can possibly happen other than as providence has determined from all eternity. Providence is so to speak a fate, une fatalité, or immutable necessity which we must set against fortune and for for Descartes this is that we have the way of things in our hands or things just happen contingently." So we must set fate une fatalité against fortune in order to expose the latter as a chimera which solely arise from an error of our intellect, the erroneous transcendental I referred to before. Descartes' point is here that a fatalist assumption is necessary to counter the wrong conception of freedom. But fatalism cannot simply be reduced to mechanistic determinism, rather it is characterized as a belief in divine providence and immutable necessity. At first sight Descartes' claim may seem to be paradoxical. If we seek to avoid given determinations of freedom, how can the remedy lie in assuming that everything is predetermined by God's providence. Right, it seems like we're simply replacing the one for the other. Believing in fortune, I emphasize, in good luck in a sense, I emphasize the possibility or the may-being, to speak with Meillassoux, of things that are out of my hands. I may win the lottery and I may not. I do not have the knowledge of how things may go, which is one of the reasons why they're out of my hands. The outcome depends on causes external to that of my will, causes of which I do not know enough. Therefore, attaining knowledge about the outcome depends on time, most precisely on the future. The future will show if my desire for the millions I can win in the lottery will be satisfied. This conceptual concatenation turns the future into something that I cannot predict in advance and that is therefore beyond the scope of my action and will. Right, the future will tell if I bought the the lottery ticket and for a reason. One problem arises at this point, namely that I thereby attain for Descartes a weak concept of contingency. If things can go either way but the choice is not mine, I identify contingency with arbitrariness such that the future outcomes of choices depend on good or bad luck. As soon as I do so, my will is determined neither by my knowledge nor by the rigidity of my judgments, but by an arbitrary outcome that is out of my hands. But a will that is determined arbitrarily is not free in its actions. The defense of immutable necessity, and so what Descartes tries to do is we should give up the idea of good or bad luck. *The Passions of the Soul* is so refreshing because he has a super brutal criticism of hope. He thinks it's one of the most reactionary affects ever invented. Okay, not fashionable I see but I mean it's interesting. Okay, the defense of immutable necessity as a step to overcome this problematic concept of contingency, namely contingency as arbitrariness that determines my will and with it the state of un-freedom that results from it. This defense therefore does not work simply by playing out one externality, one determination against another, but by
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emphasizing necessity against contingency, and now the catch, for the sake of unfolding a proper concept of contingency. Right, so Descartes' just like the defense of predestination is just like the first step to gets to a point where we can think contingency proper. In order to achieve this goal one has to shift the temporal focus from the future to an already determined and yet still determining past, a shift that is performed by a way of an appeal to divine providence. Cartesian fatalism thus counters the idea of an arbitrary future outcome that determines the will with the assumption of an always already necessarily determined past and thereby a fully determined future as it seems. But and here comes the catch, God did predestine things in such a way that A) it will never be we will never be able to know how they're predestined and B) he predestined the way of things in an entirely free manner. God is another name in Descartes for freedom. Right, he's so free he can just like alter the laws of the universe whenever he's in the mood and stuff like that. So what appears to be or what is strategically an attack on a weak form of contingency leads to a strong form of contingency embodied by God's ultimate free will, right, and the plan that he made up and we can never know. That is to say, assuming divine predestination, being a fatalist in this sense, prepares one for an unknowable contingency, for a strong concept of contingency that thereby one assumes to be absolutely necessary. But I do not only assume a position that is able to accept a fundamental necessity of contingency, this is the assumption of God's plan as for example Meillassoux would advocate I think, but also a fundamental contingency of necessity. Why? To give you a trivially trivial and slightly not even slightly romanticizing example, at the end. If you want to fall in you're not in love in this setting right now, right you don't have a partner but you want to fall in love. How do you prepare for that? What what can Descartes tell us for such such a such a situation? First I think one has to assume that everything is predetermined and thus that there is no need whatsoever to go out looking for someone, engage in online dating or stuff like that. Because in this sense as a fatalist, one cannot simply one knows that one cannot simply decides to fall in love, one cannot force it, in a sense it's predestined, right. This is why in one way or the other if it happens that you fall in love, it appears to you as an absolute necessity. I had to meet him, I had to meet her, or whatsoever, right I mean it at least once I think. Okay, so this means it's a preparation for an utterly contingent encounter and this utterly contingent encounter can produce a kind of necessity of its own. This is why it's not only right the necessity of contingency that needs to be embraced but also the contingency of necessity. This is why one
emphasizing necessity against contingency, and now the catch, for the sake of unfolding a proper concept of contingency. Right, so Descartes' just like the defense of predestination is just like the first step to gets to a point where we can think contingency proper. In order to achieve this goal one has to shift the temporal focus from the future to an already determined and yet still determining past, a shift that is performed by a way of an appeal to divine providence. Cartesian fatalism thus counters the idea of an arbitrary future outcome that determines the will with the assumption of an always already necessarily determined past and thereby a fully determined future as it seems. But and here comes the catch, God did predestine things in such a way that A) it will never be we will never be able to know how they're predestined and B) he predestined the way of things in an entirely free manner. God is another name in Descartes for freedom. Right, he's so free he can just like alter the laws of the universe whenever he's in the mood and stuff like that. So what appears to be or what is strategically an attack on a weak form of contingency leads to a strong form of contingency embodied by God's ultimate free will, right, and the plan that he made up and we can never know. That is to say, assuming divine predestination, being a fatalist in this sense, prepares one for an unknowable contingency, for a strong concept of contingency that thereby one assumes to be absolutely necessary. But I do not only assume a position that is able to accept a fundamental necessity of contingency, this is the assumption of God's plan as for example Meillassoux would advocate I think, but also a fundamental contingency of necessity. Why? To give you a trivially trivial and slightly not even slightly romanticizing example, at the end. If you want to fall in you're not in love in this setting right now, right you don't have a partner but you want to fall in love. How do you prepare for that? What what can Descartes tell us for such such a such a situation? First I think one has to assume that everything is predetermined and thus that there is no need whatsoever to go out looking for someone, engage in online dating or stuff like that. Because in this sense as a fatalist, one cannot simply one knows that one cannot simply decides to fall in love, one cannot force it, in a sense it's predestined, right. This is why in one way or the other if it happens that you fall in love, it appears to you as an absolute necessity. I had to meet him, I had to meet her, or whatsoever, right I mean it at least once I think. Okay, so this means it's a preparation for an utterly contingent encounter and this utterly contingent encounter can produce a kind of necessity of its own. This is why it's not only right the necessity of contingency that needs to be embraced but also the contingency of necessity. This is why one
