Lacan’s Four Discourses
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014 · 1:16:01 · 10,537 words
psychoanalysisideologyhegel-dialecticssubjectivitycinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalhistory
In this seminar-style Q&A session, Žižek elaborates on Lacan's objet petit a, tracing its dual character as both an empirical remainder (a contingent imperfection that animates desire) and a purely formal structural gap. He then pivots to ideology, arguing that ideology is not only its explicit content but essentially includes its obscene underside of solicited transgressions and unwritten meta-rules, illustrated through Yugoslav army anecdotes, Stalinist prohibition of the prohibition, and the Hollywood censorship system in Casablanca. He concludes with an extended walkthrough of Lacan's four discourses (Master, Hysteric, University, Analyst), arguing that hysterical discourse, not perversion, is the truly subversive position and that subjectivity at its most elementary is feminine.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's object-cause of desire, which Žižek here defines as the dialectical coincidence of a purely formal void and a totally contingent empirical remainder that fills it, at once the grain in the machine that sustains desire and the structural gap around which drive circulates.
as “the sign of imperfection that sustains desire”
The empirical obstacle or blemish (e.g., Cindy Crawford's mole) that, precisely as imperfection, humanizes and animates desire rather than blocking it, the classic Žižekian illustration of object a.
The Lacanian notion that desire is not aimed at an object but caused by an object; Žižek distinguishes it from the drive's object by saying desire always chases a lost object metonymically while drive directly enjoys the loss itself.
Žižek's playful structural definition: wherever you are, the Balkan is always a little bit southeast, making it a perfect analogue for object a as that which is always somewhere else, the moving remainder that can never be located.
as “the subject is divided between something and nothing”
Žižek's rendering of Lacan's split subject: following Miller's reading, the subject emerges at the point where endless division yields not two somethings but something and nothing, a signifier that represents the subject stands for nothing, and object a fills that nothing.
Lacan's formula that desire is endlessly metonymic, whatever you get is always just a secondary substitute, never the thing itself.
as “drive is 'c'est ça'”
Lacan's formula for drive: the object is directly given but jouissance is generated by the very repeated circling around rather than reaching it.
Referenced implicitly through the discussion of jouissance generated by the repeated failure to reach the object in drive; the circling around the object produces enjoyment beyond mere pleasure.
Lacanian enjoyment invoked as what is generated by the very structure of drive's self-sabotage, failing to reach the object is itself the source of enjoyment, distinguishing drive from mere pleasure.
as “sexualization through repetition”
Žižek's claim that a neutral act (handshaking) becomes sexualized not through content but through rhythmic repetition, demonstrating that only through the cultural structure of self-sabotage does sexuality become sexualized.
The sexualized dirty rituals that are constitutive of military community life, for Žižek these are not sites of resistance but an inherent part of military discipline without which it would disintegrate.
as “obscene underside of ideology”
Žižek's claim that every ideological order has a constitutive obscene supplement, solicited transgressions, dirty rituals, unwritten permissions, without which the official order would disintegrate.
The unwritten rules about how to treat rules, which rules you are expected to violate, and in what way, that accompany every formal normative system and reveal how ideology actually functions.
The Stalinist structure where not only is X prohibited, but the very prohibition of X is itself prohibited, you must pretend you are free to do X while knowing you are not, doubling the unfreedom.
Lacan's 'subject supposed to know'; Žižek invokes it in the context of the analyst's discourse, where the analyst occupies the position of the one supposed to know while remaining an enigmatic remainder.
Drawing on the book Agnotology, Žižek argues we need not only epistemology but a science of the different modalities of not-knowing, things truly unknown, things prohibited to know, things one must know but pretend not to know.
The symbolic order whose gaze one evades; Žižek uses it to explain how enjoyment functions by finding a niche where the Big Other doesn't see you.
The situation where you are offered a choice but on condition you don't use it, the injunction is not merely to do X but to freely want to do X, which Žižek identifies as the basic formula of totalitarianism.
Žižek's Lacanian formula for totalitarianism: unlike old patriarchal prohibition, the totalitarian master doesn't block enjoyment but actively promotes and regulates it, telling subjects 'we know better than you what you really want.'
as “master's discourse”
Lacan's first discourse: a subject represented by a signifier addresses the other, producing an excess remainder (object a) that escapes representation.
Žižek's gloss on je ne sais quoi: the object a as the uncanny excess in the subject that exceeds its symbolic identity and is the real cause of the Other's desire.
One of Lacan's four discourses; Žižek argues it is the discourse of genuine knowledge production and the truly subversive subject position, resisting interpellation by asking 'what object am I for the Other?'
Referenced implicitly in the context of hysterical discourse: Žižek reads the hysterical question 'what object am I?' as precisely the moment of resisting symbolic interpellation.
as “subjectivity at its most elementary is feminine”
Žižek's reading of Lacan's hysterical discourse: since the paradigmatic subject position is the hysteric and the hysteric par excellence is the feminine subject, subjectivity itself, not secretly masculine, is at its core feminine.
Lacan's discourse of neutral expertise that secretly exercises mastery; Žižek illustrates it with today's economic experts who present austerity as mere technical knowledge while concealing its normative-political dimension.
Lacan's fourth discourse: the analyst occupies the position of the enigmatic remainder, eliciting the patient's knowledge and ultimately producing/disinvesting the master signifier that defines the patient's identity.
Stories he reaches for 7
Žižek sets the scene: if someone criticizes Stalin in a Central Committee meeting, everyone knows they vanish; but if a second person shouts 'don't you know we don't criticize Stalin here?', the second person disappears even faster, because even naming the prohibition is prohibited.
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, the prohibition itself was prohibited. You had to pretend that yes if I want I can but simply Stalin is so good why criticize.”
Old patriarchal father orders a child to visit grandmother without caring about feelings, perfect, child can hate father. Modern permissive father says 'only visit if you really want to,' which is actually more totalitarian: the injunction is to freely want to go, an impossible demand.
“'You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I want you to decide freely and to visit her only if you really want to.' Every kid knows that beneath the appearance of choice you have a much stronger injunction.”
A soldier friend asked whether signing the loyalty oath was obligatory and, told it was free, refused; after an argument, the officer gave him a piece of paper ordering him to freely sign, encapsulating the ideological paradox of commanded freedom.
“The officer gave him a piece of paper ordering him to freely sign the...”
In Casablanca, a three-and-a-half-second fade-out to an airport tower deliberately provides contradictory signals about whether Rick and Ilsa had sex, showing that Hollywood ideology operates precisely by staging both the official prohibition and its transgression, the obscene imagination being not resistance but part of the system.
“The film treats you as a divided subject. We will give you arguments so that you can pretend 'I'm just watching an innocent movie' at the same time we open up the space for all the dirty fantasies.”
In the same morning, soldiers were first taught the international convention forbidding shooting parachuters in mid-air, then next hour taught the ballistics of how to hit a parachuter in mid-air; when Žižek pointed out the contradiction, the officer called him an idiot.
“He gave me a right answer. He said, 'Žižek, you're supposed to be a doctor, I didn't know you are such a complete idiot.'”
Žižek invites a woman in the audience to imagine him shaking her hand and then rhythmically continuing to do so, a non-obscene act that would become sexually charged through sheer repetition, demonstrating that repetition itself sexualizes.
“The very repetition would minimally sexualize it... this can be demonstrated in a very primitive way.”
Žižek notes that the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko's surname means 'not needed' (ne trebko), which perfectly captures the fatal feminine quality of indifference: a woman whose name says 'I don't need you.'
“Netrebko. Trebat means needed. It's wonderful, a fatal woman and her name is Netrebko. Fuck off, I don't need you.”
Works invoked 11
Casablanca film
Used as the central example of Hollywood ideology: the fade-out scene gives contradictory signals about whether sex occurred, showing ideology operates simultaneously through prohibition and solicited transgression.
Žižek's own book, cited as the source of the Badiou phone call anecdote about absolute friendship.
Titanic film
Named as another of Badiou's favored films, presented by Žižek as evidence of Badiou's kitsch tastes.
Encore (Seminar XX) book
Lacan's seminar cited for the parallel Freud:Lacan :: Marx:Lenin, which Žižek uses to explain why Miller was called 'the Stalinist' of Lacanianism.
Mentioned as an example of Alain Badiou's surprisingly lowbrow film taste, Žižek finds it a descent to the lowest.
Kant avec Sade essay
Described as one of Lacan's most difficult texts; Žižek recalls Miller's seminar reading it page by page, sentence by sentence, as the occasion for his demonstration of Miller's pedagogical genius.
Project X film
Described as 'stupid' but useful: the father's ambivalent reaction to his son's unauthorized party illustrates authentic paternal authority that prohibits while secretly leaving space for transgression.
Cited as the source of Lacan's Q&A distinguishing the status of object a in desire versus drive.
As Time Goes By other
A short story Žižek mentions that begins with the Casablanca scene and inserts pages of hardcore pornography in between, with Bogart's famous phrases given obscene twists; Žižek thinks making it explicit 'ruins' the original but appreciates the idea.
Žižek's own book on Schelling, described as his 'favorite book of mine' (though noting it doesn't sell well); source of the Yugoslav army masturbation anecdote.
French documentary filmed behind the scenes of a hardcore pornography shoot; Žižek calls it 'the most depressing film I've seen' but uses it intellectually to illustrate the gap between fantasy and the desexualized reality of its production.
People invoked 17
Described as introducing one of Žižek's talks; subject of the embarrassing Marines' chant anecdote; Žižek apologized in the 'Judith Butler ritual' manner.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Referred to as 'the other girl here' who developed nicely the argument about culture as the condition of sexuality's sexualization.
Joseph Breen positive
Head of the Hays Office; Žižek quotes Maltby's account of Breen's frank dialogues with directors about coding sex in Hollywood, using them to illustrate the official censorship and its codified transgressions.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; Žižek expounds, defends, and develops Lacan's concepts of object a, the four discourses, desire vs. drive, and the divided subject.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Cited as not entirely innocent in the '68 revolution's elevation of perversion over hysteria, a mistake Žižek argues diminished the radical potential of the hysterical subject.
Mentioned only as the reference point for a ritual of apologizing: 'the standard Judith Butler ritual apologizing.'
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my best friend'; Žižek finds him intellectually brilliant on courage and decision but gently criticizes him for using mathemes (S, O) without the generative richness of Lacanian notation.
Gilbert Ryle positive
Referenced via Miller's citation of a British philosopher who argued endless halving produces not two somethings but something and nothing, used to illustrate the Lacanian theory of the divided subject.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek recalls speaking with Assange and arguing he was 'too naive' in believing WikiLeaks revealed genuinely unknown secrets, when in fact it mainly forced people to stop pretending not to know.
Referred to as a friend Žižek stood in for when giving student exams; mentioned only in passing.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Despite later personal and theoretical conflicts, Žižek calls Miller 'the only absolute pedagogical genius that I know' and credits him with making Lacan readable for a generation; also playfully calls him 'the great Stalinist Lacanian.'
Dean MacCannell positive
Professor, husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell; described as 'a crazy guy, more crazy than me'; Žižek cites his research on the semiotics of facial expressions in hardcore pornography approvingly.
Richard Maltby positive
British cinema theorist who hates Žižek's type of theory but whose analysis of the Casablanca fade-out scene Žižek uses approvingly to illustrate Hollywood ideology.
Russian soprano mentioned in passing as an example of the 'fatal woman' whose very name (Netrebko = 'not needed') embodies the attractive feminine indifference of object a.
Augustine of Hippo positive
Cited for his theological claim that in paradise sexual erection was like raising a hand, purely instrumental, without excitement, which Žižek uses to contrast paradise (neutral biological activity) with human sexuality (mediated by cultural failure).
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked as the authority who always emphasized that perverts fit relations of domination and that hysteria, not perversion, is the more radical position.
Identified as 'an old Lacanian from San Francisco Bay Area' and wife of Dean MacCannell; mentioned only in passing.
What it argues
objet petit a as dialectical coincidence of empirical imperfection and formal voiddesire versus drive in Lacanideology's obscene underside and solicited transgressionunwritten meta-rules: prohibition of the prohibitionLacanian four discourses and their structural logichysteria as the truly subversive subject positionthe science of not-knowing (agnotology)
Dialectical moves 9
“The sign of imperfection is apparently an obstacle, but precisely as an obstacle it sustains what it appears to be an obstacle to.”
Object a works by inversion: the flaw or blemish that seems to block perfect desire is in fact the very thing that makes desire possible and keeps it alive.
“Far from prohibiting, far from rendering enjoyment impossible, the paternal prohibition sustains it, opens up the space.”
The law's prohibition is not the negation of enjoyment but its condition, without the prohibition there is no libidinal space to transgress into.
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin; the prohibition itself was prohibited.”
Stalinist ideology is self-erasing: the very rule cannot be named, so subjects must perform freedom while being unfree, doubling the unfreedom rather than negating it.
“The truly subversive position is not that of the pervert but that of the hysteric.”
Against post-68 celebrations of perversion, Žižek inverts the hierarchy: perverts are complicit with domination, hysterics alone produce genuinely new knowledge and challenge the master.
“Subjectivity in itself is feminine—it's not like the pure cogito is secretly masculine.”
Reversing the default assumption, Žižek argues that the split subject's paradigm (the hysteric) is feminine, so subjectivity at its core is not masculine but feminine.
“What animals do is not human sexuality; it's just a purely neutral activity. Only through culture is sexuality sexualized.”
