Is It Still Possible to be An Hegelian Today?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-03-31 · 0:58:35 · 7,162 words
hegel-dialecticsideologyreligion-theologycapitalismphilosophy-generalpsychoanalysiscinema-art-culture
Žižek delivers a lecture defending Hegel's continued relevance against both traditionalist and deflationary readings, arguing that Hegel's 'totality' is a critical rather than harmonizing concept that includes antagonisms and symptoms. He develops a theory of dialectical temporality, the retroactive constitution of necessity, and shows how this illuminates the French Revolution, the death of Christ, quantum mechanics, and capital as automatic subject. The lecture closes with a call for critical thinking against the ideological pressure to reduce intellect to expert problem-solving.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “begriffliche Vermittlung (conceptual mediation)”
Hegel's notion of absolute conceptual mediation that post-Hegelian thought (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx, natural science) claims to have surpassed.
The tendency (exemplified by Brandom) to strip Hegel of his ontologico-metaphysical commitments and reduce him to a general theorist of discursive strategies.
as “Hegel as vanishing mediator”
Hegel occupies a brief transitional moment between pre-critical metaphysics and post-metaphysical thought, seeing something that becomes invisible on both sides of the passage.
The popular caricature of Hegel as a Prussian megalomaniac is a fantasy formation that obfuscates and renders invisible the traumatic excess of what Hegel actually saw.
as “philosophical police”
Chesterton's ironic proposal, taken seriously by Žižek as a template for the liberal anti-totalitarian project, of philosophers who detect dangerous ideas before crimes occur, linking the notion of philosophical 'totality' to political totalitarianism.
For Žižek's Hegel, totality is not an organic harmonious whole but a critical concept that includes all symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies as integral parts, 'the whole plus its symptoms.'
as “List der Vernunft (cunning of reason)”
Reread not as a hidden higher reason guaranteeing good outcomes, but as the way every project is undermined by its own inconsistencies, a profit from chance rather than providential design.
The dialectical move from an external violation of a concept (e.g., theft as violation of property) to the dimension of that violation inscribed into the very concept itself (property is theft).
The structure in which the first choice must be the wrong choice, because it is only through that wrong choice (e.g., revolutionary terror) that the conditions for the right choice are created, necessitating a repetition of the choice.
as “Holy Spirit as first name for Communist Party”
After God's death on the cross abolishes the Big Other, the Holy Spirit names the egalitarian collective that must carry on without transcendent guarantee, making it structurally homologous to an emancipatory political organization.
as “Big Other”
The transcendent guarantee of meaning that Žižek argues is precisely what dies on the cross, leaving humanity free but without cosmic support.
Speech is always a promise/slip: to speak something deep is to say too much, then improvise to recover, the mechanism by which genuine new truths are discovered, as illustrated by Mirabeau's famous declaration.
Hegelian necessity is not pre-given but emerges retroactively: once an event occurs (Caesar crossing the Rubicon), it recreates its own destiny so that it appears to have been necessary.
Hegel's dialectical sublation/idealization, the movement Žižek argues pure repetition (Kierkegaard, Freud) defies, pointing to a limit in Hegel's own framework.
as “Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion)”
Pure mechanic repetition without Aufhebung, found in both Freud and Kierkegaard, marks the post-Hegelian space and points to an un-thought within Hegel's own system.
as “capital as automatic subject (automatisches Subjekt)”
Marx's formulation in the Grundrisse: capital is a self-relating subject beyond spurious infinity, at once actual infinity and endlessly repetitive bad infinity, something Hegel's matrix would have found horrifying.
Freud's thesis is not biological determinism but that sexuality is where the passage from natural to human occurs through drive (Wiederholungszwang), which is irreducible to instinct.
Hegel's concept of the structurally necessary dispossessed underclass, which Žižek argues is more useful today than the Marxist working-class/bourgeoisie binary for understanding dispersed forms of exploitation: illegal immigrants, those in apartheid conditions, etc.
as “state of emergency ideology”
The ideological operation, now adopted by figures like Bill Gates, that displaces critical thinking by invoking urgent suffering ('children are starving') to demand immediate pragmatic action rather than structural analysis.
Stories he reaches for 8
Starbucks charges more for coffee while advertising that the premium funds Guatemalan farmers and forest protection, allowing consumers to be simultaneously consumerist and ethically satisfied, the price of solidarity is included in the commodity price.
“They tell you: In the old times we were split into consumerists and good citizens caring about. Now we propose you to include the price of solidarity into the price of the commodity.”
Job's three theologian-friends each try to justify his suffering as meaningful; God arrives and vindicates Job's complaints, condemning the theologians. Chesterton reads God's answer not as arrogant but as a self-blasphemy, 'the whole creation is a big mess.' The death of Christ repeats this structure.
“God there commits a blasphemy. The true answer of God to Job is: 'You think you are something special with your trouble, but look, the whole creation is a big mess.'”
Caesar's crossing was not predestined; the situation was totally open. But once he crossed, he retroactively recreated his destiny so that it appeared necessary, the model for Hegelian retroactive constitution of necessity.
“Once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he as it were recreated his destiny so that it retroactively appeared necessary.”
Chesterton ironically proposed a corps of philosopher-policemen who detect dangerous ideas before crimes occur; Žižek argues this is exactly what liberal anti-totalitarians (Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksmann) do, tracing a straight road from philosophical totality to political totalitarianism.
“The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.”
Borges argued that Kafka retroactively created his forerunners (Dostoevsky, Poe, Blake): we can only identify those precursors once Kafka exists. This illustrates Hegel's theory of totality as retroactively rewritten history.
“Kafka — only Kafka and some of the greatest — can be said to create also their forerunners.”
Every genuinely new work of art retroactively changes the meaning and narrative of the entire history of art, Žižek's example for the Hegelian theory of totality as retroactively rewritten.
“Every really new work of art doesn't just introduce something new but retroactively changes the entire history of art.”
Chaplin's first sound film split his own tramp persona into the tramp and his double Hynkel (Hitler), a pure figure of voice, showing that voice is not transparent self-expression but a foreign body that haunts; a vision later rendered invisible.
“He saw there a potential ominous, spectral dimension of voice … that voice is never a transparent means of self-expression, that voice is a kind of a foreign body, intruder.”
Wagner's unpublished play has Jesus supplement the commandments: the true adultery is not extramarital sex but copulation within a loveless marriage, which destroys the law's spirit from within while respecting its letter.
“The true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love.”
Works invoked 12
Capital book
Marx's Capital shows Hegel was 'not Hegelian enough' on the economy, missing the speculative madness of capital as self-relating abstraction ruling concrete life.
Grundrisse book
Contains Marx's formulation of capital as 'automatisches Subjekt' (automatic subject), the concept Žižek uses to identify what Hegel's framework could not grasp.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Cited as the example of radical deadly erotic passion, the third domain (beyond nature and culture) that a properly Hegelian account of sexuality would need to acknowledge.
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin's first sound film is used to illustrate the in-between historical moment of visibility, the ominous spectral dimension of voice briefly seen and then rendered invisible.
T.S. Eliot's essay, its thesis that new artworks retroactively change the entire history of art, is cited as a Hegelian theory of totality.
Chesterton's novel contains the ironic proposal for a philosophical police corps that Žižek uses to diagnose the liberal anti-totalitarian project.
Hegel's theory of madness (Wahnsinn) and habit (Gewohnheit) in the third part is presented as more radical than Foucault, revealing Wiederholungszwang as a permanent background of being human.
Adorno's text is the lecture's opening guideline, cited for rejecting the historicist approach and for the Schoenberg analogy about being a Hegelian after the post-Hegelian break.
Kleist's essay is described as a 'wonderful Hegelian text' illustrating how true thoughts are discovered through over-speaking and improvisation, dialectical temporality in action.
Jesus von Nazareth play
Wagner's unpublished draft is presented as a genuinely Hegelian text, its supplementation of the commandments enacts negation of negation.
Über Pädagogik book
Kant's text supplies the definition of man as 'an animal who needs a master' not to control natural instincts but to handle a radical metaphysical unruliness, anticipating the Lacanian-Freudian point.
Croce's book exemplifies the fashionable historicist approach that presumes we can judge Hegel from outside, rejected by Žižek and Adorno.
People invoked 34
A Le Monde sentence about the 1995 French election ('if Balladur is elected, then his election was necessary') is used to illustrate retroactive necessity.
Robert Brandom negative
Representative of the 'deflated image of Hegel' that strips Hegel of ontologico-metaphysical commitments and reduces him to a general theorist of discursive argumentation.
Charlie Chaplin positive
Used to illustrate the Hegel-as-vanishing-mediator thesis: Chaplin briefly saw the ominous spectral dimension of voice at the beginning of sound cinema, a vision later rendered invisible.
Richard Wagner positive
His unpublished play Jesus von Nazareth is used as an example of a genuinely dialectical (Hegelian) move, the negation of negation applied to the commandments, linking him also to Proudhon and Feuerbach.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited approvingly for his rejection of the historicist 'what is living and dead in Hegel' approach and his analogy between being a full Hegelian after the post-Hegelian break and writing tonal music after Schoenberg.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Listed among those who would subscribe to the philosophical police project linking totality to totalitarianism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited approvingly: Lacan is right that Christianity's horror of sexuality is not a fight against animal biology but against its metaphysical competitor, sexuality as the domain of drive.
His mega-popularity illustrates that people do not read popular science to understand physics but to get big metaphysical answers, showing the 'deflated Hegel' approach fails to satisfy this need.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Catholic theologian cited twice: first for his ironic 'philosophical police' proposal (which Žižek uses to illuminate liberal anti-totalitarianism), and second for his re-reading of God's answer to Job as divine self-blasphemy.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for the insight, despite not knowing he was 'also a Hegelian', that what characterizes post-Hegelian space is the notion of pure mechanic repetition without Aufhebung.
Benedetto Croce negative
His book What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel exemplifies the fashionable historicist approach that Adorno, and Žižek, reject.
His famous declaration at the Estates-General, improvised in confusion, illustrates how genuine new truths surprise their own speakers (Kleist's thesis, Žižek's point about dialectical temporality).
Heinrich von Kleist positive
His essay On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech (Sprechen ist immer ein Versprechen) is presented as a Hegelian text illustrating dialectical temporality, truth discovered through over-speech and improvisation.