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assumes that people in this sense can be can assume that they're meant for each other. Descartes is a fatalist because he defends the need for thinking both, the fundamental necessity of contingency, that is I'm only free if something contingently happens to me that forces me to be free and that forces me to think. So freedom is something that happens and not is. And the fundamental contingency of necessity, that is if something happens to me I assume it as my destiny, I assume it as something which I follow necessarily. It's very close I think to what in psychoanalysis I don't know if you would agree is Freud calls *Neurosenwahl*, the choice of neurosis. I mean it's not something that you decide right I mean as you never decide to fall in love, either you fall in have fallen in love and then you're in love or you're not in love. I mean it's not the moment where you think well how much money does she earn, she is a bit too tall or something like that, right I mean you don't do it like this. Okay. Maybe and to end you can see why fatalism in this is my fourth point necessarily has a certain comic form because its basic principle and axiom is the following, namely that there is no there is. I think this is a version of a Hegelian speculative sentence. And one reason why for example Slavoj has done a lot of work on that why Hegel to to defend this insight even goes as far as defending the necessity of war, war in history or just like take the perspective of the science of logic which is depicts the created God's thought before the creation of the world. So there is no there is or in a longer version the worst always already happened and thus it it somehow seems impossible to continue as one did before. To now truly end I want to quote just like a wonderfully fatalist line by Samuel Beckett. At one point he comes up with a I think quite comic description of a problem. I quote: "I see nothing. It's because there is nothing or it's because I have no eyes. Or both. That makes three possibilities to choose from." I mean just think of Buridan's ass, right I mean there is a that's like a nice Beckettian twist on that. Sometimes I think and this this is the main point argument of the book, sometimes it's important to see the minimal difference by means of which a third option appears. Sometimes the problem does I think not lie as one can learn from the rationalist tradition in not being able to solve the problem but in seeing that the problem is what we perceive as a problem, which blinds us for our our own involvement in it. I think the same holds for freedom. So although this is only a first step one should I think opt for this Beckettian fatalism. There
assumes that people in this sense can be can assume that they're meant for each other. Descartes is a fatalist because he defends the need for thinking both, the fundamental necessity of contingency, that is I'm only free if something contingently happens to me that forces me to be free and that forces me to think. So freedom is something that happens and not is. And the fundamental contingency of necessity, that is if something happens to me I assume it as my destiny, I assume it as something which I follow necessarily. It's very close I think to what in psychoanalysis I don't know if you would agree is Freud calls *Neurosenwahl*, the choice of neurosis. I mean it's not something that you decide right I mean as you never decide to fall in love, either you fall in have fallen in love and then you're in love or you're not in love. I mean it's not the moment where you think well how much money does she earn, she is a bit too tall or something like that, right I mean you don't do it like this. Okay. Maybe and to end you can see why fatalism in this is my fourth point necessarily has a certain comic form because its basic principle and axiom is the following, namely that there is no there is. I think this is a version of a Hegelian speculative sentence. And one reason why for example Slavoj has done a lot of work on that why Hegel to to defend this insight even goes as far as defending the necessity of war, war in history or just like take the perspective of the science of logic which is depicts the created God's thought before the creation of the world. So there is no there is or in a longer version the worst always already happened and thus it it somehow seems impossible to continue as one did before. To now truly end I want to quote just like a wonderfully fatalist line by Samuel Beckett. At one point he comes up with a I think quite comic description of a problem. I quote: "I see nothing. It's because there is nothing or it's because I have no eyes. Or both. That makes three possibilities to choose from." I mean just think of Buridan's ass, right I mean there is a that's like a nice Beckettian twist on that. Sometimes I think and this this is the main point argument of the book, sometimes it's important to see the minimal difference by means of which a third option appears. Sometimes the problem does I think not lie as one can learn from the rationalist tradition in not being able to solve the problem but in seeing that the problem is what we perceive as a problem, which blinds us for our our own involvement in it. I think the same holds for freedom. So although this is only a first step one should I think opt for this Beckettian fatalism. There
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is certainly not yet this is certainly not yet emancipation, so right one should opt for there is nothing and we don't have any eyes, but I think it helps to avoid seeing what is not there with eyes one imagined. So I stop here. Before you take over can I just make a short remark because it really touched me how my wife is a chain smoker, no. And she developed once the same line about I think the clearest case of this false choice is smoking. She read an essay where they claimed that the most efficient way to make it sure that you will never stop smoking is to convince you that it's not a problem because you have the freedom of choice at any point to stop. So then why do it, I can stop whenever I want. And she even read some American analysis interesting where they claim maybe but you can never do it, one way to make you stop smoking was but of course you can never do it, at the very beginning when you start smoking if some divine figure were to tell you you have a complete freedom now to smoke or not, but once you decide to smoke you will never be able to stop smoking. And that would probably make the majority no. Another thing sorry then immediately you do the democratic debate. You know when you talk about this freedom, I forgot his name it's not Van Inwagen, one of the intelligent Christian philosophers the one who does analytic philosophy I'm very sorry forgot the name proposed a wonderful way to combine freedom and predestination. It's such a simple way, he says I have to decide something now. I am totally free to decide and it's contingent and so on. How then can there be predestination? Because God as all-powerful sees the future and he although my decision is totally free he already knows in advance because he sees the future how I will now decide. So it's a nice way God was able to predestine me because my free decision now is retroactively already included by I talk too much democracy please. Okay, thank you. So democracy, would anybody like to respond? I'd like to ask a question about the ontology of psychoanalysis. So is it a continuance of you know Hegelian ontological logical project self-development of thought? If so, what’s wrong with Hegel? And if not, what’s going on? And very connectedly, is there any way you can evaluate the correctness of a given psychoanalytic thesis? Of which thesis? Any given? Yes, is there a general criteria? And that’s obviously going to hang on the question of ontology too. No, that’s of course a very tough question and so on. I mean it would take too much time, but I will I will try to be as brief as possible here. First when you ask this question, what do you mean by Hegel wrong and so on. It's incredible to what extent if you read Hegel closely, and I think that’s the
