Lacan’s Hypothesis: Psychoanalysis as the Ex-Timate Core of Philosophy
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-10-31 · 2:08:46 · 16,736 words
with Cathy Newman
psychoanalysisideologysexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismfascism-populismdemocracyphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticssubjectivity
A Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities masterclass lecture by Žižek titled 'Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,' covering the Lacanian notion of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir) and its derivation from Marx's surplus value. He illustrates the concept via bureaucracy, the Goebbels Total War speech, and consumerist rituals, then extends the argument into sexual difference, transgender politics, identity politics, and class antagonism. The talk closes with a discussion of analytic intervention and a preview of the following day's session on Frank Ruda's work on fatalism and freedom.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's sardonic formulation applied to Trump's hair: real hair that looks like a wig, achieving the opposite of the usual strategy of making a wig look like real hair, a genuine Lacanian reversal.
as “plus-de-jouir (surplus enjoyment)”
The paradoxical excess pleasure derived not from attaining an object but from the detour, renunciation, or ritual approach to it; Lacan's central discovery, explicitly derived by Žižek here from Marx's Mehrwert (surplus value).
as “Lustgewinn (profit of enjoyment)”
Freud's term for the additional pleasure derived from the detour or mode of approaching an object, which Žižek treats as the empirical root of Lacan's surplus enjoyment.
as “jouissance (enjoyment)”
Enjoyment as distinct from pleasure, illustrated by the crowd ecstatically consenting to Goebbels' call for total war and maximal suffering, pleasure in pain at its purest.
Žižek's signature claim that bureaucracy is not an instrument of efficiency but a machine of pure surplus enjoyment through eternal postponement, analogous to divine mystery, 'our only contact with the divine in godless times.'
The structural remainder in any symbolic/social field that cannot be integrated, the figure Žižek tracks across Badiou, Rancière, Hegel, and Lacan as the common post-Hegelian problem.
Hegelian sublation; Žižek notes that surplus enjoyment names precisely that which resists Aufhebung in any symbolic field.
as “Pöbel (rabble/rebel)”
Hegel's figure of the social remainder that has no proper place in the ethical order; Žižek cites Frank Ruda's book on it as the archetype of the wandering excess.
as “la part des sans-part (the part of no-part)”
Rancière's term for the element that is inside the social edifice yet has no proper place in it; Žižek invokes it (via Badiou) to discuss refugees, the poor, and transgender people as figures of this excess.
as “il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel (there is no sexual relation)”
Lacan's thesis that sexuality is constitutively antagonistic at its core, so that trans identities and all sexual 'exceptions' are symptoms of this foundational impossibility rather than mere marginal variations.
Žižek's label for the left's self-lacerating moralistic complaining ('It's horrible, did you see what they are doing?') as a form of enjoyment that replaces practical action with the pleasure of maintaining moral superiority.
The left-moralist posture of enjoying one's own moral authority while lamenting catastrophe without acting, equivalent to what Žižek calls the surplus enjoyment of the left.
Žižek treats transgender identity not as marginal deviation from a norm but as the symptom in the Lacanian sense, the point where the truth of the constitutive deadlock of sexuality explodes most visibly.
A satirical reductio in which Žižek applies the logic of sexual identity categories (bi-class, masturbatory cross-class, trans-class, class fluid, two-spirit capitalist) to expose the absurdity of translating antagonism into identity.
The psychoanalytic act at the end of analysis that does not integrate or resolve the excess but invents a new name that displaces the subject's fixation, illustrated by the joke punch-line as a model of analytic cut.
as “identity politics as politics of coexistence”
Žižek's reframing of identity politics: its goal is not radical transformation but coexistence ('can't we all live together'), which obscures the class antagonism that cannot be domesticated into competing identities.
Lacan's name for the object-cause of desire and the embodiment of surplus enjoyment; Žižek presents it as Lacan's own stated greatest invention, distinct from the unconscious structured like a language or the non-existence of sexual relation.
as “sexual difference (Lacanian)”
Not the biological or social distinction between men and women, but an inner self-difference or obstacle that ruins the very field of sexuality, the deadlock at the centre rather than a binary taxonomy.
as “Homo deus / post-human prospect”
The prospect that digital control and biogenetic manipulation will translate class divisions into direct biological divisions, rendering sexuality unnecessary for reproduction and thus ending subjectivity as we know it.
as “performative construction of gender”
Butler's theory that gender is not naturally fixed but contingently constructed through performance; Žižek challenges it by asking whether it is itself an eternal theory or historically specific to modernity.
Stories he reaches for 6
In a 1930s Politburo debate about whether money will exist under communism, Stalin resolves the deadlock with: 'There will be money and there will not be money, some people will have money, other people will not.' Žižek applies this to post-humanism.
“'There will be money and there will not be money.' 'How do you mean, Comrade Stalin?' 'Some people will have money, other people will not have money.'”
A patient wanting to take a woman to dinner before sex mistakenly tells the maitre d' 'a room with a bed for two, please'; the correct Lacanian reading is not that he had sex on his mind but that he was afraid of enjoying the dinner so much he'd be too tired, the slip is a reminder not to get lost in the detour.
“He was so afraid that he will enjoy too much what should have been only the preparatory step of eating... it was a reminder to himself this slip.”
Žižek's mother constantly offered to run errands ('Should I go to a store for you?'), and when refused, broke down crying. Žižek uses this to illustrate the dirty libidinal economy behind apparent altruism, the enjoyment of being wounded by ingratitude.
“When I said 'Please stop, I don't want anything from you,' she broke down crying, 'Oh my God, what should I then do with myself?'”
In Brazil, rich diners receive an unappetizing mash on a plate accompanied by a beautiful colour photo of what they are 'really' eating; the fantasy image, not the real food, constitutes the experience.
“They get a plate on which there is just a kind of a dog shit heap... And above this, it's a beautiful color image telling you what you are really eating.”
Impoverished middle-class Americans who can't afford to buy anything go to Walmart, fill their carts in a ritualized way, then abandon them and leave, seeking pure surplus enjoyment without the object.
“they go to the mega store and they in a ritualized way play the game of buying. They go around, fill it in, and they just leave it there and go out.”
Žižek screens clips of Goebbels' 1943 Sportpalast speech where the crowd ecstatically shouts for maximal suffering and total war; Goebbels' own face enters a trance of disgusting passivity, the purest illustration of jouissance as pleasure in pain.
“Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be? ... His face becomes twisted in a certain disgusting passivity, he is so clearly enjoying himself.”
Works invoked 18
Capital book
Marx's Critique of Political Economy; identified as the direct source for Lacan's concept of surplus enjoyment (Mehrwert → plus-de-jouir), per Tomšič's reconstruction.
Vertigo film
Claimed to be 'a deeply feminist film'; Scottie is characterized as 'evil,' in love only with a dead fantasy; Judy's love for him is the only authentic love.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own massive book; self-deprecatingly mentioned when he says he prefers short books and gestures at his own as an example of what not to do ('look, pages, you know?').
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as a blockbuster illustrating Sloterdijk's 'cupola' metaphor for class segregation.
The Hunger Games film
Cited (alongside Elysium) as a Hollywood illustration of the coming biopolitical class topology, the protected cupola versus the excluded majority.
Brazil film
Called 'one of the greatest British movies'; two scenes used extensively, the bureaucracy corridor scene for surplus enjoyment, and the restaurant fantasy-image scene for male fantasy and objet petit a.
The Crying Game film
Used to illustrate that the structure of male heterosexual desire is already homosexual, the man's love is authentic, not suppressed gay desire, but the beloved's penis reveals that the ideal is 'a man dressed as a woman.'
Les non-dupes errent other
Lacan's seminar; quoted for the punning title (non-dupes/noms du père) and for Lacan's self-description of objet petit a as his central invention.
Samo Tomšič's book; cited to establish the derivation of Lacan's surplus enjoyment from Marx's surplus value.
M. Butterfly film
Cited alongside The Crying Game as a second film with essentially the same Lacanian point about male heterosexual fantasy structure.
Frank Ruda's book; Žižek calls it 'wonderful' and uses it as the occasion to propose his own inversion of freedom, the future is fixed, the past can be changed.
Kolberg film
Veit Harlan's 1944-45 Nazi propaganda film; presented as an example of 'ideological madness at its purest', Goebbels' belief that a great film could turn the war around.
La Vraie Vie book
Badiou's book; Žižek says 'I almost cried' reading it, calls it 'beautiful,' especially its Platonist-Maoist celebration of youth and its analysis of eternal adolescence and premature feminine maturity.
The Mikado opera
Gilbert and Sullivan; Žižek ends his satirical trans-class taxonomy by quoting 'They are all on the list and none of them will be missed' as the appropriate verdict.
Kant with Sade essay
Lacan's text; cited for its claim that the movement culminating in Freud begins with Kant, used to defend Lacan's inseparability from philosophy.
Male Fantasies book
Klaus Theweleit's book; cited for its documentation of German conservative obsessions with violent Bolshevik women as the ultimate horror, evidence for Žižek's analysis of the conservative gender tradition.
The Song of the Bell other
Friedrich Schiller's poem; called 'an extraordinary ultra-conservative piece' tracing the French Revolution to women leaving the home, invoked as the origin of the German Romantic tradition of horror at women in public.
Void and its Excess book
Žižek's forthcoming book at the time of the talk; briefly described as arguing that excesses and symptoms exist not because the norm fails to integrate them but because the base itself is cut by a constitutive impossibility.
People invoked 40
Described as a 'good friend'; used to introduce the anecdote about Palestinian women and Israeli lesbians protesting together, Žižek agrees it is 'a miracle' but warns against over-utopian conclusions.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Žižek mentions having read the manuscript of her new book and plans to discuss her examples from jokes as illustrations of analytic intervention; also mentions her coining 'scroptacles' about Roger Scruton.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited for his observation about the potentially progressive egalitarian side of the army (October Revolution, the Aurora), and contrasted with Stalin; Žižek endorses the 'brutal Leninist question' about how renaming actually functions.
Jacques Lacan positive
The central theoretical reference throughout; Žižek treats Lacan's invention of objet petit a as his greatest discovery and defends Lacan's inseparability from philosophy against clinicians like Miller.
Madeleine Albright negative
Her statement that 500,000 Iraqi children dead was 'an acceptable price' is called 'more obscene than all Trumpisms together', the paradigm of polished liberal obscenity.
The target of the Croatian plane joke used to illustrate the psychoanalytic intervention, his authoritarian right-wing rule in 1990s Croatia is the political backdrop.
Mentioned as the 'right-wing' position in the Stalin money-in-communism joke (money is natural and will remain).
Frank Ruda positive
Žižek calls Ruda a 'good friend' (by which he jokes he means he hates him), praises his book Abolishing Freedom and his work on the Hegelian Pöbel, and has invited him to present at the masterclass.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek argues her performative theory of sexuality is covertly liberal, fails to answer whether its claims are historically specific or eternal, and that when challenged she responded aggressively by invoking Foucault to dismiss the question.
Friedrich Schiller negative
The Song of the Bell is cited as an 'extraordinary ultra-conservative piece' that traces the French Revolution to women leaving the home, evidence of the conservative tradition's horror of women as public figures.
Žižek repeatedly calls Trump 'vulgar,' 'disgusting,' and 'white trash' but argues he has paradoxically achieved useful political disruptions (destroying the GOP establishment) and occasionally says non-idiotic things (on Russia, Palestinians).
Terry Gilliam positive
Brazil is described as 'one of the greatest British movies' and used extensively to illustrate surplus enjoyment and male fantasy.
Tim Cook negative
Grouped with Zuckerberg as a tech CEO whose fanatical LGBT advocacy serves to deflect from class analysis.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Briefly dismissed as representative of techno-optimist 'singularity' thinking that Žižek calls a naïve happy ending to the post-human question.
Justin Trudeau negative
Canada's 'happy face' multiculturalism under Trudeau is criticized as cosmetic while massive abuse of indigenous Inuit populations continues, exemplifying the hypocritical liberal humanitarian stance.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek praises Badiou's new book La Vraie Vie ('I almost cried') for its observations on eternal adolescence, premature feminine maturity, and the abolition of conscription; he has some reservations but finds it beautiful.
Mentioned as 'close to' the Communist Gnostic strand that believed sexuality was the last resistance of the bourgeoisie and wanted to create a post-emotional, post-sexual new man; Stalin's opposition to this is presented as paradoxically winning popular support.
Fredric Jameson positive
Briefly mentioned in passing: Badiou's observation about conscription and egalitarianism 'approaches the motif' where Jameson has worked, though Badiou and Jameson 'don't like each other.'
Bernie Sanders positive
Called 'the true miracle' for mobilizing both progressive academics and small farmers usually captured by right-wing populism; Žižek is baffled and disappointed by his capitulation to Clinton at the DNC.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Named as one of the tech capitalists who fanatically support LGBT causes while suggesting class difference should likewise be dissolved into an identity ('I help workers, I want a special category'), illustrating how capital co-opts identity logic.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Žižek treats Varoufakis's plan to unsettle the Eurozone from within (pseudo-Euro, parallel currency) as 'the true threat,' as distinct from both Syriza's capitulation and the Left Platform's Grexit, and as the reason he was forced to resign.
Used as a case study in ideology and surplus enjoyment; Žižek describes him as 'a fascinating figure' of ideological madness who went to the end while others (Göring, Himmler) compromised.
Roger Scruton negative
Dismissively referred to as 'your greatest scrotum philosopher', Alenka Zupančič's wordplay ('scroptacles') is approvingly cited.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Cited for his analysis of capitalism as a 'cupola', a spatial metaphor for growing class segregation, which Žižek uses to support his argument about class antagonism becoming biological.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Mentioned as co-author of the 'Triple Orgy' book with Butler and Žižek, where Žižek developed his critique of Butler on historicity.
Cited alongside Trump and Hillary as figures of a new type of power; Žižek ironically notes there is 'almost something refreshing' in Duterte's open conversion of state power into mob rule, proposed as one pole of 'Hillary Duterte Trump,' the ideal composite politician.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited for the concept of 'la part des sans-part' (the part of no-part) as Žižek's framework for discussing wandering excesses in social structure.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Žižek reports Miller had a 'tremendous outburst' against him in the US accusing him of doing politics rather than real psychoanalysis; Žižek dismisses this as hypocritical given Miller's own political activity (Sarkozy committee).
Darian Leader positive
Described as a 'good British friend' and 'distinguished analyst'; Žižek uses his interpretation of a patient's Freudian slip to illustrate correct Lacanian clinical reading.
