Is Lacan An Anti-Philosopher? (2/3 - Slavoj Žižek)
Debate · Zizek Comedy ·
2010-05-28 · 0:53:00 · 6,150 words
philosophy-generalpsychoanalysisideologycinema-art-culturehegel-dialecticssubjectivitylanguage
Žižek analyzes the BP oil spill and Ted Kennedy’s offshore drilling scandal as examples of the gap between the Real and the Symbolic, using Freud’s Irma’s Dream to illustrate the impotence of symbolic representation. He then engages in a theoretical debate with Alain Badiou regarding 'anti-philosophy,' arguing that the core of anti-philosophy is the violent opposition between productive presence and representation. Finally, he reinterprets Lacan’s anti-philosophical stance not as a return to presence, but as the insistence that language is a 'torture house' that must be tortured to reveal truth, contrasting this with Heidegger’s hermeneutic trust in language. Žižek engages in a dense theoretical dialogue with a respondent (likely Catherine Malabou or Quentin Meillassoux) regarding Jacques Lacan’s 'anti-philosophy' and Martin Heidegger’s ontology. He argues that Lacan’s late work, particularly the identification of the cogito with being as an empty set, can be read as a return to pure, non-historical universality rather than a rejection of philosophy. Žižek critiques Heidegger for missing the dimension of being 'tortured by language' (the symbolic), using the example of Auschwitz to illustrate this gap. He further distinguishes his own position by positing 'anxiety' and the 'death drive' as a third domain between animal life and truth events, and reinterprets feminine jouissance as being fully within the symbolic order.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The structural disconnect where the Real (horror/catastrophe) cannot be adequately symbolized, leading to a return of the ridiculous or absurd in public discourse.
The failure of symbolic structures (law, politics, language) to contain or adequately represent the traumatic Real, resulting in comical or tragic absurdity.
as “four domains of truth”
Badiou’s conditions for truth events: science, politics, art, and love; Žižek maps these onto German Idealism (Kant/Science, Fichte/Politics, Schelling/Art, Hegel/Love).
A philosophical position that denounces philosophy itself, typically by claiming to break out of the closed circle of representation into a more direct, productive presence or life.
The central opposition in anti-philosophy: the desire to escape the 'theater' of abstract representation to access a direct, unmediated 'productive' reality or life.
Hegel’s notion of the non-representable element (the people) that escapes parliamentary representation, cited as the first development of the anti-philosophical topic.
The excess of enjoyment/pain that disrupts the harmony of being and logos; the point where philosophy fails and anti-philosophy begins.
as “master and hysteric”
Žižek’s characterization of his relationship with Alain Badiou: Badiou is the Master, Žižek is the Hysteric who provokes him.
The primordial masochism of jouissance that introduces a crack in the pre-established harmony between being and logos, which philosophy escapes.
as “language is a torture house of being”
Žižek’s Lacanian revision of Heidegger: language is not a transparent house for being, but a traumatic, distorting medium that must be 'tortured' (through art/poetry) to extract truth.
Lacan’s definition of the subject not as a Cartesian master of the world, but as one tortured and dominated by language, a dimension Žižek argues Heidegger misses.
as “historicist transcendental attitude”
The view that language is our inescapable fate, preventing us from formulating universality outside the 'prison house of language'.
as “position in between the two deaths”
The Antiguan state of being biologically alive but symbolically dead (homo sacer), which Žižek claims Heidegger fails to address in his readings of Antigone.
as “cogito, incognito”
Žižek’s reading of late Lacan: the identity of cogito and being is asserted as an empty set, where one is pure thinking without content and pure being without content.
A proposed counter to Heidegger’s 'state-forming' (staatsbildend) violence: a violence that breaks through language to access universality, rather than grounding a nation.
Žižek’s rebuttal to Meillassoux: the 'fossil' (the real prior to humans) is not a pre-human reality but the objet petit a, the leftover of symbolization within the subject.
Žižek’s controversial reinterpretation of Lacan’s 'not-all': women are paradoxically more fully within the symbolic order because there is no exception, whereas men have a 'leg out' in mystical jouissance.
as “real is the deadlock of symbolization”
The claim that the Real is not an 'in-itself' behind appearances, but literally the failure or deadlock of the symbolic order itself.
as “self-relating negativity”
The German Idealist term Žižek uses to 'de-imaginarize' the death drive, treating it not as a psychological fantasy but as a structural logical operation.
as “gradual disintegration”
Žižek’s assessment of Lacan’s late seminars (from Anxiety to Encore), arguing they represent a decline into symptom-tolerance rather than a final wisdom.
Stories he reaches for 2
Žižek cites Heidegger’s horrified statement that in concentration camps, corpses were produced industrially and people were 'not really dying.' Žižek argues this reveals Heidegger’s failure to grasp the subject being 'tortured by language' (symbolic death), as the victim did not feel like a mere technological object.
“he says that in concentration camps, they were just in an industrial way producing corpses. people were not really dying there.”
Žižek dismisses the idea that Lacan’s final years (represented by his 'official mistress' Catherine Millot) contained a 'last wisdom' or point of the Real, arguing instead that these seminars represent a 'gradual disintegration' and a liberalizing of Lacan’s thought.
“the idea was that she was there when lacon was dying... no, i claim... i'm more and more convinced they're gradual disintegration.”
Works invoked 7
Antigone play
Used to illustrate the 'position in between the two deaths'; Žižek notes Heidegger’s two great readings of Antigone fail to mention this crucial dimension, unlike Lacan.
The German Ideology book
Called 'the worst Marx' by Žižek for his brutal dismissal of philosophy as masturbation vs. sexual act.
Being and Time book
Heidegger’s work, specifically the concept of 'Dasein' (being there), which Žižek argues is 'good for neurotics' but fails to account for the psychotic position of being tortured by language.
Logics of Worlds book
The respondent’s (Malabou’s) work, which Žiženg agrees approaches the problem of how thought emerges from the 'stupidity of the real,' though he disagrees on the role of language.
Described as 'one of the great books of anti-philosophy,' but Žižek argues Levinas’s critique fails because it reduces being to naive positive reality.
Lacan’s seminar, cited by Žižek as the place where Lacan returns to the identity of cogito and being as an 'empty set' (cogito, incognito).
Used as a structural analogy for the BP oil spill: the horror of the throat (oil gushing) followed by the ridiculous blame-shifting of the doctors (executives).
People invoked 34
André Bazin positive
Cited as the great opposition to Eisenstein, representing passive filming as a mode of torture.
Mentioned as the company owner (Halliburton) of the BP CEO, involved in the blame-shifting of the oil spill hearings.
François Balmès positive
Lacan’s ex-colleague whose studies on Lacan emphasized the mystery of why Lacan stuck to the notion of the subject.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Mapped to the condition of Politics (French Revolution); cited as part of the anti-hegelian turn.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Žižek’s colleague who developed the topic of denouncing representation throughout the 19th century.
Cited as the starting point of philosophy where being and logos are in pre-established harmony.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek loves 'Derrida reading Foucault, Bataille, Levinas'; he praises Derrida for showing how anti-philosophical attempts to break out remain determined by the field they undermine.
Senator caught in a sex scandal in a boat, used as a political joke about offshore drilling.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Cited as a great book of anti-philosophy (Totality and Infinity), but Žižek argues Levinas’s critique of Hegel/Heidegger fails because it reduces being to naive positive reality.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek locates Lacan’s anti-philosophy at the point of 'jouissance' and the crack in the harmony of being/logos; he agrees with Lacan that language is a 'torture house' rather than a transparent house of being.
Catherine Millot negative
Identified as Lacan’s 'official mistress' and the object of affection in his final years; Žižek uses her association with the late seminars to argue for their 'gradual disintegration' rather than wisdom.
Georges Bataille positive
Cited in Derrida’s reading as someone who tries to enact the anti-philosophical gesture (Sovereignty against Hegel).
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek describes their relationship as 'master and hysteric'; he agrees with Badiou’s anti-philosophy but critiques him for retaining too much of the 'productive presence' vs. representation dichotomy.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Referenced for the concept of 'homo sacer,' which Žižek uses to describe the subject in the 'position in between the two deaths' (biologically alive, symbolically dead).