Paul Claudel positive
Conservative Catholic cited, alongside Chesterton, for knowing that the true message of Christianity is not 'trust God' but 'God trusts us.'
Fredric Jameson positive
Described as 'French-sorry, American Hegelian Marxist'; Žižek borrows his concept of the 'vanishing mediator' to describe Hegel's unique historical position.
André Glucksmann negative
Mentioned as a likely subscriber, if he still holds his old ideas, to the philosophical police project of tracing totalitarianism back to philosophical totality.
T. S. Eliot positive
Described as a 'great conservative poet' but cited approvingly for Tradition and the Individual Talent, his thesis that every new artwork retroactively changes the entire history of art is presented as Hegelian.
Arthur Schopenhauer negative
Characterized as a vulgarizer of Schelling's assertion of the abyss of pre-logical will.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Paraphrased for the quip 'what is the robbing of a bank to the founding of a new bank', used as a structural parallel to the dialectical move from petty crime to the crime constitutive of law.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Mentioned as having gotten the uncertainty principle wrong, treating it as merely epistemological, with Bohr correcting him: the gap is in the thing itself.
Mentioned as a comparison point: Hegel's theory of madness and habit in the Philosophie des Geistes is said to be more radical than Foucault.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as evidence that the state-of-emergency ideological injunction ('don't think, act') has migrated from the left to capitalist philanthropy.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon positive
His motto 'property is theft' is cited as the dialectical formula illustrating negation of negation, the violation inscribed into the very notion of property.
Mentioned as one of the post-Hegelian breaks: his assertion of the abyss of pre-logical will (later vulgarized by Schopenhauer) marks the rupture with Hegelian absolute conceptual mediation.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invoked alongside Hegel for the idea that history is not fully constituted, events are retroactively constituted, not simply already there before being remembered.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for his notion of repetition as pure mechanic repetition without Aufhebung, pointing to the un-thought within Hegel; also invoked at the close as the model for how to 'repeat Hegel' today, mobilizing Hegelian potentials, not copying him.
Niels Bohr positive
Cited for correcting Heisenberg: the incompleteness is ontological, in the thing itself, not merely an epistemological obstacle.
Briefly mentioned: Wagner in 1848 was a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love as well as a Proudhonian revolutionary.
Karl Popper negative
Listed among those who would subscribe to a version of Chesterton's philosophical police, tracing a straight road from philosophical totality to political totalitarianism.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for Capital and Grundrisse (capital as automatisches Subjekt, subject-substance passage); Žižek argues Marx showed Hegel was 'not Hegelian enough' on capital, but also suggests we should return from Marx to Hegel on the Pöbel and on theory vs. praxis.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
His essay on Kafka creating his own forerunners illustrates Hegel's theory of totality as retroactively rewritten history.
Sigmund Freud positive
Wiederholungszwang and the thesis that sexuality is where the passage from natural to human occurs through drive (not instinct) are central to Žižek's critique of Hegel's inadequate account of sexuality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure of the lecture; Žižek defends a radical reading of Hegel against both vulgar caricature and deflationary neo-pragmatist appropriation, arguing Hegel saw something that became invisible afterwards.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for his definition in Über Pädagogik: man is an animal who needs a master not to control natural instincts but to manage a radical 'metaphysical unruliness', anticipating the Lacanian-Freudian point about the excess beyond nature.
What it argues
Hegel's totality as self-contradictory and symptom-inclusive rather than harmoniousDialectical temporality and the retroactive constitution of necessityNegation of negation: external violation becoming internal self-contradictionThe materialist reading of Christ's death and the Holy SpiritCapital as automatic subject — what Hegel was not Hegelian enough to seeResistance to ideology of emergency and the imperative to thinkHegel as vanishing mediator between pre-critical metaphysics and post-metaphysical thought
Dialectical moves 11
“The true question about Hegel is not what is living and dead in Hegel, but exactly the opposite: what is our contemporary world in the eyes of Hegel?”
Inverts the standard historicist judgement of Hegel to make our present the object of Hegelian evaluation rather than Hegel the object of our evaluation.
“The Hegelian totality is by definition self-contradictory, antagonistic. The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, its unintended consequences, which betray its untruth.”
Totality is not harmonious wholeness but the self-undermining field that includes its own negations and excesses.
“What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery which is a loveless marriage? — marriage without love is already adultery.”
Shifts from the external violation of an institution to the violation constitutive of the institution itself, the negation of negation.
“Property is theft — the shift from theft as a distortion of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property.”
External negation (crime against law) becomes internal self-negation (law is itself the crime), the negation of negation as a move from external violation to constitutive contradiction.
“The first choice has to be the wrong choice, and it is only the wrong choice which creates the conditions for the right choice.”
The proper dialectical sequence is not to choose correctly from the start but to pass through the wrong choice, which retroactively enables the right one, necessitating repetition.
“The bad news — God is dead, we are abandoned — and the good news are exactly the same news: we are given freedom.”
The terror of divine abandonment is identical with the gift of emancipation, the dialectical coincidence of opposites in Christ's death.
“Hegel is not saying choose not the lowest but the highest; you arrive at the highest only through the lowest, through the radical contradiction of the lowest.”
The spiritual is not achieved by bypassing the base (phallus, bone) but only by passing through it, there is no shortcut that skips radical contradiction.
“Far from being a philosopher of pre-given necessity, Hegel is the most radical thinker of contingency: necessity retroactively emerges in a contingent way out of contingency.”
The usual charge against Hegel (teleological determinism) is its opposite: for Hegel necessity is always retroactively constituted, never pre-ordained.
“Maybe in the 20th century we tried too quickly to change the world, and the point is now to interpret it — inverting Marx's eleventh thesis.”
In the current conjuncture, insisting on thinking and theoretical interpretation is the most subversive act, not immediate praxis.
“It is not that we fight sexuality because it reduces us to animals; animals do it for procreation — to autonomize sexuality from its biological aim is itself the essentially human, metaphysical move.”
Christianity's policing of sexuality is not defending culture against nature but defending against a specifically human/metaphysical excess that culture itself generates.
“God trusts us — not 'trust God'; God abdicated and leaves us alone with the Holy Spirit.”
The standard religious message ('trust God') is reversed: the genuine Christian message is that God transfers responsibility to humanity entirely.
Claims 18
reframes
The true question about Hegel is not what is living or dead in him, but what our contemporary world looks like through Hegel's eyes.the relevance of Hegel today
rejects
A deflated Hegel stripped of ontologico-metaphysical commitments (à la Brandom) is not enough; the big questions that Hegel addressed have not disappeared.neo-pragmatist / deflationary readings of Hegel
asserts
Hegel is a vanishing mediator who, in the passage between traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought, briefly saw something invisible both before and after.Hegel's unique philosophical position
reframes
Hegelian totality is not an ideal of organic wholeness but a critical concept that includes all symptoms, antagonisms, and inconsistencies as integral parts.the concept of Hegelian totality
reframes
The cunning of reason (List der Vernunft) means that every project is undermined by its own inconsistency, not that a higher hidden reason guarantees a good outcome.Hegel's List der Vernunft
asserts
In Hegelian dialectics the first choice must be the wrong choice, because it is only through that wrong choice that the conditions for the right choice are created — necessitating a repetition.dialectical temporality and the logic of choice
asserts
Hegelian necessity is always retroactive: events are not pre-ordained but, once they occur, they retroactively appear necessary.Hegel's theory of necessity and contingency
asserts
What dies on the cross is God-of-beyond itself — the transcendent guarantor of meaning — leaving humanity free but without a Big Other.materialist reading of Christ's death
asserts
The Holy Spirit is the first name for an egalitarian community that carries on after the death of God, structurally homologous to the Communist Party.Holy Spirit and egalitarian political forms
asserts
Marx's critique of Hegel on capital shows that Hegel was not Hegelian enough — he failed to grasp the speculative madness of capital as automatic subject.the limits of Hegel's political economy
reframes
The post-Hegelian domain of pure repetition (Wiederholungszwang) is not simply missed by Hegel but points to un-thought potentials within his own system.Hegel's theory of repetition and its limits
reframes
Today it may be more subversive to interpret and think critically than to change the world — inverting Marx's famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.the relationship between theory and political action
asserts
The ideology of emergency (NGOs, Bill Gates, Starbucks solidarity) is precisely the injunction not to think — its function is to neutralize critical analysis.the ideology of humanitarian emergency and consumerist solidarity
asserts
Hegel's concept of the Pöbel (rabble) is more adequate to contemporary dispersed forms of exploitation than the Marxist working-class/bourgeoisie binary.class struggle and the contemporary dispossessed
rejects
Hegel's theory of sexuality is an un-Hegelian relapse into vulgar evolutionism; a properly Hegelian account would recognize that culture generates its own excess of deadly erotic passion irreducible to nature.Hegel's account of sexuality
asserts
Christianity's horror of sexuality is not a fight against animal biology but against its metaphysical competitor: the autonomization of sexuality beyond its natural aim.Christianity, sexuality, and Freud's theory of drive
asserts
The incompleteness of reality (as revealed by quantum mechanics) must be thought in a materialist way without positing a divine programmer — this is the genuine Hegelian challenge.quantum mechanics and materialist ontology
asserts
The popular caricature of Hegel as Prussian megalomaniac is a Deckerinnerung — a fantasy formation covering over the traumatic excess of what Hegel actually saw.the ideological function of the popular image of Hegel
Quotes 12
“Das Ganze ist das Wahre — the whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, its unintended consequences, which betray its untruth.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian totality as self-undermining
“To act like a full Hegelian today involves the same falsity as to write tonal music after Schoenberg's revolution. One cannot pretend that it didn't happen.”Slavoj Žižek · the impossibility of naive Hegelianism after the post-Hegelian break
“The first choice has to be the wrong choice, and it is only the wrong choice which creates the conditions for the right choice.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical temporality and the necessity of repeating the choice
“Necessity retroactively emerges in a contingent way out of contingency. Hegel is the most radical thinker of contingency.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of necessity
“What dies on the cross is God-of-beyond itself. The message is: there is no Big Other, no guarantee of meaning. I give you freedom, you are alone.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist reading of the death of Christ
“Not 'trust God' — it's God trusts us. God abdicated and Holy Spirit means we are here alone without a guarantee.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of the standard religious message
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world — the point is to change it. My God, isn't it that maybe in the 20th century we tried too quickly to change it, and the point is now to interpret it?”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of Marx's eleventh thesis: theory as the subversive act today
“What they want is that you have a problem, you call psychologists, you call social workers, you call experts. But this is not thinking. Thinking is not just solving problems posed to you by others.”Slavoj Žižek · the Bologna reform ideology and the reduction of thought to expertise