Mentioned as having proposed, at a previous Birkbeck event, splitting personal identity from legislative solutions for trans recognition, a position Žižek does not fully adopt.
Angela Merkel positive
Praised despite reservations as 'by far the best' European leader on refugees, and her proposal to dedicate a percentage of EU budget to refugee support is called 'very reasonable'; Žižek criticizes the left for focusing on German failures rather than others' worse behavior.
Hillary Clinton negative
Presented as the embodiment of Badiou's 'manipulating woman' figure who uses a fake inclusive femininity to exercise efficient power while obscuring economic class interests; her DNC moment is described as a humiliation of Sanders.
Samo Tomšič positive
Žižek cites Tomšič's The Capitalist Unconscious to establish that Lacan's surplus enjoyment is directly derived from his reading of Marx's Capital.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo is invoked as a 'deeply feminist film' with Scottie as an 'evil character' and Judy as the only truly loving figure, used to illustrate the male tendency to relate to a woman as a fantasy screen.
Several Stalin jokes are used: the money/communism Politburo joke to illustrate class division post-humanism; the observation that Stalin triumphed because he reassured people about permanence of language, family, sexuality against Communist Gnostic constructivism.
Karl Marx positive
Capital and Critique of Political Economy are identified (via Tomšič) as the direct empirical source for Lacan's surplus enjoyment concept; Mehrwert (surplus value) is the origin of plus-de-jouir.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for Lustgewinn (profit of enjoyment) and the theory of fetishism; Žižek uses the fetishism theory to set up its inversion in The Crying Game.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced throughout via Aufhebung, the wandering excess, and the Pöbel; Žižek also invokes the Hegelian logic of universal labor becoming visible only under capitalism as a parallel to Butler's performativity theory.
Klaus Theweleit positive
Male Fantasies is cited for its documentation of German conservatives' obsession with 'crazy seductive, promiscuous, brutal, violent Bolshevik women' at the end of WWI, supporting Žižek's point about conservative gender ideology.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited as the starting point of the movement culminating in Freud, per Lacan's Kant with Sade; also invoked in the Butler discussion where Žižek is accused of being a 'closet Kantian' for positing a formal a priori structure of sexuality.
What it argues
surplus enjoyment and its political-cultural manifestationsbureaucracy as erotic-theological phenomenonsexual difference as constitutive impossibility, not binary normidentity politics versus class antagonismtransgender as symptom of the impossibility of sexual relationTrump and the crisis of liberal-left politicsanalytic intervention and the production of a new signifier
Dialectical moves 10
“Trump achieved a real Lacanian achievement: he has real hair which looks like a wig — the opposite of the usual strategy of making a wig look like real hair. This is the illusion of illusion.”
The joke condenses a genuine Lacanian inversion: instead of concealing artifice behind reality, the real thing presents itself as artifice, a second-order simulacrum.
“Madeleine Albright saying half a million dead Iraqi children is 'an acceptable price' is more obscene than all Trumpisms together.”
The polished, morally serious liberal statement is revealed as more obscene than the vulgar demagogue's, inverting the usual moral hierarchy of respectable versus populist speech.
“The norm itself is already perverted. You think you are a heterosexual man? Your fantasy is screwing a guy dressed up as a woman.”
Eccentric sexual positions are not deviations from a healthy norm but symptoms of what is already wrong at the centre; the norm is the primary pathology.
“The only true heterosexuals are lesbians. Standard heterosexual men are, from the male side, just a subspecies of homosexuality.”
Lacan's inversion: what passes as the norm (male heterosexuality) is structurally a form of the supposed deviation (homosexuality), because male fantasy treats the woman as a fantasmatic screen.
“Psychoanalysis is more philosophical than philosophy — it brings out the fundamental gesture of philosophy that philosophers themselves ignore.”
The discipline that appears to be outside or against philosophy turns out to be its deepest instantiation; the anti-philosophy is the truest philosophy.
“The wandering excesses (transgender, rabble, sans-papiers) are not just remainders to be included — they are symptoms of a foundational antagonism at the very heart of the structure.”
Far from being secondary effects awaiting integration, the excesses are the truth of the system itself; inclusion is still a liberal solution that leaves the deadlock untouched.
“Bureaucracy is our only contact with the divine in godless times — Kafka was right.”
Rather than being mere administrative obstruction, bureaucracy's eternal postponement and unresolvable process structurally mirrors the experience of the divine, revaluing what looks like dysfunction as spiritual form.
“The Swiss bureaucracy doesn't give you citizenship — at most it gives you a document asserting that you are 'seriously considered for the possibility to become a Swiss citizen.' That limbo is the utmost you can get.”
The endpoint of bureaucratic process is not resolution but the certification of a state of endless consideration, pure surplus enjoyment institutionalized.
“The past is what we can change (through radical reinterpretation), not the future — almost the opposite of the standard picture of freedom.”
Freedom is relocated from the open future to retrospective reinterpretation of the fixed past, inverting the usual temporal logic of political agency.
“Will there be humanity or not in the post-human era? 'Some people will have all the power, other people will not' — the Stalin answer.”
The apparently metaphysical question about post-humanism resolves into a classic class-division answer: the dystopia is not uniform dehumanization but hierarchical biopolitical stratification.
Claims 20
reframes
Trump, despite being a disgusting opportunist, has made a paradoxical left-wing achievement by destroying the Republican establishment and creating space for a new populist left to reach his working-class base.Trump and US politics
asserts
Lacan's central and self-proclaimed greatest invention is objet petit a as surplus enjoyment, derived directly from Marx's concept of surplus value.Lacanian psychoanalysis / surplus enjoyment
asserts
Bureaucracy generates pure surplus enjoyment through eternal postponement and the refusal to solve problems, making it an erotic and theological phenomenon rather than an instrument of efficiency.bureaucracy and surplus enjoyment
asserts
The Goebbels Total War speech after Stalingrad is the purest available illustration of jouissance — crowd enjoyment in collective renunciation and suffering — distinguishing Lacanian jouissance from mere pleasure.jouissance / Nazi ideology
asserts
Transgender people are not marginal exceptions to sexual norms but the purest symptom of Lacan's thesis that sexuality is constitutively traversed by impossibility ('there is no sexual relation').transgender identity / sexual difference
asserts
Homosexuality does not undermine the gender binary — it operates fully within it — whereas transgender experience does, making trans the more genuinely subversive position.LGBT politics / gender binary
asserts
Sexual difference for Lacan is not men versus women but an inner obstacle or self-impediment at the core of sexuality itself, which makes all nominal 'norms' already perverted.sexual difference / Lacanian theory
rejects
Identity politics dissolves class antagonism by translating it into questions of recognition and coexistence, thereby serving the interests of capital.identity politics
asserts
The left's moralistic self-laceration over refugee and other humanitarian crises is itself a form of surplus enjoyment — the pleasure of moral superiority substituted for practical-political action.left-wing moralism / surplus enjoyment
rejects
The principle that any designation that hurts you gives you the right to be called differently is not a universal principle: criminals and war criminals should be called what they are even if it hurts them.identity politics / trigger warnings / rights of naming
reframes
The abolition of military conscription has an ambiguous progressive valence: it removes one of the last genuinely egalitarian institutions and accelerates the privatization of violence into mercenary forces.militarism / egalitarianism
asserts
Psychoanalysis is more philosophical than philosophy because it brings out the fundamental gesture of philosophy — the decentering of the subject — that philosophers themselves ignore.relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy
rejects
Butler's performative theory of sexuality is implicitly a linear liberal progress narrative and cannot answer whether its own claims are historically specific or eternal — a question Žižek regards as fundamental.Judith Butler / performativity theory
asserts
Advanced digital surveillance and biogenetics are translating class divisions into direct biological divisions, making the dystopian Homo deus prospect already present rather than a future scenario.technology / class / post-humanism
rejects
University should expose people to the brutality of life, not make them feel safe; trigger warnings are counterproductive because confronting horror (in art, theory) is the only thing that prevents it recurring in reality.trigger warnings / university / safe space
reframes
The Occupy Wall Street formula 'We are the 99%' points to a genuine wandering excess, but merely including all such excesses into a pluralist framework is still a liberal solution; the real task is to locate the foundational antagonism that produces the excess.Occupy / liberal pluralism / class antagonism
reframes
Freedom should be reframed: the past is what we can change through radical reinterpretation, while the future may be fixed — inverting the standard assumption that only the future is open.freedom / temporality
asserts
When police kill without justification, it is incomparably worse than a citizen killing police, because the former constitutes self-destruction of the law and erodes the basic trust that law requires.police violence / Black Lives Matter
reframes
Corporate support for LGBT causes (Apple, Facebook) should prompt the question of whether this is a genuinely neutral field or whether capital co-opts identity politics precisely to deflect from class conflict.LGBT / capitalism / identity politics
asserts
Hitchcock's Vertigo is a deeply feminist film because Scottie is an evil character in love with a dead fantasy, while Judy is the only genuinely loving person.Vertigo / feminist film reading
Quotes 16
“he has real hair which looks like a wig, you know? A very Lacanian point, admit it, you know?”Slavoj Žižek · illusion of illusion / Lacanian reversal
“that Madeleine Albright statement when she was asked is people children dead, is this acceptable, when she said 'Yes, this is an acceptable price.' Sorry, but for me this is more obscene than all Trumpisms together.”Slavoj Žižek · polished liberal obscenity vs. vulgar populism
“the only path to a new left in the United States goes through some at least of the Trump supporters.”Slavoj Žižek · left strategy / populism
“Lacan asks himself in his own arrogant way: 'What was it that Lacan who is here present invented?' And then he answers: objet petit a. So not 'desire is the desire of the other,' not 'the unconscious is structured like a language.'”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's self-proclaimed greatest invention
“they go to the mega store and they in a ritualized way play the game of buying. They go around, fill it in, and they just leave it there and go out. They try to get the pure surplus enjoyment, as it were, without it.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment without the object
“The greatest sin in bureaucracy is if you just simply solve the problem. You must procrastinate, create additional problems and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · bureaucracy and surplus enjoyment
“Kafka was right, bureaucracy is now in our godless times our only contact with the divine.”Slavoj Žižek · bureaucracy as theological phenomenon
“The norm itself is already perverted. You think you are heterosexual man? No, no, your fantasy is I'm screwing a guy who is dressed up as a woman.”Slavoj Žižek · the norm is the primary pathology
“trans people are the purest symptom... Symptom does not mean just an aftereffect, secondary. Symptom is the point where the truth of a field explodes.”Slavoj Žižek · transgender as Lacanian symptom
“Identity politics is for me the politics of coexistence. The goal is not to destroy the other but 'can't we all live together with our identities, recognize...' but not at the basic class level.”Slavoj Žižek · identity politics vs class antagonism
“People must not feel safe. People must be safe. And the worst thing is that to make you feel safe where you are not really safe.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of safe spaces / trigger warnings
“Psychoanalysis is in a way more philosophical than philosophy. It brings out what... happens with Kant and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis as philosophy's inner truth
“under heaven there is disorder; the situation is excellent”Slavoj Žižek · Maoist dialectics of chaos as opportunity
“times are so bad now that the only thing that remains to you is theory, I can tell you.”Slavoj Žižek · theory as refuge in political despair
“the first thing to ask is where is the self-organization... among the refugee immigrants themselves? To mobilize them, to bring them daily and also to embarrass them, not just to treat like...”Slavoj Žižek · critique of patronizing refugee solidarity
“I'm a low-level guy, I like commercial blockbuster movies. And they are also so bad. Inferno is so... You cannot even rely on Hollywood blockbusters. This is what remains for us: Lacan theory.”Slavoj Žižek · wit / theory as last resort
Transcript 48 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Are there any Americans here? Just to provoke you, if you want to have further access to this room, you have to swear an official, how do you call it, affidavit statement that you will vote for Trump. Listen, okay, this is just introductory chatter, but I really think it's so suspicious, this liberal fear, "My God, Trump, the end of the world, it will be the end." Listen, first, there is a mega achievement of Trump. Are you aware that he single-handedly ruined the Republican Party? Because this big establishment wing, they are now all, you remember the big strategist of freedom, Donald Rumsfeld advisor, Paul Wolfowitz, and that how is it called, that neocon, Crystal something [Bill Kristol]? I was told they both turned against Trump. Gently they are, yeah, yeah, yeah, they both did it. Banks are against, and even the religious right. Okay, Trump is a total opportunist, but I think he is just a cheap guy, opportunist, improvising, but it's clear also that if there is a place where Trump doesn't belong, it's Christian conservatives. My God, it's ridiculous, you know? So I think from what I learned, there is now a core of Trump supporters who are really lower-class, impoverished people, and who are simply pushed by a kind of an anti-establishment rage, and there a new Bernie Sanders should intervene. They, the only, I literally mean it, the only path to a new left in the United States goes through some at least of the Trump supporters. And also, listen, he is disgusting, believe it to me, I can do an analysis why, but two times I sympathized with him. First, you remember when he supported, when, sorry, Bernie Sanders supported Hillary, Trump said, you remember his reaction, "It's like somebody from Occupy Wall Street supporting Lehman Brothers," I mean. Sorry, it was a nice statement. Then, although it was cheap, but you remember, I didn't watch all of it, but that detail from the presidential whatever dialogue, confrontation, when Hillary was going on how she is worried what will happen if Trump wins, and Trump basically answered something like, "Yes, you will be in jail if I win." I mean, and a friend of mine who is some kind of this bullshit pseudoscience, semiotician of face language and so on, played slowly and he claimed that you can see if you enhance the image that Hillary was a little bit shocked for a split of a second, you know? It wasn't, and you know, like, I'm sorry if I repeat an old joke which I already used, but when people talk against Trump and so on, of course he is vulgar to the, to the end. But listen, you remember, I know I quoted it here, that Madeleine Albright statement when she was asked is people children dead [in Iraq], is this acceptable, when she said "Yes, this is an acceptable price." Sorry, but for me this is more obscene than all Trumpisms together. The last, then I give you the word, Trump did make quite a Lacanian achievement, this illusion of illusion, you know? Normal people, we have a problem, I am not yet there, probably I will be, that if you wear a wig, you try to make it look like real hair. But Trump achieved the opposite: he has real hair which looks like a wig, you know? A very Lacanian point, admit it, you know? Okay, stop, please. As you see, Slavoj has a lot to say to you, so I don't want to stand between him and you, but I just want to welcome him to his, here for his regular Birkbeck
Are there any Americans here? Just to provoke you, if you want to have further access to this room, you have to swear an official, how do you call it, affidavit statement that you will vote for Trump. Listen, okay, this is just introductory chatter, but I really think it's so suspicious, this liberal fear, "My God, Trump, the end of the world, it will be the end." Listen, first, there is a mega achievement of Trump. Are you aware that he single-handedly ruined the Republican Party? Because this big establishment wing, they are now all, you remember the big strategist of freedom, Donald Rumsfeld advisor, Paul Wolfowitz, and that how is it called, that neocon, Crystal something [Bill Kristol]? I was told they both turned against Trump. Gently they are, yeah, yeah, yeah, they both did it. Banks are against, and even the religious right. Okay, Trump is a total opportunist, but I think he is just a cheap guy, opportunist, improvising, but it's clear also that if there is a place where Trump doesn't belong, it's Christian conservatives. My God, it's ridiculous, you know? So I think from what I learned, there is now a core of Trump supporters who are really lower-class, impoverished people, and who are simply pushed by a kind of an anti-establishment rage, and there a new Bernie Sanders should intervene. They, the only, I literally mean it, the only path to a new left in the United States goes through some at least of the Trump supporters. And also, listen, he is disgusting, believe it to me, I can do an analysis why, but two times I sympathized with him. First, you remember when he supported, when, sorry, Bernie Sanders supported Hillary, Trump said, you remember his reaction, "It's like somebody from Occupy Wall Street supporting Lehman Brothers," I mean. Sorry, it was a nice statement. Then, although it was cheap, but you remember, I didn't watch all of it, but that detail from the presidential whatever dialogue, confrontation, when Hillary was going on how she is worried what will happen if Trump wins, and Trump basically answered something like, "Yes, you will be in jail if I win." I mean, and a friend of mine who is some kind of this bullshit pseudoscience, semiotician of face language and so on, played slowly and he claimed that you can see if you enhance the image that Hillary was a little bit shocked for a split of a second, you know? It wasn't, and you know, like, I'm sorry if I repeat an old joke which I already used, but when people talk against Trump and so on, of course he is vulgar to the, to the end. But listen, you remember, I know I quoted it here, that Madeleine Albright statement when she was asked is people children dead [in Iraq], is this acceptable, when she said "Yes, this is an acceptable price." Sorry, but for me this is more obscene than all Trumpisms together. The last, then I give you the word, Trump did make quite a Lacanian achievement, this illusion of illusion, you know? Normal people, we have a problem, I am not yet there, probably I will be, that if you wear a wig, you try to make it look like real hair. But Trump achieved the opposite: he has real hair which looks like a wig, you know? A very Lacanian point, admit it, you know? Okay, stop, please. As you see, Slavoj has a lot to say to you, so I don't want to stand between him and you, but I just want to welcome him to his, here for his regular Birkbeck
Cathy Newman
Institute for the Humanities Masterclass. It's good to have you here for three sessions this week. I also want to welcome all of you who've come along. If you're not already on our mailing list, please do join to get involved in other such events, although none are probably quite like this one, or these ones. Slavoj's going to speak for three sessions on the theme of "Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis."