is certainly not yet this is certainly not yet emancipation, so right one should opt for there is nothing and we don't have any eyes, but I think it helps to avoid seeing what is not there with eyes one imagined. So I stop here. Before you take over can I just make a short remark because it really touched me how my wife is a chain smoker, no. And she developed once the same line about I think the clearest case of this false choice is smoking. She read an essay where they claimed that the most efficient way to make it sure that you will never stop smoking is to convince you that it's not a problem because you have the freedom of choice at any point to stop. So then why do it, I can stop whenever I want. And she even read some American analysis interesting where they claim maybe but you can never do it, one way to make you stop smoking was but of course you can never do it, at the very beginning when you start smoking if some divine figure were to tell you you have a complete freedom now to smoke or not, but once you decide to smoke you will never be able to stop smoking. And that would probably make the majority no. Another thing sorry then immediately you do the democratic debate. You know when you talk about this freedom, I forgot his name it's not Van Inwagen, one of the intelligent Christian philosophers the one who does analytic philosophy I'm very sorry forgot the name proposed a wonderful way to combine freedom and predestination. It's such a simple way, he says I have to decide something now. I am totally free to decide and it's contingent and so on. How then can there be predestination? Because God as all-powerful sees the future and he although my decision is totally free he already knows in advance because he sees the future how I will now decide. So it's a nice way God was able to predestine me because my free decision now is retroactively already included by I talk too much democracy please. Okay, thank you. So democracy, would anybody like to respond? I'd like to ask a question about the ontology of psychoanalysis. So is it a continuance of you know Hegelian ontological logical project self-development of thought? If so, what’s wrong with Hegel? And if not, what’s going on? And very connectedly, is there any way you can evaluate the correctness of a given psychoanalytic thesis? Of which thesis? Any given? Yes, is there a general criteria? And that’s obviously going to hang on the question of ontology too. No, that’s of course a very tough question and so on. I mean it would take too much time, but I will I will try to be as brief as possible here. First when you ask this question, what do you mean by Hegel wrong and so on. It's incredible to what extent if you read Hegel closely, and I think that’s the
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ultimate mystery of Hegel, he appears you know absolute knowing I know everything and so on. But are people aware to what extent he is at the same time open to the future, relativizing and so on and so on. So often even in logic for example he was constantly reworking the logic. Or the nice example for me is if you look that’s my eternal example in the introduction of his philosophy of history, when he goes through the geography of the world and apropos of two countries: America, United States, and Russia. He says the same thing. He says and it's not so stupid when you take into account that this was written or put down in 1820s. For Russia and United States he says it's too early, we cannot conceptually develop it because next century will be theirs. It's not so stupid to say this. So what I'm saying saying is that as many intelligent readers of Hegel know, here I even agree with Brandom, Hegel is the supreme example of what you referred to now, the contingency of necessity itself. And I think Hegel is here more open than Marx, which is why a proof. For Hegel, the Marxist vision, at least in its vulgar evolutionary way like in the famous introduction to or for for the critique of political economy, for Hegel it's absolutely prohibited to do any teleology which reaches into the future. For Hegel now it's the absolute limit. Like we cannot make this totalitarian temptation in Marx you know like Marx does allow in spite of all Lukácsian relativism, Marx does allow for the option that there is a historical agent which knows where the history is going and justifies its own activity in this way. We are just fulfilling if not necessity a possibility opened up by history. For Hegel this is a totally prohibited option. Which means Hegel is radically contingent here. We know in this way very materialist contingent. I also read here all my gratitude to Pippin who pointed out this point which is so obvious but do you know anybody else who made it so clear apart from whom? The owl of Minerva. Yeah, when Hegel says, you know the owl of Minerva, that a certain social order can be comprehended in its notional structure only when its time is past. But I think Hegel was not such a total idiot not to know that this must held also for his own philosophy of right. So I think it's total misreading of Hegel to claim his corporate state as developed in philosophy of right it's the model. No, he gave a precise philosophical deduction of it, which means fuck off it's gray on gray it's so that’s my paradox, that the harshest predestiny determinist everything but at the same time I claim the most open philosopher you can imagine. So I don't see any
ultimate mystery of Hegel, he appears you know absolute knowing I know everything and so on. But are people aware to what extent he is at the same time open to the future, relativizing and so on and so on. So often even in logic for example he was constantly reworking the logic. Or the nice example for me is if you look that’s my eternal example in the introduction of his philosophy of history, when he goes through the geography of the world and apropos of two countries: America, United States, and Russia. He says the same thing. He says and it's not so stupid when you take into account that this was written or put down in 1820s. For Russia and United States he says it's too early, we cannot conceptually develop it because next century will be theirs. It's not so stupid to say this. So what I'm saying saying is that as many intelligent readers of Hegel know, here I even agree with Brandom, Hegel is the supreme example of what you referred to now, the contingency of necessity itself. And I think Hegel is here more open than Marx, which is why a proof. For Hegel, the Marxist vision, at least in its vulgar evolutionary way like in the famous introduction to or for for the critique of political economy, for Hegel it's absolutely prohibited to do any teleology which reaches into the future. For Hegel now it's the absolute limit. Like we cannot make this totalitarian temptation in Marx you know like Marx does allow in spite of all Lukácsian relativism, Marx does allow for the option that there is a historical agent which knows where the history is going and justifies its own activity in this way. We are just fulfilling if not necessity a possibility opened up by history. For Hegel this is a totally prohibited option. Which means Hegel is radically contingent here. We know in this way very materialist contingent. I also read here all my gratitude to Pippin who pointed out this point which is so obvious but do you know anybody else who made it so clear apart from whom? The owl of Minerva. Yeah, when Hegel says, you know the owl of Minerva, that a certain social order can be comprehended in its notional structure only when its time is past. But I think Hegel was not such a total idiot not to know that this must held also for his own philosophy of right. So I think it's total misreading of Hegel to claim his corporate state as developed in philosophy of right it's the model. No, he gave a precise philosophical deduction of it, which means fuck off it's gray on gray it's so that’s my paradox, that the harshest predestiny determinist everything but at the same time I claim the most open philosopher you can imagine. So I don't see any