“Capital is ein automatisches Subjekt — an automatic subject. Beyond schlechte Unendlichkeit, self-relating, but at the same time automatic.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as automatic subject — the horror Hegel couldn't think
“Hegel in economy was still this naive manufacturer. The idea of this incredible ideal strength of capital as abstraction which rules concrete life — Hegel wasn't Hegelian enough there.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's critique: Hegel was not Hegelian enough on capital
“Kafka — only Kafka and some of the greatest — can be said to create also their forerunners.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of tradition
“What worries them in sexuality is that sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary the passage from natural to human emerges — through drive, Wiederholungszwang.”Slavoj Žižek · Freud's thesis: sexuality as the site of the nature-to-human passage
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Vielen Dank. Ich bin wirklich sehr stolz, dass ich hier bin. Leider ist meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug. So muss ich auf die Sprache des universellen Imperialismus wechseln. My guideline, you can say, is a thought of Adorno from the beginning of his Drei Studien zu Hegel, where he totally rejects this fashionable historicist approach to Hegel, in the sense of the title of Benedetto Croce’s book, What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel, as if we can today judge Hegel. He says, Adorno, that the true question, if Hegel is still a living presence, is exactly the opposite one: Let’s try to imagine what is our contemporary world in the eyes of Hegel. Now, can we still be Hegelians today? The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very fact of the post-Hegelian break. What even the most fanatical partisan of Hegel cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel. A new era of thought began, which can no longer be accounted for in Hegelian terms of absolute conceptual mediation, Vermittlung. This rupture occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of pre-logical will, vulgarized by Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard’s insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, up to Marx’s assertion of actual socio-economic life process and the full autonomization of mathematicized natural sciences. There is here a clear break between before and after. So we can say that after this break, Hegelian thought in a way lost its innocence. Again to paraphrase Adorno, to act like a full Hegelian today involves the same falsity as to write tonal music after Schoenberg’s revolution. One cannot pretend that it didn’t happen. The predominant Hegelian strategy today that is emerging as a reaction against this reproach is what I am tempted to call the deflated image of Hegel. The idea is forget about or ignore Hegel’s ontologico-metaphysical commitments and then we get something along the lines of Brandom and others, Hegel reduced to some kind of a general theorist of discourse. Like logic is no longer an ontologico—Hegel’s Logic—an ontologico-metaphysical treatise but a kind of a general outline of all possible in our historical moment, a moment, all possible strategies of discursive argumentation or modes to describe the world. Here again the so-called metaphysical questions, like this very naive questions—what’s the origin of our reality, does God exist, and so on—simply disappear. One ignores them. But already the history of popular sciences today tells us that we cannot ignore these questions. What I’m tempted to say is that the mega-popularity of people like Stephen Hawking or some Darwinians, isn’t it, doesn’t it reside precisely in the fact that they were there filling in this gap? People do not read Hawking to understand quantum physics, nobody does it. They read Hawking to get the big answers. So my thesis is that such a deflated Hegel is not enough. True, there is a break after Hegel, but as I will try at least to indicate, I think that the break is between post-Hegelian thought, this reassertion of a positivity of being which precedes the begriffliche Vermittlung, and the pre-Hegelian, let’s call it pre-critical, even naive metaphysics. But, I’m sorry I will not have time to develop this in detail, my thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage. Hegel is, if I may use the term elaborated by French—sorry, American Hegelian Marxist Fredric Jameson—Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two. In this passage between traditional philosophy and so-called post-metaphysical thought, Hegel for a brief moment saw something which you see neither before or after. And if you have a real dialectical sensitivity, for example, even for the history of art, you will see that this always happens in moments of historical breakthrough or passage. That if you are in between, you can see something which afterwards it becomes invisible. Again, I’m sorry I don’t have time, I could engage here in, for example, a nice example from history of cinema: the beginning of sound cinema. For a brief moment, those apparent reactionaries like Charlie Chaplin knew something about the ominous dimension of voice. Remember the crucial fact that Chaplin’s first full sound film is The Great Dictator, where he split his own person of the tramp into tramp and his double, pure figure of voice, Hynkel—that is to say Hitler. I claim he saw there a potential ominous, spectral dimension of voice. To put it bluntly, he saw for a brief moment that voice is never a transparent means of self-expression, that voice is a kind of a foreign body, intruder, which can haunt us, which again became later again invisible. So I claim that it is precisely to obliterate this unbearable excess in Hegel, what Hegel saw and became later invisible, that this ridiculous image of Hegel, the popular image emerged. You know, Hegel, you know, that crazy guy, Prussian state philosopher who thought that he knows everything, absolute knowledge, from the beginning, that he can read divine thoughts, and so on and so on. I think that this image of Hegel should be treated precisely what in psychoanalysis we call Deckerinnerungen, a fantasy formation to obfuscate, to render invisible some traumatic data. Let me nonetheless go back to this Hegel, this ultra-totalitarian intellectual. How do we relate to this Hegel? Maybe the model was provided here by an interesting Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton who, having in mind precisely thinkers like Hegel, made in his well-known novel, among other places, The Man Who Was Thursday, an ironic proposal to install—for the state to organize, I quote him: 'a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers.' Quote: 'It is their business [of these policemen philosophers] to watch the beginnings of a conspiracy, not only a criminal but a controversy before the criminal. The work of the philosophical policeman should be at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.' Now, this may appear to you ridiculous, but think about it: Would not thinkers as different as Popper, Adorno, Levinas and probably, if he still sticks to his old ideas of twenty years ago, also my predecessor here André Glucksmann, would they not also subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea? Where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the word totality. A straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism. And the task of philosophical police should be then to discover from a book of Plato’s Dialogues or from a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime, totalitarian revolution, Gulag, will be committed. Or as they say in English, from Plato to NATO, for pleasure. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest terrorists. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia, or maybe they are here, to detect proponents of totality. Now, I would like then to begin by precisely doing this: defending the notion of totality. You know this extremely boring deconstructionist point that Hegelian totality wants to grasp it all, but there is always something which escapes, an invisible remainder, excess, and so on. But I claim if you really read Hegel closely, you will see that this is the point of his notion of totality. Totality is not an ideal of organic whole, but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its symptoms, antagonisms, inconsistencies, excesses as its integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition self-contradictory, antagonistic. The whole which is the true—you know, das Ganze ist das Wahre—is the whole plus its symptoms, its unintended consequences, which betray its untruth. For example, in one phrase: Today’s global capitalism means speak about Congo, totally devastated land and so on. See how that is a necessary part of today’s global capitalism. This is why, again, the anti-Hegelian rhetorics which insists on how Hegel’s totality misses the details which stick out and ruins its balance, misses the point. The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of abstract harmonious whole and all the excesses which undermine it. Which is why, incidentally, now I’m still moving at a very elementary level, just read honestly Hegel and you will see this with an openness: that when Hegel speaks about List der Vernunft, all his examples are exactly the opposite of what is usually attributed to Hegel. List der Vernunft doesn’t mean things may seem to go wrong but there is a higher hidden reason which guarantees that it will all end up well, that even what appears to us a catastrophe serves a higher purpose. List der Vernunft—I mean the best definition would have been—whenever you have a project to do something, you can be sure that something will go wrong, as it were. That’s how it function. List der Vernunft means how every project is undermined by its inconsistency. Now, let’s go a step further. You will tell me, okay, but I got engaged now in a kind of dialectical interplay where every totality is its opposite, where law itself is the highest crime and so on and so on. You are fully justified to raise here a very naive, why not, ethical reproach: Does this bring us to some pseudo-dialectical relativized cynical anti-moralism? No! Let me prove it by just one genuinely dialectical figure which I found in someone in whom you would not expect to find it: Richard Wagner. I’m referring to the draft of a play, Jesus von Nazareth, that Wagner wrote somewhere between late and early where Wagner attributes to Jesus a series of alternate supplementations to the commandments. A quote from Wagner: 'The commandment says, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into. And who marries without love already breaks the wedding.' And so on. End of quote. So the shift from the actual words of Jesus is crucial here. Jesus, as we all know, internalizes the prohibition, rendering it much more severe. The law says no actual adultery, while I say if you only covet the other’s wife in your mind, it is the same as if you have already committed adultery, and so on. Wagner does something different. The inner dimension he evokes is not that of intention to do it, adultery, but that of love that should accompany law, marriage. The true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love. The simple adultery—cheating your wife—just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So to paraphrase Brecht again, you know that Brecht of what is the robbing of a bank to the founding of a new bank: What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery which is a loveless marriage? It is not by chance that Wagner’s underlying formula, marriage is adultery, marriage without love, recalls Proudhon’s property is theft. In the stormy year of Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary. So he also gives a similar paraphrase of you shall not steal. I quote again Wagner: 'This also is a good law, you shall not steal. Who goes against this law is sinning. But I preserve you from this sin in as much as I teach you: Love your neighbor as yourself, which also means, lay not up for yourself treasures whereby you are stealing from your neighbor and make him to starve. For when you have your goods safeguarded by the law of men, you provoke your neighbor to sin against the law.' End of quote. So what Wagner is here saying, in a properly Hegelian I think move of negation of negation, what he practices is a shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of the notion itself. Recall again Proudhon’s old dialectical motto: property is theft. The negation of negation is here the shift from theft as a distortion, negation, violation of property, to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property. And so again this shift where external negation becomes self-negation, where okay we have crime as external negation of law, but what if an oppressive law is in itself the highest crime? And so on and so on. This move, I think, is crucial for the Hegelian conceptual process. And we can already here discern the contours of a dialectical process, namely, this brings me now to my next point, to the specific temporality of a dialectical process which is obviously often overlooked. Remember how—I will take the example of French Revolution—remember how Hegel celebrated the French Revolution as, I quote: 'a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.' End of quote. This, of course, as we all know, did not prevent Hegel from coldly analyzing the inner necessity of the explosion of abstract freedom to turn into its opposite, the self-destructive revolutionary terror. However, one should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution. Hegel in no way subscribes to the standard liberal critique of the French Revolution which locates the wrong turn in That is to say whose ideal is without the liberal phase without its Jacobin radicalization. For Hegel, is a necessary immanent consequence of There was no choice in or to take a more moderate path. Why? Because only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for the post-revolutionary concrete freedom. So if we try to put it in the terms of choice, then Hegel practices here the paradox of logical temporality. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, and it is only the wrong choice which creates the conditions for the right choice. You see what I mean. When Hegel criticizes again the terror of the French Revolution as abstract freedom against the rational post-revolutionary state, his point is not: we have a choice and we should choose the good concrete rational state against abstract terror. No, his point is that you only arrive at the point from which you can see the possibility of a rational state through revolutionary terror. In other words, you must repeat the choice. The first choice is simply between organic totality of pre-revolutionary world and again it’s only terror itself with its negativity which opens up the space for so-called concrete freedom. It’s the same with that—so that you will see that Hegel also has its obscenity—remember Hegel’s two readings of Der Geist ist ein Knochen, of the spirit is a bone, where Hegel—and this is much more often than it may appear the case—refers in a lovingly obscene way to phallus, no? And he says it is like in the case of phallus when you have the unity of the organ of the lowest, urination, and organ of the highest, insemination. But wait a minute, again read it closely, Hegel is not saying so we should make a choice, not the lowest but the highest. The whole point of Hegel’s description of phrenology is that you arrive at the highest only through the lowest, through the radical contradiction of the lowest. Again, this is the basic temporality of the dialectical process. There is a choice but in two stages: the choice has to be repeated. Which is why Hegel has, I claim, a whole in Hegelian process, there is a whole underlying structure of jokes, of this type of jokes where you progress through a misunderstanding or a mistake or a failure. You do something wrong, but then you discover that this wrong in itself, if you just change the perspective, already is its own solution. Like, if you permit me to repeat an old joke that I’m repeating already for literally years, I’m sorry for repeating myself—you know the Soviet joke about, you know, Rabinovich, a Jew who wants to emigrate, goes to the state bureaucrat responsible for it and says: 'I want to leave Soviet Union for two reasons. The first reason is, I’m afraid that Soviet Union will disintegrate and they will then blame us Jews for all the communist crimes.' And the bureaucrat tells him: 'Are you crazy? Soviet Union will be here forever, nothing will ever change here.' And Rabinovich says: 'Well, this is my second reason,' no? I mean, this is the logic of dialectical reversal. There is no magic in final twist, it’s simply that the very argument against becomes an argument for. And, I will—don’t have time now to go in detail into it—but just read Hegel’s theory of why Christ had to die on the cross and you will see it’s practically a Rabinovich joke. The idea is, you know, it’s like those wonderful doctors' jokes: 'What do you want to hear first, the bad news then the good news?', no? Which are, I think, very Hegelian, no? In the style of: 'Okay, first I will tell you,' says the doctor, 'the bad news: we discovered you have cancer, you will be dead in two months.' Then you ask: 'But what can be the good news then, eh?' And the doctor says: 'Well, we also discovered you have Alzheimer's and you will forget the bad news before you reach home,' no? That the bad news is God is dead on the cross, we are abandoned by God, we have no support in a substantial other. And what’s the good news? Exactly the same news! It means we are given freedom. Because for Hegel—I’m sorry, I don’t have time to develop it—I claim Hegel was the first to read Gospel in a truly materialist way. Why? Okay, let me improvise a little bit, I'm making suicide, it’s my time. If you ask me the first critique of Ideologiekritik in world literature or whatever, it’s the book of—how do you pronounce it in German—Job, Hiob, the guy who got like strange fate. You remember what happens then when things go wrong? Three friends come, theologians, each of them tries to convince Job of how his suffering must have some deeper meaning. One says, oh, even if you think you didn’t do anything wrong, God is just, so just look deeper, you must have done something wrong. The second one says something like, maybe this is all a test by God, suffering and so on and so on. And then the wonder happens: you remember, God comes and says everything that those three guys said is wrong, everything that Job said in complaining about is right. But what happens then? Then Job nonetheless asks God: 'Okay, but still, why did all this happen to me?' Now comes the crucial thing. Usually we read God’s answer as the arrogant answer, you know, all those lines of: 'Are you even aware of all the monsters, unicorns, I don’t know what, that I created? Who are you to even talk to me?' But the same Chesterton proposes a wonderful different reading, very pro—he says, God there commits a blasphemy. That the true answer of God to Job is: 'You think you are something special with your trouble, but look, the whole creation is a big mess, like I screwed up everything.' Which is why, I think, the death of Christ should be read as a repetition of Job. I think the death of Christ is not God sends the messenger, it went back, okay, come back to me, maybe we will try years later. As Hegel put it precisely, what dies on the cross is God-of-beyond itself. Which is why we have this unique figure of Holy Spirit which is something again totally unique. In what sense? I think that what really dies on the cross is again this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. You know this, the most disgusting metaphor that I know about religion where you say what when something appears to us as evil, it’s only if you look at the picture from too close, no? And it looks a stain. But when you move to a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as stain really contributes to global harmony. This idea, the situation may be confused but there is up there God who sees it all and guarantees blah blah. I claim—I read the sacrifice of Jesus—to avoid a misunderstanding, I’m a total atheist, this is a materialist reading—I read the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as precisely—the message is precisely: there is no Big Other, no guarantee of meaning. I give you freedom, you are alone. Holy Ghost is not a new collective spirit, Holy Ghost means we are here alone without a guarantee. Or as even many intelligent conservatives knew it, from Chesterton up to Paul Claudel, the true message of Christianity is not trust God, like it may seem confused the things but it’s God trusts us. God abdicated and Holy Spirit, which is if I may go a little bit fast in a problematic sense—Holy Spirit is the first name for Communist Party and similar institutions if you want. Is the first egalitarian institution against, you know, here we should read Christ—not sentimentalist like that Christ, you know, 'oh I bring love,' haha. I like Christ who says if you don’t hate your mother and father you are not my follower. I like Christ who says if you don’t have a sword, sell your shirt and buy a sword, and so on. I like Christ who says I bring war, I bring I bring conflict, not peace. What is meant here, I claim? It’s not of course just violence. When Christ says hate your mother and father, I claim the idea is hate your mother and father in their function of mother and father as parts of social hierarchic order. The message—this is for me absolutely unique in the idea of a Holy Spirit: First, history is not circular, God is dead, there is a break and the only hope after this break is an egalitarian is an egalitarian community. But now let me go even a step further. Now you will say, 'yeah yeah, this all may be true, but nonetheless in Hegel there is a teleological movement, you know, somehow we know it will end well,' and so on. Ah, it’s more complex. I would like to draw your attention here to a wonderful Hegelian text, I claim, from Heinrich von Kleist, from first published only posthumously in 1878—I’m sorry for this obscenity to present you the title in English—On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech. I think all this double temporality that I was talking about, you have it there. The idea is that when you say something deep, a new truth, Sprechen ist immer ein Versprechen, you say something too much, you get confused and then to quickly squeeze out you invent something. In a wonderful way, Kleist interprets like that this famous moment in the French Revolution where the master of ceremonies from the king on June came to the assembly and said 'disperse' and so on. And how Mirabeau first says, didn't know what to say, just went on 'on what authority do you think' and so on and so on. And then said too much, didn't know what to do, and just to squeeze out of the trouble pronounced his great sentence: 'Go and tell your king that we should not leave our places here except when forced with bayonets,' and so on and so on. So the idea is again that a true invention of the new surprises you. It’s—and this is, I think, Hegel’s List der Vernunft. It’s not a reason hidden from the very beginning controlling it all. It’s kind of a profit from chance. You say too much, quickly you try to accommodate or to somehow integrate that excess and in a way you succeed. And I think this would even have been a Hegelian reading of the death of Christ. You know, Christ died, it was a shock, they didn't know what. Then somebody said, 'My God, why don't we turn this into a triumph?', no? Like, and so on. From here we should go a step further: Hegel and contingency. I think that Hegel is absolutely not a philosopher of contingency in the sense that there is a deeper necessity which only expresses or articulates itself through contingencies. Hegel’s deepest thought is that necessity retroactively emerges in a contingent way out of contingency. And here, I’m really sad not to have time, here you can see the materialist core of Hegel’s even most speculative propositions. For example, what would have been Hegel’s reading of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon? It’s not, it was predestined, he had to do it. It was, no! At that point the situation was totally open. But once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he as it were recreated his destiny so that it retroactively appeared necessary. I think I should quote here—I got it from a French theorist—a wonderful small passage from French journal Le Monde, which refers to some French voting on May At that point, Balladur, Édouard Balladur was one of the candidates and in Le Monde they wrote: 'If Balladur will be elected, then we can say that his election was necessary.' No? In the sense of something happens and once it happens, it retroactively becomes necessary. I think that Hegelian necessity always has this retroactive status. Which is why, this is my final provocation: if some of you are old-fashioned Marxists, the time has come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. Because what this Hegel’s opening towards contingency—and this is what Hegel means, not some reactionary passivity with his, you know, that thought, philosophy, arises in the evening like the owl of Minerva. Hegel is I think the most radical thinker of contingency in the sense that for him the position adopted by Marx, to simplify it, which is: you as a historical agent can as it were can look into history, see where the history is going and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. This is totally prohibited as idealist for Hegel. For Hegel precisely there is no Big Other in the sense of general tendency and so on and so on. You know whom I should talk about, but don't have time here, about, for example, the great conservative poet, but there he is good: T. S. Eliot in his most famous text, you know the Tradition and the Individual Talent, when he says that every really new work of art doesn't just introduce something new but retroactively changes the entire history of art. Of course, we are not talking about magic, but about how the meaning, the narrative of the entire past is is is changed. This, I think, is the Hegelian also theory of totality. Not we have a large evolutionary necessary narrative where everything is pre-ordained. No, on the contrary, that with every new break the whole past is the whole past is rewritten. If I may refer here to another old example which illustrates this point perfectly, Borges wrote about Kafka that every writer can have its forerunners, predecessors, but that Kafka—only Kafka and some of the greatest—can be said to to create also their forerunners. He means that of course we can now say it’s clear that Kafka had forerunners in, I don’t know, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, but we can say this only once Kafka is here. And again, it is wrong to say that yes, this is simply reality before and just that we are in this way just retroactively projecting things into the past. No, here Hegel should be