Institute for the Humanities Masterclass. It's good to have you here for three sessions this week. I also want to welcome all of you who've come along. If you're not already on our mailing list, please do join to get involved in other such events, although none are probably quite like this one, or these ones. Slavoj's going to speak for three sessions on the theme of "Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis."
Slavoj Žižek
Which means anything about anything,
Which means anything about anything,
Cathy Newman
yeah.
yeah.
unknown
Ostensibly about the
Ostensibly about the
Cathy Newman
way in which Lacan is stranded between and against these themes, but I suppose in many ways it also describes Slavoj Žižek's own philosophical and psychoanalytical journey. So I shall hand over to him. He will lecture, he will talk to you for, I don't know, maybe even up to minutes or so, but there will be time for discussion... Please, yes. ...and shared discussion.
way in which Lacan is stranded between and against these themes, but I suppose in many ways it also describes Slavoj Žižek's own philosophical and psychoanalytical journey. So I shall hand over to him. He will lecture, he will talk to you for, I don't know, maybe even up to minutes or so, but there will be time for discussion... Please, yes. ...and shared discussion.
Slavoj Žižek
And this is not an empty offer out of politeness. Since it's difficult to stop me, so if there is some point that I'm on purpose now using this terrible American politically, politically correct term, this triggering, you know, if it triggers a reaction in you, please, I mean it literally, just stop me. Really, interrupt me nicely, you don't have to shout and so on, stop me and ask the question. No, it's simple. Thanks very much. Ah, just another thing to warn, yes. Ah! You are like a Lacanian analyst, you know, this is the record. I spoke with an old lady in France who told me...
And this is not an empty offer out of politeness. Since it's difficult to stop me, so if there is some point that I'm on purpose now using this terrible American politically, politically correct term, this triggering, you know, if it triggers a reaction in you, please, I mean it literally, just stop me. Really, interrupt me nicely, you don't have to shout and so on, stop me and ask the question. No, it's simple. Thanks very much. Ah, just another thing to warn, yes. Ah! You are like a Lacanian analyst, you know, this is the record. I spoke with an old lady in France who told me...
unknown
Beware the old ladies, indeed.
Beware the old ladies, indeed.
Slavoj Žižek
What are you? This is, you know, in if you say this in United States, you would be accused as politically incorrect. Ageism, they call it ageism. Sorry, please, I talk too much, please.
What are you? This is, you know, in if you say this in United States, you would be accused as politically incorrect. Ageism, they call it ageism. Sorry, please, I talk too much, please.
unknown
I wanted to pick you up on Trump because I entirely take the points that you were saying. But it seems to me a very white perspective. I really do not think that we are taking sufficient account of the number of dead black bodies that might result. And really, is that
I wanted to pick you up on Trump because I entirely take the points that you were saying. But it seems to me a very white perspective. I really do not think that we are taking sufficient account of the number of dead black bodies that might result. And really, is that
Slavoj Žižek
acceptable? I totally, first, let me put it bluntly. Trump is a totally disgusting person, trash, he is the white trash. And okay, let me improvise for five minutes. He is, even when he tries to be gentle and polite, he is even more vulgar. For example, I remember in one of his appearances, I just read about it, I don't lose time watching him, he wanted to demonstrate how his wife, my own compatriot Melania, who is Slovene, you know, this is why Trump is so popular in Slovenia, you know, like we Slovenes practically occupied the White House, if he wins. He wanted to illustrate what a noble lady she is. And I cannot use, you think I have no limits in vulgarity, but even I cannot use certain words. So he said publicly on TV that she is such a nice lady that not even once in all their lives together he didn't hear her flatulence. No? But you know what's the problem? Like, it's vulgar even to talk, you know, you don't mention this. Like, you know, it's vulgar already to say this publicly, you know? Although that is my dream, you know, to enter a restaurant and to have "no smoking please, no flatulence please," or whatever, and you would be shocked, it's vulgar. And he does this all the time. With Hillary, wasn't there a roundtable TV whatever where Hillary probably for the toilet had to leave for a minute? And then Trump commented it and said, "Where did she go now? It's disgusting," and so on. No, sorry, we all go to toilets, we see it. What's disgusting is to talk about it like that, you know? So that's the beauty. So no, and I know the story what you were hinting at. It's not only the blacks, it's that now recently also the darkest American civil society movements are getting mobilized for Trump. Open racist white supremacists and so on, it's it's an entire movement which is exploding now. And it's good that you mention the black bodies. I totally agree with you here. You know why? You remember when a black guy shot a couple of policemen about two months ago? And there you had a clear split, even in very legalistic terms you can put it, between progressive and reactionary. The reaction even of Donald Trump was: here the game stops. When people are attacking police, the very embodiment of law and order, the game is over. But I'm here on the black side absolutely, and for theoretical reasons. When they said, no, it's, okay, we have this opposition: on the one hand, some furious black guy shoots some policeman. On the other hand, a policeman kills in a non-justified way a black guy. I think the second case is incomparably worse. Why? Because the first case was simply someone who doesn't represent the law doing, I admit it, something not nice and so on. But you know, but when the police does that, it's a self-destruction of the law. You lose the basic trust into the law. That's the true horror. So I find totally hypocritical this idea, "Now it's over when blacks are shooting." No, the game is over when the police just becomes another gang. And this is a tendency that makes me really afraid. I will speak about this more this evening in Southbank. My good friend Alain Badiou just published a book which I love it, I almost cried, but I don't totally agree, but it's beautiful. *La Vraie Vie*, "The True Life." It's about, he's really getting old and in this patronizing attitude he addresses the young generation, and it's, you saw it Frank, it's beautiful. Already, for example, it's written in this well-meant, hymnic, Platonist, Platonist, Platonist Maoist celebra-, like, can you imagine a book written today where the second chapter ends with this Maoist motto, "Long live our, our young boys and young girls," or what, you know? Like, it's incredible. But he has a wonderful, some wonderful motifs there. The first is, he almost without knowing it, they don't like each other Badiou and Jameson, approaches the motif where he says that although of course we are all anti-militarist and so on and so on. Nonetheless, he has a wonderful observation Badiou of how what we are getting today with this global privatization. For example, he says, "Okay, we can be anti-militarists and whatever. But the abolishment of military conscription, it's a very ambiguous gesture." Because whatever you say, okay, we are anti-militarists and so on. But at least at some level, military are the point where we are all together at the same level. The price we are now paying, it's let's be clear, that it's mercenaries who are fighting for us. So it's again in a way privatized, it's no longer your duty. Which is why already Lenin drew attention to it. You remember, October Revolution, Germany Many, many soldiers become revolutionary. No October Revolution without Aurora, the ship, without militarists on their side. And precisely that potentially progressive, egalitarian side of the army, we are losing it today. But back to Badiou, it's a beautiful beginning where he says that he wants just to go on with what from Socrates onwards is the the one definition of what is the task of a philosopher: to corrupt the youth. And then he goes wonderfully in what in what way this should function today. He also, if I will not be able to read it I will present it to you tomorrow, he he's a little bit too naive there, but it's the most beautiful, okay, a little bit male chauvinist from his position, celebration of women. He says that at least ontologically in our ideological space, man is usually perceived as "the one," man stands for hierarchy, authority, while a woman is always, even in this male chauvinist image of a woman, is always in a passage between the two. For example, you cannot pin her down. These are vulgar examples but it's a mother and a whore, this and whatever, it's always in passage. And then I almost cried when I read it. He said, this is why, this is why if you are an, if you are still religious, you just have to take a good look at a woman. The very existence of a woman is a proof that God doesn't exist, you know? It's a kind of a totally naive beautiful passage and so on. But more about Badiou again later or this evening because he does something which brings us back to Hillary, Trump and so on, something wonderfully simple but I think basically correct. He claims that today in this late capitalist, consumerist, society of permissivity, a new sexual couple is emerging. Men are more and more retarded adolescents. That because of the cancellation of military conscription, because also education, you know what, manhood was defined, and it's good that manhood is over, by a certain rite of initiation, maturation. Like, you become a man when, usually in more conservative countries it was when you do your military service, then you are a man. Or when you marry. Or when you get a permanent job. Or or at least when you finish your studies. But none of this functions. Men are more and more eternal adolescents, while and it's very personal, tragic what he writes there, that a new figure of a woman, not a good image, like, emancipatory figure of a woman is emerging. Because his theory is that while men are pushed towards perpetual adolescence, women are more and more pushed towards premature, too early maturity. Already girls are treated like adult women, so that he claims that more and more the positions of social power are feminized, but not in this good sense, but in the sense that you include into the exercise of power a kind of fake femininity to make it even more efficient. For example, Badiou already spoke about this to me in a very, he says because he has some sons adopted, he had some trouble with them, delinquency and so on. And then he said it's becoming almost a classic scene for all those Arab immigrant boys, whatever, who get prosecuted to court, that the face of power that you see is mostly women. A woman psychiatrist, a woman judge, you know, like, they try to help you, they understand you, which makes it only worse for them. So I was thinking about it, isn't it this what we have at its purest now in the American election? Donald Trump is this eternal adolescent, cannot control himself, and Hillary is that type of a manipulating woman. And I was so glad when I met a guy who met a guy who met a guy who at the end knows Bill and Hillary and told me that for long years this is how that horrible couple works. Like you know, Hillary pulls the strings, manipulates, and then, of course, I'm making a caricature now, no, but that, and then if Bill annoys her, "Bill, let Monica suck you again, just give me alone, we are having serious business here," and so on. She is the force in the family. Now, let me make it clear what I want to say here. I am not in any way making fun of feminine power. It's excellent whenever it happens. I even don't mind images of strong women. I think that men are really maybe, like, if you want really, I don't think Theresa May will be, but you know, from Indira Gandhi to Margaret Thatcher, I like, my idea of power today is not the old fascist leader who shouts, you know, but a woman who speaks very nicely and so on, but cuts the balls even more efficiently. So I don't have any problem with this. All I'm, all I'm saying is that there is something changing today very radically at this level and we have to take into account. Okay, enough of these stupid jokes. Now, just to tell you, my good friend and good friend it means I hate him, I hate him as much as I hate Alenka Zupančič and others, Frank Ruda is here. And I invited him, he did a wonderful book, *Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism*. And I asked him, he graciously accepted, you will get, if you are superficial guys and came here for my show, you will get it over one hour tomorrow, and then I asked him to present the line of argumentation briefly, to make just a half-hour intervention, to borrow because I'm, here it is, *Abolishing Freedom*, you know, I don't know what I should add, buy four, you get one for free or [unintelligible] whatever. No, because I more and more think that all this focus on freedom of choice and so on gave such a bad name to freedom that we have to rethink the notion. And just replying Frank to your book, I think more and more that we should turn around the standard idea of freedom of choice which says that where we that the past is the past, we cannot change it, while the future is open. You can do this, that and so on. I'm tempted to say almost the opposite. The future is fixed, but we can change the past maybe, through radical reinterpretation. So the only freedom we have is to change the past. I mean, of course, I'm not a magician, not in reality. So all these paradoxes and it's a short book, I like books which are, I don't like mine *Less Than Nothing*, look, pages, you know? You can do it. Oh, sorry. I just had a quick question on the what you just talked about, the changing dynamics between men and women. Yes, please. I was wondering what the geography of this shift is. Because, for example, I can't remember his name, but there's an anthropologist who's been spending time with people who have left the West to go fight for ISIS. To go sorry where? Have left the West to go fight for ISIS. Yeah, yeah. He makes kind of a similar argument saying that they they want something that's bigger than them, they want this kind of rite of passage, this rite... Yeah, yeah. So I'm just wondering if there's that as a as a possibility to I think figure into this, but a general question looking at the geography of this shift. Absolutely. Even, sorry, to interrupt, no, no, even Badiou uses this example as this, he claims that that's why, he claims that Western young guys traveling to Syria to join ISIS, it's basically sociologically almost the same phenomenon as youth gangs in LA and so on. A desperate attempt at a pseudo-initiation. And then, so maybe, just to conclude this line, I think the an ideal politician today, let's put together three names, would be somebody called Hillary Duterte Trump. Duterte you know, the president of Philippines. Oh yeah. Who also, it's open, in a way there is almost something refreshing in that. Changing the state power into another mob rule, just calling for direct murders and so on, killing and so on and so on. And you see you have this tendency even with Trump, you know, all these games he is playing of I cannot tell you, basically he is even flirting with a revolution, he is saying, "I will admit the elections if I win," you know? Listen, I'm not crazy here. I totally know that, although I wonder if you concede one point to me. I still think that Trump is just an extremely vulgar opportunist guy who as if by mistake from time to time, did you notice this, he even says something almost, I wouldn't say I would fully agree with it, but you remember he said why are we just antagonizing Russia, at some point he even says shouldn't we show more understanding for Palestinians and so on and so on? No, I'm not saying he has a good heart deep, I'm just saying he is a total disgusting