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contradiction between claiming yes Hegel is the ultimate guy, but that’s why I think that if at all we can do something like what Hegel wanted with logic today, we will have to do it's not a question of what Hegel was trying to do at the end you know change the order of categories a little bit, although it would be a wonderful reading to look at some weak points. For example one mega weak point. We all know that Hegel's failure in mathematics is his reduction of mathematics to just bad bad spurious infinity of quantitative thinking. But then Hegel has a problem in in how do you call it
contradiction between claiming yes Hegel is the ultimate guy, but that’s why I think that if at all we can do something like what Hegel wanted with logic today, we will have to do it's not a question of what Hegel was trying to do at the end you know change the order of categories a little bit, although it would be a wonderful reading to look at some weak points. For example one mega weak point. We all know that Hegel's failure in mathematics is his reduction of mathematics to just bad bad spurious infinity of quantitative thinking. But then Hegel has a problem in in how do you call it
Slavoj Žižek
that calculus the infinitesimal, yeah the infinitesimal calculus. There mathematics becomes qualitative. It does something that according to Hegel it shouldn't have done it, which is why check it out, it's this typical Hegelian symptomal point. You have fifty-sixty pages totally overblown he is fighting with it. This is Hegel at its most beautiful, struggling with himself. So I think that and that’s the crucial point, we can relativize overcome Hegel without historicizing him in a cheap way, you know like Hegel was a child of his time, we see more. That’s the for Hegel, historical closure as even Lukács knew and so on, historical closure like we cannot step over blah blah is the the and in this sense absolute knowing is a form of historical closure is the most radical historicization imaginable. It's a historicization which allows for no you know usual historicism allows the agent the thinker this false distance. I'm somewhere outside I see how things are developing and so on and so on. Hegel doesn't give you that option. So again I don't have any problem with even as a good Hegelian totally rejecting Hegel moving over and so on and so on. Like maybe we cannot do it in the same way, but I was dreaming, I report on this dream in the first or second chapter, second of my I think it's *Tarrying with the Negative*, or how Hegel's logic should have been rewritten today. That instead of that concept and so on we should somehow distill the logical structure all the paradoxes
that calculus the infinitesimal, yeah the infinitesimal calculus. There mathematics becomes qualitative. It does something that according to Hegel it shouldn't have done it, which is why check it out, it's this typical Hegelian symptomal point. You have fifty-sixty pages totally overblown he is fighting with it. This is Hegel at its most beautiful, struggling with himself. So I think that and that’s the crucial point, we can relativize overcome Hegel without historicizing him in a cheap way, you know like Hegel was a child of his time, we see more. That’s the for Hegel, historical closure as even Lukács knew and so on, historical closure like we cannot step over blah blah is the the and in this sense absolute knowing is a form of historical closure is the most radical historicization imaginable. It's a historicization which allows for no you know usual historicism allows the agent the thinker this false distance. I'm somewhere outside I see how things are developing and so on and so on. Hegel doesn't give you that option. So again I don't have any problem with even as a good Hegelian totally rejecting Hegel moving over and so on and so on. Like maybe we cannot do it in the same way, but I was dreaming, I report on this dream in the first or second chapter, second of my I think it's *Tarrying with the Negative*, or how Hegel's logic should have been rewritten today. That instead of that concept and so on we should somehow distill the logical structure all the paradoxes
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of these new ways of thinking quantum physics and so on and so on. Because it's obvious that there is in all of Hegel's logic I don't see a place in categories where you can squeeze in something like quantum physics and so on. And there are so again I think for me Hegel is not a thinker which is like a pressure total system and so on. Hegel is for me a liberating presence. And then if you are truly a Hegelian you can discern here and there the way Hegel misses his own point. For example you develop this I think nicely
of these new ways of thinking quantum physics and so on and so on. Because it's obvious that there is in all of Hegel's logic I don't see a place in categories where you can squeeze in something like quantum physics and so on. And there are so again I think for me Hegel is not a thinker which is like a pressure total system and so on. Hegel is for me a liberating presence. And then if you are truly a Hegelian you can discern here and there the way Hegel misses his own point. For example you develop this I think nicely
Slavoj Žižek
in your book on rebel, pöbel, no? How if Hegel were to be truly Hegelian he should have seen what he otherwise knows always that precisely this super-numerary part of no part, part which is generated by a social edifice but doesn't belong to it, that this is the point of universality. Such an element out of its place stands for in it the universality of the existing system comes to be. But Hegel probably also for political is afraid to draw this conclusion. It would have been too revolutionary to say that today universality is embodied in rebel, in pöbel and so on. So again that’s for me I don't see a problem into going further of Hegel. I think that the most stupid I'm even making a step further I will stop immediately sorry by provoking you even further. You know that wonderful book it's one of truly few truly Hegelian essayists today: Pierre Bayard, the French guy who among other things wrote a wonderful book it's translated into English called *How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read*. And it proves in such a wonderful way it's not a joke but it's a serious joke. For example he goes through through I think through Joyce or whom and proves that he contacted them that the best readings of Joyce are those by guys who privately admit to you that they haven't read all of it. And if this is true for someone it's for Hegel. People who really know all of Hegel, they get this boring academic stuff. But look at Kojève. Maybe he read all of it, but it's such a one-sided reductionist reading Kojève's lectures on Hegel. And this would be for me a true Hegelian approach: not this, you have to know it all, not isolate part. The mystery of Hegel's logic is not this pseudo-dialectical one, to know a phenomenon you have to know all the totality. No, the truth is always partial. You know like Brecht says in a wonderful way that conceptual analysis should deal like fighting criminals. It is much easier to kill an enemy if you if you catch it alone, you know like that you should isolate it. So I'm sorry, I know I didn't answer you but I think it's crucial to answer you properly. I'm now just giving you a transcendental prolegomena for a future answer to your question, no. It's to get rid of this total Hegel image, the guy who somehow knew it all or whatever. Okay, sorry. I have a question for Ruda and Frank. Two questions. One, what kind of politics or political projects stems from fatalism in terms of, you know, getting us away from this tyranny of pseudo-choice and I'm wondering if that connects to what Dr. Žižek or Professor Žižek said yesterday? What did I do to you that you humiliate me so much? What do you mean by the Doctor Žižek? Who is Doctor Žižek? I don't, I don't, we're not on an intimate thing you never you haven't said please call me Slavoj. No, I will not say