read with Benjamin. What if history is not fully constituted? What if history is in itself open, so that we don’t have already before fully constituted events, but they are also retroactively constituted? So to come to the end, slowly, the best story, metaphor, almost joke about Hegelian vision of reality would have been for me what I read in a certain book about modern philosophy—forgot even which one—where this book tries to explain quantum mechanics and evokes computer games. The idea is this one: that, you know, how to read Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? We all know today that Heisenberg himself got it wrong. Bohr corrected it. It’s not only an epistemological obstacle, that you cannot measure this and that. The gap, the opening is in the thing itself. So here is this wonderfully simple idea. You know if you play—I unfortunately do, being terrorized by my son—these computer military games: you see a forest in the background. But this forest is not even fully programmed, you know what I mean? Because if it’s not part of the game that you can go there, then why spend time programming all the details of the trees there? Or you have a house in the background. If you cannot enter the house, of course the inner of the house is not programmed. Now comes the beautifully simple idea: what if God was the programmer of our world and was in the same sense a lazy programmer? He thought we humanity are too stupid to move beyond the atom. So God says: 'Why should I then even program the position and capacity? The humans are too stupid,' no? We were a little bit too bright for God. But now comes the true materialist task. And this is I think the true Hegelian challenge of quantum physics: Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking it, in a materialist way? This, I think, is the task. If you just permit me now to add some short concluding remarks: Of course in a way it is true, we cannot simply—it’s ridiculous—become Hegelians. We should be the first to admit that there are things that Hegel couldn’t have thought. I think that they first—my first thesis: they concern the topic of repetition. Because you know as Gilles Deleuze—he didn’t know that he was also a Hegelian—as Gilles Deleuze made it clear: what really characterizes the post-Hegelian space, it’s not all this bullshit—positivity of being, full life, real actual life—it’s a notion of repetition, mechanic pure repetition, which in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung or idealization. Hegel has, as you probably know, a beautiful theory of repetition which is precisely back to Julius Caesar. He develops it a propos Caesar, no? How Caesar is first just a name, Julius Caesar. Then he dies, he repeats himself as a universal title: Caesar as the title. So Hegel’s point is idealization. But what about what we find in thinkers as opposite as Kierkegaard and Freud? Wiederholungszwang or Kierkegaard’s repetition, a kind of a pure repetition. And my point is that it’s not that Hegel simply didn’t see it, but there are signs which point towards this un-thought of Hegel. And the way we should think further from Hegel is not to say, 'oh there is a totally different domain.' It is—and there are many points—where you can clearly see how paradoxically Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. Isn’t this the whole point of Marx? What is effectively Marx saying if you read Capital really closely is basically that Hegel’s theory of economy, although Hegel read Adam Smith and so on, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of capital. Hegel in economy was still this naive manufacturer, you know, people collaborate. The idea of this incredible ideal strength of capital as abstraction which rules concrete life. Like Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough there. That’s basically the thesis of Marx. That if you take Hegel’s matrix of subject-substance, the whole passage from money to capital, of course, is passage from subject to substance and so on and so on again. And what maybe makes precisely the example of capital so wonderful is that Marx uses in Grundrisse fragments, I think, a very precise expression, that capital is ein automatisches Subjekt, an automatic subject. What does this mean? Capital is a subject beyond schlechte Unendlichkeit, spurious infinity, self-relating, but at the same time automatic. This though capital was I think would have been such a horror for Hegel because he would have to think something which at the same time is actual infinity and the bad endlessly repetitive infinity. So then there are, sorry don't have time, other wonderful examples. For example, I think it absolutely should be reread Hegel’s theory of madness from the first point of the third part chapter of the third part of Enzyklopädie: Philosophie des Geistes, where Hegel develops, like to put it naively, the rise of human spirit out of animal life. And my God, it’s more radical than Michel Foucault! The key notions are Wahnsinn, madness, and Gewohnheit, habit. And the idea is that the passage through radical madness, even if of course doesn’t happen to all of us empirically, it’s a permanent background to being human. And I think here we can see this negativity as Wiederholungszwang in Hegel, in his necessity of war, in his theory of madness. I don't have time to develop it—also in his, for example, theory of rabble, Pöbel. And even, I claim, okay to add a little bit of spice to end, in Hegel’s theory of sexuality. Hegel is there an anti-Hegelian vulgar evolutionist. He treats sexuality as something basically biological, which we then through our cultural development we symbolize it, vermitteln, mediate it, and so on. Like, I no longer just jump over a woman, I write poems, whatever you want, mediate. But you know what Hegel doesn’t see—and my God, he should have seen it following his own procedure—that it’s not as simple as that, that we don’t pass directly from nature to culture. Our cultural rituals in love are not a defense against the brutality of some natural force, but against a certain excess which we can see in this kind of a radical deadly erotic passion, Tristan und Isolde, and so on and so on. That is to say once we pass from nature to culture, retroactively a third domain of, let’s call it naively, radical negativity emerges. And that’s the problem. You know who already knew this in a way? Kant even! You know in his wonderful short writing Über Pädagogik. He provides his famous definition of: man is an animal who needs a master. And then he says why: not because we must need a master to control our natural instincts, but Kant speaks about some kind of a radical madly free unruliness which is typical to man and which is kind of metaphysical unruliness. So again, to go back to sexuality: What Hegel, if he were to be Hegelian today, would have been definitely against the Catholic Church and all this bullshit about how if you copulate just for pleasure you are reduced to an animal, it must be for procreation. Hegel would have said, but isn't it exactly the opposite, that animals do it only basically for procreation? To take something which serves a certain terrestrial biological aim and to autonomize it with regard to that aim, to make it a Selbstzweck, this is the fundamental lesson of metaphysics. So I think Jacques Lacan is right when he claims that the horror of sexuality for Christianity and others is not they are not fighting there vulgar utilitarian biological life, they are fighting their metaphysical competitor. What worries them in sexuality is that—and this is the thesis of Freud—the thesis of Freud is not we are determined by biology; the thesis of Freud is that sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary the passage from natural to human emerges through again through drive, Wiederholungszwang, which have nothing to do with with instinct and so on. So again, let me stop and finish with the—half a minute—first again I’m not saying let’s be Hegelians, I’m just saying in today’s crazy world with all this with all its crazy reversals and so on, it’s as if it offers itself to a Hegelian approach. And because Hegel lived in a certain in-between, and we obviously also do: we all know a certain epoch is coming to an end. In this sense we should repeat Hegel, but repeat Hegel in a Kierkegaardian sense. Not in the sense of some Hegelian Aufhebung, but also not in the sense of doing the same as Hegel but, let me put it in this way as Kierkegaard would have put it—mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world. And here to avoid a misunderstanding, for example a propos Pöbel or capital: I think the time has come maybe to even return to Hegel up to a point again against great post-Hegelians like Marx. For example, Hegel’s passages on Pöbel, rabble, are usually read for 'yeah Hegel vaguely saw that part of society is necessarily proletarianized but he didn't see it clearly like Marx.' No, isn't it that today precisely, if there is something going on is that the main form of class struggle is no longer simply working class/bourgeoisie, but that those vaguely let’s say exploited are dispersed into many forms of Pöbel: undeveloped, those living in apartheid position in apartheids, illegal immigrants, and so on and so on. So maybe we should even return here a little bit from Marx to Hegel. Another point where we should return. Now I will say something horrible. We know that Marx which you still I think find in Humboldt University: philosophers have only interpreted the world—es geht darum—the point is to change it. My God, I will say something horrible today: isn’t it that we are living in a time where we can say this: maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick too fast to change the world, and es geht darum that we interpret it, reflect a little bit more radically? And this seems to be more and more the most subversive thing to do today. A proof: you in Germany are happy here. A brutal fascist counter-revolution called Bologna high education reform. You know what's the goal of that one? You know the horrible consequences in England and so on? It’s very clear: they want to change us into experts. It is all masked into this, you know, higher education must serve social must be socially useful, and so on. What they want is that, for example, you have a problem, let’s say demonstrations in the suburb of Paris, ah you call psychologists how to contain them, you call social workers, you call experts. But sorry, this is not thinking. Thinking is not just solving problems posed to you by others. Thinking is critically questioning the way we perceive problems. Take ecology. Ecology is not just to contain Fukushima and all that. Ecology should also ask: how did it come to that, in what way do we perceive the problem? Like is it right to perceive it only as a technological problem, or is it correct to to just to spiritualize it in a superficial way like, you know, it’s I don’t know all this anti-Enlightenment twist of technology and so on—sorry, of ecology and so on and so on. All all this is crucial for me. I think that my God, we are approaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed. Like ecology or think about biogenetics. What is happening if really it will go on what it appears: that the limit that separates inside from outside, our experience—sorry I got your gentle body language, yes I will finish it. Inside from outside, you know, when you can for example already up to a point control mind from the outside, or the other way around. I saw it in England myself: you have already chairs moving for cripples where crippled people where you don’t even need that Stephen Hawking’s finger, you know, you can directly move it by your thought. This changes the very definition of being human and so on. I claim that thinking is needed much than ever. And now I give you a theoreticist advice: so be careful to resist the pseudo-temptation of the state of emergency. When I was young, the state of emergency talk was still the talk of leftists like 'oh you are there living in your ivory tower but children are starving in Africa.' Didn't you notice that now Bill Gates talks like that? Why? Because if you read all those statements of emergency which go something like this: why are we still caught in this stupid ideological debates, capitalism, socialism, while children are starving in Africa? Let's get all together, private business, state, NGOs, and let's do something. The message is precisely 'do' in the sense of 'don't think about it.' And all even consumption is going in this direction. Where I become a Hegelian moment with which I will conclude: when I—I’m not for terrorism not in any way—but I almost become tempted by it when I pass a Starbucks coffee. Because you know what operation you have there. Go into it, at least it’s in England and United States, probably it’s here. They do a wonderful job of ideology. They have all these posters which basically tell you this: 'Yes, our coffee is more expensive, but goes for starving Guatemala children, to protect forests.' Basically they tell you this: In the old times we were split into consumerists and good citizens caring about. Now we propose you to include the price of solidarity into the price of the commodity, so that you can be totally consumerist saying, 'but by buying that coffee I already covered also that solidarity aspect.' The message is again: 'Don't think, buy our coffee which is a little bit more expensive, your thinking is included, it will be done by others,' and so on, no? To fight all this, don't be afraid to be intellectuals today. The fact of Bologna reform demonstrates that at least those in power know that we are dangerous. Thanks very much für Ihre Geduld.