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the term 'prison house of language,' which Žižek uses to frame the historicist attitude he seeks to break out of.
Adrian Johnston positive
Cited for his reading of Badiou, emphasizing that philosophy cannot stand on its own but must attach to a condition.
Catherine Malabou positive
Likely the 'Balmash' respondent. Žižek praises her 'brutal clinical judgment' on Heidegger and her concept of the 'post-traumatic subject' as accurately describing the position Lacan identifies.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited in Derrida’s reading as someone who tries to enact the anti-philosophical gesture (Madness as outside).
Jean-Luc Marion negative
Cited as taking over Levinas’s idea that Heidegger remains within philosophy; Žižek implies this view is flawed.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Žižek says 'I don't like Elfriede Jelinek. her style is too dirty for me' but deeply agrees with her phrase that 'language should be tortured to tell the truth.'
Martin Heidegger negative
Žižek agrees with Heidegger’s anti-hermeneutic distrust of truth as language, but critiques him for 'hermeneutic trust' in language as the house of being, arguing instead for the 'torture house' view.
Roberto Rossellini positive
Cited as an example of passive cinema (anti-Eisenstein) that is still a mode of torturing language.
Jacqueline Miller negative
Criticized for a 'liberal reinterpretation' of Lacan as a 'wise man,' which Žižek sees as a danger of dismissing the truth in favor of symptom-tolerance.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Mapped to the condition of Art in the four domains of truth; cited as part of the anti-hegelian turn.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for his distinction between 'state-forming' (staatsbildend) and 'divine' violence, which Žižek adapts to propose 'sprachzerstörend' (language-destroying) violence.
Quentin Meillassoux negative
Žižek critiques Meillassoux’s 'fossil' argument as a 'pre-hegelian problematic' stuck in the pseudo-problem of reaching reality-in-itself, arguing instead that the Real is the objet petit a.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited as part of the anti-hegelian turn; his anti-philosophy is the unique existence of the religious individual escaping conceptual mediation.
Described as appearing 'a little bit of a clown' by claiming BP would pay every cent, which Žižek finds ridiculous.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Cited as an example of 'torturing' language through montage/cutting to squeeze out truth.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Cited as an example of 'torturing' language through slow cinema/stretching to squeeze out truth.
Karl Marx negative
Žižek calls him 'the worst Marx' (German Ideology) for his brutal dismissal of philosophy as masturbation vs. sexual act; he critiques Marx’s anti-philosophical gesture.
René Descartes negative
Used as the foil for Lacan’s subject: the 'Cartesian subject' who dominates the world, which Lacan rejects in favor of the subject suffering from the symbolic.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek argues Hegel is the unique point 'no longer philosopher... but not yet anti-philosopher'; he maps Hegel to the condition of Love and defends him against the 'little bit here, little bit there' interpretation.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited as the first breakthrough of anti-philosophy through Kantian ethics, separating theoretical truth from the ethical act.
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
. difficult to follow. i hope you hear me. glad to be here. glad to be with alain. of course, in this 20-minute forum, it's just a little bit too little time to really develop a line of thought all one can do is more just trace, define positions, oppositions, and so on. i would nonetheless like to begin with reference to what is going on recently in your territory, or just off your territory in louisiana, because i think it concerns precisely in a way, very oblique way, what alain was talking about, this gap, sorry, distance between... the real. and the symbolic. i was thinking about do you know how freudian dream of irma's injection is structured? first, you have this look deep into irma's throat. the primal horror distorted flesh, then you have this sudden pass from the real into the ridiculous. impotence of the symbolic, the three doctors. exchanging faked arguments. isn't this going on now in the united states public discourse? the look into the irma's throat would have been those camera shots that we get of the oil gushing out. and then the three doctors literally exist, you remember in the congressional hearing, as the three representatives who were exactly in the same comical way putting the blame of each other. bp bp representative or ceo even said, no, it's not me, it's the subcontractor. that halliburton or whatever, i think it's the big dick cheney's company said, no, we just made the plan. it's our own subcontractor who poured the concrete, who screwed it up. and finally, the last one returned. the ball and said, no but we were just following the plans we got from the other two and so on. so it's clearly this same constellation but things are more tragic here. ur. remember when i think unfortunately even president obama appeared a little bit of a clown here. for me, when he pathetically claimed we, i will make on behalf of american people, whatever, bp, british petroleum, play, sorry, pay every cent of the damage and so on and so on. sorry, this is ridiculous. if the spilling will go on the way it goes, even if they so many environment ruined, lives ruined, etc., you simply cannot pay for it. it's ridiculous. it's a little bit, i exaggerate consciously, like to say germany will pay every cent for the holocaust and so on. i mean, when catastrophes are too big, it's meaningless to talk in these terms. so we have to rethink it. i remember, here, connected to. impossibility of sexual relationship. i remember some twenty years ago exactly in the same territory the waters. seawater south of louisiana. ted kennedy, a that senator, was caught, was caught by a paparazzo in a lone boat. he thought he is alone, only sea around, making love to a lady. i mean, it's a blurred image, but very clear. her legs spread and so on. exactly at that point in the senate they were debating offshore drilling. and i loved how a republican senator here i like it, referring to this said, oh, i noticed that recently senator kennedy, who was opposed to it, changed his position on offshore drilling. well, i'm here for kennedy. no? i think that the only offshore drilling that should be allowed is the one that kennedy was involved in. no? okay, but... not too much of this. ugh. er. la con and antiosoph. you know i will just try to again present state my case and not. just mark some differences allowing hopefully alain to strike. back because as i already developed once in paris, i think, or london, our relationship is that of a master and the hysteric. he's the master, i'm the hysteric provoking all the time and so on. it's sometimes difficult to provoke the master. uh. now, more seriously. ugh. i was deeply influenced by his insight into the whole concept of. anti-philosophy. maybe i would just shift a little bit. orplace, expand, whatever my understanding of it. of course, i totally agree with kim, we can say already pascal and so on, but nonetheless, pascal clearly situated himself outside. philosophy. for me, maybe i'm wrong. where do we have the first breakthrough of anti-philosophy is a philosophical position. maybe. risky hypothesis kant, kantian ethics. it's it's... the first time that you clearly have this position of we have the domain of. knowledge or theoretical truth and then we have access to the real through the ethical act which is again. the relationship to the impossible real or think itself outside truth. it's also interesting how speaking about anti-philosophy, did you notice that in the history of philosophy, from that point on of kantian revolution, practically. practically, not totally of course. entire philosophy no longer wants to be called philosophy. kant is no longer metaphysics, but transcendental critique of the conditions of metaphysics. fichte is wissenschaftlehhre. that is to say teaching on science not philosophy. h privileges art hegel also said no longer love of wisdom but wisdom itself, not to mention marx and so on and so on. so my first constatation when laccon says je me cherche contre la philosophie is well, welcome to the camp of philosophers. all philosophers from kant onwards are doing nothing but that. in surging against philosophy. nobody wants to be a philosopher. me accept me. i agree with you. that's my point. yeah, that's precisely my point. because would you agree now i have a new proposal for you to try to convert you to my cause of the love of german idealism you know your four domains of domains, okay, conditions, whatever of. of where a truth event can occur. let's enumerate them. science, politics, art, love. and i deeply agree with adrian johnston's reading of you where he emphasized an aspect of this which is usually ignored ignored that. this people usually dress emphasize your opposite point, which is this suture, not totally attach philosophy to one truth condition. but i think, on the other hand, you make a much nicer point, which is even close to some kind of engaged marxist thinking, which is nonetheless that philosophy cannot stand on its own. heroically, you have to attach, engage yourself, attach yourself to a condition. you cannot be philosopher just in the air. and would you agree or not? this came to me. that the same four goes for conditions of truth, goes for german idealism. look, kant's problem was science, was how to philosophize in the conditions of newtonian science. fichte is clearly politics, french revolution. schelling is art. and i claim hegelislav. i mean, we have precisely the four guys there. but okay, now let me go on into anti-philosophy. where do i? maybe, maybe. shift the accent a little bit. for me. i would say that the great breakthrough of anti-philosoph occurs with the so-called anti-hegelian turn. we need three main forms. first. the late schelling and the young schopenhauer. then kierkegaard then marx. i think that all three in a way meet your condition. philosophy is in all three versions. uh. denounced as caught in its own circle of