please call me Slavoj, I will say fuck off if you don't call me Slavoj. Is this clear enough? Okay, Slavoj. Pardon the American accent. Slavoj said yesterday about if pressed for what kind of political solution he thinks would be kind of a some sort of socialist bureaucracy that just kind of functions in the background takes care of all these time-consuming overburdening choices etc. So I'm just wondering if there's a connection there or if that's something that's in the book, I haven't read all of it. And second of all, it seems from what you said that you were talking about in terms of the freedom as capacity. I'm wondering if you also addressed kind of the kind of modern twist on that that comes from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum where they kind of branch that out to capabilities and functionings and there's all these different lists about which list is appropriate for development as freedom etc. And I'm wondering if you have anything to to say about that because essentially Sen is kind of the darling, right. Tony Blair invited him to make a something and also the UN development goals are kind of they say based on his thought of expanding what development is Sen, right? Amartya Sen. Yeah yeah yeah, he is very much kind of the darling. But isn't Martha Nussbaum the great Aristotelian also? I would have to ask the philosophers that, yes because I'm a self-taught pseudo-philosopher. No, I don't impute it on them but she is usually considered as- this is this as you pointed out correctly new return of Aristotelianism. You know like not abstract thinking but organic tendencies, capacities. Sorry. The question was to Frank talk please. Why I'm not a filthy liberal why should I. You invited him. I invited him to exert my right to terrorize. Okay. First answer, there is no political program or agenda as such. I mean I get asked that frequently actually. I understand why but I think for example that Dupuy has a good position on that. I mean because he makes it very concrete what it means to say something about what he calls enlightened doomsaying, right I mean understanding that the way people treat ecological or economic catastrophes is the catastrophe. Accepting that this is the catastrophe will change something, right and somehow bring up a be- because his version of enlightened doomsaying means that if we still consider the possibilities that we see as a given to be the only ones left, everything is already lost. So one needs to, let's put it like that, change the transcendental framework. So I'm not making a normative claim in this super strong what will follow from that. Because then I think one needs to discuss that pretty much concretely also the role of bureaucracy or whatever this may may mean. And the other the other answer I would agree with Slavoj in a sense. No I didn't allow you for you I am Doctor Žižek. Ah yeah okay. Sorry. So what Professor Doctor Žižek said, I agree with his authority and why isn't this that he's sharing so kindly kindly with us because I think it doesn't change much. The standard answer of an Aristotelian to that kind of criticism is you misunderstand what we mean by capacity. You think right do we have a catalog or register in in us and then is freedom is either one of the capacities or the meta meta capacity which allows for actualizing whatever capacity, right eating going to the toilet whatever talking. But I think this is this this then they basically shift it by saying no, no, freedom is the way in which we determine or speak about what it means to realize a capacity, right it's a performative pragmatist model. But I think this doesn't change much unless you think that there are acts that change the very form of what an action means. Right, because they transcendentalize the very procedure. You find that in inferentialism and I think the modern pragmatists they transcendentalize they usually speak of
in your book on rebel, pöbel, no? How if Hegel were to be truly Hegelian he should have seen what he otherwise knows always that precisely this super-numerary part of no part, part which is generated by a social edifice but doesn't belong to it, that this is the point of universality. Such an element out of its place stands for in it the universality of the existing system comes to be. But Hegel probably also for political is afraid to draw this conclusion. It would have been too revolutionary to say that today universality is embodied in rebel, in pöbel and so on. So again that’s for me I don't see a problem into going further of Hegel. I think that the most stupid I'm even making a step further I will stop immediately sorry by provoking you even further. You know that wonderful book it's one of truly few truly Hegelian essayists today: Pierre Bayard, the French guy who among other things wrote a wonderful book it's translated into English called *How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read*. And it proves in such a wonderful way it's not a joke but it's a serious joke. For example he goes through through I think through Joyce or whom and proves that he contacted them that the best readings of Joyce are those by guys who privately admit to you that they haven't read all of it. And if this is true for someone it's for Hegel. People who really know all of Hegel, they get this boring academic stuff. But look at Kojève. Maybe he read all of it, but it's such a one-sided reductionist reading Kojève's lectures on Hegel. And this would be for me a true Hegelian approach: not this, you have to know it all, not isolate part. The mystery of Hegel's logic is not this pseudo-dialectical one, to know a phenomenon you have to know all the totality. No, the truth is always partial. You know like Brecht says in a wonderful way that conceptual analysis should deal like fighting criminals. It is much easier to kill an enemy if you if you catch it alone, you know like that you should isolate it. So I'm sorry, I know I didn't answer you but I think it's crucial to answer you properly. I'm now just giving you a transcendental prolegomena for a future answer to your question, no. It's to get rid of this total Hegel image, the guy who somehow knew it all or whatever. Okay, sorry. I have a question for Ruda and Frank. Two questions. One, what kind of politics or political projects stems from fatalism in terms of, you know, getting us away from this tyranny of pseudo-choice and I'm wondering if that connects to what Dr. Žižek or Professor Žižek said yesterday? What did I do to you that you humiliate me so much? What do you mean by the Doctor Žižek? Who is Doctor Žižek? I don't, I don't, we're not on an intimate thing you never you haven't said please call me Slavoj. No, I will not say please call me Slavoj, I will say fuck off if you don't call me Slavoj. Is this clear enough? Okay, Slavoj. Pardon the American accent. Slavoj said yesterday about if pressed for what kind of political solution he thinks would be kind of a some sort of socialist bureaucracy that just kind of functions in the background takes care of all these time-consuming overburdening choices etc. So I'm just wondering if there's a connection there or if that's something that's in the book, I haven't read all of it. And second of all, it seems from what you said that you were talking about in terms of the freedom as capacity. I'm wondering if you also addressed kind of the kind of modern twist on that that comes from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum where they kind of branch that out to capabilities and functionings and there's all these different lists about which list is appropriate for development as freedom etc. And I'm wondering if you have anything to to say about that because essentially Sen is kind of the darling, right. Tony Blair invited him to make a something and also the UN development goals are kind of they say based on his thought of expanding what development is Sen, right? Amartya Sen. Yeah yeah yeah, he is very much kind of the darling. But isn't Martha Nussbaum the great Aristotelian also? I would have to ask the philosophers that, yes because I'm a self-taught pseudo-philosopher. No, I don't impute it on them but she is usually considered as- this is this as you pointed out correctly new return of Aristotelianism. You know like not abstract thinking but organic