The reversal: raw biology is not more 'sexual' than culturally mediated desire, it is precisely the detour through culture's structure of failure and repetition that sexualizes sexuality.
“The obscene rituals are not a site of resistance to military discipline—if you take away the obscene underside, military discipline would disintegrate.”
The transgressive supplement is not external opposition to the system but its internal condition; what looks like resistance is constitutive of the order it appears to subvert.
“A real democracy—where people don't get a clear injunction and have to choose—is usually experienced as a crisis of democracy.”
The inversion reveals that actually exercising democratic choice is experienced not as fulfillment of democracy but as its breakdown, showing that subjects prefer the appearance of choice.
“The most subversive thing for a woman married to a disguised male chauvinist would be to tell him: 'Please, I am your slave, treat me as a master.'”
The most radical feminist gesture is not direct rebellion but making the hidden structure explicit, forcing the chauvinist to own his actual position.
Claims 15
asserts
Object a is the dialectical coincidence of a purely formal void and a totally contingent empirical element that fills it—it is simultaneously the irreducible grain of imperfection and an abstract structural gap.objet petit a
asserts
In desire, object a is a lost object that one endlessly pursues, while in drive object a is directly lost as such and one enjoys the very repetition of failure rather than chasing a substitute.difference between desire and drive
asserts
Ideology is not only its explicit discourse but is constitutively sustained by its obscene underside—the solicited transgressions, dirty rituals, and unwritten permissions that, if removed, would cause the official order to disintegrate.ideology
asserts
Every normative system operates not just with rules but with meta-rules—unwritten rules about how to treat rules, including which rules you are expected to violate.ideology and unwritten rules
asserts
In Stalinism, the prohibition of criticizing Stalin was itself prohibited—you had to pretend you were free not to criticize, making the unfreedom doubly invisible.Stalinist ideology and the prohibition of the prohibition
asserts
The truly subversive subject position is not that of the pervert but that of the hysteric, because new knowledge is produced only by hysterical discourse, not by perversion.hysteria vs. perversion as subversive positions
asserts
The permissive-totalitarian injunction is more oppressive than direct command because it demands not merely that you comply but that you genuinely want to comply—the formula of totalitarianism.permissive totalitarianism and false freedom
asserts
Subjectivity at its most elementary is feminine, since the hysterical subject—the paradigm of the split subject—is the feminine subject for Lacan.gender and subjectivity in Lacan
asserts
The WikiLeaks and Snowden disclosures revealed nothing that people did not already suspect; their significance is that citizens can no longer pretend not to know.WikiLeaks, Snowden, and political epistemology
asserts
Most people do not truly want to know traumatic truths, and in democracy most people do not really want to decide—they want the appearance of decision while a master tells them what to freely choose.democracy and the will to not-know
asserts
The explosion of nationalism in post-Yugoslav republics was not natural but was instrumentalized by communist nomenklatura as a survival strategy to present itself as protector of national interests.Yugoslav nationalism and communist nomenklatura
asserts
University discourse is not neutral expertise but a disguised master discourse—today's economic austerity experts exemplify this by presenting political decisions as mere technical knowledge.university discourse and political authority
rejects
The '68 sexual revolution's elevation of perversion over hysteria was a mistake—Freud and Lacan consistently held that perverts fit perfectly into relations of domination, while hysterics genuinely subvert the master.perversion as the radical position (Deleuze et al.)
asserts
Only through culture is sexuality sexualized—animal sexuality is neutral instrumental activity, and it is the cultural structure of self-sabotage and repetition that creates human erotic experience.culture, sexuality, and the drive
asserts
Paternal prohibition does not render enjoyment impossible but sustains and opens up the space for enjoyment—the injunction 'don't do X' secretly leaves room for X.law, prohibition, and enjoyment
Quotes 14
“The sign of imperfection which is apparently an obstacle, but precisely as an obstacle it, as it were, sustains what it appears to be an obstacle to.”Slavoj Žižek · object a as enabling obstacle
“The only consistent definition of Balkan is that wherever you are, Balkan is a little bit southeast from everywhere.”Slavoj Žižek · Balkan as structural object a
“If you take away this obscene underside, military discipline would disintegrate.”Slavoj Žižek · obscene supplement as constitutive of order
“It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, the prohibition itself was prohibited. You had to pretend that yes if I want I can but simply Stalin is so good why criticize.”Slavoj Žižek · prohibition of the prohibition
“You have to freely visit her, you have to want to visit her. This is the formula of totalitarianism.”Slavoj Žižek · commanded desire as totalitarian formula
“The truly subversive position is not that of a pervert, but is that of a hysteric. New knowledge is produced only by hysterical discourse.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as subversive position
“Subjectivity in itself is feminine. It's not like some critics read Descartes, the pure cogito is secretly masculine.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity is feminine in Lacan
“When we don't get a clear injunction what to choose, it's panic. It's usually real democracy... experienced as a crisis of democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · real democratic choice experienced as crisis
“The film treats you as a divided subject. We will give you arguments so that you can pretend 'I'm just watching an innocent movie' at the same time we open up the space for all the dirty fantasies.”Slavoj Žižek · Hollywood ideology and the divided spectator
“He is the only absolute pedagogical genius that I know. Lacan was happy to have him because for a whole generation, even for those who later disagreed with him, Miller made Lacan readable.”Slavoj Žižek · Miller as Lacan's indispensable interpreter
“Only through culture sexuality is sexualized. What animals do is not human sexuality, but it's just some purely neutral activity.”Slavoj Žižek · culture as condition of sexuality
“I know him because he is the husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell, an old Lacanian from San Francisco Bay Area.”Slavoj Žižek · Dean MacCannell introduced via Lacanian network
“The sobering lesson of WikiLeaks is not so much secret service, is that we ordinary people are no longer allowed to pretend that we don't know it.”Slavoj Žižek · WikiLeaks and the end of strategic ignorance
“Every oppressive regime has a place for perverts. The truly subversive position is not that of a pervert, but is that of a hysteric.”Slavoj Žižek · perverts vs. hysterics and political subversion
Transcript 6 turns
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Slavoj Žižek
little bit of explanation because I thought about it, what the question you raised about different dimensions of Object A. And I just, if you permit me, would like, before we begin to improvise a little bit, beginning with, you know, it's easy to define what Lacan calls objet petit a, object small a, in abstract terms. But then the whole point of this notion of Object A is how it's really a dialectical notion, it’s how totally opposite determinations coincide in it. For example, on the one hand, Object A is usually called, how do you call it, a piece of grain in the machine. You know, like some irreducible, like, imagine a purely formal structure and then you have some little remainder of totally contingent material stuff, which again, as with that, and incidentally now I will tell you, but this is recorded, don't put it. The lady who told me that her last lover told her that with when she saw her naked that with two-three kilos less she would be perfect, this lady has a name, she is my wife. Okay, that’s... This is why I played this game from far away and so on. You know? Okay, so, you know, it's this sign of imperfection which is apparently an obstacle, but precisely as an obstacle it, as it were, sustains what it appears to be an obstacle to. And again, what has, why is this object cause of desire? Because, okay, let’s start with the elementary things. When Lacan says object cause of desire, the first distinction to be drawn, I'm sorry, like you be my professor and scold me if I don't, I mean, we are talking elementary things, but I think we should do this. Don't you think that it's easy to bluff complex notions, but the really difficult thing is to raise these totally elementary questions? And in spite of my later conflict with him, that's why I admire Jacques-Alain Miller, the great Stalinist Lacanian. I always called him a Stalinist when we were friends and he laughed because, you know why? Lacan says in Encore, draws this parallel: Freud and Lacan, Marx and Lenin. And then, well, who is the next guy? It’s Freud, Lacan, Lacan’s successor Miller, Lenin, Stalin. Well, he appeared to be a Stalinist, you know. And once, this was my lucky time, early eighties, when I was privileged, it’s before it became a public spectacle, Miller had in Paris every week a closed seminar, just fifteen-twenty people, and there I witnessed what is a true master, a pedagogical wonder. For example, for one semester we were reading maybe one of the most difficult of Lacan's texts, Kant avec Sade, Kant with Sade, you know like, page by page, sentence by sentence. And this was the miracle of Miller. You read the page, you understand nothing. Then you listen to Miller for two hours and it becomes so transparent that you could like, why was I so stupid, everything is self-evident. With all problems I have with him personal even theoretical, he is the only absolute pedagogical genius that I know. You know, he is... Lacan was happy to have him because for a whole generation, even for those who later disagreed with him, Miller made Lacan readable. And I didn't lose my thread. Miller was a master of this, like you know this blah-blah bullshit, divided subject, the subject is divided. Miller was torturing us once for two hours: Okay, between what and what is the subject divided, you know? And of course, we went through and came to the only consistent answer, you know. It's not between this and that for Lacan. It's not, you have a conscious part and then that stupid iceberg beneath the unconscious. It's between, you know, Miller quoted one of, was it Gilbert Ryle or one of the British empiricist philosophers who said that if you imagine endlessly cutting a certain quantity, like half, half, half, you go endlessly, that the dream is of course empirically impossible, that at the end you arrive at a point where you divide a remainder in half, but what you get is not something and something but something and nothing, you know? And that this is the, this is the... this is the subject's division. In this sense the subject is divided between something and nothing. You arrive at a subject when you have a something, a signifier which represents the subject, which stands for nothing, and then here at a second level Object A enters. Object A fills in this nothing. Now you get here the first ambiguity of Object A. On the one hand it's that piece of... piece of dust or whatever, the empirical remainder which precisely as an obstacle gets your desire in motion. On... I repeat this old story, I used it, but sorry, I will use it again just to make it clear. I remember when I was young, younger, they are now half-forgotten, there were two model beauties, the German and the American one: Claudia Schiffer and the American one, my god, she is Cindy Crawford. Yes, yeah, I see, we from Balkan. We know our beauties. And although this would be, maybe Balkan is an Object A, because maybe you know, I'm sorry for repeating this joke, you know, when you ask people where is Balkan? You know like, we Slovenians, we are like everyone the usual racist, we say no, we are still Mitteleuropa, Mid-Europe, Balkan begins in Croatia. Croat says no, we are the last frontier of Western civilization, Serbia is Balkan. Serb says no, we are Christian, Kosovo, Bosnia, down there is Balkan. So maybe Balkan is an... and if you go to the end, Greece, they will say no, we are non-Balkan, it’s up there. So my idea is that the only consistent definition of Balkan is that wherever you are, Balkan is a little bit southeast from everywhere, you know. And then, I'm sorry for this joke, the point is that it goes also into the other direction. Like, for Austrians, we Slovenians are Balkan. For Germans, my god, already Austrians, you know, Austrian empire, mixture of races, Austria is already Balkan. For Frenchmen, Germany, primitive, Teutonic, wild warriors, Vikings, they are Balkan. And finally for British, and I tend to agree with them, the whole of Europe is Balkan and Brussels bureaucracy is the new Constantinople for them, you know. So I like this idea, this maybe would be Balkan as object small a. But let's go back to my point. So on the one hand, yes, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford. You know that I read years ago, and it was done in Europe so it's not American patriotism, some stupid journal asked some men you know like, whom would you prefer as your ideal partner? Cindy Crawford won overwhelmingly. But then it's interesting when they ask men why. And they all mentioned, didn't she have here on her lips a small mole sign, no? They said this small imperfection makes her human, acceptable. That Claudia Schiffer was too perfect, this makes her cold, distant, and so on and so on. You know, it was a nice, it was a nice detail, no? Okay. Ah, can I give you, I cannot resist vulgarities, another example. Yesterday evening, you remember when I explained how even these most spontaneous outbursts of swearing orgies are, there you find culture at its purest. They are ritual, symbolic structure. But I think I used this somewhere but probably you don't know it, in a book of mine, the only one, that the same goes for hardcore pornography. Namely, a guy who is called Dean MacCannell, he is a professor in somewhere in San Francisco, no another, doesn't matter. I know him because he is the husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell, an old Lacanian from San Francisco Bay Area. And he told me, he's a crazy guy, more crazy than me, if you don't believe me. He did a research into, and published a totally crazy article, like research into the expression on woman's faces while they are banged in hardcore pornography. And he discovered a whole semiotic system. It's not, the woman just does it. It's really a kind of a semiotic square and then he spoke with people who produce hardcore and learned that this is totally, they just, they have names for it, producer, and they just the woman, do this expression, do that expression. The four expressions are, you really can make these four elements of Lacanian discourse into it. The one, the most obvious one is that, and sorry, I cannot do it, but it's that, how shall I call it, simply the trance, you know, [unintelligible] okay, I cannot do it, but like you are overwhelmed, ecstatic. The second one, now things get interesting. The second one is a, is a, this is almost my favorite one to watch, is a kind of an instrumental control, you know, lips tight, oh, like I'm in the middle of a hard work, let's con... You know like, you make an effort. This "I'm in the middle of business," hard work. The third one, that's interesting. The third one is boredom. And many, many find this attractive, you know a woman is chewing gum, look you, fuck it, do it, I don't care, you know. It's ignorance. And then some truth in it, for a woman to be truly fatal, there must be some indifference in her, which is why I was told by my Russian friends, it's you know their great soprano, now my god, okay, we'll be politically incorrect, a little bit too chubby, Anna Netrebko. If you know anything about opera, you must know her, beautiful, long dark hair she was. But you know we Slavs know: Netrebko. *Trebat* means needed. It's wonderful, a fatal woman and her name is Netrebko. Fuck off, I don't need you. No? Like this indifferent ignorance. And so this is then the third position. And the fourth position, the most provocative one is, it's also codified, woman looks into the man with this mocking smile, "ho-ho is this all you can do?" or whatever, you know. And it's wonderful, it's totally codified, you know. And they have names for it. I mean, but on the other hand it's better that you don't, because I was told by this guy and some others, if you witness shooting of a hardcore movie, it's such a totally depressing experience, you know. A French guy, Sibony