representation, abstract contextual thinking and some kind of return to. not the real in the lacian sense but some kind of a positive singular life foundation which implies a critique of philosophy is enacted. for kierkegaard, this is the unique existence of religious individual which escapes philosophical conceptual mediation. for late selling heidegger it is the primordial irrational, pre-logical abyss of willing outside philosophical truth. and for marx is the actual life process of actual people and so on. and so on and so on. al what i claim. ich death. in all this here things probably will become, i'm asking you a question and not in this boring pseudo-pedagogical way where asking someone a question means that you already know what is the truth and just expect from you to confirm it's really an open question. i claim that what unites all the three and this is really what happened after hegel. is that. with all violence, a certain opposition became predominant. which i think maybe, i wonder if you would agree, defines the very coordinates for me of anti-philosophy. the opposition between productive presence and mere conceptual idealistic theater scene of representation. marx is here very brutal. marx, the worst marx, which i think should be abandoned, the marx of german ideology with all the stuff of philosophy. is with regard to real life like masturbation is with regard to sexual act and so on. so again, this idea that we are caught into a closed circle of representation. philosophy, ideology got into it, and the point is to. break out of this closed circle of representation into some more direct, productive. presence. and as my colleague alenka zupančič developed in a very nice way, it's interesting how this same topic of denouncing representation became also actual throughout the 19th century. of course it was present before, but then it exploded as general problematizing of representation. for example, in the domain of love, all of a sudden the problem was can. love encounter be properly represented in the institution of marriage. with usual ambiguity on the one hand it was the bourgeois principle you know, the only legitimate marriage is marriage which should be founded in love. but then you always have this idea, but nonetheless the institution of marriage cannot fully recuperate love. there is an excess. this idea of an access escaping representation. you have the same in politics. you have parliamentary representation but then you know, this topic of can parliamentary representation adequately represent social base isn't there something in social base which escapes representation. the first one to fully develop this was already none other than hegel in his wonderful wonderfully ambiguous notion of pe. rebel is the is the non-representable element. now up. here, i'm just asking you a question and trying to draw maybe a line of distinction. i think. this entire topic of productive presence. and then. uh. misrepresented in some scene of representation should be ultimately dropped. this is for me the core of anti. philosophy. and now comes the evil part. i don't have time to develop it. the stalinist part of me. i think you remain here for my taste sometimes a little bit of too much of anti-philosopher. sometimes you also mobilize this representation versus the real of productive presence. with this topic. so this is, again, my first point. and it would be very interesting here to play in a nice way different philosophers one against the other. for example, although we both totally more or less disagree with derrida, i think that when derrida, i wonder if you agree, is at his best, it's when he not in his critique of metaphysics, we know that, but in his critique of too fast, direct anti-philosophical attempts to break out. theerrida i love is derrida reading foucault, bataille, levinas, where he takes someone who tries to enact the basic anti-philosophical gesture, like bataille, against hegelian philosophy sovereignty. foucault against cartesian cogito madness as outside or. levinash against philosophical totality, infinity of relating to otherness. and i think here dererrida is a good anti--philosopher. in a wonderful detailed analysis, she shows how all these attempts to break out remain nonetheless in a hidden way determined by the field they want to undermine. so here again, we can learn something from derrida. you know, derrida is not just the one who wants to screw philosophy, break out of it and so on and so on. he is a good philosopher, especially good in showing how it's not as easy as it may appear to break out of. out of philosophy. especially actual today, i think, is for example, derrida's and later developed by other critique of levinas. because i think that if there is one of the great books of anti-philosophy, it's levinas's totality and infinity. and i think it is easy to show how levinasi's critique of hegel and especially of heidegger, which was later taken over by jean-luc marion. this idea that even heidegger remains too much within philosophy, that even the ontological difference between being and entities still remains within the horizon of being, while we must break through towards this infinite radical otherness of god. beyond being. i think it can be shown in convincing way every serious philosopher can show it that. levina simply doesn't hold there. that the price is a very superficial reduction of the notion of being to some pretty naive positive reality and then you can say, oh, but god is outside it and so on and so on. a heidegarian who would have insisted here that even if god outside, beyond being, still fest to. of course not exist as a determinate object, but has to be present, disclose itself in a certain way, would be fully justified. you cannot escape it as simple as that. so... again, i don't have time to develop it, but the reason i remain faithful to hegel would have been that i insist that hegel is absolutely unique here. he is on the... i mean... usually people perceive hegel in this shift from traditional metaphysics philosophy to anti-philosophy in the guise of the 19th century historicicism, life philosophy and so on, is somewhere in between, as they say, on the one hand, hegel remained absolutely metaphysical system, everything. on the other hand, we already find in hegel good historical analysis and so on and so on. i think this image of hegel is deeply misleading, like a little bit here, a little bit there. i think he was not a little bit here, a little bit there. he was neither here nor there. he was a unique point, no longer. philosopher in the sense of metaphysical philosopher, but not yet. anti-philosopher that's what makes hegel so traumatic. so now let me go on. into just two more points. first, i'll try to be as brief as possible, into how i locate lacche's anti-philosophy. basically, i am... totally. in full agreement with al maybe i would just formulate. the ambiguity of lacon in a little bit different way. for for me. first, one has to be... precise in where does lacon locate. that witch, that. anti-philosophical point, if you would have put it, on behalf of which lacconbe makes this pathetic claim m i raise myself contre la philosophie against philosophy. this point is clearly a jouissance, the excess of enjoyment. for laccon, this excess of, for lac, let me be very precise, philosophy is that which begins with parmenides, you know, the same is being and logos, thinking, talking, this kind of a pre-established harmony between discourse and being. being can be logically apprehended said. for lacon, again, as you pointed out, this is the anti-philosophical core of lacon, there is something which introduces a crack here. here is a nice quote from lacan of 1966, his seminar on the object of psychoanalysis. quote. i challenge whichever philosopher to account now for the relation that is between the emergence of the signifier and the way jouissance relates to being. no philosophy, i say, meets us here today. the brexit aborted freaks of philosophy which we drag behind us from the beginning of the last, 19th century, as the habits that are falling apart are nothing but a way to frisk rather than to confront this question, which is the only question about truth and which is called and named by freud the death drive, the primordial masochism of jouissance. all philosophical speech escapes and withdraws here. uh... i will try here to be at the same time critical but also positive towards lacon. first, i would say... what always fascinated me in la con est. what did one enigma which an ex-colleague of alain, françois balmes, in his very good studies on laccon emphasized. the great mystery and perhaps the best way to approach laccon is to ask a very simple, almost detective question. laccon obviously knew heidegger very well. why then? did she stick to the notion of the subject? why didn't he drop subject? i mean, it's the name for. the core of inhhuman core of human being. uh... i think the reason is and here again, from a weird perspective, i approach one of the big topics of alain, where i agree with him, the relationship between language and truth. wer i support al fully ich. in his, the way i understand it, anti-hermeneutic trust of not identifying. truth wit. the one who developed this most radically was heidegger. arguably, this idea that truth is ultimately the historically destined horizon of being which dwells is inscribed into our language. and in this historicized transcendental mode, a heidegerarian would have said, this is the unsurpassable horizon of our. access to truth. the ultimate, the furthest you can go is to reflect on the horizon of how. things appear to you of how being is disclosed. for example, you can make, i don't know how many speculative quantum physics discoveries, but in order to pursue them, you already have to. have a certain historically destined embodied in language pre-understanding of being so all we can do then is to. think the event, not in allen's sense, but as heideggerian ereignis of of new destinies of being this totally abyssal game of eventful occurrences of modes of disclosure is the ultimate horizon. uh. so, in this sense, for heidegger. uh frau heidegger... language is the house of being. what lacon dash here? basically i think it's just to add something a dimension missing in. what laconde is here missing in heidegger. to put it in cynical terms, for lacon. language is not just the house of being, it's a torture house of being. we are basically tortured by language. that's