tendencies, capacities. Sorry. The question was to Frank talk please. Why I'm not a filthy liberal why should I. You invited him. I invited him to exert my right to terrorize. Okay. First answer, there is no political program or agenda as such. I mean I get asked that frequently actually. I understand why but I think for example that Dupuy has a good position on that. I mean because he makes it very concrete what it means to say something about what he calls enlightened doomsaying, right I mean understanding that the way people treat ecological or economic catastrophes is the catastrophe. Accepting that this is the catastrophe will change something, right and somehow bring up a be- because his version of enlightened doomsaying means that if we still consider the possibilities that we see as a given to be the only ones left, everything is already lost. So one needs to, let's put it like that, change the transcendental framework. So I'm not making a normative claim in this super strong what will follow from that. Because then I think one needs to discuss that pretty much concretely also the role of bureaucracy or whatever this may may mean. And the other the other answer I would agree with Slavoj in a sense. No I didn't allow you for you I am Doctor Žižek. Ah yeah okay. Sorry. So what Professor Doctor Žižek said, I agree with his authority and why isn't this that he's sharing so kindly kindly with us because I think it doesn't change much. The standard answer of an Aristotelian to that kind of criticism is you misunderstand what we mean by capacity. You think right do we have a catalog or register in in us and then is freedom is either one of the capacities or the meta meta capacity which allows for actualizing whatever capacity, right eating going to the toilet whatever talking. But I think this is this this then they basically shift it by saying no, no, freedom is the way in which we determine or speak about what it means to realize a capacity, right it's a performative pragmatist model. But I think this doesn't change much unless you think that there are acts that change the very form of what an action means. Right, because they transcendentalize the very procedure. You find that in inferentialism and I think the modern pragmatists they transcendentalize they usually speak of
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a space of reasons. And surprisingly there is no exit and no entry door. I mean which generates quite quite profound problems, right I mean they have to give a very
a space of reasons. And surprisingly there is no exit and no entry door. I mean which generates quite quite profound problems, right I mean they have to give a very
Slavoj Žižek
speculative to say the least accounts of how just like because people enter,
speculative to say the least accounts of how just like because people enter,
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right I mean one year
right I mean one year
Slavoj Žižek
old is not a fully a normative creature and then they have to come up with sub-explanations
old is not a fully a normative creature and then they have to come up with sub-explanations
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when the precise entry point is when do people know how to make normative moves and stuff like that. So I think this doesn't really solve the problem to my mind. No, but just very briefly if you permit me, just another point in your anti-Aristotelianism to confirm it. Pippin has one wonderful point I hope you will agree with it where he says that the problem with that false materialist reversal of Hegel in Feuerbach and Young Marx, these *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts* are ultra-Aristotelian
when the precise entry point is when do people know how to make normative moves and stuff like that. So I think this doesn't really solve the problem to my mind. No, but just very briefly if you permit me, just another point in your anti-Aristotelianism to confirm it. Pippin has one wonderful point I hope you will agree with it where he says that the problem with that false materialist reversal of Hegel in Feuerbach and Young Marx, these *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts* are ultra-Aristotelian
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texts. Marx all the time in a various sense speaks about these essential possibilities, essential abilities, potentials of being human. And I think that with his mature return to Hegel *Critique of Political Economy*, totally he steps out of this Young Marx Aristotelianism. Sorry. I have spoken. Yesterday I think we
texts. Marx all the time in a various sense speaks about these essential possibilities, essential abilities, potentials of being human. And I think that with his mature return to Hegel *Critique of Political Economy*, totally he steps out of this Young Marx Aristotelianism. Sorry. I have spoken. Yesterday I think we
Slavoj Žižek
established that there is a gap between philosophy and
established that there is a gap between philosophy and
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psychoanalysis. Yeah, I will go tomorrow
psychoanalysis. Yeah, I will go tomorrow
Slavoj Žižek
into it more in detail. I mean. So yesterday we established. So my question is, is the gap there to be bridged or is it there for a reason? No, I we didn't establish this the way I would maybe in an unfair way because I maybe relatively know what I wanted to say but didn't, I would say what we
into it more in detail. I mean. So yesterday we established. So my question is, is the gap there to be bridged or is it there for a reason? No, I we didn't establish this the way I would maybe in an unfair way because I maybe relatively know what I wanted to say but didn't, I would say what we
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established is that there is a radical gap even thematized by intelligent philosophers up to Heidegger within philosophy itself. There is the true gap between what philosophy can do its hidden not in a Aristotelian sense the space it opens potential and what it actually becomes. It is as if it's a very beautiful formulation I don't know where I found it, all of philosophy is fighting trying to control to contain the devil that it philosophy itself unleashed in its founding gesture. Philosophy is something crazy radical, it's always as you quoted of course Socrates corrupting the youth and so on, there is a radical negative dimension and the gap is there. And I think the greatness of Lacan is this: his reference
established is that there is a radical gap even thematized by intelligent philosophers up to Heidegger within philosophy itself. There is the true gap between what philosophy can do its hidden not in a Aristotelian sense the space it opens potential and what it actually becomes. It is as if it's a very beautiful formulation I don't know where I found it, all of philosophy is fighting trying to control to contain the devil that it philosophy itself unleashed in its founding gesture. Philosophy is something crazy radical, it's always as you quoted of course Socrates corrupting the youth and so on, there is a radical negative dimension and the gap is there. And I think the greatness of Lacan is this: his reference
Slavoj Žižek
to philosophy, he makes an alliance to what
to philosophy, he makes an alliance to what
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philosophy its own founding gesture that philosophy tries to unleash. And what is this founding gesture? When Lacan when he attacks philosophy he gets very simplistic. He likes to say that philosophy is this *Weltanschauung*, world view, the view of one- no, look at what I improvised one hour ago in a confused way about Kant. Kant's whole point is that there is antinomy we are unable that there is a fundamental gap no unity self-impossibility and so on and so on. So again the lesson of psychoanalysis I think is that to to bring out a gap in philosophy itself. There are different names for this gap, a Heideggerian would have said forgetting obliteration of ontological difference or whatever you want. I think again that the gap is there and then it then there was a kind of a forgetfulness on both sides. Philosophy is all the time obliterating its own founding gesture at the same time of course psychoanalysis one big regression.