Vielen Dank. Ich bin wirklich sehr stolz, dass ich hier bin. Leider ist meine deutsche Sprache nicht gut genug. So muss ich auf die Sprache des universellen Imperialismus wechseln. My guideline, you can say, is a thought of Adorno from the beginning of his Drei Studien zu Hegel, where he totally rejects this fashionable historicist approach to Hegel, in the sense of the title of Benedetto Croce’s book, What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel, as if we can today judge Hegel. He says, Adorno, that the true question, if Hegel is still a living presence, is exactly the opposite one: Let’s try to imagine what is our contemporary world in the eyes of Hegel. Now, can we still be Hegelians today? The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very fact of the post-Hegelian break. What even the most fanatical partisan of Hegel cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel. A new era of thought began, which can no longer be accounted for in Hegelian terms of absolute conceptual mediation, Vermittlung. This rupture occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of pre-logical will, vulgarized by Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard’s insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, up to Marx’s assertion of actual socio-economic life process and the full autonomization of mathematicized natural sciences. There is here a clear break between before and after. So we can say that after this break, Hegelian thought in a way lost its innocence. Again to paraphrase Adorno, to act like a full Hegelian today involves the same falsity as to write tonal music after Schoenberg’s revolution. One cannot pretend that it didn’t happen. The predominant Hegelian strategy today that is emerging as a reaction against this reproach is what I am tempted to call the deflated image of Hegel. The idea is forget about or ignore Hegel’s ontologico-metaphysical commitments and then we get something along the lines of Brandom and others, Hegel reduced to some kind of a general theorist of discourse. Like logic is no longer an ontologico—Hegel’s Logic—an ontologico-metaphysical treatise but a kind of a general outline of all possible in our historical moment, a moment, all possible strategies of discursive argumentation or modes to describe the world. Here again the so-called metaphysical questions, like this very naive questions—what’s the origin of our reality, does God exist, and so on—simply disappear. One ignores them. But already the history of popular sciences today tells us that we cannot ignore these questions. What I’m tempted to say is that the mega-popularity of people like Stephen Hawking or some Darwinians, isn’t it, doesn’t it reside precisely in the fact that they were there filling in this gap? People do not read Hawking to understand quantum physics, nobody does it. They read Hawking to get the big answers. So my thesis is that such a deflated Hegel is not enough. True, there is a break after Hegel, but as I will try at least to indicate, I think that the break is between post-Hegelian thought, this reassertion of a positivity of being which precedes the begriffliche Vermittlung, and the pre-Hegelian, let’s call it pre-critical, even naive metaphysics. But, I’m sorry I will not have time to develop this in detail, my thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage. Hegel is, if I may use the term elaborated by French—sorry, American Hegelian Marxist Fredric Jameson—Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two. In this passage between traditional philosophy and so-called post-metaphysical thought, Hegel for a brief moment saw something which you see neither before or after. And if you have a real dialectical sensitivity, for example, even for the history of art, you will see that this always happens in moments of historical breakthrough or passage. That if you are in between, you can see something which afterwards it becomes invisible. Again, I’m sorry I don’t have time, I could engage here in, for example, a nice example from history of cinema: the beginning of sound cinema. For a brief moment, those apparent reactionaries like Charlie Chaplin knew something about the ominous dimension of voice. Remember the crucial fact that Chaplin’s first full sound film is The Great Dictator, where he split his own person of the tramp into tramp and his double, pure figure of voice, Hynkel—that is to say Hitler. I claim he saw there a potential ominous, spectral dimension of voice. To put it bluntly, he saw for a brief moment that voice is never a transparent means of self-expression, that voice is a kind of a foreign body, intruder, which can haunt us, which again became later again invisible. So I claim that it is precisely to obliterate this unbearable excess in Hegel, what Hegel saw and became later invisible, that this ridiculous image of Hegel, the popular image emerged. You know, Hegel, you know, that crazy guy, Prussian state philosopher who thought that he knows everything, absolute knowledge, from the beginning, that he can read divine thoughts, and so on and so on. I think that this image of Hegel should be treated precisely what in psychoanalysis we call Deckerinnerungen, a fantasy formation to obfuscate, to render invisible some traumatic data. Let me nonetheless go back to this Hegel, this ultra-totalitarian intellectual. How do we relate to this Hegel? Maybe the model was provided here by an interesting Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton who, having in mind precisely thinkers like Hegel, made in his well-known novel, among other places, The Man Who Was Thursday, an ironic proposal to install—for the state to organize, I quote him: 'a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers.' Quote: 'It is their business [of these policemen philosophers] to watch the beginnings of a conspiracy, not only a criminal but a controversy before the criminal. The work of the philosophical policeman should be at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves. We go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.' Now, this may appear to you ridiculous, but think about it: Would not thinkers as different as Popper, Adorno, Levinas and probably, if he still sticks to his old ideas of twenty years ago, also my predecessor here André Glucksmann, would they not also subscribe to a slightly changed version of this idea? Where actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the word totality. A straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism. And the task of philosophical police should be then to discover from a book of Plato’s Dialogues or from a treatise on social contract by Rousseau that a political crime, totalitarian revolution, Gulag, will be committed. Or as they say in English, from Plato to NATO, for pleasure. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest terrorists. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia, or maybe they are here, to detect proponents of totality. Now, I would like then to begin by precisely doing this: defending the notion of totality. You know this extremely boring deconstructionist point that Hegelian totality wants to grasp it all, but there is always something which escapes, an invisible remainder, excess, and so on. But I claim if you really read Hegel closely, you will see that this is the point of his notion of totality. Totality is not an ideal of organic whole, but a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its symptoms, antagonisms, inconsistencies, excesses as its integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition self-contradictory, antagonistic. The whole which is the true—you know, das Ganze ist das Wahre—is the whole plus its symptoms, its unintended consequences, which betray its untruth. For example, in one phrase: Today’s global capitalism means speak about Congo, totally devastated land and so on. See how that is a necessary part of today’s global capitalism. This is why, again, the anti-Hegelian rhetorics which insists on how Hegel’s totality misses the details which stick out and ruins its balance, misses the point. The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of abstract harmonious whole and all the excesses which undermine it. Which is why, incidentally, now I’m still moving at a very elementary level, just read honestly Hegel and you will see this with an openness: that when Hegel speaks about List der Vernunft, all his examples are exactly the opposite of what is usually attributed to Hegel. List der Vernunft doesn’t mean things may seem to go wrong but there is a higher hidden reason which guarantees that it will all end up well, that even what appears to us a catastrophe serves a higher purpose. List der Vernunft—I mean the best definition would have been—whenever you have a project to do something, you can be sure that something will go wrong, as it were. That’s how it function. List der Vernunft means how every project is undermined by its inconsistency. Now, let’s go a step further. You will tell me, okay, but I got engaged now in a kind of dialectical interplay where every totality is its opposite, where law itself is the highest crime and so on and so on. You are fully justified to raise here a very naive, why not, ethical reproach: Does this bring us to some pseudo-dialectical relativized cynical anti-moralism? No! Let me prove it by just one genuinely dialectical figure which I found in someone in whom you would not expect to find it: Richard Wagner. I’m referring to the draft of a play, Jesus von Nazareth, that Wagner wrote somewhere between late and early where Wagner attributes to Jesus a series of alternate supplementations to the commandments. A quote from Wagner: 'The commandment says, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, you shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into. And who marries without love already breaks the wedding.' And so on. End of quote. So the shift from the actual words of Jesus is crucial here. Jesus, as we all know, internalizes the prohibition, rendering it much more severe. The law says no actual adultery, while I say if you only covet the other’s wife in your mind, it is the same as if you have already committed adultery, and so on. Wagner does something different. The inner dimension he evokes is not that of intention to do it, adultery, but that of love that should accompany law, marriage. The true adultery is not to copulate outside marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love. The simple adultery—cheating your wife—just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So to paraphrase Brecht again, you know that Brecht of what is the robbing of a bank to the founding of a new bank: What is a simple adultery compared to the adultery which is a loveless marriage? It is not by chance that Wagner’s underlying formula, marriage is adultery, marriage without love, recalls Proudhon’s property is theft. In the stormy year of Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary. So he also gives a similar paraphrase of you shall not steal. I quote again Wagner: 'This also is a good law, you shall not steal. Who goes against this law is sinning. But I preserve you from this sin in as much as I teach you: Love your neighbor as yourself, which also means, lay not up for yourself treasures whereby you are stealing from your neighbor and make him to starve. For when you have your goods safeguarded by the law of men, you provoke your neighbor to sin against the law.' End of quote. So what Wagner is here saying, in a properly Hegelian I think move of negation of negation, what he practices is a shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of the notion itself. Recall again Proudhon’s old dialectical motto: property is theft. The negation of negation is here the shift from theft as a distortion, negation, violation of property, to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property. And so again this shift where external negation becomes self-negation, where okay we have crime as external negation of law, but what if an oppressive law is in itself the highest crime? And so on and so on. This move, I think, is crucial for the Hegelian conceptual process. And we can already here discern the contours of a dialectical process, namely, this brings me now to my next point, to the specific temporality of a dialectical process which is obviously often overlooked. Remember how—I will take the example of French Revolution—remember how Hegel celebrated the French Revolution as, I quote: 'a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.' End of quote. This, of course, as we all know, did not prevent Hegel from coldly analyzing the inner necessity of the explosion of abstract freedom to turn into its opposite, the self-destructive revolutionary terror. However, one should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution. Hegel in no way subscribes to the standard liberal critique of the French Revolution which locates the wrong turn in That is to say whose ideal is without the liberal phase without its Jacobin radicalization. For Hegel, is a necessary immanent consequence of There was no choice in or to take a more moderate path. Why? Because only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for the post-revolutionary concrete freedom. So if we try to put it in the terms of choice, then Hegel practices here the paradox of logical temporality. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, and it is only the wrong choice which creates the conditions for the right choice. You see what I mean. When Hegel criticizes again the terror of the French Revolution as abstract freedom against the rational post-revolutionary state, his point is not: we have a choice and we should choose the good concrete rational state against abstract terror. No, his point is that you only arrive at the point from which you can see the possibility of a rational state through revolutionary terror. In other words, you must repeat the choice. The first choice is simply between organic totality of pre-revolutionary world and again it’s only terror itself with its negativity which opens up the space for so-called concrete freedom. It’s the same with that—so that you will see that Hegel also has its obscenity—remember Hegel’s two readings of Der Geist ist ein Knochen, of the spirit is a bone, where Hegel—and this is much more often than it may appear the case—refers in a lovingly obscene way to phallus, no? And he says it is like in the case of phallus when you have the unity of the organ of the lowest, urination, and organ of the highest, insemination. But wait a minute, again read it closely, Hegel is not saying so we should make a choice, not the lowest but the highest. The whole point of Hegel’s description of phrenology is that you arrive at the highest only through the lowest, through the radical contradiction of the lowest. Again, this is the basic temporality of the dialectical process. There is a choice but in two stages: the choice has to be repeated. Which is why Hegel has, I claim, a whole in Hegelian process, there is a whole underlying structure of jokes, of this type of jokes where you progress through a misunderstanding or a mistake or a failure. You do something wrong, but then you discover that this wrong in itself, if you just change the perspective, already is its own solution. Like, if you permit me to repeat an old joke that I’m repeating already for literally years, I’m sorry for repeating myself—you know the Soviet joke about, you know, Rabinovich, a Jew who wants to emigrate, goes to the state bureaucrat responsible for it and says: 'I want to leave Soviet Union for two reasons. The first reason is, I’m afraid that Soviet Union will disintegrate and they will then blame us Jews for all the communist crimes.' And the bureaucrat tells him: 'Are you crazy? Soviet Union will be here forever, nothing will ever change here.' And Rabinovich says: 'Well, this is my second reason,' no? I mean, this is the logic of dialectical reversal. There is no magic in final twist, it’s simply that the very argument against becomes an argument for. And, I will—don’t have time now to go in detail into it—but just read Hegel’s theory of why Christ had to die on the cross and you will see it’s practically a Rabinovich joke. The idea is, you know, it’s like those wonderful doctors' jokes: 'What do you want to hear first, the bad news then the good news?', no? Which are, I think, very Hegelian, no? In the style of: 'Okay, first I will tell you,' says the doctor, 'the bad news: we discovered you have cancer, you will be dead in two months.' Then you ask: 'But what can be the good news then, eh?' And the doctor says: 'Well, we also discovered you have Alzheimer's and you will forget the bad news before you reach home,' no? That the bad news is God is dead on the cross, we are abandoned by God, we have no support in a substantial other. And what’s the good news? Exactly the same news! It means we are given freedom. Because for Hegel—I’m sorry, I don’t have time to develop it—I claim Hegel was the first to read Gospel in a truly materialist way. Why? Okay, let me improvise a little bit, I'm making suicide, it’s my time. If you ask me the first critique of Ideologiekritik in world literature or whatever, it’s the book of—how do you pronounce it in German—Job, Hiob, the guy who got like strange fate. You remember what happens then when things go wrong? Three friends come, theologians, each of them tries to convince Job of how his suffering must have some deeper meaning. One says, oh, even if you think you didn’t do anything wrong, God is just, so just look deeper, you must have done something wrong. The second one says something like, maybe this is all a test by God, suffering and so on and so on. And then the wonder happens: you remember, God comes and says everything that those three guys said is wrong, everything that Job said in complaining about is right. But what happens then? Then Job nonetheless asks God: 'Okay, but still, why did all this happen to me?' Now comes the crucial thing. Usually we read God’s answer as the arrogant answer, you know, all those lines of: 'Are you even aware of all the monsters, unicorns, I don’t know what, that I created? Who are you to even talk to me?' But the same Chesterton proposes a wonderful different reading, very pro—he says, God there commits a blasphemy. That the true answer of God to Job is: 'You think you are something special with your trouble, but look, the whole creation is a big mess, like I screwed up everything.' Which is why, I think, the death of Christ should be read as a repetition of Job. I think the death of Christ is not God sends the messenger, it went back, okay, come back to me, maybe we will try years later. As Hegel put it precisely, what dies on the cross is God-of-beyond itself. Which is why we have this unique figure of Holy Spirit which is something again totally unique. In what sense? I think that what really dies on the cross is again this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. You know this, the most disgusting metaphor that I know about religion where you say what when something appears to us as evil, it’s only if you look at the picture from too close, no? And it looks a stain. But when you move to a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as stain really contributes to global harmony. This idea, the situation may be confused but there is up there God who sees it all and guarantees blah blah. I claim—I read the sacrifice of Jesus—to avoid a misunderstanding, I’m a total atheist, this is a materialist reading—I read the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as precisely—the message is precisely: there is no Big Other, no guarantee of meaning. I give you freedom, you are alone. Holy Ghost is not a new collective spirit, Holy Ghost means we are here alone without a guarantee. Or as even many intelligent conservatives knew it, from Chesterton up to Paul Claudel, the true message of Christianity is not trust God, like it may seem confused the things but it’s God trusts us. God abdicated and Holy Spirit, which is if I may go a little bit fast in a problematic sense—Holy Spirit is the first name for Communist Party and similar institutions if you want. Is the first egalitarian institution against, you know, here we should read Christ—not sentimentalist like that Christ, you know, 'oh I bring love,' haha. I like Christ who says if you don’t hate your mother and father you are not my follower. I like Christ who says if you don’t have a sword, sell your shirt and buy a sword, and so on. I like Christ who says I bring war, I bring I bring conflict, not peace. What is meant here, I claim? It’s not of course just violence. When Christ says hate your mother and father, I claim the idea is hate your mother and father in their function of mother and father as parts of social hierarchic order. The message—this is for me absolutely unique in the idea of a Holy Spirit: First, history is not circular, God is dead, there is a break and the only hope after this break is an egalitarian is an egalitarian community. But now let me go even a step further. Now you will say, 'yeah yeah, this all may be true, but nonetheless in Hegel there is a teleological movement, you know, somehow we know it will end well,' and so on. Ah, it’s more complex. I would like to draw your attention here to a wonderful Hegelian text, I claim, from Heinrich von Kleist, from first published only posthumously in 1878—I’m sorry for this obscenity to present you the title in English—On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech. I think all this double temporality that I was talking about, you have it there. The idea is that when you say something deep, a new truth, Sprechen ist immer ein Versprechen, you say something too much, you get confused and then to quickly squeeze out you invent something. In a wonderful way, Kleist interprets like that this famous moment in the French Revolution where the master of ceremonies from the king on June came to the assembly and said 'disperse' and so on. And how Mirabeau first says, didn't know what to say, just went on 'on what authority do you think' and so on and so on. And then said too much, didn't know what to do, and just to squeeze out of the trouble pronounced his great sentence: 'Go and tell your king that we should not leave our places here except when forced with bayonets,' and so on and so on. So the idea is again that a true invention of the new surprises you. It’s—and this is, I think, Hegel’s List der Vernunft. It’s not a reason hidden from the very beginning controlling it all. It’s kind of a profit from chance. You say too much, quickly you try to accommodate or to somehow integrate that excess and in a way you succeed. And I think this would even have been a Hegelian reading of the death of Christ. You know, Christ died, it was a shock, they didn't know what. Then somebody said, 'My God, why don't we turn this into a triumph?', no? Like, and so on. From here we should go a step further: Hegel and contingency. I think that Hegel is absolutely not a philosopher of contingency in the sense that there is a deeper necessity which only expresses or articulates itself through contingencies. Hegel’s deepest thought is that necessity retroactively emerges in a contingent way out of contingency. And here, I’m really sad not to have time, here you can see the materialist core of Hegel’s even most speculative propositions. For example, what would have been Hegel’s reading of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon? It’s not, it was predestined, he had to do it. It was, no! At that point the situation was totally open. But once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he as it were recreated his destiny so that it retroactively appeared necessary. I think I should quote here—I got it from a French theorist—a wonderful small passage from French journal Le Monde, which refers to some French voting on May At that point, Balladur, Édouard Balladur was one of the candidates and in Le Monde they wrote: 'If Balladur will be elected, then we can say that his election was necessary.' No? In the sense of something happens and once it happens, it retroactively becomes necessary. I think that Hegelian necessity always has this retroactive status. Which is why, this is my final provocation: if some of you are old-fashioned Marxists, the time has come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. Because what this Hegel’s opening towards contingency—and this is what Hegel means, not some reactionary passivity with his, you know, that thought, philosophy, arises in the evening like the owl of Minerva. Hegel is I think the most radical thinker of contingency in the sense that for him the position adopted by Marx, to simplify it, which is: you as a historical agent can as it were can look into history, see where the history is going and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. This is totally prohibited as idealist for Hegel. For Hegel precisely there is no Big Other in the sense of general tendency and so on and so on. You know whom I should talk about, but don't have time here, about, for example, the great conservative poet, but there he is good: T. S. Eliot in his most famous text, you know the Tradition and the Individual Talent, when he says that every really new work of art doesn't just introduce something new but retroactively changes the entire history of art. Of course, we are not talking about magic, but about how the meaning, the narrative of the entire past is is is changed. This, I think, is the Hegelian also theory of totality. Not we have a large evolutionary necessary narrative where everything is pre-ordained. No, on the contrary, that with every new break the whole past is the whole past is rewritten. If I may refer here to another old example which illustrates this point perfectly, Borges wrote about Kafka that every writer can have its forerunners, predecessors, but that Kafka—only Kafka and some of the greatest—can be said to to create also their forerunners. He means that of course we can now say it’s clear that Kafka had forerunners in, I don’t know, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, but we can say this only once Kafka is here. And again, it is wrong to say that yes, this is simply reality before and just that we are in this way just retroactively projecting things into the past. No, here Hegel should be read with Benjamin. What if history is not fully constituted? What if history is in itself open, so that we don’t have already before fully constituted events, but they are also retroactively constituted? So to come to the end, slowly, the best story, metaphor, almost joke about Hegelian vision of reality would have been