all the topic of castration, distortion, and so on. we are never at home in the house of being. it's a traumatic discord. and again, the name of this discord is... jouissance. and... so here i come to alain. i don't like elfriede jelinek. her style is too dirty for me. but she said something that i deeply agree with, a wonderful phrase. she said, language should be tortured to tell the truth. i think that this would be the second counterpart that we should drop all this hermeneutic trust into, you know, the access to truth is open yourself to the message which is in language. no. we should torture language. and i think maybe we should even read poetry and art in this way, as different modes of torture. what is poetry? it's a great torture of language. imagine how you have to torture. language to write a simple sonnet for. cut words, squeeze them and so on. even in cinema as art, what was eisenstein doing? my god, all his words are already words of extreme violence and torture. cut, montage, stitch it together and so on. now you will say, yeah, yeah, this is eisenstein's manipulative approach. what about the great opposition to eisenstein, andré bazin, rossellini, av tarkovsky, where you have the passive attitude of just? filming, not intervening. well, i would say it's a different mode of torture. it's slow down, how do you call that instrument? where somebody is tortured so that you tie him up and then stretch it. yeah, yeah, that's tarkovsky. so i would say, imagine a debate between eisenstein and tarkovsky. it's like two torturers. what's the better way to squeeze out the truth? and i hear, i agree. oui,... i, i think that we, of course, we think in language, but nonetheless, paradoxically, language is not our horizon. language in it, let's call it naively. mito poetic. poetic function. language, as you know poetry in the bad sense of poetry as founding a nation and so on. i think that we can do more. truly great artists, poets do more. they torture the their language, they force it to go beyond. we can, within language, think with language, against language to arrive at a true universality. this is a very radical thesis, but i think it's crucial. i'm not sure. lacon himself is clear here. if he were to be clear at this point he is ambiguous, he would no longer be anti-philosopher. but i think this is the crucial point again. is the historicist transcendental attitude, language is our fate, the last thing we do, is this the last thing or can we and break out of the, to use fredric jameson's term, the prison house of language and formulate universality outside it now a step further. i claim that. uh. i claim that... uh. this is why as balalmesh demonstrates la con h. to the notion of subject. subject for laccon, as you pointed out when you emphasized this weakness and so on, subject for laccon is not in this modern way the excess of you this cartesian subject, not in descartes sense, but more in this heideggerian sense of modern subjectivity, dominate the world, mediated technologically. master it and so on. subject is the one who, as laccon puts it,, who suffers from the symbolic. it's tortured. und design dich la dich ich. this dimension of being tortured by language is missing in heidegger, which is why i'm so sad i don't have time to develop this, why i think lacconbe emphasizes a feature of antigone which is totally absent in heidegger. in his two great readings of antigone, heidegger never mentions this famous position in between the two deaths. that is to say, you know, you are still biologically alive ex. because this is the pure position of what agambian later calls homo sacer of subject est tortured. and i'm even tempted to say, to make a quick far-fetched reference to fashionable one to accusations against heidegger to concentration camps and so on. you know where you can see that heidegger misses this dimension? you know that famous passage from heidegger, which horrified many people, where he says that in concentration camps, they were just in an industrial way producing corpses. people were not really dying there. well, eh... of course this is true in a way. but... i would say it is true. ford. executioners. if you were somebody dying in auschwitz, you didn't feel, oh my god, i'm just an object being technologically produced. precisely this. other side. is missing here. now we can go on. because of this dimension missing i agree with what you developed as lacon from truth to knowledge about truth to knowledge. i would only say that maybe desperately, there is an alternate way to read this. as not anti-philosophical in what sense? you know that strictly parallel to the movement that you described in these precise terms is and this is very nicely incidentally, i love this naivety of balmesh, who makes a brutal clinical judgment on heidegger. i love it. it appears brutal nonsense, where he says that the problem with heidegger's description of, for example, dasase sein being there in sein und zeit is that it's good for neurotics, but it doesn't cover psych. you know in what naive sense he was right. let's take what catherine malabou calls post-traumatic subject, or this, homo sacer and so on. they describe a subjective position of this suffering, being tortured by language and so on, which i think you know how heidegger describes being human in time and being as this from future through the past to present engaged existence and so on. you are out of debt. you are no longer. caught into this structure of care engaged existence, but nonetheless you are not outside animal. you are still human being deprived of it. this would be vaguely the psychotic position for this there is no. place in heidegger. so i find this a very nice thesis of how, again, lacomb sticks to the notion of subject, not because he remains modern age faithful to modern age subjectivity, which is the cause of our crisis. he does, but for the opposite reason. and now i want just to supplement you. balalmesh shows in a triumphant way here how this movement from truth, knowledge of truth the is strictly correlative in lacon. two. the forceful reaffirmation of the cartesian cogito. when you have this late laccon knowledge, always you should seek cogito. here you should always bear in mind that when we think about lacon et cogito, it's not enough to recite those boring old poems, you know, of yeah la conette against descartes, i am not where i think. this can still be read in a purely anti-philosophical way. it simply means the truth of my being, the true lively productivity is not where i think. then lacon turns it around and says, uh. i. i think where i am not. this is more interesting, where the unconscious is not the fullness of my being outside my thought, but it's a pure thinking outside myself, not where i. feel myself existentially as the one i am. then there are other formulations, but as balalmmes points out very nicely, what lacomb does in his seminar, i think, on logique du fantasme. logical of fantasy ist to. return to the identity of cogito and being, but as an empty set. for the last lacon, cogito, incognito, being and thinking do coincide, but in a negative way. incognito, i am pure thinking, but which is just a form of thinking without any content. at the same time, i am pure being, but deprived of any content. it's just as if the two empty the two so point overlap here. and again, as such, this cogito should be asserted es. universal non-historical. non-historical. historicity is, i think, not the ultimate horizon. weak why, as i tried to develop in one of my texts, i i think that one can in a very nice way refer here to walter benjamin, you know, when he talks about these two types of violence, staatsbildend and staatzerstörend, violence which creates state and violence which... this divine violence. and i think that heidegger's problem is that when he does talk about violence and language, h! the ocean of language as poet who grounds a police, a nation, is still staatsbildend. i would like in parallel to the relation of violence and state to assert also. not violence imminent in this, imposing a certain disclosure of being, what poets do for a nation, but sprachzerstörend, violence. violence of torturing language breaking through two. universality. so here. i think that. uh. e. maybe partially since i haven't... yet thought them to the end things are here very ambiguous for me but i would have said nonetheless that here. maybe. lacon anti-philosophy can nonetheless be maybe reinterpreted as precisely! because, you know, when lacont says anti-philosophy, one should always ask the obvious question, what is philosophy for him? and the quote. that i read you is very ambiguous here. qualifies philosophy to which he opposes as w aborted freaks of philosophy which he which drag behind us from the beginning of the 19th century. that is to say basically anti-philosophy. heated philosophy, this post-hegel post-hegelian philosophy. so again, what i would have said is that one should never forget that for lacan, philosophie ich, r dich. h. hermeneutic hermeneutic harmony between being and thinking w. historically specified and so on and so on i think that through the link of cogito and. knowledge and so on. one can maybe maybe construct and out reading lacon against lacon. of. totally crazy, like we want to do a kind of a return to pure cogito, matem knowledge and so on. outside this historicist hermeneutic. universal but one crucial problem here what about juissance s nameless and so on. doesn't lacon nonetheless support, sustain his? critique of philosophy in this disturbing element of excess of jouissance. many things can be said here. i think one can even answer here in a very nice way quentin meillassoux when he insisted on the problem of fossil. fossil is death. third element which breaks this transcendental correlation. i think that for laccon you don't have to go outside. the true fossil is object small a. it's here in me, not. for lacombbe, she would have been way too leninist in the bad sense of materialism andiero criticism. meillassoux for me remains all too stuck in this typical, naive, pre-hegelian problematic of we are caught in our representations. can we reach out of them to reality in itself or not? for me as a hegelian, this is a pseudo-problem. the problem is not can we reach in itself. the problem is but you's problem. how can in this stupid real something like thought emerge? problem is not can we go beyond our appearances too? the real in itself. the problem is the one approached