but not Daniel, another one, did a year or two ago, from my friends at Cahiers du Cinéma I got a copy, a documentary with a title *Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel* even, there is no sexual relationship. It's done like this: the director contacted a hardcore producer and made a deal. They are shooting a hardcore movie, he, this documentarist, will just stay behind and shoot the entire scene, you know. I must tell you, I have it, I even thought of bringing it to you, but I don't want to be arrested here for whatever, the Swiss are... It's the most depressing film I've seen. You know, because first you see how the actors are waiting, you know. The guy to get a hard-on is desperately masturbating. The woman is calling her daughter or, you know, on phone, "Baby, don't be worried, I'll be soon home," and so on. And then you know, you see all this depressing background and all this how it's totally faked, you know like, they do just the faces where you don't see penetration. So of course there is no penetration, just the woman is doing this "ah-ah" or what... I mean, it's a totally depressing thing. So I really think, I'm not kidding, when you are nymphomaniac too much, I think there should be a clinic for nymphomaniacs where they just would be obliged to watch how hardcore pornography is shot and so on. It kills desire to the end. Okay, but... so I come to this point. Sorry, let's go on. So, Object A. On the one hand, it's this empirical sign of imperfection, but on the other hand, as Lacan emphasizes, it's also the most, a purely formal element. As Lacan says, Object A is just a certain structural gap, *l'axe*, so it's the coincidence of a purely formal void with a totally contingent element filling it in. This is why I wonder if you agree, it's a risky... and because you know this Lacanian definition between, sorry, desire and drive. Desire is endlessly metonymic. It's the experience of always non-satisfied. You know the formula of desire is "ce ne pas ça." It's not that, like whatever you get it's just a secondary substitute. In drive, the definition of drive is precisely "c'est ça." You get something you don't really get it, you just circulate around it. You know that's Lacan's definition of drive, that you fail the object but to reach the object, but then pleasure or even jouissance, sorry, pleasure is generated by your very repeated failure to reach the object. This is why when I was in Australia, I celebrated them as Australian Aborigines as the inventors of humanity, because I think if there is an instrument which signalizes the birth of humanity, it's boomerang. You know, officially you use it to hit, but the whole point is to, you know, you miss it, it comes back to you, you do it again. And effectively, people who know how to do it told me there that, you know, it's very dangerous to use boomerang, because the greatest art is that you are not there to catch it when it comes back to you. So again, see, this is why Alenka, the other girl here, she developed this nicely of how it's not that you have some, how should I call it, brutal animal sexuality which is then humanized. You know like, instead of me, I want a woman, sorry for my chauvinist example, instead of directly knocking her head with a stone and raping her, I write poems, whatever, invite her to dinner. No, no. It's that only through culture sexuality is sexualized. What animals do is not human sexuality, but it's just some purely neutral activity. It's basically paradise because you know as Saint Augustine makes it clear already, there was sex in paradise. But it was Augustine's metaphor, like raising, getting erection was the same thing like you raise your hand. There was no excitement, it was pure simple instrumental activity. And Lacan's idea is that this very structure of self-sabotage, you fail to do it, you are never sure, you repeat it, sexualizes the situation. And I claim that this can be demonstrated in a very primitive way. I'm sorry, some of you know this example of mine. Don't be afraid, it's not vulgar, although maybe it is. Imagine one of you ladies, I shake your hand. And I do something which is not in any way obscene. I just, you know, we shake hands then, instead of dropping hands, I just go on rhythmic... I shake your hand again, I shake your hand again. Admit it that you would have said: what's this guy up to? It would get dirty in a way. The very repetition would minimally sexualize it, no? So I wonder if you agree, I claim because Lacan at the same time claims that object small a is object cause of desire while in drive it's also that drive circulates around... Why are you doing this? What is this? [Audience member: "It's that stupid attendance sheet."] Are you crazy? You know if I were to run this university, I would also make this circulate, but the point would have been if you didn't miss my talk at least once, you are out. You know like... Why? But listen, who is doing this? You? Yes. But why don't you give it to them like to sign for all the time ahead once, you know? I mean, I find this... I had a good professor, you know when, I like this false permissivity which is the hidden face of terror. I remember in high school already we had a professor of history and we got assignments like, you know, once every semester we wrote there a text and usually professors insisted you have to know it so all books references were prohibited. This professor was a genius of oppression masked as permissivity. No, he said, bring all the books you want, because then you were under true pressure, you know like, how to write something, you know you couldn't just copy from the book, you know. That's the true oppression. And but I, maybe you know this story, I'm sorry if you do, it's in one of my very early books probably you don't know I used it. I only once I was standing in for my friend Mladen Dolar, I gave exams in the sense of examining students, and I got a lesson in Lacanian theory. I did succeed in terrorizing them by excessive permissivity, but I was beaten in the game, I loved it. The idea is, you know when you have these standard exams, you know the professor asks you a certain question. Isn't it part of a ritual that the student plays, "oh my god just this question," like anything else but the question that you get is always treated as a bad surprise, you know like, "oh the weak point." So to fight this I told students, "fuck you, you ask yourself any question you want and you answer it." The effect was, because total terror, they were terrified. Because they had no excuse. You couldn't have said "oh sorry I didn't," fuck you, you have chosen the question. But I was beaten. You know how? By a couple of students, they did something absolutely ingenious. They asked themselves a question and they treated it as a bad surprise. "Oh this, oh my god, I don't know." You know, in a totally non-psychological way. Once the question was raised by themselves, they treated it as a bad surprise and so on, you know. I was beaten. This is, this is what... ah, still you were asked, you asked me some of you about ideology, no? You know what is ideology and its underside? I'm sorry if you know this story. Yugoslavia, ex-socialist Yugoslavia was a paradise of ideology because the whole system worked through its own violations. So we had a communist regime, which officially it was not against religion, you I mean, we were not Albania or what, but nonetheless not too well looked upon. Okay. So, no you don't know it, you are too young, but older people remember and so on. In Međugorje, Croat south part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Virgin Mary did what she is paid to do. She appeared there, you know, some visions blah-blah. So instead of using the opportunity and organizing because for a couple of years Međugorje was after Lourdes the second biggest miracle site, the communists said, "no no we shouldn't encourage it, this is religion." Italian tourist agencies took it over. They earned billions of dollars with Yugoslavia in crisis economic, it was madness. In my part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia, the communists were more business-oriented. And then it happened there in mid-eighties just north of Ljubljana, in a very on a very good location between Ljubljana city and the airport, there was a small crossing with a statue of Virgin Mary. And this statue did what it's decent of her to do. It started to move with some blood and so on, you know. And communists were ecstatic. "We will do it," they immediately had architectural plan to build a big tourist site there and so on. Then a catastrophe happened. The local priest said, "No, this is superstition, this is not a true miracle." Now something beautifully obscene happened. The Communist Party weekly attacked the priest for non-patriotic behavior. Like, "fuck you, you should help your country, you should help... what stupid materialism are you preaching now here and so on," you know. This was a... I have a couple, maybe you know them, of stories like this that you should laugh. And I'm answering your question, this is for me how the system functions. Or another example, my absolute favorite, I'm sorry if you know it. In the last late eighties, maybe we had a very good government, at least in Slovenia, maybe others had, you know why? Because communists saw the writing on the wall, which means they knew they are lost basically. And so they tried to be as friendly as possible, wait, to survive. The game played by Serb communists but in a different way also by Slovene was nationalism, no? The problem I don't think there is anything natural in explosion of nationalism. Nationalism was for me at least one of the components it was the way for communist nomenklatura to survive. It was to present itself as the protector of local Serb, Croat, Slovene, whatever national interest. So communists were desperate to please people. And they did everything. I remember in Ljubljana '86, gay homosexuals established their society. Immediately there was there a member of the central committee greeting them, "we communists support your movement, do you want money for a newspaper or whatever," you know like they just... and that's the beautiful irony. When in first so-called free elections the city council was taken over by conservatives, the first thing they did was to cancel this support, so then gay people, "oh where were the communist free times when we were..." So, okay, what happened was this. In a radio station in Ljubljana, a small called Radio Študent, Student Radio, a small station, local, out of control by the party, it was dissident-controlled, they invited an old party apparatchik for an interview. He was an old retired communist but you know true, you know these grey dresses, speaking the jargon, the true one, they no longer make them like that today. And he terribly wanted to to please the young generation. So of course I was I totally sympathized with him. The the guy who interviewed him asked provocative questions. And then came this ridiculous wonderful moment. The guy, the question he was asked was, "how are you doing with sex? Do you enjoy it? How are you doing it?" Now the guy knew he must have say he must say something positive about sex, but the only language he was able to speak was the communist jargon. So he improvised desperately a celebration of sex in communist terms. He said things like "dreaming about naked women, touching them between their legs is a great instigation in my struggle for socialism" or whatever. It was wonderful, poor guy, you know this total totally obscene how shall I put it, mixture of different discourses, no? Do you know how many of you do know, that's my fondest memory of the Yugoslav army. Do you know the story about the the soldier masturbating? It's... okay, then I can repeat it. It's from my book which doesn't sell so well although it's my favorite book of mine, *Indivisible Remainder* on Schelling and so on, no? This happened to me in the army. This was my moment of of like revelation, you know, I understood ideology. I was in a small military barracks where there was no hospital department or doctor. There was just one room in which a certain ordinary regular soldier who was also a student of medicine in private life had his room. It was his bed there, office table, you will see why this is important, a long bench, and a small washbasin with a mirror, and you will see why this is important, behind the mirror there were you know these soft pornographic pre-pornographic images of half-naked women and so on, postcards. Okay. So every Saturday if you were ill, you you you said to the officer and then a doctor came every Saturday morning from military hospital and we all soldiers who claimed to be ill were examined there. It was done collectively. All of us were sitting behind the bench and then one after the other we were called up and blah-blah. Okay, so a soldier was called up. Doctor asked him what's wrong with you. He said, "I have pain in my prick, in my... *boli me kurac*." This already triggered laughter because if you say literally *boli me kurac*, "I have pain in my prick," it means "I don't give a damn," you know. Like this is what I liked in the poetry of the army language, how things mean almost the opposite. Like one of the great military sayings was *stara pička ništa ne jebe*, "the old cunt is not fucking, being fucked." But this was the greatest compliment you could give to someone. It meant an old experienced soldier really doesn't care about anything, it's... Okay, so then the soldier explained that no no, he means it literally, that he feels pain when he pulls the skin from the top of his penis. Okay, the doctor says, "do it." And then he says, "but you see you did it without pain." Then the soldier said, "no no no, it's only when the penis is erected that I feel this pain." Then, now comes the obscenity, the doctor said, "okay, let's test it, masturbate." And it was already an orgy, you know, people sitting there, the guy desperately red in face masturbating, and then the orgy really happened. The doctor started to shout at the soldiers: "what men you are, masturbate!" Then the doctor went, that's why I mentioned it, to that washbasin and took a photo of a half-naked girl and showed it to the soldier and said, "Look, what beautiful breasts, what body, look at it, masturbate, look at it." And it became an orgy in the sense that the doctor was laughing, it was a kind of obscene solidarity. You know like we are... why am I mentioning this? Because it took me some time to get it, this is how power functions. There was absolutely nothing subversive about it, you know. It's not that you have the oppressive military order, rituals, and then resist, oh, as they, I hate this term, as some of my enemies would have said, this was one site of resistance, you know. No, it wasn't. If you take away this obscene underside, military discipline would disintegrate. So my point is that this is my lesson on ideology. Ideology is not only the explicit discourse, discipline, sacrifice and so on. It's absolutely an inherent part of military discipline, these obscene rituals and so on. Which is why as I developed in another text of mine, if you take US army, all I know about it is from Hollywood, but I believe in Hollywood, reality follows Hollywood. You know the so-called Marines' marching chants, these rhythmic songs that you sing while marching and which are usually a mixture of sexual obscenities and nonsense, you know. Like I remember one from a movie where they go, "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold," you know like... and you know what I did once, I went almost too far. To the girl who will be here maybe, Avital Ronell. I gave a talk introduced by her and then I used this example. And then she was a little bit shocked and told Avital, "Oh, it was a strange... oh, that song of yours." I, you know when there is an opportunity for making a further bad-taste remark I cannot resist, no? So I said, "Oh Avital, so you want to hear another version? And it means 'I don't know but I was told that Avital's pussy is rather hot,'" you know? She didn't throw me out. I mean it was... maybe even I then afterwards I thought oh no... and then again I went through the standard Judith Butler ritual apologizing, you know, and she gave me the same treatment. Slavoj, we know basically her message was, we all know you are totally crazy, no need to apologize, no. But what I wanted to say is that now I'm serious, this is the key lesson. What I already improvised also yesterday. An ideology is not only what it says, it's also the complex network of even solicited transgressions, you know. It like in the army, I remember this, there were things which were prohibited but they were things which you were expected to violate. If you didn't do it, you were an idiot. And this is, I've written a lot about it, maybe some of you know the line. This is for me the thing I mentioned yesterday evening worth studying. When you have a language or any community, rules of a community, it's never just you have rules. For theoretical reasons which can be nicely explained through the logic of non-all by Lacan and so on, you never have just rules. You always have, let’s call them naively, meta-rules which tell you how to treat rules. Which