acceptable? I totally, first, let me put it bluntly. Trump is a totally disgusting person, trash, he is the white trash. And okay, let me improvise for five minutes. He is, even when he tries to be gentle and polite, he is even more vulgar. For example, I remember in one of his appearances, I just read about it, I don't lose time watching him, he wanted to demonstrate how his wife, my own compatriot Melania, who is Slovene, you know, this is why Trump is so popular in Slovenia, you know, like we Slovenes practically occupied the White House, if he wins. He wanted to illustrate what a noble lady she is. And I cannot use, you think I have no limits in vulgarity, but even I cannot use certain words. So he said publicly on TV that she is such a nice lady that not even once in all their lives together he didn't hear her flatulence. No? But you know what's the problem? Like, it's vulgar even to talk, you know, you don't mention this. Like, you know, it's vulgar already to say this publicly, you know? Although that is my dream, you know, to enter a restaurant and to have "no smoking please, no flatulence please," or whatever, and you would be shocked, it's vulgar. And he does this all the time. With Hillary, wasn't there a roundtable TV whatever where Hillary probably for the toilet had to leave for a minute? And then Trump commented it and said, "Where did she go now? It's disgusting," and so on. No, sorry, we all go to toilets, we see it. What's disgusting is to talk about it like that, you know? So that's the beauty. So no, and I know the story what you were hinting at. It's not only the blacks, it's that now recently also the darkest American civil society movements are getting mobilized for Trump. Open racist white supremacists and so on, it's it's an entire movement which is exploding now. And it's good that you mention the black bodies. I totally agree with you here. You know why? You remember when a black guy shot a couple of policemen about two months ago? And there you had a clear split, even in very legalistic terms you can put it, between progressive and reactionary. The reaction even of Donald Trump was: here the game stops. When people are attacking police, the very embodiment of law and order, the game is over. But I'm here on the black side absolutely, and for theoretical reasons. When they said, no, it's, okay, we have this opposition: on the one hand, some furious black guy shoots some policeman. On the other hand, a policeman kills in a non-justified way a black guy. I think the second case is incomparably worse. Why? Because the first case was simply someone who doesn't represent the law doing, I admit it, something not nice and so on. But you know, but when the police does that, it's a self-destruction of the law. You lose the basic trust into the law. That's the true horror. So I find totally hypocritical this idea, "Now it's over when blacks are shooting." No, the game is over when the police just becomes another gang. And this is a tendency that makes me really afraid. I will speak about this more this evening in Southbank. My good friend Alain Badiou just published a book which I love it, I almost cried, but I don't totally agree, but it's beautiful. *La Vraie Vie*, "The True Life." It's about, he's really getting old and in this patronizing attitude he addresses the young generation, and it's, you saw it Frank, it's beautiful. Already, for example, it's written in this well-meant, hymnic, Platonist, Platonist, Platonist Maoist celebra-, like, can you imagine a book written today where the second chapter ends with this Maoist motto, "Long live our, our young boys and young girls," or what, you know? Like, it's incredible. But he has a wonderful, some wonderful motifs there. The first is, he almost without knowing it, they don't like each other Badiou and Jameson, approaches the motif where he says that although of course we are all anti-militarist and so on and so on. Nonetheless, he has a wonderful observation Badiou of how what we are getting today with this global privatization. For example, he says, "Okay, we can be anti-militarists and whatever. But the abolishment of military conscription, it's a very ambiguous gesture." Because whatever you say, okay, we are anti-militarists and so on. But at least at some level, military are the point where we are all together at the same level. The price we are now paying, it's let's be clear, that it's mercenaries who are fighting for us. So it's again in a way privatized, it's no longer your duty. Which is why already Lenin drew attention to it. You remember, October Revolution, Germany Many, many soldiers become revolutionary. No October Revolution without Aurora, the ship, without militarists on their side. And precisely that potentially progressive, egalitarian side of the army, we are losing it today. But back to Badiou, it's a beautiful beginning where he says that he wants just to go on with what from Socrates onwards is the the one definition of what is the task of a philosopher: to corrupt the youth. And then he goes wonderfully in what in what way this should function today. He also, if I will not be able to read it I will present it to you tomorrow, he he's a little bit too naive there, but it's the most beautiful, okay, a little bit male chauvinist from his position, celebration of women. He says that at least ontologically in our ideological space, man is usually perceived as "the one," man stands for hierarchy, authority, while a woman is always, even in this male chauvinist image of a woman, is always in a passage between the two. For example, you cannot pin her down. These are vulgar examples but it's a mother and a whore, this and whatever, it's always in passage. And then I almost cried when I read it. He said, this is why, this is why if you are an, if you are still religious, you just have to take a good look at a woman. The very existence of a woman is a proof that God doesn't exist, you know? It's a kind of a totally naive beautiful passage and so on. But more about Badiou again later or this evening because he does something which brings us back to Hillary, Trump and so on, something wonderfully simple but I think basically correct. He claims that today in this late capitalist, consumerist, society of permissivity, a new sexual couple is emerging. Men are more and more retarded adolescents. That because of the cancellation of military conscription, because also education, you know what, manhood was defined, and it's good that manhood is over, by a certain rite of initiation, maturation. Like, you become a man when, usually in more conservative countries it was when you do your military service, then you are a man. Or when you marry. Or when you get a permanent job. Or or at least when you finish your studies. But none of this functions. Men are more and more eternal adolescents, while and it's very personal, tragic what he writes there, that a new figure of a woman, not a good image, like, emancipatory figure of a woman is emerging. Because his theory is that while men are pushed towards perpetual adolescence, women are more and more pushed towards premature, too early maturity. Already girls are treated like adult women, so that he claims that more and more the positions of social power are feminized, but not in this good sense, but in the sense that you include into the exercise of power a kind of fake femininity to make it even more efficient. For example, Badiou already spoke about this to me in a very, he says because he has some sons adopted, he had some trouble with them, delinquency and so on. And then he said it's becoming almost a classic scene for all those Arab immigrant boys, whatever, who get prosecuted to court, that the face of power that you see is mostly women. A woman psychiatrist, a woman judge, you know, like, they try to help you, they understand you, which makes it only worse for them. So I was thinking about it, isn't it this what we have at its purest now in the American election? Donald Trump is this eternal adolescent, cannot control himself, and Hillary is that type of a manipulating woman. And I was so glad when I met a guy who met a guy who met a guy who at the end knows Bill and Hillary and told me that for long years this is how that horrible couple works. Like you know, Hillary pulls the strings, manipulates, and then, of course, I'm making a caricature now, no, but that, and then if Bill annoys her, "Bill, let Monica suck you again, just give me alone, we are having serious business here," and so on. She is the force in the family. Now, let me make it clear what I want to say here. I am not in any way making fun of feminine power. It's excellent whenever it happens. I even don't mind images of strong women. I think that men are really maybe, like, if you want really, I don't think Theresa May will be, but you know, from Indira Gandhi to Margaret Thatcher, I like, my idea of power today is not the old fascist leader who shouts, you know, but a woman who speaks very nicely and so on, but cuts the balls even more efficiently. So I don't have any problem with this. All I'm, all I'm saying is that there is something changing today very radically at this level and we have to take into account. Okay, enough of these stupid jokes. Now, just to tell you, my good friend and good friend it means I hate him, I hate him as much as I hate Alenka Zupančič and others, Frank Ruda is here. And I invited him, he did a wonderful book, *Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism*. And I asked him, he graciously accepted, you will get, if you are superficial guys and came here for my show, you will get it over one hour tomorrow, and then I asked him to present the line of argumentation briefly, to make just a half-hour intervention, to borrow because I'm, here it is, *Abolishing Freedom*, you know, I don't know what I should add, buy four, you get one for free or [unintelligible] whatever. No, because I more and more think that all this focus on freedom of choice and so on gave such a bad name to freedom that we have to rethink the notion. And just replying Frank to your book, I think more and more that we should turn around the standard idea of freedom of choice which says that where we that the past is the past, we cannot change it, while the future is open. You can do this, that and so on. I'm tempted to say almost the opposite. The future is fixed, but we can change the past maybe, through radical reinterpretation. So the only freedom we have is to change the past. I mean, of course, I'm not a magician, not in reality. So all these paradoxes and it's a short book, I like books which are, I don't like mine *Less Than Nothing*, look, pages, you know? You can do it. Oh, sorry. I just had a quick question on the what you just talked about, the changing dynamics between men and women. Yes, please. I was wondering what the geography of this shift is. Because, for example, I can't remember his name, but there's an anthropologist who's been spending time with people who have left the West to go fight for ISIS. To go sorry where? Have left the West to go fight for ISIS. Yeah, yeah. He makes kind of a similar argument saying that they they want something that's bigger than them, they want this kind of rite of passage, this rite... Yeah, yeah. So I'm just wondering if there's that as a as a possibility to I think figure into this, but a general question looking at the geography of this shift. Absolutely. Even, sorry, to interrupt, no, no, even Badiou uses this example as this, he claims that that's why, he claims that Western young guys traveling to Syria to join ISIS, it's basically sociologically almost the same phenomenon as youth gangs in LA and so on. A desperate attempt at a pseudo-initiation. And then, so maybe, just to conclude this line, I think the an ideal politician today, let's put together three names, would be somebody called Hillary Duterte Trump. Duterte you know, the president of Philippines. Oh yeah. Who also, it's open, in a way there is almost something refreshing in that. Changing the state power into another mob rule, just calling for direct murders and so on, killing and so on and so on. And you see you have this tendency even with Trump, you know, all these games he is playing of I cannot tell you, basically he is even flirting with a revolution, he is saying, "I will admit the elections if I win," you know? Listen, I'm not crazy here. I totally know that, although I wonder if you concede one point to me. I still think that Trump is just an extremely vulgar opportunist guy who as if by mistake from time to time, did you notice this, he even says something almost, I wouldn't say I would fully agree with it, but you remember he said why are we just antagonizing Russia, at some point he even says shouldn't we show more understanding for Palestinians and so on and so on? No, I'm not saying he has a good heart deep, I'm just saying he is a total disgusting
unknown
opportunist. But still, as such, infinitely better there if you want horror is Ted Cruz. Or that other guy Rick Santorum or what. I doubt if they are human. If you ask me, they are aliens. These are these are these true monstrous religious conservatives where, you know, they talk in a certain almost automated way, no? So yes, I agree with you, but you know what's the problem here? I'm well aware of it, I'm now replying in a way to both of you. That I'm moving here in a very dangerous waters because these are phenomena, these are
opportunist. But still, as such, infinitely better there if you want horror is Ted Cruz. Or that other guy Rick Santorum or what. I doubt if they are human. If you ask me, they are aliens. These are these are these true monstrous religious conservatives where, you know, they talk in a certain almost automated way, no? So yes, I agree with you, but you know what's the problem here? I'm well aware of it, I'm now replying in a way to both of you. That I'm moving here in a very dangerous waters because these are phenomena, these are
Slavoj Žižek
worth we should openly confront them, but it's very one must be very careful not to fall in a subtle way in some kind of a neo-conservative trap, you know? That you say, you see today because women are taking over, that. And then you are very close here to an ultra-conservative motif, which you find for example in German Romanticism, from Schelling to Richard Wagner operas, where women are celebrated insofar as they become in the family, back at home, this silent support. But the ultimate horror is a woman who oversteps her boundary and becomes a public person. That's the ultimate evil. Like, I don't know if I did it here, you find a wonderful English translation free online, Friedrich Schiller, *The Song of the Bell*. It's an extraordinary ultra-conservative piece, and Schiller, who is supposed to be the big poet of freedom, he gives in this song a kind of a genesis of French Revolution. And the idea is, as long as there was a proper family life, women were staying at home, keeping things in order, men were going out, adventurous. But then, women revolted against this role and everything went wrong, French Revolution and so on and so on. French Revolution is literally interpreted, read as the explosion of, they he calls them "laughing hyenas" (*lachende Hyänen*), these crazy women, and then this is a motif which determines the entire German conservative tradition. For example, I read this in a book which is a little bit outdated but you get some data in it, Klaus Theweleit, *Male Fantasies*. He has many documents there about how at the end of the First World War the obsession of German conservatives was crazy seductive, promiscuous, brutal, violent Bolshevik women. The ultimate horror and so on. So what I'm saying is just this. That what interests me with Trump is that, you know, it's chaos. But I'm a Maoist, I would say "under heaven there is disorder; the situation is excellent," you know? I think that just maybe there is a possibility of some new political dynamic which is opened up in this way, because let's go back to Bernie Sanders. The true miracle for me of Bernie Sanders is that he didn't just mobilize academics, the usual progressive usual suspects, he also mobilized precisely those small Vermont farmers and so on who are usually appropriated by the right-wing populism. That's that's what we should do without doing this, you know, because what annoys me with much of contemporary left is that they all have this dream. For example, my good friend otherwise Udi Aloni told me, I was it was a year ago at some demonstration small Palestinian village that Israeli army wanted to destroy in front of, sorry, and there were in the same crowd mixed Palestinian women, even conservative totally veiled, and Israeli lesbians. And how it's a miracle. Yes, I told him, it's a miracle. But don't become too utopian, don't think that this is the beginning at what in two years we will have half a million of Palestinian, you know what I mean, this the problem of bringing together these two these two these two orientations. On one hand our Western struggle for sexual freedoms and so on and so on, on the other hand this third world revolt of what Badiou calls, I have some doubts about the term although it's a nice one, "nomadic proletarians." Let's not underestimate the trouble of really bringing these two together. It's not just patient propaganda and we will be all together. You know how many, for example I was in Vancouver, quite by chance, when there was a big Pride parade, LGBT and so on. And then I had some friends there who immediately informed me, there were so many conflicts, all the political radicals, some black organizations boycotted it and so on. Because they wanted to be in this Justin Trudeau way so all inclusive that they invited the police, and the police grabbed the opportunity because of course they did some shooting of the blacks there, you know? And this was an ideal way for the police to redeem themselves, "you see, but we are progressive, but we are here," you know? And even I think this was even the basic formula of Hillary Clinton, you know? To admit all this LGBT whatever you want, she is for it, just to obfuscate the the economic the economic part. So I still, I don't understand, like I wrote about it, that's the problem. Why did Bernie, I understand Bernie Sanders that he didn't go against her. That yes, but why did he have to go through that humiliating spectacle of publicly supporting her? You remember at the Democratic Convention it was Bernie Sanders who proposed acclamation, no? Why did he have to do that, my God? Couldn't he just keep a certain distance just to re-, okay. We are losing time. So comrades, let's go to work. Because no, times are so bad now that the only thing that remains to you is theory, I can tell you. Listen, I'm a low-level guy, I like commercial blockbuster movies. And they are also so bad. *Inferno* is so, I stopped watching it after five minutes. *Jack Reacher*, did some of you see it? I like that sarcastic brutal beginning, then I stopped watching it. You cannot even rely on Hollywood blockbusters. This is what remains for us: Lacan theory, I tell you this. Okay, so let's do, are you where is Madison? Ah, you are there, sorry. No, no, you still have time. I just was afraid that you will [unintelligible]. Okay, so I will begin with something that I already used here, and then I will try we will do