by you in his logics of the world. how can in the flex stupidity of the real something like the word emerged. hegel knew this very clearly. the problem is not breakout of appearance. the problem is how is appearance possible. okay, but to go on, so jouissance. here i wonder if you would accept something. in one of your texts, you were totally right to characterize la référence to jouissance féminine as. a reference to some kind of a cultural unsayable. but i don't think it is necessary to read it in that way, although i admit this is a predominant way. you know in laccon's formula of succession. when lacon how does lacan describe this feminine position of? je change. usually this is red ash. something in woman resist symbolic. order. not all of woman is caught into the symbolic order. but i think if we read this in the sense of there is something in woman, this excess of mystical enrapture which sounds which resist the symbolic. maybe we don't read lacon correctly. maybe we should nonetheless emphasize how the non-all of feminine r also means that there is no exception. that we should also say. there is nothing in woman which is outside. the symbolic order or whatever. so i think that instead of reading jouissance féminine as kind of a mystical enrapture and so on, we should so that, to put it bluntly in an almost sexist way, we men are purely within the symbolic order, women are with one leg in, with another part of them it exists with some kind of rupture. i think women are paradoxically more fully in the symbolic order. this is why. they are done all. they don't have any. in this sense, i think that here is how i would try to save lacachenian jouissance and the real for philosophy. and you already indicate that path. i think that what i don't like is this anti-philosophical notion of jouissance as some terrifying access too strong for symbolization. but i am tempted to read lace's famous formula, which you also quote on, that the real is only accessible through the deadlock lampasse of the symbolization. in a very strong literal way. the real is not some in itself, and lacon formally opposes the idea that the real is any kind of country in itself. which then we can only partially grasp no. i think that the real literally is nothing but the deadlock of symbolization. a totally immanent real, a real which is just yes, i stop catch of symbolism and so on and so on. so from here i would just like to mark, maybe one or two, this is a question to you, how you would react. differences. one big difference, i'm even not sure about it myself. we have this debate for 15 years, i think. is that... in your log of the worlds, i will just state the position. you seem to implplied that what you call world. i think, i know i violently disagree with you and you with me here. i think there is no world without language, to cut a long story short. and i think that the very categories you use, like the crucial category of the point. point is a signifying category. i agree with you with language is not, here i'm also a platonist, not a limit. but i claim that, again, the category of wealth is is thinkable only within the human universe of. language well, you, if i got you correctly, you for you. there are worlds already. in to put it in very naive terms, in reality, outside man, once you even spoke of, ironically, i know, of your dialectic of nature. second point. uh. you are usually reproached with a very stupid criticism that you are secretly an idealist in the sense of human animal, but then out of nowhere event, grace, blah blah. and then the idea is we should nonetheless develop out of concrete history how the event can emerge. i am tempted to say the opposite, that my critique critique open question to you would have been the opposite one what i. problemmatize is not event but human animal. i don't think there is something like human animal. i think that, of course there is empirically, but okay, to cut a long story short, i just will, and then i will finish, designate my position now, i claim that what you call animal life, this pursuit of servicing the good, service de bien and so on, this normal animal utilitarian existence and the truth event, the dispolarity duality doesn't cover the entire field. there is something which i am tempted to call with terms like anxiety, death drive and so on, which is neither the one nor the other. and i think that wit. humans, what you call animal life, this ordinary. existence, utilitarian and so on, servicing the goods always comes. secondary in the sense of its attempt to stabilize some traumatic anxiety which is also a condition for a truth event. you need you need. anxiety, displacement and so on in order to open up the space for the truth. and i think that's my final point, that this maybe can be read in a not anti-philosophical way. my whole wager is that all this topic of death drive and so on should be totally de-imaginarized. it's what was called in philosophy, in german idealism. self-relating negativity and so on. so again i totally accept your tension between truth. the domain of truth procedures and... human animal i just think that we need a third domain death drive anxiety and so on, which then allows us to properly locate this two. but i know i didn't prove anything here. but you see my desperate wager totally agreeing with your anti-anti-philosophy. what i'm trying to do is consciously reading laccon against himself. because let's be clear. what jacqueline miller is doing now with his right liberal recription of laccon as some kind of a liberal, wise men and so on. this is the danger of this what you said, dismissing the truth. then you definitely, okay, just to finish, because the first thing one should say is that where i disagree with miller, i hope we agree, is this idea of looking in the last, last, last lacon for some point of last wisdom, you know, like just before he died, he saw something. which is why maybe you know it better than me last official mistress, catherine millot i think yeah was the object of such affection. the idea was that she was there when lacon was dying and just on the point of dying, he told her something, you know. this last, as you would say, singularity, encounter of the real. no, i claim agreeing with you that i claim that somewhere between in those 10 years or more seminars of from anxiety to to maybe encore. this was lacon at his top. and i i think, frankly, all those attempts with not the last years, sorry to tell you, i'm more and more convinced they're gradual disintegration. i don't think, and you effectively have what you said, all this, you know, accommodate to the symptom, truth doesn't matter, a kind of almost mish right rortian playfulness, which to us is old. i wouldn't say old followers of the follower of lenin, not to name the name this i don't buy. so i'm sorry if i was too long, but you see my point. what i'm trying to do is desperately to nonetheless save! la con in some sense for. for philosophy. i'm very sorry if i was too long and please strike back with all your force. thank you.
. difficult to follow. i hope you hear me. glad to be here. glad to be with alain. of course, in this 20-minute forum, it's just a little bit too little time to really develop a line of thought all one can do is more just trace, define positions, oppositions, and so on. i would nonetheless like to begin with reference to what is going on recently in your territory, or just off your territory in louisiana, because i think it concerns precisely in a way, very oblique way, what alain was talking about, this gap, sorry, distance between... the real. and the symbolic. i was thinking about do you know how freudian dream of irma's injection is structured? first, you have this look deep into irma's throat. the primal horror distorted flesh, then you have this sudden pass from the real into the ridiculous. impotence of the symbolic, the three doctors. exchanging faked arguments. isn't this going on now in the united states public discourse? the look into the irma's throat would have been those camera shots that we get of the oil gushing out. and then the three doctors literally exist, you remember in the congressional hearing, as the three representatives who were exactly in the same comical way putting the blame of each other. bp bp representative or ceo even said, no, it's not me, it's the subcontractor. that halliburton or whatever, i think it's the big dick cheney's company said, no, we just made the plan. it's our own subcontractor who poured the concrete, who screwed it up. and finally, the last one returned. the ball and said, no but we were just following the plans we got from the other two and so on. so it's clearly this same constellation but things are more tragic here. ur. remember when i think unfortunately even president obama appeared a little bit of a clown here. for me, when he pathetically claimed we, i will make on behalf of american people, whatever, bp, british petroleum, play, sorry, pay every cent of the damage and so on and so on. sorry, this is ridiculous. if the spilling will go on the way it goes, even if they so many environment ruined, lives ruined, etc., you simply cannot pay for it. it's ridiculous. it's a little bit, i exaggerate consciously, like to say germany will pay every cent for the holocaust and so on. i mean, when catastrophes are too big, it's meaningless to talk in these terms. so we have to rethink it. i remember, here, connected to. impossibility of sexual relationship. i remember some twenty years ago exactly in the same territory the waters. seawater south of louisiana. ted kennedy, a that senator, was caught, was caught by a paparazzo in a lone boat. he thought he is alone, only sea around, making love to a lady. i mean, it's a blurred image, but very clear. her legs spread and so on. exactly at that point in the senate they were debating offshore drilling. and i loved how a republican senator here i like it, referring to this said, oh, i noticed that recently senator kennedy, who was opposed to it, changed his position on offshore drilling. well, i'm here for kennedy. no? i think that the only offshore drilling that should be allowed is the one that kennedy was involved in. no? okay, but... not too much of this. ugh. er. la con and antiosoph. you know i will just try to again present state my case and not. just mark some differences allowing hopefully alain to strike. back because as i already developed once in paris, i think, or london, our relationship is that of a