philosophy its own founding gesture that philosophy tries to unleash. And what is this founding gesture? When Lacan when he attacks philosophy he gets very simplistic. He likes to say that philosophy is this *Weltanschauung*, world view, the view of one- no, look at what I improvised one hour ago in a confused way about Kant. Kant's whole point is that there is antinomy we are unable that there is a fundamental gap no unity self-impossibility and so on and so on. So again the lesson of psychoanalysis I think is that to to bring out a gap in philosophy itself. There are different names for this gap, a Heideggerian would have said forgetting obliteration of ontological difference or whatever you want. I think again that the gap is there and then it then there was a kind of a forgetfulness on both sides. Philosophy is all the time obliterating its own founding gesture at the same time of course psychoanalysis one big regression.
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And the genius of Lacan is that he got it in spite of all his anti-philosophical posturing, that the only way to bring out
And the genius of Lacan is that he got it in spite of all his anti-philosophical posturing, that the only way to bring out
Slavoj Žižek
the most radical dimension of Freudian psychoanalysis is through a reference to philosophy. Every all philosophers are needed. When Lacan talks about repetition, it's Kierkegaard. When Lacan talks about surplus enjoyment, it's Marx and so on and so on. It's a much more intricate relationship. So it's not just a gap, but it's there is a gap but a redoubled gap: a gap in philosophy and a gap in the sense of self-obliteration in psychoanalysis itself. That's all I can
the most radical dimension of Freudian psychoanalysis is through a reference to philosophy. Every all philosophers are needed. When Lacan talks about repetition, it's Kierkegaard. When Lacan talks about surplus enjoyment, it's Marx and so on and so on. It's a much more intricate relationship. So it's not just a gap, but it's there is a gap but a redoubled gap: a gap in philosophy and a gap in the sense of self-obliteration in psychoanalysis itself. That's all I can
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not to take too much
not to take too much
Slavoj Žižek
time.
time.
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Simple question. What do you make of Jacques-Alain Miller's notion of ordinary psychosis? Firstly it's not Jacques-Alain Miller's from what I know. It's already Lacan says that the ordinary person, the sane ordinary
Simple question. What do you make of Jacques-Alain Miller's notion of ordinary psychosis? Firstly it's not Jacques-Alain Miller's from what I know. It's already Lacan says that the ordinary person, the sane ordinary
Slavoj Žižek
person has a psychotic structure and so on and so on. But there is I cannot answer you I will just again prolegomena for a future answer. You know I often like this Miller's paradoxes, for example the way I developed the last time I was here. I found wonderful his provocation, you know this eternal search for what is at the level of four discourses capitalism and his idea that capitalism is precisely a specific twist to the analyst discourse, you know. So not simply analyst are always good guys. But you know what I'm afraid of here. Are you acquainted with this late Miller in the last years. His theory that now we have that reality is moving late capitalism outside the old Lacanian real into this pure radical real out of the law and so on and so on. I think he he buys too much the self-ideology of capitalism itself. If you look closely at how capitalism functions, it appears as this Deleuzian machine real desiring assemblage outside all law, but there are hard laws determining it, there is a fixed structure beneath. Also what I find so problematic in Miller here is that my God he should have known, it is as if I'm sorry to say this as if as if Lacan as if he didn't read Lacan. Lacan's whole point is that, and Lacan says this emphatically, for example debating Kant. Lacan says my real has nothing to do with this Kantian thing in itself some entity pure real out of law. Lacanian real is a kind of a purely formal obstacle, impossibility and so on. Real is not outside symbolic. Real is an internal obstacle, twist whatever within the symbolic itself. And this brings us back also to feminine sexuality. For Lacan it's often misread. Feminine sexuality, the formula doesn't mean women are partially within the
person has a psychotic structure and so on and so on. But there is I cannot answer you I will just again prolegomena for a future answer. You know I often like this Miller's paradoxes, for example the way I developed the last time I was here. I found wonderful his provocation, you know this eternal search for what is at the level of four discourses capitalism and his idea that capitalism is precisely a specific twist to the analyst discourse, you know. So not simply analyst are always good guys. But you know what I'm afraid of here. Are you acquainted with this late Miller in the last years. His theory that now we have that reality is moving late capitalism outside the old Lacanian real into this pure radical real out of the law and so on and so on. I think he he buys too much the self-ideology of capitalism itself. If you look closely at how capitalism functions, it appears as this Deleuzian machine real desiring assemblage outside all law, but there are hard laws determining it, there is a fixed structure beneath. Also what I find so problematic in Miller here is that my God he should have known, it is as if I'm sorry to say this as if as if Lacan as if he didn't read Lacan. Lacan's whole point is that, and Lacan says this emphatically, for example debating Kant. Lacan says my real has nothing to do with this Kantian thing in itself some entity pure real out of law. Lacanian real is a kind of a purely formal obstacle, impossibility and so on. Real is not outside symbolic. Real is an internal obstacle, twist whatever within the symbolic itself. And this brings us back also to feminine sexuality. For Lacan it's often misread. Feminine sexuality, the formula doesn't mean women are partially within the
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symbolic order but haha we are
symbolic order but haha we are
Slavoj Žižek
not totally in, we are a little bit out, we have that stupid *jouissance féminine*. No, Lacan says women are
not totally in, we are a little bit out, we have that stupid *jouissance féminine*. No, Lacan says women are
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also more fully within the symbolic
also more fully within the symbolic
Slavoj Žižek
than men because you know the other part of non-all is no
than men because you know the other part of non-all is no
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exception. Women are non-all because there is nothing in a woman which is not within the symbolic order. So it is as if there is something, I mean Miller still, I confess it, he is basically a genius, he is my introduction to Lacan. But it's as if he is losing nerves in the last years. My idea is and I say this with all respect, look at his edition of Lacan's seminars. Till some ten years ago a little bit more, he followed Lacan's line which was: seminars should be edited as if they're contemporary books, none of those explanatory notes