for me what I read in a certain book about modern philosophy—forgot even which one—where this book tries to explain quantum mechanics and evokes computer games. The idea is this one: that, you know, how to read Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? We all know today that Heisenberg himself got it wrong. Bohr corrected it. It’s not only an epistemological obstacle, that you cannot measure this and that. The gap, the opening is in the thing itself. So here is this wonderfully simple idea. You know if you play—I unfortunately do, being terrorized by my son—these computer military games: you see a forest in the background. But this forest is not even fully programmed, you know what I mean? Because if it’s not part of the game that you can go there, then why spend time programming all the details of the trees there? Or you have a house in the background. If you cannot enter the house, of course the inner of the house is not programmed. Now comes the beautifully simple idea: what if God was the programmer of our world and was in the same sense a lazy programmer? He thought we humanity are too stupid to move beyond the atom. So God says: 'Why should I then even program the position and capacity? The humans are too stupid,' no? We were a little bit too bright for God. But now comes the true materialist task. And this is I think the true Hegelian challenge of quantum physics: Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking it, in a materialist way? This, I think, is the task. If you just permit me now to add some short concluding remarks: Of course in a way it is true, we cannot simply—it’s ridiculous—become Hegelians. We should be the first to admit that there are things that Hegel couldn’t have thought. I think that they first—my first thesis: they concern the topic of repetition. Because you know as Gilles Deleuze—he didn’t know that he was also a Hegelian—as Gilles Deleuze made it clear: what really characterizes the post-Hegelian space, it’s not all this bullshit—positivity of being, full life, real actual life—it’s a notion of repetition, mechanic pure repetition, which in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung or idealization. Hegel has, as you probably know, a beautiful theory of repetition which is precisely back to Julius Caesar. He develops it a propos Caesar, no? How Caesar is first just a name, Julius Caesar. Then he dies, he repeats himself as a universal title: Caesar as the title. So Hegel’s point is idealization. But what about what we find in thinkers as opposite as Kierkegaard and Freud? Wiederholungszwang or Kierkegaard’s repetition, a kind of a pure repetition. And my point is that it’s not that Hegel simply didn’t see it, but there are signs which point towards this un-thought of Hegel. And the way we should think further from Hegel is not to say, 'oh there is a totally different domain.' It is—and there are many points—where you can clearly see how paradoxically Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. Isn’t this the whole point of Marx? What is effectively Marx saying if you read Capital really closely is basically that Hegel’s theory of economy, although Hegel read Adam Smith and so on, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of capital. Hegel in economy was still this naive manufacturer, you know, people collaborate. The idea of this incredible ideal strength of capital as abstraction which rules concrete life. Like Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough there. That’s basically the thesis of Marx. That if you take Hegel’s matrix of subject-substance, the whole passage from money to capital, of course, is passage from subject to substance and so on and so on again. And what maybe makes precisely the example of capital so wonderful is that Marx uses in Grundrisse fragments, I think, a very precise expression, that capital is ein automatisches Subjekt, an automatic subject. What does this mean? Capital is a subject beyond schlechte Unendlichkeit, spurious infinity, self-relating, but at the same time automatic. This though capital was I think would have been such a horror for Hegel because he would have to think something which at the same time is actual infinity and the bad endlessly repetitive infinity. So then there are, sorry don't have time, other wonderful examples. For example, I think it absolutely should be reread Hegel’s theory of madness from the first point of the third part chapter of the third part of Enzyklopädie: Philosophie des Geistes, where Hegel develops, like to put it naively, the rise of human spirit out of animal life. And my God, it’s more radical than Michel Foucault! The key notions are Wahnsinn, madness, and Gewohnheit, habit. And the idea is that the passage through radical madness, even if of course doesn’t happen to all of us empirically, it’s a permanent background to being human. And I think here we can see this negativity as Wiederholungszwang in Hegel, in his necessity of war, in his theory of madness. I don't have time to develop it—also in his, for example, theory of rabble, Pöbel. And even, I claim, okay to add a little bit of spice to end, in Hegel’s theory of sexuality. Hegel is there an anti-Hegelian vulgar evolutionist. He treats sexuality as something basically biological, which we then through our cultural development we symbolize it, vermitteln, mediate it, and so on. Like, I no longer just jump over a woman, I write poems, whatever you want, mediate. But you know what Hegel doesn’t see—and my God, he should have seen it following his own procedure—that it’s not as simple as that, that we don’t pass directly from nature to culture. Our cultural rituals in love are not a defense against the brutality of some natural force, but against a certain excess which we can see in this kind of a radical deadly erotic passion, Tristan und Isolde, and so on and so on. That is to say once we pass from nature to culture, retroactively a third domain of, let’s call it naively, radical negativity emerges. And that’s the problem. You know who already knew this in a way? Kant even! You know in his wonderful short writing Über Pädagogik. He provides his famous definition of: man is an animal who needs a master. And then he says why: not because we must need a master to control our natural instincts, but Kant speaks about some kind of a radical madly free unruliness which is typical to man and which is kind of metaphysical unruliness. So again, to go back to sexuality: What Hegel, if he were to be Hegelian today, would have been definitely against the Catholic Church and all this bullshit about how if you copulate just for pleasure you are reduced to an animal, it must be for procreation. Hegel would have said, but isn't it exactly the opposite, that animals do it only basically for procreation? To take something which serves a certain terrestrial biological aim and to autonomize it with regard to that aim, to make it a Selbstzweck, this is the fundamental lesson of metaphysics. So I think Jacques Lacan is right when he claims that the horror of sexuality for Christianity and others is not they are not fighting there vulgar utilitarian biological life, they are fighting their metaphysical competitor. What worries them in sexuality is that—and this is the thesis of Freud—the thesis of Freud is not we are determined by biology; the thesis of Freud is that sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary the passage from natural to human emerges through again through drive, Wiederholungszwang, which have nothing to do with with instinct and so on. So again, let me stop and finish with the—half a minute—first again I’m not saying let’s be Hegelians, I’m just saying in today’s crazy world with all this with all its crazy reversals and so on, it’s as if it offers itself to a Hegelian approach. And because Hegel lived in a certain in-between, and we obviously also do: we all know a certain epoch is coming to an end. In this sense we should repeat Hegel, but repeat Hegel in a Kierkegaardian sense. Not in the sense of some Hegelian Aufhebung, but also not in the sense of doing the same as Hegel but, let me put it in this way as Kierkegaard would have put it—mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world. And here to avoid a misunderstanding, for example a propos Pöbel or capital: I think the time has come maybe to even return to Hegel up to a point again against great post-Hegelians like Marx. For example, Hegel’s passages on Pöbel, rabble, are usually read for 'yeah Hegel vaguely saw that part of society is necessarily proletarianized but he didn't see it clearly like Marx.' No, isn't it that today precisely, if there is something going on is that the main form of class struggle is no longer simply working class/bourgeoisie, but that those vaguely let’s say exploited are dispersed into many forms of Pöbel: undeveloped, those living in apartheid position in apartheids, illegal immigrants, and so on and so on. So maybe we should even return here a little bit from Marx to Hegel. Another point where we should return. Now I will say something horrible. We know that Marx which you still I think find in Humboldt University: philosophers have only interpreted the world—es geht darum—the point is to change it. My God, I will say something horrible today: isn’t it that we are living in a time where we can say this: maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick too fast to change the world, and es geht darum that we interpret it, reflect a little bit more radically? And this seems to be more and more the most subversive thing to do today. A proof: you in Germany are happy here. A brutal fascist counter-revolution called Bologna high education reform. You know what's the goal of that one? You know the horrible consequences in England and so on? It’s very clear: they want to change us into experts. It is all masked into this, you know, higher education must serve social must be socially useful, and so on. What they want is that, for example, you have a problem, let’s say demonstrations in the suburb of Paris, ah you call psychologists how to contain them, you call social workers, you call experts. But sorry, this is not thinking. Thinking is not just solving problems posed to you by others. Thinking is critically questioning the way we perceive problems. Take ecology. Ecology is not just to contain Fukushima and all that. Ecology should also ask: how did it come to that, in what way do we perceive the problem? Like is it right to perceive it only as a technological problem, or is it correct to to just to spiritualize it in a superficial way like, you know, it’s I don’t know all this anti-Enlightenment twist of technology and so on—sorry, of ecology and so on and so on. All all this is crucial for me. I think that my God, we are approaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed. Like ecology or think about biogenetics. What is happening if really it will go on what it appears: that the limit that separates inside from outside, our experience—sorry I got your gentle body language, yes I will finish it. Inside from outside, you know, when you can for example already up to a point control mind from the outside, or the other way around. I saw it in England myself: you have already chairs moving for cripples where crippled people where you don’t even need that Stephen Hawking’s finger, you know, you can directly move it by your thought. This changes the very definition of being human and so on. I claim that thinking is needed much than ever. And now I give you a theoreticist advice: so be careful to resist the pseudo-temptation of the state of emergency. When I was young, the state of emergency talk was still the talk of leftists like 'oh you are there living in your ivory tower but children are starving in Africa.' Didn't you notice that now Bill Gates talks like that? Why? Because if you read all those statements of emergency which go something like this: why are we still caught in this stupid ideological debates, capitalism, socialism, while children are starving in Africa? Let's get all together, private business, state, NGOs, and let's do something. The message is precisely 'do' in the sense of 'don't think about it.' And all even consumption is going in this direction. Where I become a Hegelian moment with which I will conclude: when I—I’m not for terrorism not in any way—but I almost become tempted by it when I pass a Starbucks coffee. Because you know what operation you have there. Go into it, at least it’s in England and United States, probably it’s here. They do a wonderful job of ideology. They have all these posters which basically tell you this: 'Yes, our coffee is more expensive, but goes for starving Guatemala children, to protect forests.' Basically they tell you this: In the old times we were split into consumerists and good citizens caring about. Now we propose you to include the price of solidarity into the price of the commodity, so that you can be totally consumerist saying, 'but by buying that coffee I already covered also that solidarity aspect.' The message is again: 'Don't think, buy our coffee which is a little bit more expensive, your thinking is included, it will be done by others,' and so on, no? To fight all this, don't be afraid to be intellectuals today. The fact of Bologna reform demonstrates that at least those in power know that we are dangerous. Thanks very much für Ihre Geduld.