master and the hysteric. he's the master, i'm the hysteric provoking all the time and so on. it's sometimes difficult to provoke the master. uh. now, more seriously. ugh. i was deeply influenced by his insight into the whole concept of. anti-philosophy. maybe i would just shift a little bit. orplace, expand, whatever my understanding of it. of course, i totally agree with kim, we can say already pascal and so on, but nonetheless, pascal clearly situated himself outside. philosophy. for me, maybe i'm wrong. where do we have the first breakthrough of anti-philosophy is a philosophical position. maybe. risky hypothesis kant, kantian ethics. it's it's... the first time that you clearly have this position of we have the domain of. knowledge or theoretical truth and then we have access to the real through the ethical act which is again. the relationship to the impossible real or think itself outside truth. it's also interesting how speaking about anti-philosophy, did you notice that in the history of philosophy, from that point on of kantian revolution, practically. practically, not totally of course. entire philosophy no longer wants to be called philosophy. kant is no longer metaphysics, but transcendental critique of the conditions of metaphysics. fichte is wissenschaftlehhre. that is to say teaching on science not philosophy. h privileges art hegel also said no longer love of wisdom but wisdom itself, not to mention marx and so on and so on. so my first constatation when laccon says je me cherche contre la philosophie is well, welcome to the camp of philosophers. all philosophers from kant onwards are doing nothing but that. in surging against philosophy. nobody wants to be a philosopher. me accept me. i agree with you. that's my point. yeah, that's precisely my point. because would you agree now i have a new proposal for you to try to convert you to my cause of the love of german idealism you know your four domains of domains, okay, conditions, whatever of. of where a truth event can occur. let's enumerate them. science, politics, art, love. and i deeply agree with adrian johnston's reading of you where he emphasized an aspect of this which is usually ignored ignored that. this people usually dress emphasize your opposite point, which is this suture, not totally attach philosophy to one truth condition. but i think, on the other hand, you make a much nicer point, which is even close to some kind of engaged marxist thinking, which is nonetheless that philosophy cannot stand on its own. heroically, you have to attach, engage yourself, attach yourself to a condition. you cannot be philosopher just in the air. and would you agree or not? this came to me. that the same four goes for conditions of truth, goes for german idealism. look, kant's problem was science, was how to philosophize in the conditions of newtonian science. fichte is clearly politics, french revolution. schelling is art. and i claim hegelislav. i mean, we have precisely the four guys there. but okay, now let me go on into anti-philosophy. where do i? maybe, maybe. shift the accent a little bit. for me. i would say that the great breakthrough of anti-philosoph occurs with the so-called anti-hegelian turn. we need three main forms. first. the late schelling and the young schopenhauer. then kierkegaard then marx. i think that all three in a way meet your condition. philosophy is in all three versions. uh. denounced as caught in its own circle of representation, abstract contextual thinking and some kind of return to. not the real in the lacian sense but some kind of a positive singular life foundation which implies a critique of philosophy is enacted. for kierkegaard, this is the unique existence of religious individual which escapes philosophical conceptual mediation. for late selling heidegger it is the primordial irrational, pre-logical abyss of willing outside philosophical truth. and for marx is the actual life process of actual people and so on. and so on and so on. al what i claim. ich death. in all this here things probably will become, i'm asking you a question and not in this boring pseudo-pedagogical way where asking someone a question means that you already know what is the truth and just expect from you to confirm it's really an open question. i claim that what unites all the three and this is really what happened after hegel. is that. with all violence, a certain opposition became predominant. which i think maybe, i wonder if you would agree, defines the very coordinates for me of anti-philosophy. the opposition between productive presence and mere conceptual idealistic theater scene of representation. marx is here very brutal. marx, the worst marx, which i think should be abandoned, the marx of german ideology with all the stuff of philosophy. is with regard to real life like masturbation is with regard to sexual act and so on. so again, this idea that we are caught into a closed circle of representation. philosophy, ideology got into it, and the point is to. break out of this closed circle of representation into some more direct, productive. presence. and as my colleague alenka zupančič developed in a very nice way, it's interesting how this same topic of denouncing representation became also actual throughout the 19th century. of course it was present before, but then it exploded as general problematizing of representation. for example, in the domain of love, all of a sudden the problem was can. love encounter be properly represented in the institution of marriage. with usual ambiguity on the one hand it was the bourgeois principle you know, the only legitimate marriage is marriage which should be founded in love. but then you always have this idea, but nonetheless the institution of marriage cannot fully recuperate love. there is an excess. this idea of an access escaping representation. you have the same in politics. you have parliamentary representation but then you know, this topic of can parliamentary representation adequately represent social base isn't there something in social base which escapes representation. the first one to fully develop this was already none other than hegel in his wonderful wonderfully ambiguous notion of pe. rebel is the is the non-representable element. now up. here, i'm just asking you a question and trying to draw maybe a line of distinction. i think. this entire topic of productive presence. and then. uh. misrepresented in some scene of representation should be ultimately dropped. this is for me the core of anti. philosophy. and now comes the evil part. i don't have time to develop it. the stalinist part of me. i think you remain here for my taste sometimes a little bit of too much of anti-philosopher. sometimes you also mobilize this representation versus the real of productive presence. with this topic. so this is, again, my first point. and it would be very interesting here to play in a nice way different philosophers one against the other. for example, although we both totally more or less disagree with derrida, i think that when derrida, i wonder if you agree, is at his best, it's when he not in his critique of metaphysics, we know that, but in his critique of too fast, direct anti-philosophical attempts to break out. theerrida i love is derrida reading foucault, bataille, levinas, where he takes someone who tries to enact the basic anti-philosophical gesture, like bataille, against hegelian philosophy sovereignty. foucault against cartesian cogito madness as outside or. levinash against philosophical totality, infinity of relating to otherness. and i think here dererrida is a good anti--philosopher. in a wonderful detailed analysis, she shows how all these attempts to break out remain nonetheless in a hidden way determined by the field they want to undermine. so here again, we can learn something from derrida. you know, derrida is not just the one who wants to screw philosophy, break out of it and so on and so on. he is a good philosopher, especially good in showing how it's not as easy as it may appear to break out of. out of philosophy. especially actual today, i think, is for example, derrida's and later developed by other critique of levinas. because i think that if there is one of the great books of anti-philosophy, it's levinas's totality and infinity. and i think it is easy to show how levinasi's critique of hegel and especially of heidegger, which was later taken over by jean-luc marion. this idea that even heidegger remains too much within philosophy, that even the ontological difference between being and entities still remains within the horizon of being, while we must break through towards this infinite radical otherness of god. beyond being. i think it can be shown in convincing way every serious philosopher can show it that. levina simply doesn't hold there. that the price is a very superficial reduction of the notion of being to some pretty naive positive reality and then you can say, oh, but god is outside it and so on and so on. a heidegarian who would have insisted here that even if god outside, beyond being, still fest to. of course not exist as a determinate object, but has to be present, disclose itself in a certain way, would be fully justified. you cannot escape it as simple as that. so... again, i don't have time to develop it, but the reason i remain faithful to hegel would have been that i insist that hegel is absolutely unique here. he is on the... i mean... usually people perceive hegel in this shift from traditional metaphysics philosophy to anti-philosophy in the guise of the 19th century historicicism, life philosophy and so on, is somewhere in between, as they say, on the one hand, hegel remained absolutely metaphysical system, everything. on the other hand, we already find in hegel good historical analysis and so on and so on. i think this image of hegel is deeply misleading, like a little bit here, a little bit there. i think he was not a little bit here, a little bit there. he was neither here nor there. he was a unique point, no longer. philosopher in the sense of metaphysical philosopher, but not yet. anti-philosopher that's what makes hegel so traumatic. so now let me go on. into just two more points. first, i'll try to be as brief as possible, into how i locate lacche's anti-philosophy. basically, i am... totally. in full agreement with al maybe i would just formulate. the ambiguity of lacon in a little bit different way. for for me. first, one has to be... precise in where does lacon locate. that witch, that. anti-philosophical