exception. Women are non-all because there is nothing in a woman which is not within the symbolic order. So it is as if there is something, I mean Miller still, I confess it, he is basically a genius, he is my introduction to Lacan. But it's as if he is losing nerves in the last years. My idea is and I say this with all respect, look at his edition of Lacan's seminars. Till some ten years ago a little bit more, he followed Lacan's line which was: seminars should be edited as if they're contemporary books, none of those explanatory notes
Slavoj Žižek
and so on. Then all of a sudden, I think with *Encore*, *Le sinthome* Joyce, he totally changed sides and all of a sudden you have pages of afterword by Miller where he goes into this for me
and so on. Then all of a sudden, I think with *Encore*, *Le sinthome* Joyce, he totally changed sides and all of a sudden you have pages of afterword by Miller where he goes into this for me
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rather
rather
Slavoj Žižek
tasteless tasteless- it's like like *National Geo-* no *National Geographic*, *National Enquirer*, those you know like oh Philippe Lacan asked me is Philippe Sollers there, yes he was there, you know reporting all these rumors about and so on. Also Miller, I know because I was partially the victim there. Up to a certain point he was accusing me of, you know, too much popular culture and so on, strict logic. But then all of a sudden he went over me much further. Look at his comments that he publishes in in *Le Point* and in *Figaro* sometimes. Like the lowest was I think his comment on Sarah Palin. He proclaimed she will squash Obama, that's the new post-feminist woman, she was absolutely- I mean he is making such I think that he is a sad example of what maybe holds even for Lacan, that and maybe it holds also for me, that it's not always that when a thinker is at the end of his path that you get some final wisdom, you know trying to catch the last words. No, there can be a high point before and then you go down. And I think the tragedy of the very last Lacan was that somewhere around Seminar a year before after, I think this is his high point. He there formulated a certain deadlock of his thought and then I think all those knots and so on and Borromean knot and so on, these are desperate attempts to find a way out and if you really read closely
tasteless tasteless- it's like like *National Geo-* no *National Geographic*, *National Enquirer*, those you know like oh Philippe Lacan asked me is Philippe Sollers there, yes he was there, you know reporting all these rumors about and so on. Also Miller, I know because I was partially the victim there. Up to a certain point he was accusing me of, you know, too much popular culture and so on, strict logic. But then all of a sudden he went over me much further. Look at his comments that he publishes in in *Le Point* and in *Figaro* sometimes. Like the lowest was I think his comment on Sarah Palin. He proclaimed she will squash Obama, that's the new post-feminist woman, she was absolutely- I mean he is making such I think that he is a sad example of what maybe holds even for Lacan, that and maybe it holds also for me, that it's not always that when a thinker is at the end of his path that you get some final wisdom, you know trying to catch the last words. No, there can be a high point before and then you go down. And I think the tragedy of the very last Lacan was that somewhere around Seminar a year before after, I think this is his high point. He there formulated a certain deadlock of his thought and then I think all those knots and so on and Borromean knot and so on, these are desperate attempts to find a way out and if you really read closely
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those
those
Slavoj Žižek
very late Lacan's seminars which are somehow tragically funny like he tells a couple of sentences some of them are an open admission of total defeat. And the same goes for many philosophers. For example my example Schelling, I think it's the middle Schelling, *Freedom* essay and *The Ages of the World* which is the real and then it's just a regression and so on. I think that sometimes late the last works of thinkers are the most productive ingenious but sometimes they're they're simply a regression. And what I am afraid, but he's not yet so old although he is like me, it means he is not young no, that what if Miller went on the same path again. Miller defines the real in Lacan as we pass from the real of nature external real submitted subjected to natural laws to this totally outlaw chaotic postmodern real capitalism and so on quantum physics, but what is missing in between for me is simply what is so great about Lacanian real, it's not the external stable reality but it's also not this totally chaotic *hors-la-loi* outlaw, but it's precisely just an immanent obstacle, totally virtual, like sexual difference as real. It doesn't exist, it's just a point of reference purely virtual for all the effects, it exists through its distorted effects. That’s the ultimate Lacanian real. And it's as if this is this is disappearing. It's very sad, it's very sad because you know why? Because I think that it's because of this that, okay I don't want now to speak so that you will crucify me then but I still believe Lacanian theory has tremendous potentials not just in clinic but for social analysis and so on whatever and it's not to put it very naively its potentials are not fully used and so on. It's very sad thing because again I admit it in spite of all my misunderstanding with Miller, I say it brutally, without Miller I would simply not be in Lacan, I would not ever understand Lacan. Thank you. Okay so I think we'll leave it there some more tomorrow.
very late Lacan's seminars which are somehow tragically funny like he tells a couple of sentences some of them are an open admission of total defeat. And the same goes for many philosophers. For example my example Schelling, I think it's the middle Schelling, *Freedom* essay and *The Ages of the World* which is the real and then it's just a regression and so on. I think that sometimes late the last works of thinkers are the most productive ingenious but sometimes they're they're simply a regression. And what I am afraid, but he's not yet so old although he is like me, it means he is not young no, that what if Miller went on the same path again. Miller defines the real in Lacan as we pass from the real of nature external real submitted subjected to natural laws to this totally outlaw chaotic postmodern real capitalism and so on quantum physics, but what is missing in between for me is simply what is so great about Lacanian real, it's not the external stable reality but it's also not this totally chaotic *hors-la-loi* outlaw, but it's precisely just an immanent obstacle, totally virtual, like sexual difference as real. It doesn't exist, it's just a point of reference purely virtual for all the effects, it exists through its distorted effects. That’s the ultimate Lacanian real. And it's as if this is this is disappearing. It's very sad, it's very sad because you know why? Because I think that it's because of this that, okay I don't want now to speak so that you will crucify me then but I still believe Lacanian theory has tremendous potentials not just in clinic but for social analysis and so on whatever and it's not to put it very naively its potentials are not fully used and so on. It's very sad thing because again I admit it in spite of all my misunderstanding with Miller, I say it brutally, without Miller I would simply not be in Lacan, I would not ever understand Lacan. Thank you. Okay so I think we'll leave it there some more tomorrow.