a little bit of serious theory today. I will first like to explain, illustrate through some examples the Lacanian notion of *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment. Because this for Lacan himself was his great discovery. I already quoted it here in his seminar from *Les non-dupes errent*, "those who are not duped, those are really in the wrong." And of course it's a pun with *les noms du père*, "names of the father." Lacan asks himself in his own arrogant way: this is the question that he, Lacan, raises, I quote: "What was it that Lacan who is here present invented?" And then he answers like that to get things going: *objet petit a*, the object small a. So not "desire is the desire of the other," "the unconscious is structured like a language," not even "there is no sexual relationship." He focuses it on this notion of object a as surplus enjoyment. And what is so interesting is that, as I will maybe engage later in some friendly dialogue with him, Samo Tomšič in that book, *The Capitalist Unconscious*, demonstrates that this re-actualization in the last years of Lacan's teaching of object a is strictly indebted to Marx, is the result of Lacan's reading of *Capital*, of *Critique of Political Economy*. Like, the empirical at least origin of the notion of *Mehrlust*, surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir* is *Mehrwert*, surplus value. So what's the paradox of this notion? You must know it. It's that it's a surplus but in a way a surplus [unintelligible]. Okay, I'll put it like this. The origin in psychoanalysis of this notion is the well-known fact that Freud uses sometimes the term *Lustgewinn*, the profit of enjoyment. How? You have a certain official goal: you want to eat, to make love, whatever. But the way you do it, the detour to doing it, brings an additional pleasure. So that this excess comes, it's not excess in the sense of "I got even more pleasure when I got the object." No, it's the pleasure that you get from the very way you approach an object. Even more, here we get the paradox, it's the pleasure that you get from even renouncing direct pleasure. For example, and it's really a sad example if you ask me. A friend of mine who is now in United States told me a weird story. Then I found some places where they confirmed it on the web, and it's such a sad tragic story but good illustration of Lacan. He went to, how do you pronounce it correctly, Walmart? That mega, yeah, yeah, Walmart, I knew I pronounced it correctly. And when he exited the store, he found there just abandoned where do you put the thing you want to buy, trolleys, or what do you call them? Carts? Whatever, full of stuff but abandoned. And then he asked some personnel there what's going on, and he said that many people, not the lowest class but that impoverished middle class, they don't have money to buy. So they go to the mega store and they in a ritualized way play the game of buying. They go around, fill it in, and they just leave it there and go out. You know, they try to get the pure surplus enjoyment, as it were, without it. It's a beautiful, very tragic metaphor, I claim. Now I will give you another example. Now come the the two clips. The second one, because if there is an agency which is surplus enjoyment embodied, it's of course bureaucracy. You know, all that we know about bureaucracy is this procrastination. The greatest sin in bureaucracy is if you just simply solve the problem. You must procrastinate, create additional problems and so on and so on. So of course, I will show you first a short clip from what I consider one of the greatest British movies, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*. It's the film's hero, played by Jonathan Pryce, walks along corridors of a big administration building and encounters a group of people. Obviously there is a main administrator bureaucrat, and all people around him, they play this game of "Please, sir, what should I do this? With this request, do that." And although they they they appear as if they are trying to act in an extremely efficient way, you know, "do this, do that," but it's all utter nonsense game. Totally inefficient in its very ultra efficiency. I think this is a wonderful example of surplus enjoyment that is generated precisely by the total nonsense failure of any utilitarian efficiency. So let's do first this one. Let's put the voice. *[Audio clip from Brazil begins]* "I want a full report." "But sir, the [unintelligible] are still in the [unintelligible]." "You should have thought of that." "What about the terrorists, the Western..." "It's a mystery to me." "Exactly, we've got to put it back." "No." "You definitely no?" "Well, I wish to know where we stand [unintelligible]." "Hillary! Yes, sir. Excuse me, excuse me, [unintelligible]. Okay." "The minister will want to have you all on board." "Yes, sir. Fine. [unintelligible]." "Yeah, the deputy's being very difficult, isn't he? Very. Yes, yes, yes. You like it up here? This is where it's at. Seen you're on a crack team, aren't they? Decision makers. No nonsense, intuitive. I'm expecting big things, Sam. Pump some life into the old [unintelligible]." *[Clip ends]* You see, when you have group enjoyment, crowd this you will see it now at its absolutely purest. No, okay, we can stop it here. Just now go to to "total war," no? Okay, so this would be like one figure of surplus enjoyment. But this was just a, how do you call it, a foreplay. Because now comes the true horror, my favorite, and you know whatever you are saying, I think this is one of the absolutely most efficient speeches, political speeches. I will just show you some clips whatever I was able to find on on YouTube. It's first let me just, no no, stop it now for a second I will just explain it. This is you know after the Stalingrad defeat, where the mood in Germany was not exactly the best, no? And then Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did something quite extraordinary. He gave a speech in big Berlin Hall, Sportpalast, where he mobilized the people. It was an incredibly efficient public gathering and speech. But listen to what he is saying. He is preaching just more suffering, more renunciation to enjoyment. He says, listen carefully, among other things he says, "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be? Do you want to work not but hours a day?" And watch carefully the expression of faces, especially, I wasn't able to get any close-ups, but there are some photos when Goebbels himself gets into this trance, it's not just aggressivity. His face becomes twisted in a certain disgusting passivity, he is so clearly enjoying himself. This is at its purest what Lacan calls a pleasure in pain. Surplus enjoyment. Okay, now comes the pleasure, at least for me. *[Long audio clip of Goebbels' Total War speech follows in German]* Okay, let's not exaggerate, let's not give them too much pleasure because they... no, I mean Goebbels is a fascinating figure because all other big leaders like Himmler, especially Göring, they had this compromising, pragmatic attitude. For example, Göring already approached in the winter of '44 the Americans, "can we make a partial peace?" But Goebbels went to the end, and if you want to see ideological madness at its purest, download the movie, you can get it now on whatever still functions on I use now Pirate Bay because my beloved torrents or whatever Kickass is out and so on, no? You can get it there. You remember, it's the film called *Kolberg*. It's a film, it's madness. It was shot in the fall of '44. And the, you know what was in the fall of '44, I mean Germany was losing and Goebbels convinced Hitler to allow him to withdraw tens of thousands of soldiers from the front to play in the film. The military industry has to build old-fashioned guns, uniforms and so on. Kolberg now it's in Poland, it's a small Baltic city which was under siege by Napoleon in Napoleonic Wars and when it was almost destroyed, they didn't win but because of some peace between Napoleon and Prussia, whatever, they survived it. And he wanted to use this obviously as a metaphor, as a parallel to today's situation of how German people have to endure and so on. But this madness, that one big good film can save us, can turn around the war. And he took it so seriously. You can find you can it's quite interesting to see this film. I mean it's an extremely well-made, it's Veit Harlan, the truly greatest Nazi director and so on. So again, this speech, what was my point? It's that if you want to see, to grasp almost physically what Lacan means by *jouissance*, enjoyment, as opposed to pleasure, it's this. It's this crowd shouting and so on and so on. And I think this was quite a risky move. You know, I read somewhere in history of World War II that after Stalingrad defeat, there were some oscillations. More compromising people, Göring and so on, they said let's not even announce clearly the defeat at Stalingrad,
worth we should openly confront them, but it's very one must be very careful not to fall in a subtle way in some kind of a neo-conservative trap, you know? That you say, you see today because women are taking over, that. And then you are very close here to an ultra-conservative motif, which you find for example in German Romanticism, from Schelling to Richard Wagner operas, where women are celebrated insofar as they become in the family, back at home, this silent support. But the ultimate horror is a woman who oversteps her boundary and becomes a public person. That's the ultimate evil. Like, I don't know if I did it here, you find a wonderful English translation free online, Friedrich Schiller, *The Song of the Bell*. It's an extraordinary ultra-conservative piece, and Schiller, who is supposed to be the big poet of freedom, he gives in this song a kind of a genesis of French Revolution. And the idea is, as long as there was a proper family life, women were staying at home, keeping things in order, men were going out, adventurous. But then, women revolted against this role and everything went wrong, French Revolution and so on and so on. French Revolution is literally interpreted, read as the explosion of, they he calls them "laughing hyenas" (*lachende Hyänen*), these crazy women, and then this is a motif which determines the entire German conservative tradition. For example, I read this in a book which is a little bit outdated but you get some data in it, Klaus Theweleit, *Male Fantasies*. He has many documents there about how at the end of the First World War the obsession of German conservatives was crazy seductive, promiscuous, brutal, violent Bolshevik women. The ultimate horror and so on. So what I'm saying is just this. That what interests me with Trump is that, you know, it's chaos. But I'm a Maoist, I would say "under heaven there is disorder; the situation is excellent," you know? I think that just maybe there is a possibility of some new political dynamic which is opened up in this way, because let's go back to Bernie Sanders. The true miracle for me of Bernie Sanders is that he didn't just mobilize academics, the usual progressive usual suspects, he also mobilized precisely those small Vermont farmers and so on who are usually appropriated by the right-wing populism. That's that's what we should do without doing this, you know, because what annoys me with much of contemporary left is that they all have this dream. For example, my good friend otherwise Udi Aloni told me, I was it was a year ago at some demonstration small Palestinian village that Israeli army wanted to destroy in front of, sorry, and there were in the same crowd mixed Palestinian women, even conservative totally veiled, and Israeli lesbians. And how it's a miracle. Yes, I told him, it's a miracle. But don't become too utopian, don't think that this is the beginning at what in two years we will have half a million of Palestinian, you know what I mean, this the problem of bringing together these two these two these two orientations. On one hand our Western struggle for sexual freedoms and so on and so on, on the other hand this third world revolt of what Badiou calls, I have some doubts about the term although it's a nice one, "nomadic proletarians." Let's not underestimate the trouble of really bringing these two together. It's not just patient propaganda and we will be all together. You know how many, for example I was in Vancouver, quite by chance, when there was a big Pride parade, LGBT and so on. And then I had some friends there who immediately informed me, there were so many conflicts, all the political radicals, some black organizations boycotted it and so on. Because they wanted to be in this Justin Trudeau way so all inclusive that they invited the police, and the police grabbed the opportunity because of course they did some shooting of the blacks there, you know? And this was an ideal way for the police to redeem themselves, "you see, but we are progressive, but we are here," you know? And even I think this was even the basic formula of Hillary Clinton, you know? To admit all this LGBT whatever you want, she is for it, just to obfuscate the the economic the economic part. So I still, I don't understand, like I wrote about it, that's the problem. Why did Bernie, I understand Bernie Sanders that he didn't go against her. That yes, but why did he have to go through that humiliating spectacle of publicly supporting her? You remember at the Democratic Convention it was Bernie Sanders who proposed acclamation, no? Why did he have to do that, my God? Couldn't he just keep a certain distance just to re-, okay. We are losing time. So comrades, let's go to work. Because no, times are so bad now that the only thing that remains to you is theory, I can tell you. Listen, I'm a low-level guy, I like commercial blockbuster movies. And they are also so bad. *Inferno* is so, I stopped watching it after five minutes. *Jack Reacher*, did some of you see it? I like that sarcastic brutal beginning, then I stopped watching it. You cannot even rely on Hollywood blockbusters. This is what remains for us: Lacan theory, I tell you this. Okay, so let's do, are you where is Madison? Ah, you are there, sorry. No, no, you still have time. I just was afraid that you will [unintelligible]. Okay, so I will begin with something that I already used here, and then I will try we will do a little bit of serious theory today. I will first like to explain, illustrate through some examples the Lacanian notion of *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment. Because this for Lacan himself was his great discovery. I already quoted it here in his seminar from *Les non-dupes errent*, "those who are not duped, those are really in the wrong." And of course it's a pun with *les noms du père*, "names of the father." Lacan asks himself in his own arrogant way: this is the question that he, Lacan, raises, I quote: "What was it that Lacan who is here present invented?" And then he answers like that to get things going: *objet petit a*, the object small a. So not "desire is the desire of the other," "the unconscious is structured like a language," not even "there is no sexual relationship." He focuses it on this notion of object a as surplus enjoyment. And what is so interesting is that, as I will maybe engage later in some friendly dialogue with him, Samo Tomšič in that book, *The Capitalist Unconscious*, demonstrates that this re-actualization in the last years of Lacan's teaching of object a is strictly indebted to Marx, is the result of Lacan's reading of *Capital*, of *Critique of Political Economy*. Like, the empirical at least origin of the notion of *Mehrlust*, surplus enjoyment, *plus-de-jouir* is *Mehrwert*, surplus value. So what's the paradox of this notion? You must know it. It's that it's a surplus but in a way a surplus [unintelligible]. Okay, I'll put it like this. The origin in psychoanalysis of this notion is the well-known fact that Freud uses sometimes the term *Lustgewinn*, the profit of enjoyment. How? You have a certain official goal: you want to eat, to make love, whatever. But the way you do it, the detour to doing it, brings an additional pleasure. So that this excess comes, it's not excess in the sense of "I got even more pleasure when I got the object." No, it's the pleasure that you get from the very way you approach an object. Even more, here we get the paradox, it's the pleasure that you get from even renouncing direct pleasure. For example, and it's really a sad example if you ask me. A friend of mine who is now in United States told me a weird story. Then I found some places where they confirmed it on the web, and it's such a sad tragic story but good illustration of Lacan. He went to, how do you pronounce it correctly, Walmart? That mega, yeah, yeah, Walmart, I knew I pronounced it correctly. And when he exited the store, he found there just abandoned where do you put the thing you want to buy, trolleys, or what do you call them? Carts? Whatever, full of stuff but abandoned. And then he asked some personnel there what's going on, and he said that many people, not the lowest class but that impoverished middle class, they don't have money to buy. So they go to the mega store and they in a ritualized way play the game of buying. They go around, fill it in, and they just leave it there and go out. You know, they try to get the pure surplus enjoyment, as it were, without it. It's a beautiful, very tragic metaphor, I claim. Now I will give you another example. Now come the the two clips. The second one, because if there is an agency which is surplus enjoyment embodied, it's of course bureaucracy. You know, all that we know about bureaucracy is this procrastination. The greatest sin in bureaucracy is if you just simply solve the problem. You must procrastinate, create additional problems and so on and so on. So of course, I will show you first a short clip from what I consider one of the greatest British movies, Terry