rules you are supposed even to violate and in what way. And things here get interesting because you have two types of these unwritten rules. On the one hand the usual type, rules which... for example, in the army they told us don't get drunk. If on Saturday and Sunday evening you were not drunk, you were considered an idiot. Not only an idiot, but even non-patriotic. You know like, you are not a true comrade, you don't fraternize and so on. You know this is a nice example of how drinking was prohibited which strictly meant you have to do it to prove that you are really one of us soldiers. So what interests me is on the one hand these rules which you are expected to violate. And a much more interesting phenomenon on the other hand, you were allowed, solicited even to do something, but you were expected not to use that opportunity, you know? Like, I don't know, there was a nice example and I'm not dreaming, I am trying to answer your [unintelligible] yes sorry, your question. You know this is the life of ideology for me. For example, in the army, what fascinated me in the Yugoslav army is how openly it played this game of unwritten rules and so on. We had in the mornings military education, simply one hour, second hour. One morning, the first hour was more political education, quite on a chance, it was a miraculous coincidence that on that day the officer was teaching us these International Red Cross whatever rules, you know, do you know maybe you know this, that there is a rule of warfare that you are not allowed to shoot a parachuter while he is still in the air. This is an international convention. You have to wait that he touches... Okay, we were taught this. Now this was the miraculous coincidence. Next class, next hour was shooting a gun and yes you guessed it, the topic was how do you hit a parachuter in the air, you know because you have to take into account the movement, how the wind and so on. And then I was a total idiot, total idiot that I am, I asked the officer: "But sorry sir, one hour ago you were teaching us this now this, isn't there a contradiction here?" And he gave me a right answer. He said, "Žižek, you're supposed to be a doctor, I didn't know you are such a complete idiot and so on, you don't thing things like that," you know. It was simply an... ah another I'm sorry if you know this example, the one of military... if you know it I will probably most of... this is it happened to a friend of mine, he is a hero for me. This is the absolute example of this, you know, you are given a choice but you are... I don't know how it is if some of you served the army but in Yugoslavia it was usual, you enter the barracks after a week of or two of just introductory training then the solemn moment arrives where you swear the oath, you know the usual bullshit, "I swear solemnly that I am ready to sacrifice my life for blah-blah." And then after that public ritual each soldier was forced to, forced okay expected, that's the catch, to sign his name. A friend of mine did a heroic thing. When he approached the table with that big book, he asked the officer, "is this signature obligatory or not?" The office said "no, I mean, swearing an oath must be your free act." The soldier said, "Okay then I don't do it." Then the officer said, "Fuck you, you will be arrested or whatever!" Then the soldier said, "But wait a minute, you told me it's a free act and so on." So they shouted at each other and finally, you know what was the result? And that's how I know it really happened. This soldier friend of mine got from the officer a piece of paper ordering him to freely sign the... you know like... and I'm not saying that Yugoslav army was especially totalitarian, I claim doesn't our love for our country for our parents, it functions exactly in the same way. You are expected to love your parents, but you are expected to love them freely, like you know. This is the catch I claim of every ideological field. So, back to my point. This is what interests me so much. These situations where you are given a certain choice, option, on condition that you don't use it. And I'm sorry if you know it, the the big example it was confirmed to me by some historical books I read was for example in Stalinism. Officially it was of course in Stalinist Russia, but the same could be said, it was prohibited to criticize Stalin. My god, you did this you disappeared next day. But it was even more prohibited, you see the catch, to publicly announce this prohibition. Like sorry maybe you know this joke of mine, my starter joke. Imagine we are now in Moscow, I'm Stalin, Central Committee meeting, one of you stands up and criticizes me. Okay, we know what will happen next day, the big talk among you would be who was the last to have seen that guy alive, no? But then let's imagine then another guy of you would have stood up and would start to shout at the first guy, "are you crazy don't you know that here we don't criticize Stalin?" I claim that the first the second guy would have disappeared even faster. You see the point? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, the prohibition itself was prohibited. You had to pretend that yes if I want I can but simply Stalin is so good why criticize... you see this basic paradox. The prohibition itself is prohibited. You have to fake it, you have to act as if you are free although you know that you are not free. And this is why I claim here I sympathize with feminists who told me that this is why the so-called post-modern master... You know like today male chauvinists are no longer direct chauvinists usually, you know like shouting at your wife "okay why didn't you do my socks, do this, that." No they they want to control things but they pretend that you know we are all equal blah-blah-blah. So the first step in feminism is it's almost subversive, you know. Let's let's say you are married to a guy who is a male chauvinist but covers this up by treating you "oh we are just partners," all that bullshit. Maybe the most subversive thing to do maybe that's my point even more subversive than directly rebelling would have been to tell him: "Please I am your slave, treat me as a master." You know, this is why I this may surprise you I always loved them... my... okay now I sound immediately I'm sorry... Oh sorry does this also happen with knowledge, like let me give you an example, like let's say I don't know yesterday we were talking about the *sujet supposé savoir*, yeah yeah, right? So if I go to someone in the class and I say I perfectly know that you talked about the *sujet supposé savoir* not to know... but if I say like a just as a gesture and say "does he speak about this?" You know, but we both know that we... Oh no no absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. This is crucial how what things we are supposed to know but supposed to pretend we don't know and so on. There is even, I will quote this in my new book, I found a book called Agnotology or what, something, it's really the science of unlearning. You know it goes into... like you know it's like they the book claims that we need not only epistemology, the science of knowing, but we also need a science of not knowing and different modalities of not knowing. For example, what does this mean ideologically? I spoke about this with Assange and I had to convince him he was too naive. I told him, "But are you aware that all these Snowden and WikiLeaks disclosures, what we learn are details, but basically, I mean, did we learn anything that we did not already suspect that it is happening?" But we were just your example acting we preferred not to know it. And that's the tragedy. The majority even at some point of Americans, their attitude was not "oh horrible what they were doing." No, their attitude was: we pretend not to know. Those in power have to do certain things discreetly, we pretend not to know it. And I claim the great achievement of... no I mean it extremely benevolently, no bad feeling from me you guy with the cap. Go to your room and sleep I'm not terrorizing you. No no no I'm not sleeping I'm just uncomfortable. Ah sorry, because I really mean it although no this is I'm evil towards me not to you. Why don't you take a nice nap, I will try to speak with lower voice and I promise you at the end we will awaken... Oh yeah because you know I use this in my book I think it's *In Defense of Lost Causes*, you know Alain Badiou, that's why he is my best friend. Maybe you know the story, he really did this to me once, even here I think. It was a community like this, I had at that point through some shady political connections in Slovenia, I had a free cell phone. A political friend gave it to me he said this is a good cell phone, it works everywhere all the connections, it's not to your name do whatever you want with it. It worked everywhere and but you knew this I and he asked me to to if he can borrow it from me, he was expecting an important call and so on. So it was a talk like this, I was talking, he was sitting there, the phone rang, my phone even, he did it like this, no like, and then you know what he did? This is such a beautiful thing, at that point we became absolute friends because as I wrote in my book, to do to someone this you must either be an extremely brutal person or it's absolute friendship. He while I was talking he interrupted me, while I was talking, and said "Slavoj I have to talk on the phone, could you please talk a little bit lower?" I mean if there is a definition of absolute friendship this this is it, no? Sorry but... so I'm sorry, don't take it... it's just uncomfortable... yeah I cannot how shall I put it, whenever I see you know in Slovenia there is almost a saying about me that when in any social situation there is a slightless change chance opening for making a tasteless remark or whatever, I will do it. I cannot scan situation and see the opening for a tasteless remark. Sorry, let's go on. This science of not knowing. Yes that... so again I think that the sobering lesson of WikiLeaks is not so much secret service, is that we ordinary people are no longer allowed to pretend that we don't know it. Because here comes my pessimistic anthropology if you want. I think most of the people don't want to
little bit of explanation because I thought about it, what the question you raised about different dimensions of Object A. And I just, if you permit me, would like, before we begin to improvise a little bit, beginning with, you know, it's easy to define what Lacan calls objet petit a, object small a, in abstract terms. But then the whole point of this notion of Object A is how it's really a dialectical notion, it’s how totally opposite determinations coincide in it. For example, on the one hand, Object A is usually called, how do you call it, a piece of grain in the machine. You know, like some irreducible, like, imagine a purely formal structure and then you have some little remainder of totally contingent material stuff, which again, as with that, and incidentally now I will tell you, but this is recorded, don't put it. The lady who told me that her last lover told her that with when she saw her naked that with two-three kilos less she would be perfect, this lady has a name, she is my wife. Okay, that’s... This is why I played this game from far away and so on. You know? Okay, so, you know, it's this sign of imperfection which is apparently an obstacle, but precisely as an obstacle it, as it were, sustains what it appears to be an obstacle to. And again, what has, why is this object cause of desire? Because, okay, let’s start with the elementary things. When Lacan says object cause of desire, the first distinction to be drawn, I'm sorry, like you be my professor and scold me if I don't, I mean, we are talking elementary things, but I think we should do this. Don't you think that it's easy to bluff complex notions, but the really difficult thing is to raise these totally elementary questions? And in spite of my later conflict with him, that's why I admire Jacques-Alain Miller, the great Stalinist Lacanian. I always called him a Stalinist when we were friends and he laughed because, you know why? Lacan says in Encore, draws this parallel: Freud and Lacan, Marx and Lenin. And then, well, who is the next guy? It’s Freud, Lacan, Lacan’s successor Miller, Lenin, Stalin. Well, he appeared to be a Stalinist, you know. And once, this was my lucky time, early eighties, when I was privileged, it’s before it became a public spectacle, Miller had in Paris every week a closed seminar, just fifteen-twenty people, and there I witnessed what is a true master, a pedagogical wonder. For example, for one semester we were reading maybe one of the most difficult of Lacan's texts, Kant avec Sade, Kant with Sade, you know like, page by page, sentence by sentence. And this was the miracle of Miller. You read the page, you understand nothing. Then you listen to Miller for two hours and it becomes so transparent that you could like, why was I so stupid, everything is self-evident. With all problems I have with him personal even theoretical, he is the only absolute pedagogical genius that I know. You know, he is... Lacan was happy to have him because for a whole generation, even for those who later disagreed with him, Miller made Lacan readable. And I didn't lose my thread. Miller was a master of this, like you know this blah-blah bullshit, divided subject, the subject is divided. Miller was torturing us once for two hours: Okay, between what and what is the subject divided, you know? And of course, we went through and came to the only consistent answer, you know. It's not between this and that for Lacan. It's not, you have a conscious part and then that stupid iceberg beneath the unconscious. It's between, you know, Miller quoted one of, was it Gilbert Ryle or one of the British empiricist philosophers who said that if you imagine endlessly cutting a certain quantity, like half, half, half, you go endlessly, that the dream is of course empirically impossible, that at the end you arrive at a point where you divide a remainder in half, but what you get is not something and something but something and nothing, you know? And that this is the, this is the... this is the subject's division. In this sense the subject is divided between something and nothing. You arrive at a subject when you have a something, a signifier which represents the subject, which stands for nothing, and then here at a second level Object A enters. Object A fills in this nothing. Now you get here the first ambiguity of Object A. On the one hand it's that piece of... piece of dust or whatever, the empirical remainder which precisely as an obstacle gets your desire in motion. On... I repeat this old story, I used it, but sorry, I will use it again just to make it clear. I remember when I was young, younger, they are now half-forgotten, there were two model beauties, the German and the American one: Claudia Schiffer and the American one, my god, she is Cindy Crawford. Yes, yeah, I see, we from Balkan. We know our beauties. And although this would be, maybe Balkan is an Object A, because maybe you know, I'm sorry for repeating this joke, you know, when you ask people where is Balkan? You know like, we Slovenians, we are like everyone the usual racist, we say no, we are still Mitteleuropa, Mid-Europe, Balkan begins in Croatia. Croat says no, we are the last frontier of Western civilization, Serbia is Balkan. Serb says no, we are Christian, Kosovo, Bosnia, down there is Balkan. So maybe Balkan is an... and if you go to the end, Greece, they will say no, we are non-Balkan, it’s up there. So my idea is that the only consistent definition of Balkan is that wherever you are, Balkan is a little bit southeast from everywhere, you know. And then, I'm sorry for this joke, the point is that it goes also into the other direction. Like, for Austrians, we Slovenians are Balkan. For Germans, my god, already Austrians, you know, Austrian empire, mixture of races, Austria is already Balkan. For Frenchmen, Germany, primitive, Teutonic, wild warriors, Vikings, they are Balkan. And finally for British, and I tend to agree with them, the whole of Europe is Balkan and Brussels bureaucracy is the new Constantinople for them, you know. So I like this idea, this maybe would be Balkan as object small a. But let's go back to my point. So on the one hand, yes, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford. You know that I read years ago, and it was done in Europe so it's not American patriotism, some stupid journal asked some men you know like, whom would you prefer as your ideal partner? Cindy Crawford won overwhelmingly. But then it's interesting when they ask men why. And they all mentioned, didn't she have here on her lips a small mole sign, no? They said this small imperfection makes her human, acceptable. That Claudia Schiffer was too perfect, this makes her cold, distant, and so on and so on. You know, it was a nice, it was a nice detail, no? Okay. Ah, can I give you, I cannot resist vulgarities, another example. Yesterday evening, you remember when I explained how even these most spontaneous outbursts of swearing orgies are, there you find culture at its purest. They are ritual, symbolic structure. But I think I used this somewhere but probably you don't know it, in a book of mine, the