point, if you would have put it, on behalf of which lacconbe makes this pathetic claim m i raise myself contre la philosophie against philosophy. this point is clearly a jouissance, the excess of enjoyment. for laccon, this excess of, for lac, let me be very precise, philosophy is that which begins with parmenides, you know, the same is being and logos, thinking, talking, this kind of a pre-established harmony between discourse and being. being can be logically apprehended said. for lacon, again, as you pointed out, this is the anti-philosophical core of lacon, there is something which introduces a crack here. here is a nice quote from lacan of 1966, his seminar on the object of psychoanalysis. quote. i challenge whichever philosopher to account now for the relation that is between the emergence of the signifier and the way jouissance relates to being. no philosophy, i say, meets us here today. the brexit aborted freaks of philosophy which we drag behind us from the beginning of the last, 19th century, as the habits that are falling apart are nothing but a way to frisk rather than to confront this question, which is the only question about truth and which is called and named by freud the death drive, the primordial masochism of jouissance. all philosophical speech escapes and withdraws here. uh... i will try here to be at the same time critical but also positive towards lacon. first, i would say... what always fascinated me in la con est. what did one enigma which an ex-colleague of alain, françois balmes, in his very good studies on laccon emphasized. the great mystery and perhaps the best way to approach laccon is to ask a very simple, almost detective question. laccon obviously knew heidegger very well. why then? did she stick to the notion of the subject? why didn't he drop subject? i mean, it's the name for. the core of inhhuman core of human being. uh... i think the reason is and here again, from a weird perspective, i approach one of the big topics of alain, where i agree with him, the relationship between language and truth. wer i support al fully ich. in his, the way i understand it, anti-hermeneutic trust of not identifying. truth wit. the one who developed this most radically was heidegger. arguably, this idea that truth is ultimately the historically destined horizon of being which dwells is inscribed into our language. and in this historicized transcendental mode, a heidegerarian would have said, this is the unsurpassable horizon of our. access to truth. the ultimate, the furthest you can go is to reflect on the horizon of how. things appear to you of how being is disclosed. for example, you can make, i don't know how many speculative quantum physics discoveries, but in order to pursue them, you already have to. have a certain historically destined embodied in language pre-understanding of being so all we can do then is to. think the event, not in allen's sense, but as heideggerian ereignis of of new destinies of being this totally abyssal game of eventful occurrences of modes of disclosure is the ultimate horizon. uh. so, in this sense, for heidegger. uh frau heidegger... language is the house of being. what lacon dash here? basically i think it's just to add something a dimension missing in. what laconde is here missing in heidegger. to put it in cynical terms, for lacon. language is not just the house of being, it's a torture house of being. we are basically tortured by language. that's all the topic of castration, distortion, and so on. we are never at home in the house of being. it's a traumatic discord. and again, the name of this discord is... jouissance. and... so here i come to alain. i don't like elfriede jelinek. her style is too dirty for me. but she said something that i deeply agree with, a wonderful phrase. she said, language should be tortured to tell the truth. i think that this would be the second counterpart that we should drop all this hermeneutic trust into, you know, the access to truth is open yourself to the message which is in language. no. we should torture language. and i think maybe we should even read poetry and art in this way, as different modes of torture. what is poetry? it's a great torture of language. imagine how you have to torture. language to write a simple sonnet for. cut words, squeeze them and so on. even in cinema as art, what was eisenstein doing? my god, all his words are already words of extreme violence and torture. cut, montage, stitch it together and so on. now you will say, yeah, yeah, this is eisenstein's manipulative approach. what about the great opposition to eisenstein, andré bazin, rossellini, av tarkovsky, where you have the passive attitude of just? filming, not intervening. well, i would say it's a different mode of torture. it's slow down, how do you call that instrument? where somebody is tortured so that you tie him up and then stretch it. yeah, yeah, that's tarkovsky. so i would say, imagine a debate between eisenstein and tarkovsky. it's like two torturers. what's the better way to squeeze out the truth? and i hear, i agree. oui,... i, i think that we, of course, we think in language, but nonetheless, paradoxically, language is not our horizon. language in it, let's call it naively. mito poetic. poetic function. language, as you know poetry in the bad sense of poetry as founding a nation and so on. i think that we can do more. truly great artists, poets do more. they torture the their language, they force it to go beyond. we can, within language, think with language, against language to arrive at a true universality. this is a very radical thesis, but i think it's crucial. i'm not sure. lacon himself is clear here. if he were to be clear at this point he is ambiguous, he would no longer be anti-philosopher. but i think this is the crucial point again. is the historicist transcendental attitude, language is our fate, the last thing we do, is this the last thing or can we and break out of the, to use fredric jameson's term, the prison house of language and formulate universality outside it now a step further. i claim that. uh. i claim that... uh. this is why as balalmesh demonstrates la con h. to the notion of subject. subject for laccon, as you pointed out when you emphasized this weakness and so on, subject for laccon is not in this modern way the excess of you this cartesian subject, not in descartes sense, but more in this heideggerian sense of modern subjectivity, dominate the world, mediated technologically. master it and so on. subject is the one who, as laccon puts it,, who suffers from the symbolic. it's tortured. und design dich la dich ich. this dimension of being tortured by language is missing in heidegger, which is why i'm so sad i don't have time to develop this, why i think lacconbe emphasizes a feature of antigone which is totally absent in heidegger. in his two great readings of antigone, heidegger never mentions this famous position in between the two deaths. that is to say, you know, you are still biologically alive ex. because this is the pure position of what agambian later calls homo sacer of subject est tortured. and i'm even tempted to say, to make a quick far-fetched reference to fashionable one to accusations against heidegger to concentration camps and so on. you know where you can see that heidegger misses this dimension? you know that famous passage from heidegger, which horrified many people, where he says that in concentration camps, they were just in an industrial way producing corpses. people were not really dying there. well, eh... of course this is true in a way. but... i would say it is true. ford. executioners. if you were somebody dying in auschwitz, you didn't feel, oh my god, i'm just an object being technologically produced. precisely this. other side. is missing here. now we can go on. because of this dimension missing i agree with what you developed as lacon from truth to knowledge about truth to knowledge. i would only say that maybe desperately, there is an alternate way to read this. as not anti-philosophical in what sense? you know that strictly parallel to the movement that you described in these precise terms is and this is very nicely incidentally, i love this naivety of balmesh, who makes a brutal clinical judgment on heidegger. i love it. it appears brutal nonsense, where he says that the problem with heidegger's description of, for example, dasase sein being there in sein und zeit is that it's good for neurotics, but it doesn't cover psych. you know in what naive sense he was right. let's take what catherine malabou calls post-traumatic subject, or this, homo sacer and so on. they describe a subjective position of this suffering, being tortured by language and so on, which i think you know how heidegger describes being human in time and being as this from future through the past to present engaged existence and so on. you are out of debt. you are no longer. caught into this structure of care engaged existence, but nonetheless you are not outside animal. you are still human being deprived of it. this would be vaguely the psychotic position for this there is no. place in heidegger. so i find this a very nice thesis of how, again, lacomb sticks to the notion of subject, not because he remains modern age faithful to modern age subjectivity, which is the cause of our crisis. he does, but for the opposite reason. and now i want just to supplement you. balalmesh shows in a triumphant way here how this movement from truth, knowledge of truth the is strictly correlative in lacon. two. the forceful reaffirmation of the cartesian cogito. when you have this late laccon knowledge, always you should seek cogito. here you should always bear in mind that when we think about lacon et cogito, it's not enough to recite those boring old poems, you know, of yeah la conette against descartes, i am not where i think. this can still be read in a purely anti-philosophical way. it simply means the truth of my being, the true lively productivity is not where i think. then lacon turns it around and says, uh. i. i think where i am not. this is more interesting, where the unconscious is not the fullness of my being outside my thought, but it's a pure thinking outside myself, not where i. feel myself existentially as the one i am. then there are other formulations, but as balalmmes points out very nicely, what lacomb does in his seminar, i think, on logique du fantasme. logical of fantasy ist to. return to the identity of cogito and being, but as an empty set. for the last