Gilliam's *Brazil*. It's the film's hero, played by Jonathan Pryce, walks along corridors of a big administration building and encounters a group of people. Obviously there is a main administrator bureaucrat, and all people around him, they play this game of "Please, sir, what should I do this? With this request, do that." And although they they they appear as if they are trying to act in an extremely efficient way, you know, "do this, do that," but it's all utter nonsense game. Totally inefficient in its very ultra efficiency. I think this is a wonderful example of surplus enjoyment that is generated precisely by the total nonsense failure of any utilitarian efficiency. So let's do first this one. Let's put the voice. *[Audio clip from Brazil begins]* "I want a full report." "But sir, the [unintelligible] are still in the [unintelligible]." "You should have thought of that." "What about the terrorists, the Western..." "It's a mystery to me." "Exactly, we've got to put it back." "No." "You definitely no?" "Well, I wish to know where we stand [unintelligible]." "Hillary! Yes, sir. Excuse me, excuse me, [unintelligible]. Okay." "The minister will want to have you all on board." "Yes, sir. Fine. [unintelligible]." "Yeah, the deputy's being very difficult, isn't he? Very. Yes, yes, yes. You like it up here? This is where it's at. Seen you're on a crack team, aren't they? Decision makers. No nonsense, intuitive. I'm expecting big things, Sam. Pump some life into the old [unintelligible]." *[Clip ends]* You see, when you have group enjoyment, crowd this you will see it now at its absolutely purest. No, okay, we can stop it here. Just now go to to "total war," no? Okay, so this would be like one figure of surplus enjoyment. But this was just a, how do you call it, a foreplay. Because now comes the true horror, my favorite, and you know whatever you are saying, I think this is one of the absolutely most efficient speeches, political speeches. I will just show you some clips whatever I was able to find on on YouTube. It's first let me just, no no, stop it now for a second I will just explain it. This is you know after the Stalingrad defeat, where the mood in Germany was not exactly the best, no? And then Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, did something quite extraordinary. He gave a speech in big Berlin Hall, Sportpalast, where he mobilized the people. It was an incredibly efficient public gathering and speech. But listen to what he is saying. He is preaching just more suffering, more renunciation to enjoyment. He says, listen carefully, among other things he says, "Do you want a war so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be? Do you want to work not but hours a day?" And watch carefully the expression of faces, especially, I wasn't able to get any close-ups, but there are some photos when Goebbels himself gets into this trance, it's not just aggressivity. His face becomes twisted in a certain disgusting passivity, he is so clearly enjoying himself. This is at its purest what Lacan calls a pleasure in pain. Surplus enjoyment. Okay, now comes the pleasure, at least for me. *[Long audio clip of Goebbels' Total War speech follows in German]* Okay, let's not exaggerate, let's not give them too much pleasure because they... no, I mean Goebbels is a fascinating figure because all other big leaders like Himmler, especially Göring, they had this compromising, pragmatic attitude. For example, Göring already approached in the winter of '44 the Americans, "can we make a partial peace?" But Goebbels went to the end, and if you want to see ideological madness at its purest, download the movie, you can get it now on whatever still functions on I use now Pirate Bay because my beloved torrents or whatever Kickass is out and so on, no? You can get it there. You remember, it's the film called *Kolberg*. It's a film, it's madness. It was shot in the fall of '44. And the, you know what was in the fall of '44, I mean Germany was losing and Goebbels convinced Hitler to allow him to withdraw tens of thousands of soldiers from the front to play in the film. The military industry has to build old-fashioned guns, uniforms and so on. Kolberg now it's in Poland, it's a small Baltic city which was under siege by Napoleon in Napoleonic Wars and when it was almost destroyed, they didn't win but because of some peace between Napoleon and Prussia, whatever, they survived it. And he wanted to use this obviously as a metaphor, as a parallel to today's situation of how German people have to endure and so on. But this madness, that one big good film can save us, can turn around the war. And he took it so seriously. You can find you can it's quite interesting to see this film. I mean it's an extremely well-made, it's Veit Harlan, the truly greatest Nazi director and so on. So again, this speech, what was my point? It's that if you want to see, to grasp almost physically what Lacan means by *jouissance*, enjoyment, as opposed to pleasure, it's this. It's this crowd shouting and so on and so on. And I think this was quite a risky move. You know, I read somewhere in history of World War II that after Stalingrad defeat, there were some oscillations. More compromising people, Göring and so on, they said let's not even announce clearly the defeat at Stalingrad,
unknown
let's play it down. And Goebbels has this idea: no, on the contrary, let's paint it even darker than it
let's play it down. And Goebbels has this idea: no, on the contrary, let's paint it even darker than it
unknown
was. Let's use the very bad news as a as a tool. It's quite something. Okay, so I hope I got you here an
was. Let's use the very bad news as a as a tool. It's quite something. Okay, so I hope I got you here an
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idea of surplus enjoyment. Yes, please. Sorry, I just quick question on you showed the video *Brazil* and then you showed the speech, and of course one's a movie and I'm just wondering if we were to take a go and take a a look at the DMV or some bureaucratic office for an hour if the the similar mechanism would be so obvious. What do you mean by by, no I... Well, I mean like because like if I think about how I experience bureaucracy, or like the in my department we're always having another assessment, another audit, another so and so to be more efficient. Yeah, yeah. And so I think what you're saying is that there's a surplus enjoyment in that, but if I think about the mechanism of that as opposed to what was going on on the video we just saw, it's... Which video? You mean the *Brazil* or Goebbels? Both. But I think it is it is a degree. No, degree. I claim it's a degree. I claim that even the most standard bureaucracy, all those rituals, postponements, you cannot
idea of surplus enjoyment. Yes, please. Sorry, I just quick question on you showed the video *Brazil* and then you showed the speech, and of course one's a movie and I'm just wondering if we were to take a go and take a a look at the DMV or some bureaucratic office for an hour if the the similar mechanism would be so obvious. What do you mean by by, no I... Well, I mean like because like if I think about how I experience bureaucracy, or like the in my department we're always having another assessment, another audit, another so and so to be more efficient. Yeah, yeah. And so I think what you're saying is that there's a surplus enjoyment in that, but if I think about the mechanism of that as opposed to what was going on on the video we just saw, it's... Which video? You mean the *Brazil* or Goebbels? Both. But I think it is it is a degree. No, degree. I claim it's a degree. I claim that even the most standard bureaucracy, all those rituals, postponements, you cannot
Slavoj Žižek
really explain them through efficiency. There is a certain perverted enjoyment in inefficiency itself. That's why I didn't want to bother you. You should download it for free, you get it, *Brazil* also. There is another wonderful scene when in the apartment of Jonathan Pryce, the hero, you remember something, water, electricity, breaks down. And then the official plumbers come and of course just take notes, promise, they do nothing. And then Robert De Niro is there in a wonderful role. He breaks in in the evening and says, "Listen, I will do something totally illegal, I will just quickly fix it," no? As the utmost thing. And he does it and that's the origin of all the troubles, because next day the official plumbers came and said, "Oh, somebody was messing here, how dare you?" and then the guy is arrested or all the nightmare comes. And I experienced this. I mean, I really think you know what's the problem with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy's first worry is not to solve the problem, but even to create the problems to justify its existence, you know? And you are caught into this circle and there is some I don't think even we should we should fight it. There is a solution that I found in a movie that I once succeeded in doing it. And I felt so well for days afterwards. Namely, I have to go somewhere to fill in some
really explain them through efficiency. There is a certain perverted enjoyment in inefficiency itself. That's why I didn't want to bother you. You should download it for free, you get it, *Brazil* also. There is another wonderful scene when in the apartment of Jonathan Pryce, the hero, you remember something, water, electricity, breaks down. And then the official plumbers come and of course just take notes, promise, they do nothing. And then Robert De Niro is there in a wonderful role. He breaks in in the evening and says, "Listen, I will do something totally illegal, I will just quickly fix it," no? As the utmost thing. And he does it and that's the origin of all the troubles, because next day the official plumbers came and said, "Oh, somebody was messing here, how dare you?" and then the guy is arrested or all the nightmare comes. And I experienced this. I mean, I really think you know what's the problem with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy's first worry is not to solve the problem, but even to create the problems to justify its existence, you know? And you are caught into this circle and there is some I don't think even we should we should fight it. There is a solution that I found in a movie that I once succeeded in doing it. And I felt so well for days afterwards. Namely, I have to go somewhere to fill in some
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bureaucratic bullshit, no? And the lady in some office in Ljubljana told me, "Sorry, it's okay, but now there is a new regulation, something like A22 form, you don't have that," you know? And I bluffed it totally. I said, "No, sorry, I have a friend and he told me there's now a B13 regulation." And she was in a total panic. I succeeded so so triumphantly, you know, that although I didn't achieve anything. But I felt so well it was worth doing it, you know? So again, what I'm saying is that this is the or- this is why bureaucracy is for me precisely insofar as it goes into this madness, a purely erotic phenomenon. Erotic in the sense of eternal postponement and so on and so on. And I'm sorry if I repeat myself but I think
bureaucratic bullshit, no? And the lady in some office in Ljubljana told me, "Sorry, it's okay, but now there is a new regulation, something like A22 form, you don't have that," you know? And I bluffed it totally. I said, "No, sorry, I have a friend and he told me there's now a B13 regulation." And she was in a total panic. I succeeded so so triumphantly, you know, that although I didn't achieve anything. But I felt so well it was worth doing it, you know? So again, what I'm saying is that this is the or- this is why bureaucracy is for me precisely insofar as it goes into this madness, a purely erotic phenomenon. Erotic in the sense of eternal postponement and so on and so on. And I'm sorry if I repeat myself but I think
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I even already used maybe this story here. Like, let's say I am impotent. A good psychiatrist will never give me this Buddhist bullshit, you know, like "just relax, don't think, just do it." No. The only approach and to be a little bit almost obscenely open which works, I can tell you, is bureaucratization. You are impotent, you cannot do it. Sit down with the lady or man or whomever and each of you takes a piece of paper and then you say, "Okay, let's establish a precise plan. I kiss you, I put the finger here, there." And then you get into this wonderful bureaucratic problems, "No," said the lady, "I want you to kiss me first there before you put the finger here." And then we debated this so much that at the end we said, "I'm tired of this, let's just go and fuck it." It went perfectly. You know, bureaucracy is something so I will tell you another story that I used, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. The guy who lives not far from here, my good British friend, Lacanian, half Lacanian half Kleinian, I'm still a Stalinist, distinguished analyst Darian Leader. You see that's bureaucracy in practice. He told me that one of his patients told him, made a wonderful told him of a wonderful slip of tongue. He, his patient, not Darian Leader, wanted to seduce a lady, so he took her into a nice hotel where first he wanted to take her out to nice dinner down in the restaurant and then of course up into a room. But he made an embarrassing slip of tongue. When the two entered the restaurant, instead of saying "a table of a table for two please," he said "a room with a bed for two please." Now here you see that Darian Leader is a good Lacanian. He told me it's totally wrong to read this slip of tongue in this primitive pseudo-Freudian way like "Oh, for him eating was just a pretext, his mind was already on..." No, it's the opposite. He was so
I even already used maybe this story here. Like, let's say I am impotent. A good psychiatrist will never give me this Buddhist bullshit, you know, like "just relax, don't think, just do it." No. The only approach and to be a little bit almost obscenely open which works, I can tell you, is bureaucratization. You are impotent, you cannot do it. Sit down with the lady or man or whomever and each of you takes a piece of paper and then you say, "Okay, let's establish a precise plan. I kiss you, I put the finger here, there." And then you get into this wonderful bureaucratic problems, "No," said the lady, "I want you to kiss me first there before you put the finger here." And then we debated this so much that at the end we said, "I'm tired of this, let's just go and fuck it." It went perfectly. You know, bureaucracy is something so I will tell you another story that I used, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. The guy who lives not far from here, my good British friend, Lacanian, half Lacanian half Kleinian, I'm still a Stalinist, distinguished analyst Darian Leader. You see that's bureaucracy in practice. He told me that one of his patients told him, made a wonderful told him of a wonderful slip of tongue. He, his patient, not Darian Leader, wanted to seduce a lady, so he took her into a nice hotel where first he wanted to take her out to nice dinner down in the restaurant and then of course up into a room. But he made an embarrassing slip of tongue. When the two entered the restaurant, instead of saying "a table of a table for two please," he said "a room with a bed for two please." Now here you see that Darian Leader is a good Lacanian. He told me it's totally wrong to read this slip of tongue in this primitive pseudo-Freudian way like "Oh, for him eating was just a pretext, his mind was already on..." No, it's the opposite. He was so
Slavoj Žižek
afraid that he will enjoy too much what should have been only the preparatory step of eating and then
afraid that he will enjoy too much what should have been only the preparatory step of eating and then
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will be too fed up, too tired to do his duty, that it
will be too fed up, too tired to do his duty, that it
Slavoj Žižek
was a reminder to himself this slip. Don't get too involved in eating, remember your true duty. You know it was like like the warning was "solve the problem, don't get involved in bureaucratic detours" or whatever, you know? So okay, let's go on from here. Next stop a step, sorry, a little bit more theoretical. The status of this surplus of object a causes many political problems. The usual figure of this excess is what in politics it's usually referred to as the the how do you usually call it, the wandering excess, you know, the idea is. You find this in Badiou, in Rancière, and in in others. The idea is that, okay, at a philosophical level they say there's always in any field of symbolization a certain excess, something that resists it, something that cannot be in the Hegelian sense of *Aufhebung*, *aufgehoben*, sublated, integrated into the system. Always the point a point of failure. And the idea is that also in the social edifice we have always some remainder, something that resists, a surplus. For example, as Frank Ruda wrote a wonderful book on this, my God, on on the notion of rebel, *Pöbel* in Hegel, as that part of the social edifice which is precisely as Rancière put it, and Badiou follows him here, *la part des sans-part*, "the part of no-part." Something that is in the social edifice but with no proper place in it. And of course we are all deeply into this logic. For example, today, no bad jokes please because I was attacked enough, although I will continue provoking. LGBT, transgender and so on. Obviously their complaint is that they are a part of no-part. They are obviously part of our sexuality, marginalized as they are. And here I am a little bit evil, you know, but I meant it benevolently, extremely. You know that how the big Wall Street Occupy Wall Street formula was "we are no? Well trans people's formula should rather have been "we are the no? So there is also a good But okay, I will not go on not to get caught into the usual problems. What I want to say is that so the idea is we have a social body somehow structured according to certain principles like in male chauvinist perspective, patriarchal principle with men, women, their own roles and so on. And there are elements, parts which don't fit it. And I'm here much more for transgender than than for gay and lesbian. You know, because can you explain this to me? I'm asking you as a citizen a very frank question. I never got it how, and I'm here for transgender undermining the gender binary. Why is it that many gay and lesbian theoreticians emphasize how the gender binary should be undermined? But can you explain to me in what sense homosexuality undermines gender binary? The way I see it, it's fully in it. Male homosexuality means men do it with men and not with women. The