only one, that the same goes for hardcore pornography. Namely, a guy who is called Dean MacCannell, he is a professor in somewhere in San Francisco, no another, doesn't matter. I know him because he is the husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell, an old Lacanian from San Francisco Bay Area. And he told me, he's a crazy guy, more crazy than me, if you don't believe me. He did a research into, and published a totally crazy article, like research into the expression on woman's faces while they are banged in hardcore pornography. And he discovered a whole semiotic system. It's not, the woman just does it. It's really a kind of a semiotic square and then he spoke with people who produce hardcore and learned that this is totally, they just, they have names for it, producer, and they just the woman, do this expression, do that expression. The four expressions are, you really can make these four elements of Lacanian discourse into it. The one, the most obvious one is that, and sorry, I cannot do it, but it's that, how shall I call it, simply the trance, you know, [unintelligible] okay, I cannot do it, but like you are overwhelmed, ecstatic. The second one, now things get interesting. The second one is a, is a, this is almost my favorite one to watch, is a kind of an instrumental control, you know, lips tight, oh, like I'm in the middle of a hard work, let's con... You know like, you make an effort. This "I'm in the middle of business," hard work. The third one, that's interesting. The third one is boredom. And many, many find this attractive, you know a woman is chewing gum, look you, fuck it, do it, I don't care, you know. It's ignorance. And then some truth in it, for a woman to be truly fatal, there must be some indifference in her, which is why I was told by my Russian friends, it's you know their great soprano, now my god, okay, we'll be politically incorrect, a little bit too chubby, Anna Netrebko. If you know anything about opera, you must know her, beautiful, long dark hair she was. But you know we Slavs know: Netrebko. *Trebat* means needed. It's wonderful, a fatal woman and her name is Netrebko. Fuck off, I don't need you. No? Like this indifferent ignorance. And so this is then the third position. And the fourth position, the most provocative one is, it's also codified, woman looks into the man with this mocking smile, "ho-ho is this all you can do?" or whatever, you know. And it's wonderful, it's totally codified, you know. And they have names for it. I mean, but on the other hand it's better that you don't, because I was told by this guy and some others, if you witness shooting of a hardcore movie, it's such a totally depressing experience, you know. A French guy, Sibony but not Daniel, another one, did a year or two ago, from my friends at Cahiers du Cinéma I got a copy, a documentary with a title *Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel* even, there is no sexual relationship. It's done like this: the director contacted a hardcore producer and made a deal. They are shooting a hardcore movie, he, this documentarist, will just stay behind and shoot the entire scene, you know. I must tell you, I have it, I even thought of bringing it to you, but I don't want to be arrested here for whatever, the Swiss are... It's the most depressing film I've seen. You know, because first you see how the actors are waiting, you know. The guy to get a hard-on is desperately masturbating. The woman is calling her daughter or, you know, on phone, "Baby, don't be worried, I'll be soon home," and so on. And then you know, you see all this depressing background and all this how it's totally faked, you know like, they do just the faces where you don't see penetration. So of course there is no penetration, just the woman is doing this "ah-ah" or what... I mean, it's a totally depressing thing. So I really think, I'm not kidding, when you are nymphomaniac too much, I think there should be a clinic for nymphomaniacs where they just would be obliged to watch how hardcore pornography is shot and so on. It kills desire to the end. Okay, but... so I come to this point. Sorry, let's go on. So, Object A. On the one hand, it's this empirical sign of imperfection, but on the other hand, as Lacan emphasizes, it's also the most, a purely formal element. As Lacan says, Object A is just a certain structural gap, *l'axe*, so it's the coincidence of a purely formal void with a totally contingent element filling it in. This is why I wonder if you agree, it's a risky... and because you know this Lacanian definition between, sorry, desire and drive. Desire is endlessly metonymic. It's the experience of always non-satisfied. You know the formula of desire is "ce ne pas ça." It's not that, like whatever you get it's just a secondary substitute. In drive, the definition of drive is precisely "c'est ça." You get something you don't really get it, you just circulate around it. You know that's Lacan's definition of drive, that you fail the object but to reach the object, but then pleasure or even jouissance, sorry, pleasure is generated by your very repeated failure to reach the object. This is why when I was in Australia, I celebrated them as Australian Aborigines as the inventors of humanity, because I think if there is an instrument which signalizes the birth of humanity, it's boomerang. You know, officially you use it to hit, but the whole point is to, you know, you miss it, it comes back to you, you do it again. And effectively, people who know how to do it told me there that, you know, it's very dangerous to use boomerang, because the greatest art is that you are not there to catch it when it comes back to you. So again, see, this is why Alenka, the other girl here, she developed this nicely of how it's not that you have some, how should I call it, brutal animal sexuality which is then humanized. You know like, instead of me, I want a woman, sorry for my chauvinist example, instead of directly knocking her head with a stone and raping her, I write poems, whatever, invite her to dinner. No, no. It's that only through culture sexuality is sexualized. What animals do is not human sexuality, but it's just some purely neutral activity. It's basically paradise because you know as Saint Augustine makes it clear already, there was sex in paradise. But it was Augustine's metaphor, like raising, getting erection was the same thing like you raise your hand. There was no excitement, it was pure simple instrumental activity. And Lacan's idea is that this very structure of self-sabotage, you fail to do it, you are never sure, you repeat it, sexualizes the situation. And I claim that this can be demonstrated in a very primitive way. I'm sorry, some of you know this example of mine. Don't be afraid, it's not vulgar, although maybe it is. Imagine one of you ladies, I shake your hand. And I do something which is not in any way obscene. I just, you know, we shake hands then, instead of dropping hands, I just go on rhythmic... I shake your hand again, I shake your hand again. Admit it that you would have said: what's this guy up to? It would get dirty in a way. The very repetition would minimally sexualize it, no? So I wonder if you agree, I claim because Lacan at the same time claims that object small a is object cause of desire while in drive it's also that drive circulates around... Why are you doing this? What is this? [Audience member: "It's that stupid attendance sheet."] Are you crazy? You know if I were to run this university, I would also make this circulate, but the point would have been if you didn't miss my talk at least once, you are out. You know like... Why? But listen, who is doing this? You? Yes. But why don't you give it to them like to sign for all the time ahead once, you know? I mean, I find this... I had a good professor, you know when, I like this false permissivity which is the hidden face of terror. I remember in high school already we had a professor of history and we got assignments like, you know, once every semester we wrote there a text and usually professors insisted you have to know it so all books references were prohibited. This professor was a genius of oppression masked as permissivity. No, he said, bring all the books you want, because then you were under true pressure, you know like, how to write something, you know you couldn't just copy from the book, you know. That's the true oppression. And but I, maybe you know this story, I'm sorry if you do, it's in one of my very early books probably you don't know I used it. I only once I was standing in for my friend Mladen Dolar, I gave exams in the sense of examining students, and I got a lesson in Lacanian theory. I did succeed in terrorizing them by excessive permissivity, but I was beaten in the game, I loved it. The idea is, you know when you have these standard exams, you know the professor asks you a certain question. Isn't it part of a ritual that the student plays, "oh my god just this question," like anything else but the question that you get is always treated as a bad surprise, you know like, "oh the weak point." So to fight this I told students, "fuck you, you ask yourself any question you want and you answer it." The effect was, because total terror, they were terrified. Because they had no excuse. You couldn't have said "oh sorry I didn't," fuck you, you have chosen the question. But I was beaten. You know how? By a couple of students, they did something absolutely ingenious. They asked themselves a question and they treated it as a bad surprise. "Oh this, oh my god, I don't know." You know, in a totally non-psychological way. Once the question was raised by themselves, they treated it as a bad surprise and so on, you know. I was beaten. This is, this is what... ah, still you were asked, you asked me some of you about ideology, no? You know what is ideology and its underside? I'm sorry if you know this story. Yugoslavia, ex-socialist Yugoslavia was a paradise of ideology because the whole system worked through its own violations. So we had a communist regime, which officially it was not against religion, you I mean, we were not Albania or what, but nonetheless not too well looked upon. Okay. So, no you don't know it, you are too young, but older people remember and so on. In Međugorje, Croat south part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Virgin Mary did what she is paid to do. She appeared there, you know, some visions blah-blah. So instead of using the opportunity and organizing because for a couple of years Međugorje was after Lourdes the second biggest miracle site, the communists said, "no no we shouldn't encourage it, this is religion." Italian tourist agencies took it over. They earned billions of dollars with Yugoslavia in crisis economic, it was madness. In my part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia, the communists were more business-oriented. And then it happened there in mid-eighties just north of Ljubljana, in a very on a very good location between Ljubljana city and the airport, there was a small crossing with a statue of Virgin Mary. And this statue did what it's decent of her to do. It started to move with some blood and so on, you know. And communists were ecstatic. "We will do it," they immediately had architectural plan to build a big tourist site there and so on. Then a catastrophe happened. The local priest said, "No, this is superstition, this is not a true miracle." Now something beautifully obscene happened. The Communist Party weekly attacked the priest for non-patriotic behavior. Like, "fuck you, you should help your country, you should help... what stupid materialism are you preaching now here and so on," you know. This was a... I have a couple, maybe you know them, of stories like this that you should laugh. And I'm answering your question, this is for me how the system functions. Or another example, my absolute favorite, I'm sorry if you know it. In the last late eighties, maybe we had a very good government, at least in Slovenia, maybe others had, you know why? Because communists saw the writing on the wall, which means they knew they are lost basically. And so they tried to be as friendly as possible, wait, to survive. The game played by Serb communists but in a different way also by Slovene was nationalism, no? The problem I don't think there is anything natural in explosion of nationalism. Nationalism was for me at least one of the components it was the way for communist nomenklatura to survive. It was to present itself as the protector of local Serb, Croat, Slovene, whatever national interest. So communists were desperate to please people. And they did everything. I remember in Ljubljana '86, gay homosexuals established their society. Immediately there was there a member of the central committee greeting them, "we communists support your movement, do you want money for a newspaper or whatever," you know like they just... and that's the beautiful irony. When in first so-called free elections the city council was taken over by conservatives, the first thing they did was to cancel this support, so then gay people, "oh where were the communist free times when we were..." So, okay, what happened was this. In a radio station in Ljubljana, a small called Radio Študent, Student Radio, a small station, local, out of control by the party, it was dissident-controlled, they invited an old party apparatchik for an interview. He was an old retired communist but you know true, you know these grey dresses, speaking the jargon, the true one, they no longer make them like that today. And he terribly wanted to to please the young generation. So of course I was I totally sympathized with him. The the guy who interviewed him asked provocative questions. And then came this ridiculous wonderful moment. The guy, the question he was asked was, "how are you doing with sex? Do you enjoy it? How are you doing it?" Now the guy knew he must have say he must say something positive about sex, but the only language he was able to speak was the communist jargon. So he improvised desperately a celebration of sex in communist terms. He said things like "dreaming about naked women, touching them between their legs is a great instigation in my struggle for socialism" or whatever. It was wonderful, poor guy, you know this total totally obscene how shall I put it, mixture of different discourses, no? Do you know how many of you do know, that's my fondest memory of the Yugoslav army. Do you know the story about the the soldier masturbating? It's... okay, then I can repeat it. It's from my book which doesn't sell so well although it's my favorite book of mine, *Indivisible Remainder* on Schelling and so on, no? This happened to me in the army. This was my moment of of like revelation, you know, I understood ideology. I was in a small military barracks where there was no hospital department or doctor. There was just one room in which a certain ordinary regular soldier who was also a student of medicine in private life had his room. It was his bed there, office table, you will see why this is important, a long bench, and a small washbasin with a mirror, and you will see why this is important, behind the mirror there were you know these soft pornographic pre-pornographic images of half-naked women and so on, postcards. Okay. So every Saturday if you were ill, you you you said to the officer and then a doctor came every Saturday morning from military hospital and we all soldiers who claimed to be ill were examined there. It was done collectively. All of us were sitting behind the bench and then one after the other we were called up and blah-blah. Okay, so a soldier was called up. Doctor asked him what's wrong with you. He said, "I have pain in my prick, in my... *boli me kurac*." This already triggered laughter because if you say literally *boli me kurac*, "I have pain in my prick," it means "I don't give a damn," you know. Like this is what I liked in the poetry of the army language, how things mean almost the opposite. Like one of the great military sayings was *stara pička ništa ne jebe*, "the old cunt is not fucking, being fucked." But this was the greatest compliment you could give to someone. It meant an old experienced soldier really doesn't care about anything, it's... Okay, so then the soldier explained that no no, he means it literally, that he feels pain when he pulls the skin from the top of his penis. Okay, the doctor says, "do it." And then he says, "but you see you did it without pain." Then the soldier said, "no no no, it's only when the penis is erected that I feel this pain." Then, now comes the obscenity, the doctor said, "okay, let's test it, masturbate." And it was already an orgy, you know, people sitting there, the guy desperately red in face masturbating, and then the orgy really happened. The doctor started to shout at the soldiers: "what men you are, masturbate!" Then the doctor went, that's why I mentioned it, to that washbasin and took a photo of a half-naked girl and showed it to the soldier and said, "Look, what beautiful breasts, what body, look at it, masturbate, look at it." And it became an orgy in the sense that the doctor was laughing, it was a kind of obscene solidarity. You know like we are... why am I mentioning this? Because it took me some time to get it, this is how power functions. There