lacon, cogito, incognito, being and thinking do coincide, but in a negative way. incognito, i am pure thinking, but which is just a form of thinking without any content. at the same time, i am pure being, but deprived of any content. it's just as if the two empty the two so point overlap here. and again, as such, this cogito should be asserted es. universal non-historical. non-historical. historicity is, i think, not the ultimate horizon. weak why, as i tried to develop in one of my texts, i i think that one can in a very nice way refer here to walter benjamin, you know, when he talks about these two types of violence, staatsbildend and staatzerstörend, violence which creates state and violence which... this divine violence. and i think that heidegger's problem is that when he does talk about violence and language, h! the ocean of language as poet who grounds a police, a nation, is still staatsbildend. i would like in parallel to the relation of violence and state to assert also. not violence imminent in this, imposing a certain disclosure of being, what poets do for a nation, but sprachzerstörend, violence. violence of torturing language breaking through two. universality. so here. i think that. uh. e. maybe partially since i haven't... yet thought them to the end things are here very ambiguous for me but i would have said nonetheless that here. maybe. lacon anti-philosophy can nonetheless be maybe reinterpreted as precisely! because, you know, when lacont says anti-philosophy, one should always ask the obvious question, what is philosophy for him? and the quote. that i read you is very ambiguous here. qualifies philosophy to which he opposes as w aborted freaks of philosophy which he which drag behind us from the beginning of the 19th century. that is to say basically anti-philosophy. heated philosophy, this post-hegel post-hegelian philosophy. so again, what i would have said is that one should never forget that for lacan, philosophie ich, r dich. h. hermeneutic hermeneutic harmony between being and thinking w. historically specified and so on and so on i think that through the link of cogito and. knowledge and so on. one can maybe maybe construct and out reading lacon against lacon. of. totally crazy, like we want to do a kind of a return to pure cogito, matem knowledge and so on. outside this historicist hermeneutic. universal but one crucial problem here what about juissance s nameless and so on. doesn't lacon nonetheless support, sustain his? critique of philosophy in this disturbing element of excess of jouissance. many things can be said here. i think one can even answer here in a very nice way quentin meillassoux when he insisted on the problem of fossil. fossil is death. third element which breaks this transcendental correlation. i think that for laccon you don't have to go outside. the true fossil is object small a. it's here in me, not. for lacombbe, she would have been way too leninist in the bad sense of materialism andiero criticism. meillassoux for me remains all too stuck in this typical, naive, pre-hegelian problematic of we are caught in our representations. can we reach out of them to reality in itself or not? for me as a hegelian, this is a pseudo-problem. the problem is not can we reach in itself. the problem is but you's problem. how can in this stupid real something like thought emerge? problem is not can we go beyond our appearances too? the real in itself. the problem is the one approached by you in his logics of the world. how can in the flex stupidity of the real something like the word emerged. hegel knew this very clearly. the problem is not breakout of appearance. the problem is how is appearance possible. okay, but to go on, so jouissance. here i wonder if you would accept something. in one of your texts, you were totally right to characterize la référence to jouissance féminine as. a reference to some kind of a cultural unsayable. but i don't think it is necessary to read it in that way, although i admit this is a predominant way. you know in laccon's formula of succession. when lacon how does lacan describe this feminine position of? je change. usually this is red ash. something in woman resist symbolic. order. not all of woman is caught into the symbolic order. but i think if we read this in the sense of there is something in woman, this excess of mystical enrapture which sounds which resist the symbolic. maybe we don't read lacon correctly. maybe we should nonetheless emphasize how the non-all of feminine r also means that there is no exception. that we should also say. there is nothing in woman which is outside. the symbolic order or whatever. so i think that instead of reading jouissance féminine as kind of a mystical enrapture and so on, we should so that, to put it bluntly in an almost sexist way, we men are purely within the symbolic order, women are with one leg in, with another part of them it exists with some kind of rupture. i think women are paradoxically more fully in the symbolic order. this is why. they are done all. they don't have any. in this sense, i think that here is how i would try to save lacachenian jouissance and the real for philosophy. and you already indicate that path. i think that what i don't like is this anti-philosophical notion of jouissance as some terrifying access too strong for symbolization. but i am tempted to read lace's famous formula, which you also quote on, that the real is only accessible through the deadlock lampasse of the symbolization. in a very strong literal way. the real is not some in itself, and lacon formally opposes the idea that the real is any kind of country in itself. which then we can only partially grasp no. i think that the real literally is nothing but the deadlock of symbolization. a totally immanent real, a real which is just yes, i stop catch of symbolism and so on and so on. so from here i would just like to mark, maybe one or two, this is a question to you, how you would react. differences. one big difference, i'm even not sure about it myself. we have this debate for 15 years, i think. is that... in your log of the worlds, i will just state the position. you seem to implplied that what you call world. i think, i know i violently disagree with you and you with me here. i think there is no world without language, to cut a long story short. and i think that the very categories you use, like the crucial category of the point. point is a signifying category. i agree with you with language is not, here i'm also a platonist, not a limit. but i claim that, again, the category of wealth is is thinkable only within the human universe of. language well, you, if i got you correctly, you for you. there are worlds already. in to put it in very naive terms, in reality, outside man, once you even spoke of, ironically, i know, of your dialectic of nature. second point. uh. you are usually reproached with a very stupid criticism that you are secretly an idealist in the sense of human animal, but then out of nowhere event, grace, blah blah. and then the idea is we should nonetheless develop out of concrete history how the event can emerge. i am tempted to say the opposite, that my critique critique open question to you would have been the opposite one what i. problemmatize is not event but human animal. i don't think there is something like human animal. i think that, of course there is empirically, but okay, to cut a long story short, i just will, and then i will finish, designate my position now, i claim that what you call animal life, this pursuit of servicing the good, service de bien and so on, this normal animal utilitarian existence and the truth event, the dispolarity duality doesn't cover the entire field. there is something which i am tempted to call with terms like anxiety, death drive and so on, which is neither the one nor the other. and i think that wit. humans, what you call animal life, this ordinary. existence, utilitarian and so on, servicing the goods always comes. secondary in the sense of its attempt to stabilize some traumatic anxiety which is also a condition for a truth event. you need you need. anxiety, displacement and so on in order to open up the space for the truth. and i think that's my final point, that this maybe can be read in a not anti-philosophical way. my whole wager is that all this topic of death drive and so on should be totally de-imaginarized. it's what was called in philosophy, in german idealism. self-relating negativity and so on. so again i totally accept your tension between truth. the domain of truth procedures and... human animal i just think that we need a third domain death drive anxiety and so on, which then allows us to properly locate this two. but i know i didn't prove anything here. but you see my desperate wager totally agreeing with your anti-anti-philosophy. what i'm trying to do is consciously reading laccon against himself. because let's be clear. what jacqueline miller is doing now with his right liberal recription of laccon as some kind of a liberal, wise men and so on. this is the danger of this what you said, dismissing the truth. then you definitely, okay, just to finish, because the first thing one should say is that where i disagree with miller, i hope we agree, is this idea of looking in the last, last, last lacon for some point of last wisdom, you know, like just before he died, he saw something. which is why maybe you know it better than me last official mistress, catherine millot i think yeah was the object of such affection. the idea was that she was there when lacon was dying and just on the point of dying, he told her something, you know. this last, as you would say, singularity, encounter of the real. no, i claim agreeing with you that i claim that somewhere between in those 10 years or more seminars of from anxiety to to maybe encore. this was lacon at his top. and i i think, frankly, all those attempts with not the last years, sorry to tell you, i'm more and more convinced they're gradual disintegration. i don't think, and you effectively have what you said, all this, you know, accommodate to the symptom, truth doesn't matter, a kind of almost mish right rortian playfulness, which to us is old. i wouldn't say old followers of the follower of lenin, not to name the name this i don't buy. so i'm sorry if i was too long, but you see my point. what i'm trying to do is desperately to nonetheless save! la con in some sense for. for philosophy. i'm very sorry if i was too long and please strike back with all your force. thank you.