was a reminder to himself this slip. Don't get too involved in eating, remember your true duty. You know it was like like the warning was "solve the problem, don't get involved in bureaucratic detours" or whatever, you know? So okay, let's go on from here. Next stop a step, sorry, a little bit more theoretical. The status of this surplus of object a causes many political problems. The usual figure of this excess is what in politics it's usually referred to as the the how do you usually call it, the wandering excess, you know, the idea is. You find this in Badiou, in Rancière, and in in others. The idea is that, okay, at a philosophical level they say there's always in any field of symbolization a certain excess, something that resists it, something that cannot be in the Hegelian sense of *Aufhebung*, *aufgehoben*, sublated, integrated into the system. Always the point a point of failure. And the idea is that also in the social edifice we have always some remainder, something that resists, a surplus. For example, as Frank Ruda wrote a wonderful book on this, my God, on on the notion of rebel, *Pöbel* in Hegel, as that part of the social edifice which is precisely as Rancière put it, and Badiou follows him here, *la part des sans-part*, "the part of no-part." Something that is in the social edifice but with no proper place in it. And of course we are all deeply into this logic. For example, today, no bad jokes please because I was attacked enough, although I will continue provoking. LGBT, transgender and so on. Obviously their complaint is that they are a part of no-part. They are obviously part of our sexuality, marginalized as they are. And here I am a little bit evil, you know, but I meant it benevolently, extremely. You know that how the big Wall Street Occupy Wall Street formula was "we are no? Well trans people's formula should rather have been "we are the no? So there is also a good But okay, I will not go on not to get caught into the usual problems. What I want to say is that so the idea is we have a social body somehow structured according to certain principles like in male chauvinist perspective, patriarchal principle with men, women, their own roles and so on. And there are elements, parts which don't fit it. And I'm here much more for transgender than than for gay and lesbian. You know, because can you explain this to me? I'm asking you as a citizen a very frank question. I never got it how, and I'm here for transgender undermining the gender binary. Why is it that many gay and lesbian theoreticians emphasize how the gender binary should be undermined? But can you explain to me in what sense homosexuality undermines gender binary? The way I see it, it's fully in it. Male homosexuality means men do it with men and not with women. The
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space of gender binary is fully here. You just make the non-traditional choice. And I think, but we don't have time to go into this now, what Lacan does here is much more subversive than the usual bliss against gender binary,
space of gender binary is fully here. You just make the non-traditional choice. And I think, but we don't have time to go into this now, what Lacan does here is much more subversive than the usual bliss against gender binary,
Slavoj Žižek
no? "There are
no? "There are
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sexes." Lacan totally confuses the categorization. Lacan says somewhere in one of his seminars ironically that he is totally for heterosexuality. But then he says something which is beautiful. He says, "but the only true heterosexuals are lesbians." These standard
sexes." Lacan totally confuses the categorization. Lacan says somewhere in one of his seminars ironically that he is totally for heterosexuality. But then he says something which is beautiful. He says, "but the only true heterosexuals are lesbians." These standard
Slavoj Žižek
heterosexuals are, at
heterosexuals are, at
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least from
least from
Slavoj Žižek
the male side, it's just a
the male side, it's just a
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subspecies
subspecies
Slavoj Žižek
of homosexuality. And I found I used it in some of my old books, I hope you don't know it, two films which I like very much and I think had the same message. Did you see Neil Jordan's *The Crying Game* and David Cronenberg's *M. Butterfly*? It's basically with all the differences the same story. A man gets passionately in love with a person who appears to be a fatal beautiful woman, and when they are on the edge of consummating their affair of doing it and the person pulls down whatever, raises the skirt, pulls down the dress, you see a penis. She was, is a man. Why? And and then of course it's horror and so on. But the reason I first like this scene is that it's a wonderful ironic reversal of the primordial scene according to Freud of fetishism. You know, Freud's simple theory is that the origin of fetishism is this scene when you see a lady naked and she doesn't have a penis, no? And then fetish is the object you've seen just a little bit before, to postpone to cover that lack. Here the problem is not she doesn't have it, but she does have it, you know? So why now why I'm mentioning these two films? To make Lacanian points. Some gay theorists, and I don't agree with them here, they claimed that the message that these films are too much a compromise. That instead of openly admitting the guy, the lover who had this bad surprise was gay, and he just didn't was not ready to admit it to himself, that they play all this game at horror and so on and so on. I think although this reading appears to be pro-gay, it's way too simplistic. I think a much better reading would be that: no, the love here is an authentic heterosexual love. But, and Lacan says this somewhere, the mystery, what makes these scenes so shocking is not "oh I am really a gay." No, I am a heterosexual but I discovered that the structure of heterosexual love is homosexual in the sense that the ultimate male dream is that the beautiful woman is really a man dressed up as a woman. That that's the ultimate heterosexual male fantasy. And Lacan always emphasizes this that for the majority of men, our of course unconscious dream is this one. It's very difficult for us men, majority, to break out of this masturbatory sexuality where the real woman is just a phantasmatic is just a how should I put it, is just an object a phantasmatic a prop to serve as a projection screen for fantasy. How do most of us heterosexual men engage in sex? Let me return, I didn't want to lose time, to another scene from *Brazil* that I quoted many times, it's a genius of Terry Gilliam. You remember when in this futuristic society, they go out to a restaurant, a group of rich people, and they order food? And you know what they get? It's beautiful. They get a plate on which there is just a kind of a dog shit heap of some anonymous, like some kind of a porridge, although I love porridge, some kind of a porridge. And above this, it's a beautiful color image telling you what you are really eating, you know? A juicy steak with this. So you eat shit but there you see, and I find this a wonderful Platonic metaphor of, you know, you just need some shit, some material support, but the fantasy image tells you what you are eating. That's how we men treat women. The real we, bad heterosexual men in a standard heterosexual it's, we want woman, real woman, body just as that shit, so that we can have our image of whatever it is. And it's a and Lacan has which is why, for example, I'm sorry if I'm jumping and using some old stuff, which is why I claim Hitchcock's *Vertigo* is a deeply feminist film. And the true love is the love of the poor Judy for Scottie. Scottie is an evil character if there ever was one, I claim. He is simply in love with a fantasy, with a dead woman. And there is no there is no love with him, it's a mortifying love. The only tragically loving person is Judy. But that's another story. So let's go back. What Lacan does is something beautiful here: he complicates the whole scene pointing out how, you know, like I'll put it like this, and that's my message. It's not simply that we have sexual normativity, heterosexual whatever, and then we have all those marginals who don't fit it. And as good liberals we should fight for the inclusion of all those marginals and so on. Of course we should, to avoid a misunderstanding. But Lacan proposes something which at least to me appears much more radical. He proposes that there is something terribly wrong already with the norm itself. The norm itself is already perverted. You think you are heterosexual man? No, no, your fantasy is I'm screwing a guy who is dressed up as a woman. So and that all these eccentric positions, eccentric in the sense of not fitting the norm, are just symptoms, but not symptoms in the sense of secondary, symptoms in the sense of moments where the truth explodes of what is wrong with the norm itself. And to return back to my example, it's not just sexuality, it's also politics. You have again as Frank in his wonderful book developed, you have rebel, rebel as that excessive element which there is no proper place for it in in in reality and so on and so on. And as Frank developed, I think it was in your book, I'm not sure everything's confused in my mind, is that how what Badiou refers to as post-philosophy, this post-Hegelian decay of philosophy, precisely this was the golden era of this wandering excess. Because it's in erotics, in politics, in economy. They had the same problem: we have a certain normative structure, but there is a remainder which cannot be covered by it. For example, in social structure we have the people state organized, but there is rebel, something that doesn't fit into it. Then even in politics, we have this big problem of representation even in every democracy. Like, we have representative democracies, parliament, blah blah. But can they really represent it all? If and you have the same problem in eroticism: free marriage, marriage, but can marriage cover the true love and so on and so on? But the basic rule Lacanian reply to this, I think, is that is to do what Lacan did with sexual difference and so on. Again, that it's not enough to say we have the hegemonic order and then we act, speak on behalf of all those wandering excesses, how to integrate them. That's for me still a liberal perspective. And this got me into trouble once with Judith Butler who doesn't want to be called liberal. But I told her, "That's still your problem." You know, you want to include into it all those. No, something more has to be done. We should see how, like to return to Frank's topic, *Pöbel*, rebel, the point is not just to say "But there are people out, the refugees, rebel, and we should include them in." No, we should ask what fundamental class antagonism, difference, is there in the very heart of society whose effects are rebel or in sexuality? For Lacan, why do we have trans- people and so on? Because as Lacan put it, *il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship. Sexuality in its core is already antagonistic. This is why I insist, although it's not a perfect parallel of course, on this parallel: class struggle, sexual struggle. Lacan's message again, it's not that some of us can enjoy full sexuality so-called straight and then there are all those half excluded and so on and so on. No, the crucial point is to locate a deadlock into the very center. And then again, to see this wandering excesses, all that doesn't fit into it, as or Badiou's figure of wandering excess nicely developed is *les sans-papiers* in France, those immigrants whose status is not regulated, who are not included into. But again, it's not of course we should be doing it, but my point is it's not enough to say "okay all *sans-papiers* without official papers," you notice that we are again at the bureaucracy, who are not swallowed by our noble bureaucracy. And ah, you know what is the Swiss bureaucracy? Don't underestimate it. A friend who tried to become a Swiss citizen, I don't know if this still holds, told me that for years he was trying to get it but you cannot ever get it. All that you do is you can enter some kind of a limbo. You get a document which asserts that you are seriously considered for the possibility to become a Swiss citizen. And this limbo is the the utmost what you can get there. No, I mean bureaucracy is for me the noblest thing there is, Kafka was right, bureaucracy is now in our godless times our only contact with the divine. A French lady friend, I'm sorry if you know the story, told me a wonderful story how she was she got a message from city authority, Hotel de Ville, that her personal ID card, *carte d'identité*, was stolen and that she needs to report there to get a new one. Okay, she came went there and said, "Sorry, it must be a misunderstanding. Look, I have a card, it wasn't stolen, it's still valid." Ha, what a stupid lady, you know what was the answer she got? "Officially your card is stolen. So what you held in your hand now is an illegal document. So please tear it up and ask for a new one." Ha, I mean you don't get it out so easily. This is theology my God, this is how it all works, you know? The problem is again an eternal process, this is the surplus enjoyment, you know? Whatever you do and you must be active all the time, that's the basic bureaucratic rule. The problem should never be solved. Yes? What do you make of the surplus enjoyment of the left at the moment? There are, there are and I don't want to get I have enough trouble, you know who I am now? A, things went wrong with me with with Greece. Because I didn't support the Left Platform, no? And I still stand on that. I think that the choice between Syriza compromise, capitulation, and Left Platform "let's do Grexit," it's not the true choice. These are two options, both of them Varoufakis told me, I read in a newspaper, would be totally acceptable for for European bureaucracy. Varoufakis told me, I'm sorry if I repeat these stories, when he threatened Schäuble "we will do Grexit," you know what was Schäuble's answer? "Perfect, how much money do you want? billion? We give it to you to do it." What Varoufakis tried, I'm not sure how serious this was in the sense of visible, his idea was to unsettle the entire order, to stay within but to do things, Euro and then through some bank bank bank documents, some pseudo-Euro and so on to remain with, that's why Varoufakis was you remember Varoufakis had to step down and so on. He was the true threat. Okay, that was my first problem. The second problem was refugees where again I cannot repeat more: I'm totally for refugees. I just think that this this utter moralization and so on and is horrible. The price will be the way Europe is turning now in this, you know, more and more anti-immigrant racism and so on. When things will get even worse, will then all those pro-refugee pathetic hypocrites, will they be ready to admit that they are co-responsible for this crisis? There was second, then the other problem was this LGBT and so on, no? I mean I have many problems and so I will give you an example I have it for surplus enjoyment. For example, there is in parts of some left-liberal pathetic pro-refugee guys, I think this is a clear example of of surplus enjoyment, how you know you have this endless self-laceration: "Europe is entering a new a new a new barbarian age. Are we still human? Did we lose our humanity? How can this be going on?" and so on and so on. My problem is this one: that in this way what you gain is a kind of a it's a clear radical pleasure in this beautiful soul moral authority that you instead of solving problems. For example, my God, I'm much Angela Merkel, I don't idealize her, but half a year ago she made a very reasonable proposal. You remember? She said "Why don't we simply accept as a rule that of the EU budget," and we are talking about immense billions, "goes for the refugees?" You know, like, many people are ready to open their hearts to the refugees, not to have to open their purses, how should I put it, no? I'm for what where are all those humanitarians now? It's a mega tragedy in the making. Aleppo, a two million city and at least when Sarajevo was under siege, there was a little bit of a movement. Where is the mega movement now, now and so on? You know, my problem is this one: that when somebody elevates the other, refugees, into kind of ideal, poor and so on, I always smell racism behind it. I mean, I got this lesson through many contacts with, for example in Canada, Canada is now my new evil country. I love it, but you know Canada likes to boast that it's a higher synthesis of United States as America and Europe, American efficiency but European tolerant spirit. Are you crazy? Did you read from time to time you get some notes, but small notes in newspapers. You know how horrible is the situation