was absolutely nothing subversive about it, you know. It's not that you have the oppressive military order, rituals, and then resist, oh, as they, I hate this term, as some of my enemies would have said, this was one site of resistance, you know. No, it wasn't. If you take away this obscene underside, military discipline would disintegrate. So my point is that this is my lesson on ideology. Ideology is not only the explicit discourse, discipline, sacrifice and so on. It's absolutely an inherent part of military discipline, these obscene rituals and so on. Which is why as I developed in another text of mine, if you take US army, all I know about it is from Hollywood, but I believe in Hollywood, reality follows Hollywood. You know the so-called Marines' marching chants, these rhythmic songs that you sing while marching and which are usually a mixture of sexual obscenities and nonsense, you know. Like I remember one from a movie where they go, "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold," you know like... and you know what I did once, I went almost too far. To the girl who will be here maybe, Avital Ronell. I gave a talk introduced by her and then I used this example. And then she was a little bit shocked and told Avital, "Oh, it was a strange... oh, that song of yours." I, you know when there is an opportunity for making a further bad-taste remark I cannot resist, no? So I said, "Oh Avital, so you want to hear another version? And it means 'I don't know but I was told that Avital's pussy is rather hot,'" you know? She didn't throw me out. I mean it was... maybe even I then afterwards I thought oh no... and then again I went through the standard Judith Butler ritual apologizing, you know, and she gave me the same treatment. Slavoj, we know basically her message was, we all know you are totally crazy, no need to apologize, no. But what I wanted to say is that now I'm serious, this is the key lesson. What I already improvised also yesterday. An ideology is not only what it says, it's also the complex network of even solicited transgressions, you know. It like in the army, I remember this, there were things which were prohibited but they were things which you were expected to violate. If you didn't do it, you were an idiot. And this is, I've written a lot about it, maybe some of you know the line. This is for me the thing I mentioned yesterday evening worth studying. When you have a language or any community, rules of a community, it's never just you have rules. For theoretical reasons which can be nicely explained through the logic of non-all by Lacan and so on, you never have just rules. You always have, let’s call them naively, meta-rules which tell you how to treat rules. Which rules you are supposed even to violate and in what way. And things here get interesting because you have two types of these unwritten rules. On the one hand the usual type, rules which... for example, in the army they told us don't get drunk. If on Saturday and Sunday evening you were not drunk, you were considered an idiot. Not only an idiot, but even non-patriotic. You know like, you are not a true comrade, you don't fraternize and so on. You know this is a nice example of how drinking was prohibited which strictly meant you have to do it to prove that you are really one of us soldiers. So what interests me is on the one hand these rules which you are expected to violate. And a much more interesting phenomenon on the other hand, you were allowed, solicited even to do something, but you were expected not to use that opportunity, you know? Like, I don't know, there was a nice example and I'm not dreaming, I am trying to answer your [unintelligible] yes sorry, your question. You know this is the life of ideology for me. For example, in the army, what fascinated me in the Yugoslav army is how openly it played this game of unwritten rules and so on. We had in the mornings military education, simply one hour, second hour. One morning, the first hour was more political education, quite on a chance, it was a miraculous coincidence that on that day the officer was teaching us these International Red Cross whatever rules, you know, do you know maybe you know this, that there is a rule of warfare that you are not allowed to shoot a parachuter while he is still in the air. This is an international convention. You have to wait that he touches... Okay, we were taught this. Now this was the miraculous coincidence. Next class, next hour was shooting a gun and yes you guessed it, the topic was how do you hit a parachuter in the air, you know because you have to take into account the movement, how the wind and so on. And then I was a total idiot, total idiot that I am, I asked the officer: "But sorry sir, one hour ago you were teaching us this now this, isn't there a contradiction here?" And he gave me a right answer. He said, "Žižek, you're supposed to be a doctor, I didn't know you are such a complete idiot and so on, you don't thing things like that," you know. It was simply an... ah another I'm sorry if you know this example, the one of military... if you know it I will probably most of... this is it happened to a friend of mine, he is a hero for me. This is the absolute example of this, you know, you are given a choice but you are... I don't know how it is if some of you served the army but in Yugoslavia it was usual, you enter the barracks after a week of or two of just introductory training then the solemn moment arrives where you swear the oath, you know the usual bullshit, "I swear solemnly that I am ready to sacrifice my life for blah-blah." And then after that public ritual each soldier was forced to, forced okay expected, that's the catch, to sign his name. A friend of mine did a heroic thing. When he approached the table with that big book, he asked the officer, "is this signature obligatory or not?" The office said "no, I mean, swearing an oath must be your free act." The soldier said, "Okay then I don't do it." Then the officer said, "Fuck you, you will be arrested or whatever!" Then the soldier said, "But wait a minute, you told me it's a free act and so on." So they shouted at each other and finally, you know what was the result? And that's how I know it really happened. This soldier friend of mine got from the officer a piece of paper ordering him to freely sign the... you know like... and I'm not saying that Yugoslav army was especially totalitarian, I claim doesn't our love for our country for our parents, it functions exactly in the same way. You are expected to love your parents, but you are expected to love them freely, like you know. This is the catch I claim of every ideological field. So, back to my point. This is what interests me so much. These situations where you are given a certain choice, option, on condition that you don't use it. And I'm sorry if you know it, the the big example it was confirmed to me by some historical books I read was for example in Stalinism. Officially it was of course in Stalinist Russia, but the same could be said, it was prohibited to criticize Stalin. My god, you did this you disappeared next day. But it was even more prohibited, you see the catch, to publicly announce this prohibition. Like sorry maybe you know this joke of mine, my starter joke. Imagine we are now in Moscow, I'm Stalin, Central Committee meeting, one of you stands up and criticizes me. Okay, we know what will happen next day, the big talk among you would be who was the last to have seen that guy alive, no? But then let's imagine then another guy of you would have stood up and would start to shout at the first guy, "are you crazy don't you know that here we don't criticize Stalin?" I claim that the first the second guy would have disappeared even faster. You see the point? It was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, the prohibition itself was prohibited. You had to pretend that yes if I want I can but simply Stalin is so good why criticize... you see this basic paradox. The prohibition itself is prohibited. You have to fake it, you have to act as if you are free although you know that you are not free. And this is why I claim here I sympathize with feminists who told me that this is why the so-called post-modern master... You know like today male chauvinists are no longer direct chauvinists usually, you know like shouting at your wife "okay why didn't you do my socks, do this, that." No they they want to control things but they pretend that you know we are all equal blah-blah-blah. So the first step in feminism is it's almost subversive, you know. Let's let's say you are married to a guy who is a male chauvinist but covers this up by treating you "oh we are just partners," all that bullshit. Maybe the most subversive thing to do maybe that's my point even more subversive than directly rebelling would have been to tell him: "Please I am your slave, treat me as a master." You know, this is why I this may surprise you I always loved them... my... okay now I sound immediately I'm sorry... Oh sorry does this also happen with knowledge, like let me give you an example, like let's say I don't know yesterday we were talking about the *sujet supposé savoir*, yeah yeah, right? So if I go to someone in the class and I say I perfectly know that you talked about the *sujet supposé savoir* not to know... but if I say like a just as a gesture and say "does he speak about this?" You know, but we both know that we... Oh no no absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. This is crucial how what things we are supposed to know but supposed to pretend we don't know and so on. There is even, I will quote this in my new book, I found a book called Agnotology or what, something, it's really the science of unlearning. You know it goes into... like you know it's like they the book claims that we need not only epistemology, the science of knowing, but we also need a science of not knowing and different modalities of not knowing. For example, what does this mean ideologically? I spoke about this with Assange and I had to convince him he was too naive. I told him, "But are you aware that all these Snowden and WikiLeaks disclosures, what we learn are details, but basically, I mean, did we learn anything that we did not already suspect that it is happening?" But we were just your example acting we preferred not to know it. And that's the tragedy. The majority even at some point of Americans, their attitude was not "oh horrible what they were doing." No, their attitude was: we pretend not to know. Those in power have to do certain things discreetly, we pretend not to know it. And I claim the great achievement of... no I mean it extremely benevolently, no bad feeling from me you guy with the cap. Go to your room and sleep I'm not terrorizing you. No no no I'm not sleeping I'm just uncomfortable. Ah sorry, because I really mean it although no this is I'm evil towards me not to you. Why don't you take a nice nap, I will try to speak with lower voice and I promise you at the end we will awaken... Oh yeah because you know I use this in my book I think it's *In Defense of Lost Causes*, you know Alain Badiou, that's why he is my best friend. Maybe you know the story, he really did this to me once, even here I think. It was a community like this, I had at that point through some shady political connections in Slovenia, I had a free cell phone. A political friend gave it to me he said this is a good cell phone, it works everywhere all the connections, it's not to your name do whatever you want with it. It worked everywhere and but you knew this I and he asked me to to if he can borrow it from me, he was expecting an important call and so on. So it was a talk like this, I was talking, he was sitting there, the phone rang, my phone even, he did it like this, no like, and then you know what he did? This is such a beautiful thing, at that point we became absolute friends because as I wrote in my book, to do to someone this you must either be an extremely brutal person or it's absolute friendship. He while I was talking he interrupted me, while I was talking, and said "Slavoj I have to talk on the phone, could you please talk a little bit lower?" I mean if there is a definition of absolute friendship this this is it, no? Sorry but... so I'm sorry, don't take it... it's just uncomfortable... yeah I cannot how shall I put it, whenever I see you know in Slovenia there is almost a saying about me that when in any social situation there is a slightless change chance opening for making a tasteless remark or whatever, I will do it. I cannot scan situation and see the opening for a tasteless remark. Sorry, let's go on. This science of not knowing. Yes that... so again I think that the sobering lesson of WikiLeaks is not so much secret service, is that we ordinary people are no longer allowed to pretend that we don't know it. Because here comes my pessimistic anthropology if you want. I think most of the people don't want to
unknown
know it. You have to... Lacan made some nice things when Lacan ferociously opposes this notion of *Wissenstrieb* that there is ingrained deep in us some drive to know. No Lacan says basically when you come to truly traumatic points we don't want to know it. And I in one of my political books I go to the
know it. You have to... Lacan made some nice things when Lacan ferociously opposes this notion of *Wissenstrieb* that there is ingrained deep in us some drive to know. No Lacan says basically when you come to truly traumatic points we don't want to know it. And I in one of my political books I go to the
Slavoj Žižek
end and claim that even in a democracy I doubt if we really want to decide, ordinary people. We want to maintain the appearance that we decide, but we want to be given a clear choice, you know like a master should tell us what we should choose freely. When we don't get a clear injunction what to choose, it's panic. It's usually real democracy, by this I mean where people really don't get a clear injunction and have to choose, is usually experienced as a crisis of democracy. You know? So in this sense I totally agree with you. There is a whole series types of not knowing. It's things that you really don't know. Then there are things that you don't know, there are certain things which are simply prohibited, you should not know them. But then there are things that you have to know but pretend not to know and so on and so on, no? And yes it would be nice to do a science, as it were, a science of this. So let's go back to to ideology. This is what fascinates me, you know. These moments, these much more interesting than the solicitation, than the prohibition which really solicits you to do it or the standard example in patriarchal societies. Father tells you don't mess with girls. Everyone knows the message between the lines is
end and claim that even in a democracy I doubt if we really want to decide, ordinary people. We want to maintain the appearance that we decide, but we want to be given a clear choice, you know like a master should tell us what we should choose freely. When we don't get a clear injunction what to choose, it's panic. It's usually real democracy, by this I mean where people really don't get a clear injunction and have to choose, is usually experienced as a crisis of democracy. You know? So in this sense I totally agree with you. There is a whole series types of not knowing. It's things that you really don't know. Then there are things that you don't know, there are certain things which are simply prohibited, you should not know them. But then there are things that you have to know but pretend not to know and so on and so on, no? And yes it would be nice to do a science, as it were, a science of this. So let's go back to to ideology. This is what fascinates me, you know. These moments, these much more interesting than the solicitation, than the prohibition which really solicits you to do it or the standard example in patriarchal societies. Father tells you don't mess with girls. Everyone knows the message between the lines is
unknown
do it but discreetly and so on and
do it but discreetly and so on and
Slavoj Žižek
so on. And I'm not sure I used this example in my Event book, I hope you don't know it. You know at this level I quite liked, although it's a stupid movie... my tastes are very low but... to some of you I told you but you know I'm a friend of Alain Badiou so I have no shame here. You know what type of movies Alain Badiou liked? Did you see *Bridges of Madison County*? Like I don't think you can fall any lower. Then of course *Titanic* is a mega movie for him. And then you know when he speaks about the courage decision, here I agree with him, he likes these big catastrophe movies or good Westerns and so on, you know. Why not? I have a fondness for some of old classical Westerns. Okay, but let's go on. So this types of... yes the prohibition solicitation and so on. Did you see it? Another of these lowest movies. It was distributed released I think around two years ago. A modest American movie which was a surprise hit: *Project X*. You know in a small town a high school kid who is a nerd wants to become popular so he wants to organize a party and he puts it on the web, "come to my place." He expects maybe a dozen people and then it happened what really happened two years ago in in Belgium, it was reported in the media. You know what happened in Belgium? A girl put it on the net, "come to my house," people arrived. The whole city was occupied, small... yes happened! So here it’s something similar. people arrived. What happens is this in the movie, now I'm talking about *Project X* the movie. This happens on a weekend when his father and mother, his parents, go for a short vacation trip. And father tells him exactly: "Maximum ten people, stay in the living room, don't touch the swimming pool, don't touch my car," and so on. What happens is people arrive, there is an explosion of violence, a car goes into a swimming pool, the car is ruined, the house is burned, there is street fighting, police intervenes with helicopters and so on. And then something beautiful happens at the movie's end. Father comes back, sees everything is ruined, and says to the son: "It's irresponsible what you did, you will have to work for years to pay for it." And then father adds, "but I must admit I didn't expect you to have guts for it." You know like secret... no. This is I think a good paternal authority, you know? Like this is what Lacan means when he says that an authentic authority prohibits thing but with this gently leaving you some... like there I don't see you, there I'm even expecting you to do it. And maybe you know this story Lacan draws attention to it, that even in Old Testament, you know is it first, second, I don't know which commandment, "don't celebrate other gods." But you know if you literally translate that commandment, it doesn't say this. It says, "don't celebrate other gods in my presence." Like the idea being: keep the appearances. What you do in your house is your problem. And maybe this is the secret of this great religions of the book monotheisms. Because you know in Islam you find something wonderfully the same. Muhammad says when he speaks about atheism, he says no one should be ordered what you believe is your problem. Muhammad expects you to follow the ritual and he says your beliefs, your problem. You... so what I want to say is that in this sense Lacan claims that the paternal prohibition, far from prohibiting, far from rendering enjoyment impossible, sustains it, opens up the space. That's how you enjoy, you know. You find a little niche where the Big Other doesn't see you. And now you will say: what about if we have a truly totalitarian master who doesn't allow for this niche? No, with totalitarian master it's even the opposite, I claim. It's not that he totally controls you, but he precisely wants actively to promote and regulate your pleasure. I'm sorry if you know another anecdote of mine which I always use, imagine it's you are a small boy or girl, it's Sunday afternoon, your father orders you to visit grandmother. You hate it. The old patriarchal father would have done something wonderful. He would have said told you, "I don't care how you feel, just do your duty, behave nicely there." That's perfect. There will be no problems, you would hate your father secretly which is very good, you will rebel... blah-blah. But then if you get a modern permissive father, nightmare enters. What he would have told you is something like, "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I want you to decide freely and to visit her only if you really want to." Every kid, and children are not stupid, knows that beneath the appearance of choice you have a much stronger injunction. The injunction is not you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to freely visit her, you have to want to visit her. This is the formula of totalitarianism, you know where again it's not just... this is why I like conservatism, which is just "fuck off I don't care what you think, obey it." You know? And this is why Lacan has this formula of regulating enjoyment and all the stuff. And I think this is maybe the basic formula of, if this term has any meaning, totalitarianism. For example, a Stalinist regime is not simply telling its subjects "whatever you wish you have to follow our orders." No, it's telling you "we know better than you what you really want." You know? But okay that's another story. Let's go on. So this imbalance interests me, how the again ideology, or in United States army, it's not only those marching chants, it's all those rituals, how do you call them, fragging or whatever, you know. There is no military community without some dirty obscene usually sexualized rituals. And I think it's crucial to see how those moments are it. May I use another example, maybe some of you know it, but it makes the point so clear. I'm sorry if you know it, you know *Casablanca*. Every civilized person should know it. You know that mysterious thing, scene, two thirds into the film when Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart Rick's flat, asks for those mysterious visas, for Portugal whatever exit visas. And okay they first struggle, I mean shout, then they embrace. And you have a fade-out for two or three and a half seconds, you see the tower of the Casablanca airport, then after three and a half seconds we move back and you see the two of them continuing the conversation. Now the big question is the obvious one: what do those three and a half seconds stand for narratively? Does it mean they did it, that it's just a condensed version for they had sex, or is it just that the same conversation goes on? And a guy who hates my type of theory but it's not stupid, a British cinema theorist Richard Maltby did a wonderful analysis of it where he demonstrates that the movie does something ingenious. He gives you clearly contradictory signal in both direction. On the one hand you get clear signals that they did it because, you know, classical Hollywood was totally codified. Like sex was prohibited but you had ways to signal it. And it's it would be extremely interesting to compare Soviet censorship and Hollywood censorship in late 1930s. I wonder which one was more controlled. For example, you know that in classical Hollywood homosexuality was prohibited even to mention it. But you know what was the code? You can check it up in some classical noir films. If somebody mentions about the guy, "oh you use perfume," what is a perfume? This means you are gay. Or another even more comical thing: prostitution was prohibited directly. So the code word was, "that woman is from New Orleans," don't ask me why, it means she is a prostitute. So in the same way when a couple is embracing, kissing, and you have a fade-out, it means sex. Especially if afterwards they smoke. You see them smoking. Because the basic dogma of Hollywood is that great human wisdom, which is the second and the third most enjoyable thing in the world: a drink before, the drink before and the cigarette after. You know, so again then there are so this codification, the fade-out and some other elements give a clear signal they did it. At the same time they are fully dressed, the same conversation seems to go on, they did not do it. And this is the perfect functioning of ideology. It is as if imagine yourself observed by an ethical each other, the film treats you as a divided subject. We will give you arguments so that you can pretend, "I'm just watching an innocent movie, nothing goes on," at the same time we open up the space for all the dirty fantasies what they were doing. And you know there is a guy, I forgot his name, who wrote a short story called *As Time Goes By*, which doesn't work, but it's a wonderful idea. It's it's a short story about this scene. It begins with Ingrid Bergman going up then then... and at the end but in between you have pages of absolute hardcore pornography, you know. And the beauty is that it gives an obscene twist to the best known Humphrey Bogart phrases, you know, like you know "Here's to you, kid." You know in this version he puts his penis out and says "Here's to you, kid," and puts his penis into... into her. So what I'm saying is that if you make it explicit in this way, I'm opposed to it, I think things get ruined. But again, as Maltby makes it clear in his analysis, you see this is my point, it's that it's not that we have official Hollywood and then the this is again a site of resistance, all the obscene. No, the obscenities generated by these all hints are part of Hollywood. Hollywood ideology is both, is the official prohibitions and their transgressions strictly codified. And Maltby quotes some wonderful dialogues of Joseph Breen, who was the boss of Hays Office, with some directors, where directors were saying "who here we have romantic encounter" and Joseph Breen the censor asks them, "Listen tell me what happened, did they fuck or not? If they did I will tell you how to signal it" and so on, you know? So you see this is the sad lesson, no? That again ideology at the same time has this obscene underground and so on and so on. So now let's go on with what I wanted to develop, which is after this stupid... we were at the beginning at Object A, yes. So would you agree, now I'm again the Brazilian master addressing you, both in drive and in desire Object A is the cause? I'm not sure myself but I tried to because Lacan in one of the Q&A sessions at the end of one session in Seminar XI, I think he is even asked this question directly: what is the difference, the status of Object A in desire and in drive? And he squeezes out more or less I think. But I think that the difference is that it's a very subtle one, desire is still a desire for a lost object, you know. You have an X, you are searching for it, for every eludes you, while in drive the object is directly lost as such. You know? It doesn't have this endlessly running after, you directly enjoy the loss as such. So now to elaborate this, I think we should do this. I will send you all these texts, it's more interesting I think if we do this. Why don't we, because you gave you gave me the idea of how maybe I will try to convince you how Lacan works if we go a little bit into this elementary Lacanian coordination. Like what we were saying, Lacan's theory of discourses, how simply convincing they are. Just remember what I already was improvising here, namely how for Lacan the lost object is primordially the subject itself. The lost object is not "oh I don't know what I want," the lost object is "what am I for the others?" And I think this provides, you know, Lacan his first discourse is the so-called Master's discourse. And it's very okay easy. A subject is represented by some signifier name whatever, I don't want to go into it. Then you address the other and but there is something which eludes this, which causes the failure, or this failure is the product, like the object is that which the excess. What is in as they usually put it, what is in me more than myself, like this is the remainder. Like as they say, *je ne sais quoi*, that's what's in me more than myself or that. This is the elementary structure. From this, you know if you just move things a little bit, precisely this enigma, like I played the game of representation I am represented but the enigma remains, remainder is produced. Like, but what am I? This brings, this is the cause of hysterization. And if you want to study ideology, I claim that that's the greatness of Lacan, that I think we should read what Lacan calls hysterical discourse as precisely resisting interpellation. Because as Lacan himself says, the basic hysterical question is what for an object I am. Like, okay, it's very annoying, this is the only moment that I do hate women, you know this eternal question, "why do you love me?" you know like, give me the reasons and so on, you know. This is the hysterical question. So you see, you are represented like I am a teacher, unfortunately, for you my students, but fuck it, it doesn't really function. And it's very nicely done how here you have the fantasy structure. Like I am represented by a signifier, I have a symbolic identity and so on, something eludes it and fantasy fills in this gap. Okay but let's go on. So this hysterizes me. So we move it, it works so nicely, then we get the hysterical discourse. If you understood this you understand this. Here as a divided subject, what am I, split between signifier, I don't know what I am, so I am addressing a question to the master to give me knowledge, to tell me what I am as the object. You see how beautifully it works, you know. Like a woman "and you my master, you say you love me, tell me, give me knowledge what an object I am, what do you love me?" This is the only point where I really hate women, okay... then you have another version where knowledge is here the product. Which is why Lacan is far from, you should remember this, far from dismissing hysteria. That's another topic. One of the unfortunate things of the '68 revolution, sexual, was and even Deleuze is not totally innocent here, was elevating perversion and dismissing hysteria. Like you know hysterics are confused, they don't know what they want, they subvert the master but they want a master, while perverts go to the end. No, Freud is totally opposed to this. Freud always emphasized and Lacan repeats it that a pervert always perfectly fits relations of domination. Every oppressive regime has a place for perverts. The truly subversive position is not that of a pervert, but is that of a hysteric. New knowledge is produced only by hysterical discourse. And incidentally, this is even a nice proto-feminist point because you know the subject par excellence, hysterical subject is the feminine subject. Which means something pretty radical people usually don't get it, that for Lacan not only is the subject not secretly masculine, no, the subject at its most elementary is feminine subject. Subjectivity in itself is feminine. It's not like some critics read Descartes, the pure cogito is secretly masculine. Then we can also put this one in the leading position. No it’s the opposite, sorry, I'm not doing the... yeah-yeah-yeah, sorry it's the opposite here, yes. This is University discourse which is not a discourse of real productive knowledge, but it's the discourse of true power because productive really productive knowledge is hysterical knowledge. It can also be explained. Like let's say you are addressed by a hysterical subject, what I... here Object A would be a the not yet symbolized remainder, let's say the object of pedagogical process, not yet subject. Pedagogical process is a knowledge addressing that excess and making it into a subject. The beauty is what does this master here mean? It can be wonderfully explained, that as Lacan puts it, the trick of the University discourse is that it pretends to be oh it's just neutral knowledge, but it's really master, or to put it in fashionable terms, it has a normative dimension. If you want a mega example is today's economic experts, no? They proclaim oh austerity and so on, it's just our economic knowledge. No. You know, this is typical today's discourse of authority. It doesn't directly act as a master, it pretends to be we are just experts and so on but there is a master hidden here. And okay don't lose time to keep the tensions, I will say that I will on purpose... okay nonetheless let's do it then. Then the last one of course we get the discourse of the analyst. The analyst as Lacan says precisely you should not assume a clear symbolic identity. Analysts speak from this position of the enigmatic remainder addressing the patient, hysterical patient, and here you have literally the supposed knowledge. Analyst the exercise is supposed to know. And what does it mean? That master signifier is produced. This, as Miller developed nicely, production here does not mean the final result, but it's more the excess the remainder. Think about what we were talking about, types of knowledge which only function insofar as they remain unspoken. The result of the analysis is that it brings out and in this sense disinvests as it were the master signifier which defines your identity and so on and so on. Here okay it was very wildly improvised what I did here. But I hope I gave you one idea of how all these Lacanian schemes, they may appear simply but fuck it they work. And what is so wonderful is that they then allow so many different readings. And now I will say something evil but evil in a very friendly way about my good friend Alain Badiou. When he uses these drawings, mathemes, I don't think they function in this perfect way. It’s just he just writes it down, you know. He said subject object and write it S-O but my god it doesn't have this how to put it this this wealth of you know of generating. These are really nodal points around which you can produce generate so many different meanings and so on. This is why going back to the point that you said, this is why I think it's not only Object A, it's all Lacanian terms that have this wealth of... the question is always the different levels of how you can read them. For example, I developed this with one of my old books if you have the triad real imaginary, what is Lacanian real? Again you have at least three dimensions. First you must be very careful about which Lacan you speak, because the real for early Lacan it's usually just external reality. But then once you get the real real, it has at least again three levels and my reading is that the very triad of real symbolic imaginary is reflected into the...
so on. And I'm not sure I used this example in my Event book, I hope you don't know it. You know at this level I quite liked, although it's a stupid movie... my tastes are very low but... to some of you I told you but you know I'm a friend of Alain Badiou so I have no shame here. You know what type of movies Alain Badiou liked? Did you see *Bridges of Madison County*? Like I don't think you can fall any lower. Then of course *Titanic* is a mega movie for him. And then you know when he speaks about the courage decision, here I agree with him, he likes these big catastrophe movies or good Westerns and so on, you know. Why not? I have a fondness for some of old classical Westerns. Okay, but let's go on. So this types of... yes the prohibition solicitation and so on. Did you see it? Another of these lowest movies. It was distributed released I think around two years ago. A modest American movie which was a surprise hit: *Project X*. You know in a small town a high school kid who is a nerd wants to become popular so he wants to organize a party and he puts it on the web, "come to my place." He expects maybe a dozen people and then it happened what really happened two years ago in in Belgium, it was reported in the media. You know what happened in Belgium? A girl put it on the net, "come to my house," people arrived. The whole city was occupied, small... yes happened! So here it’s something similar. people arrived. What happens is this in the movie, now I'm talking about *Project X* the movie. This happens on a weekend when his father and mother, his parents, go for a short vacation trip. And father tells him exactly: "Maximum ten people, stay in the living room, don't touch the swimming pool, don't touch my car," and so on. What happens is people arrive, there is an explosion of violence, a car goes into a swimming pool, the car is ruined, the house is burned, there is street fighting, police intervenes with helicopters and so on. And then something beautiful happens at the movie's end. Father comes back, sees everything is ruined, and says to the son: "It's irresponsible what you did, you will have to work for years to pay for it." And then father adds, "but I must admit I didn't expect you to have guts for it." You know like secret... no. This is I think a good paternal authority, you know? Like this is what Lacan means when he says that an authentic authority prohibits thing but with this gently leaving you some... like there I don't see you, there I'm even expecting you to do it. And maybe you know this story Lacan draws attention to it, that even in Old Testament, you know is it first, second, I don't know which commandment, "don't celebrate other gods." But you know if you literally translate that commandment, it doesn't say this. It says, "don't celebrate other gods in my presence." Like the idea being: keep the appearances. What you do in your house is your problem. And maybe this is the secret of this great religions of the book monotheisms. Because you know in Islam you find something wonderfully the same. Muhammad says when he speaks about atheism, he says no one should be ordered what you believe is your problem. Muhammad expects you to follow the ritual and he says your beliefs, your problem. You... so what I want to say is that in this sense Lacan claims that the paternal prohibition, far from prohibiting, far from rendering enjoyment impossible, sustains it, opens up the space. That's how you enjoy, you know. You find a little niche where the Big Other doesn't see you. And now you will say: what about if we have a truly totalitarian master who doesn't allow for this niche? No, with totalitarian master it's even the opposite, I claim. It's not that he totally controls you, but he precisely wants actively to promote and regulate your pleasure. I'm sorry if you know another anecdote of mine which I always use, imagine it's you are a small boy or girl, it's Sunday afternoon, your father orders you to visit grandmother. You hate it. The old patriarchal father would have done something wonderful. He would have said told you, "I don't care how you feel, just do your duty, behave nicely there." That's perfect. There will be no problems, you would hate your father secretly which is very good, you will rebel... blah-blah. But then if you get a modern permissive father, nightmare enters. What he would have told you is something like, "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I want you to decide freely and to visit her only if you really want to." Every kid, and children are not stupid, knows that beneath the appearance of choice you have a much stronger injunction. The injunction is not you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to freely visit her, you have to want to visit her. This is the formula of totalitarianism, you know where again it's not just... this is why I like conservatism, which is just "fuck off I don't care what you think, obey it." You know? And this is why Lacan has this formula of regulating enjoyment and all the stuff. And I think this is maybe the basic formula of, if this term has any meaning, totalitarianism. For example, a Stalinist regime is not simply telling its subjects "whatever you wish you have to follow our orders." No, it's telling you "we know better than you what you really want." You know? But okay that's another story. Let's go on. So this imbalance interests me, how the again ideology, or in United States army, it's not only those marching chants, it's all those rituals, how do you call them, fragging or whatever, you know. There is no military community without some dirty obscene usually sexualized rituals. And I think it's crucial to see how those moments are it. May I use another example, maybe some of you know it, but it makes the point so clear. I'm sorry if you know it, you know *Casablanca*. Every civilized person should know it. You know that mysterious thing, scene, two thirds into the film when Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart Rick's flat, asks for those mysterious visas, for Portugal whatever exit visas. And okay they first struggle, I mean shout, then they embrace. And you have a fade-out for two or three and a half seconds, you see the tower of the Casablanca airport, then after three and a half seconds we move back and you see the two of them continuing the conversation. Now the big question is the obvious one: what do those three and a half seconds stand for narratively? Does it mean they did it, that it's just a condensed version for they had sex, or is it just that the same conversation goes on? And a guy who hates my type of theory but it's not stupid, a British cinema theorist Richard Maltby did a wonderful analysis of it where he demonstrates that the movie does something ingenious. He gives you clearly contradictory signal in both direction. On the one hand you get clear signals that they did it because, you know, classical Hollywood was totally codified. Like sex was prohibited but you had ways to signal it. And it's it would be extremely interesting to compare Soviet censorship and Hollywood censorship in late 1930s. I wonder which one was more controlled. For example, you know that in classical Hollywood homosexuality was prohibited even to mention it. But you know what was the code? You can check it up in some classical noir films. If somebody mentions about the guy, "oh you use perfume," what is a perfume? This means you are gay. Or another even more comical thing: prostitution was prohibited directly. So the code word was, "that woman is from New Orleans," don't ask me why, it means she is a prostitute. So in the same way when a couple is embracing, kissing, and you have a fade-out, it means sex. Especially if afterwards they smoke. You see them smoking. Because the basic dogma of Hollywood is that great human wisdom, which is the second and the third most enjoyable thing in the world: a drink before, the drink before and the cigarette after. You know, so again then there are so this codification, the fade-out and some other elements give a clear signal they did it. At the same time they are fully dressed, the same conversation seems to go on, they did not do it. And this is the perfect functioning of ideology. It is as if imagine yourself observed by an ethical each other, the film treats you as a divided subject. We will give you arguments so that you can pretend, "I'm just watching an innocent movie, nothing goes on," at the same time we open up the space for all the dirty fantasies what they were doing. And you know there is a guy, I forgot his name, who wrote a short story called *As Time Goes By*, which doesn't work, but it's a wonderful idea. It's it's a short story about this scene. It begins with Ingrid Bergman going up then then... and at the end but in between you have pages of absolute hardcore pornography, you know. And the beauty is that it gives an obscene twist to the best known Humphrey Bogart phrases, you know, like you know "Here's to you, kid." You know in this version he puts his penis out and says "Here's to you, kid," and puts his penis into... into her. So what I'm saying is that if you make it explicit in this way, I'm opposed to it, I think things get ruined. But again, as Maltby makes it clear in his analysis, you see this is my point, it's that it's not that we have official Hollywood and then the this is again a site of resistance, all the obscene. No, the obscenities generated by these all hints are part of Hollywood. Hollywood ideology is both, is the official prohibitions and their transgressions strictly codified. And Maltby quotes some wonderful dialogues of Joseph Breen, who was the boss of Hays Office, with some directors, where directors were saying "who here we have romantic encounter" and Joseph Breen the censor asks them, "Listen tell me what happened, did they fuck or not? If they did I will tell you how to signal it" and so on, you know? So you see this is the sad lesson, no? That again ideology at the same time has this obscene underground and so on and so on. So now let's go on with what I wanted to develop, which is after this stupid... we were at the beginning at Object A, yes. So would you agree, now I'm again the Brazilian master addressing you, both in drive and in desire Object A is the cause? I'm not sure myself but I tried to because Lacan in one of the Q&A sessions at the end of one session in Seminar XI, I think he is even asked this question directly: what is the difference, the status of Object A in desire and in drive? And he squeezes out more or less I think. But I think that the difference is that it's a very subtle one, desire is still a desire for a lost object, you know. You have an X, you are searching for it, for every eludes you, while in drive the object is directly lost as such. You know? It doesn't have this endlessly running after, you directly enjoy the loss as such. So now to elaborate this, I think we should do this. I will send you all these texts, it's more interesting I think if we do this. Why don't we, because you gave you gave me the idea of how maybe I will try to convince you how Lacan works if we go a little bit into this elementary Lacanian coordination. Like what we were saying, Lacan's theory of discourses, how simply convincing they are. Just remember what I already was improvising here, namely how for Lacan the lost object is primordially the subject itself. The lost object is not "oh I don't know what I want," the lost object is "what am I for the others?" And I think this provides, you know, Lacan his first discourse is the so-called Master's discourse. And it's very okay easy. A subject is represented by some signifier name whatever, I don't want to go into it. Then you address the other and but there is something which eludes this, which causes the failure, or this failure is the product, like the object is that which the excess. What is in as they usually put it, what is in me more than myself, like this is the remainder. Like as they say, *je ne sais quoi*, that's what's in me more than myself or that. This is the elementary structure. From this, you know if you just move things a little bit, precisely this enigma, like I played the game of representation I am represented but the enigma remains, remainder is produced. Like, but what am I? This brings, this is the cause of hysterization. And if you want to study ideology, I claim that that's the greatness of Lacan, that I think we should read what Lacan calls hysterical discourse as precisely resisting interpellation. Because as Lacan himself says, the basic hysterical question is what for an object I am. Like, okay, it's very annoying, this is the only moment that I do hate women, you know this eternal question, "why do you love me?" you know like, give me the reasons and so on, you know. This is the hysterical question. So you see, you are represented like I am a teacher, unfortunately, for you my students, but fuck it, it doesn't really function. And it's very nicely done how here you have the fantasy structure. Like I am represented by a signifier, I have a symbolic identity and so on, something eludes it and fantasy fills in this gap. Okay but let's go on. So this hysterizes me. So we move it, it works so nicely, then we get the hysterical discourse. If you understood this you understand this. Here as a divided subject, what am I, split between signifier, I don't know what I am, so I am addressing a question to the master to give me knowledge, to tell me what I am as the object. You see how beautifully it works, you know. Like a woman "and you my master, you say you love me, tell me, give me knowledge what an object I am, what do you love me?" This is the only point where I really hate women, okay... then you have another version where knowledge is here the product. Which is why Lacan is far from, you should remember this, far from dismissing hysteria. That's another topic. One of the unfortunate things of the '68 revolution, sexual, was and even Deleuze is not totally innocent here, was elevating perversion and dismissing hysteria. Like you know hysterics are confused, they don't know what they want, they subvert the master but they want a master, while perverts go to the end. No, Freud is totally opposed to this. Freud always emphasized and Lacan repeats it that a pervert always perfectly fits relations of domination. Every oppressive regime has a place for perverts. The truly subversive position is not that of a pervert, but is that of a hysteric. New knowledge is produced only by hysterical discourse. And incidentally, this is even a nice proto-feminist point because you know the subject par excellence, hysterical subject is the feminine subject. Which means something pretty radical people usually don't get it, that for Lacan not only is the subject not secretly masculine, no, the subject at its most elementary is feminine subject. Subjectivity in itself is feminine. It's not like some critics read Descartes, the pure cogito is secretly masculine. Then we can also put this one in the leading position. No it’s the opposite, sorry, I'm not doing the... yeah-yeah-yeah, sorry it's the opposite here, yes. This is University discourse which is not a discourse of real productive knowledge, but it's the discourse of true power because productive really productive knowledge is hysterical knowledge. It can also be explained. Like let's say you are addressed by a hysterical subject, what I... here Object A would be a the not yet symbolized remainder, let's say the object of pedagogical process, not yet subject. Pedagogical process is a knowledge addressing that excess and making it into a subject. The beauty is what does this master here mean? It can be wonderfully explained, that as Lacan puts it, the trick of the University discourse is that it pretends to be oh it's just neutral knowledge, but it's really master, or to put it in fashionable terms, it has a normative dimension. If you want a mega example is today's economic experts, no? They proclaim oh austerity and so on, it's just our economic knowledge. No. You know, this is typical today's discourse of authority. It doesn't directly act as a master, it pretends to be we are just experts and so on but there is a master hidden here. And okay don't lose time to keep the tensions, I will say that I will on purpose... okay nonetheless let's do it then. Then the last one of course we get the discourse of the analyst. The analyst as Lacan says precisely you should not assume a clear symbolic identity. Analysts speak from this position of the enigmatic remainder addressing the patient, hysterical patient, and here you have literally the supposed knowledge. Analyst the exercise is supposed to know. And what does it mean? That master signifier is produced. This, as Miller developed nicely, production here does not mean the final result, but it's more the excess the remainder. Think about what we were talking about, types of knowledge which only function insofar as they remain unspoken. The result of the analysis is that it brings out and in this sense disinvests as it were the master signifier which defines your identity and so on and so on. Here okay it was very wildly improvised what I did here. But I hope I gave you one idea of how all these Lacanian schemes, they may appear simply but fuck it they work. And what is so wonderful is that they then allow so many different readings. And now I will say something evil but evil in a very friendly way about my good friend Alain Badiou. When he uses these drawings, mathemes, I don't think they function in this perfect way. It’s just he just writes it down, you know. He said subject object and write it S-O but my god it doesn't have this how to put it this this wealth of you know of generating. These are really nodal points around which you can produce generate so many different meanings and so on. This is why going back to the point that you said, this is why I think it's not only Object A, it's all Lacanian terms that have this wealth of... the question is always the different levels of how you can read them. For example, I developed this with one of my old books if you have the triad real imaginary, what is Lacanian real? Again you have at least three dimensions. First you must be very careful about which Lacan you speak, because the real for early Lacan it's usually just external reality. But then once you get the real real, it has at least again three levels and my reading is that the very triad of real symbolic imaginary is reflected into the...