of whatever you call them, Inuit, Native Americans in Canada? It's a nightmare. They are in a total psychic breakdown. There is, I will quote it in my next book, there is some city of people in the cold area north way north from Toronto, and they are totally at a lost. A couple of months ago, I'm talking about a city of they had over suicides. People are just getting drunk, killing themselves and so on. Or do you know that claiming that families are drug addicted, alcohol, years ago still probably even now, and these are official documents not some left lunatics but official, of the people of Inuits and natives are taken and putting into state institutions, boarding schools. Okay, what's the problem? The problem is that I'm quoting official statistics, you know how many of them are sexually abused in those boarding schools? not one eight, I mean you know we have so many, it's so select- and this I find a little bit hypocritical. Like, such a tragedy, mega tragedy is going on there and now we have happy Canada with Justin Trudeau. Of course he did some good things but mainly cosmetic, you know? Okay, so again to go back to that. The way this moralistic leftists they simply enjoy spreading bad news instead of pragmatically focusing on how to solve problems because you know this is for me part of the surplus enjoyment of the left which I already detected years ago when I noticed that the best left theory is always a very convincing explanation after the revolution fails of why it had to fail, you know? When things go wrong the leftists write a wonderful book *Up From Trotsky*, "why," you know? This sense of morals, for example today when it's fashionable, I don't like Germans too much, all of them. But this horrible thing how Germany is now making compromises, horrible, Pegida, they are slowly closing the borders. Okay, but fuck you, they were by far the best, the miracle. What did others do? I mean you focus on the only guy in Europe who behaved half-decently with refugees. And nobody talks about, you want to see true horror? Go to my country. Go to all this Slavic post-communist countries, up, they are not Slavic, Lithuania and so on. I read somewhere in official media, but it's just a small note, talking about racism. You know now to protect them from Putin there are a couple of American battalions in Lithuania or Latvia, in one of the two. You know that their government officially protested to NATO, claiming that there are some black soldiers there and this causes unease among the population. So if they can send units without black people and so on? And my own country Slovenia, I cannot believe my years what is happening. Recently I've read in the main Slovene right-wing, very popular weekly magazine, a guy it's such a crazy conspiracy theory that I almost like it, it's almost subversive. It's a brutal attack on George Soros, claiming that he is the most dangerous and evil guy today in the world. Why? Because he is organizing the European the invasion of Europe by Negroid Islamic hordes, that's the term he uses. And he says that this is done by Soros as he calls him a "Talmudo-Zionist." So I like this theory because it says that you know we live under a wrong impression that there is some kind of a conflict in the Middle East between the Jews and the radical Muslims. No, no, he has a theory, behind Muslim migrants and radicalism it's all really a Jewish plot, you know? I mean it's and you know what shocked me? It appeared in a big media and people laughed a little bit, they just... like what worries me is this lethargy where the only thing you actually do is this morally satisfying complaining, you know? "Horrible, did you see what they are doing? Horrible, did you see what they are doing?" and so on. This moralistic left, I mean typical leftist meeting in Europe today is "Oh it's horrible, our countries are getting fascist, did you see what they are doing, what they are doing?" I mean this is for me a clear case of total lethargy, the the care is just to safeguard your your your moral your moral superiority. I'm here for like what what I would have done in Germany. First, I would have mobilized much more, maybe they are doing it, they don't, but the first thing to ask is where is the self-organization, maybe you know more, among the refugee immigrants themselves? To mobilize them, to bring them daily and also to embarrass them, not just to treat like, when there is some event like whatever some woman is raped by immigrants, bring them in, debate it. What do they say about it and so on and so on? I mean instead of this what the left what is the left is often doing is this fake understanding: "Yes they were starved, they were terrorized, it's all an effect of
of homosexuality. And I found I used it in some of my old books, I hope you don't know it, two films which I like very much and I think had the same message. Did you see Neil Jordan's *The Crying Game* and David Cronenberg's *M. Butterfly*? It's basically with all the differences the same story. A man gets passionately in love with a person who appears to be a fatal beautiful woman, and when they are on the edge of consummating their affair of doing it and the person pulls down whatever, raises the skirt, pulls down the dress, you see a penis. She was, is a man. Why? And and then of course it's horror and so on. But the reason I first like this scene is that it's a wonderful ironic reversal of the primordial scene according to Freud of fetishism. You know, Freud's simple theory is that the origin of fetishism is this scene when you see a lady naked and she doesn't have a penis, no? And then fetish is the object you've seen just a little bit before, to postpone to cover that lack. Here the problem is not she doesn't have it, but she does have it, you know? So why now why I'm mentioning these two films? To make Lacanian points. Some gay theorists, and I don't agree with them here, they claimed that the message that these films are too much a compromise. That instead of openly admitting the guy, the lover who had this bad surprise was gay, and he just didn't was not ready to admit it to himself, that they play all this game at horror and so on and so on. I think although this reading appears to be pro-gay, it's way too simplistic. I think a much better reading would be that: no, the love here is an authentic heterosexual love. But, and Lacan says this somewhere, the mystery, what makes these scenes so shocking is not "oh I am really a gay." No, I am a heterosexual but I discovered that the structure of heterosexual love is homosexual in the sense that the ultimate male dream is that the beautiful woman is really a man dressed up as a woman. That that's the ultimate heterosexual male fantasy. And Lacan always emphasizes this that for the majority of men, our of course unconscious dream is this one. It's very difficult for us men, majority, to break out of this masturbatory sexuality where the real woman is just a phantasmatic is just a how should I put it, is just an object a phantasmatic a prop to serve as a projection screen for fantasy. How do most of us heterosexual men engage in sex? Let me return, I didn't want to lose time, to another scene from *Brazil* that I quoted many times, it's a genius of Terry Gilliam. You remember when in this futuristic society, they go out to a restaurant, a group of rich people, and they order food? And you know what they get? It's beautiful. They get a plate on which there is just a kind of a dog shit heap of some anonymous, like some kind of a porridge, although I love porridge, some kind of a porridge. And above this, it's a beautiful color image telling you what you are really eating, you know? A juicy steak with this. So you eat shit but there you see, and I find this a wonderful Platonic metaphor of, you know, you just need some shit, some material support, but the fantasy image tells you what you are eating. That's how we men treat women. The real we, bad heterosexual men in a standard heterosexual it's, we want woman, real woman, body just as that shit, so that we can have our image of whatever it is. And it's a and Lacan has which is why, for example, I'm sorry if I'm jumping and using some old stuff, which is why I claim Hitchcock's *Vertigo* is a deeply feminist film. And the true love is the love of the poor Judy for Scottie. Scottie is an evil character if there ever was one, I claim. He is simply in love with a fantasy, with a dead woman. And there is no there is no love with him, it's a mortifying love. The only tragically loving person is Judy. But that's another story. So let's go back. What Lacan does is something beautiful here: he complicates the whole scene pointing out how, you know, like I'll put it like this, and that's my message. It's not simply that we have sexual normativity, heterosexual whatever, and then we have all those marginals who don't fit it. And as good liberals we should fight for the inclusion of all those marginals and so on. Of course we should, to avoid a misunderstanding. But Lacan proposes something which at least to me appears much more radical. He proposes that there is something terribly wrong already with the norm itself. The norm itself is already perverted. You think you are heterosexual man? No, no, your fantasy is I'm screwing a guy who is dressed up as a woman. So and that all these eccentric positions, eccentric in the sense of not fitting the norm, are just symptoms, but not symptoms in the sense of secondary, symptoms in the sense of moments where the truth explodes of what is wrong with the norm itself. And to return back to my example, it's not just sexuality, it's also politics. You have again as Frank in his wonderful book developed, you have rebel, rebel as that excessive element which there is no proper place for it in in in reality and so on and so on. And as Frank developed, I think it was in your book, I'm not sure everything's confused in my mind, is that how what Badiou refers to as post-philosophy, this post-Hegelian decay of philosophy, precisely this was the golden era of this wandering excess. Because it's in erotics, in politics, in economy. They had the same problem: we have a certain normative structure, but there is a remainder which cannot be covered by it. For example, in social structure we have the people state organized, but there is rebel, something that doesn't fit into it. Then even in politics, we have this big problem of representation even in every democracy. Like, we have representative democracies, parliament, blah blah. But can they really represent it all? If and you have the same problem in eroticism: free marriage, marriage, but can marriage cover the true love and so on and so on? But the basic rule Lacanian reply to this, I think, is that is to do what Lacan did with sexual difference and so on. Again, that it's not enough to say we have the hegemonic order and then we act, speak on behalf of all those wandering excesses, how to integrate them. That's for me still a liberal perspective. And this got me into trouble once with Judith Butler who doesn't want to be called liberal. But I told her, "That's still your problem." You know, you want to include into it all those. No, something more has to be done. We should see how, like to return to Frank's topic, *Pöbel*, rebel, the point is not just to say "But there are people out, the refugees, rebel, and we should include them in." No, we should ask what fundamental class antagonism, difference, is there in the very heart of society whose effects are rebel or in sexuality? For Lacan, why do we have trans- people and so on? Because as Lacan put it, *il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship. Sexuality in its core is already antagonistic. This is why I insist, although it's not a perfect parallel of course, on this parallel: class struggle, sexual struggle. Lacan's message again, it's not that some of us can enjoy full sexuality so-called straight and then there are all those half excluded and so on and so on. No, the crucial point is to locate a deadlock into the very center. And then again, to see this wandering excesses, all that doesn't fit into it, as or Badiou's figure of wandering excess nicely developed is *les sans-papiers* in France, those immigrants whose status is not regulated, who are not included into. But again, it's not of course we should be doing it, but my point is it's not enough to say "okay all *sans-papiers* without official papers," you notice that we are again at the bureaucracy, who are not swallowed by our noble bureaucracy. And ah, you know what is the Swiss bureaucracy? Don't underestimate it. A friend who tried to become a Swiss citizen, I don't know if this still holds, told me that for years he was trying to get it but you cannot ever get it. All that you do is you can enter some kind of a limbo. You get a document which asserts that you are seriously considered for the possibility to become a Swiss citizen. And this limbo is the the utmost what you can get there. No, I mean bureaucracy is for me the noblest thing there is, Kafka was right, bureaucracy is now in our godless times our only contact with the divine. A French lady friend, I'm sorry if you know the story, told me a wonderful story how she was she got a message from city authority, Hotel de Ville, that her personal ID card, *carte d'identité*, was stolen and that she needs to report there to get a new one. Okay, she came went there and said, "Sorry, it must be a misunderstanding. Look, I have a card, it wasn't stolen, it's still valid." Ha, what a stupid lady, you know what was the answer she got? "Officially your card is stolen. So what you held in your hand now is an illegal document. So please tear it up and ask for a new one." Ha, I mean you don't get it out so easily. This is theology my God, this is how it all works, you know? The problem is again an eternal process, this is the surplus enjoyment, you know? Whatever you do and you must be active all the time, that's the basic bureaucratic rule. The problem should never be solved. Yes? What do you make of the surplus enjoyment of the left at the moment? There are, there are and I don't want to get I have enough trouble, you know who I am now? A, things went wrong with me with with Greece. Because I didn't support the Left Platform, no? And I still stand on that. I think that the choice between Syriza compromise, capitulation, and Left Platform "let's do Grexit," it's not the true choice. These are two options, both of them Varoufakis told me, I read in a newspaper, would be totally acceptable for for European bureaucracy. Varoufakis told me, I'm sorry if I repeat these stories, when he threatened Schäuble "we will do Grexit," you know what was Schäuble's answer? "Perfect, how much money do you want? billion? We give it to you to do it." What Varoufakis tried, I'm not sure how serious this was in the sense of visible, his idea was to unsettle the entire order, to stay within but to do things, Euro and then through some bank bank bank documents, some pseudo-Euro and so on to remain with, that's why Varoufakis was you remember Varoufakis had to step down and so on. He was the true threat. Okay, that was my first problem. The second problem was refugees where again I cannot repeat more: I'm totally for refugees. I just think that this this utter moralization and so on and is horrible. The price will be the way Europe is turning now in this, you know, more and more anti-immigrant racism and so on. When things will get even worse, will then all those pro-refugee pathetic hypocrites, will they be ready to admit that they are co-responsible for this crisis? There was second, then the other problem was this LGBT and so on, no? I mean I have many problems and so I will give you an example I have it for surplus enjoyment. For example, there is in parts of some left-liberal pathetic pro-refugee guys, I think this is a clear example of of surplus enjoyment, how you know you have this endless self-laceration: "Europe is entering a new a new a new barbarian age. Are we still human? Did we lose our humanity? How can this be going on?" and so on and so on. My problem is this one: that in this way what you gain is a kind of a it's a clear radical pleasure in this beautiful soul moral authority that you instead of solving problems. For example, my God, I'm much Angela Merkel, I don't idealize her, but half a year ago she made a very reasonable proposal. You remember? She said "Why don't we simply accept as a rule that of the EU budget," and we are talking about immense billions, "goes for the refugees?" You know, like, many people are ready to open their hearts to the refugees, not to have to open their purses, how should I put it, no? I'm for what where are all those humanitarians now? It's a mega tragedy in the making. Aleppo, a two million city and at least when Sarajevo was under siege, there was a little bit of a movement. Where is the mega movement now, now and so on? You know, my problem is this one: that when somebody elevates the other, refugees, into kind of ideal, poor and so on, I always smell racism behind it. I mean, I got this lesson through many contacts with, for example in Canada, Canada is now my new evil country. I love it, but you know Canada likes to boast that it's a higher synthesis of United States as America and Europe, American efficiency but European tolerant spirit. Are you crazy? Did you read from time to time you get some notes, but small notes in newspapers. You know how horrible is the situation of whatever you call them, Inuit, Native Americans in Canada? It's a nightmare. They are in a total psychic breakdown. There is, I will quote it in my next book, there is some city of people in the cold area north way north from Toronto, and they are totally at a lost. A couple of months ago, I'm talking about a city of they had over suicides. People are just getting drunk, killing themselves and so on. Or do you know that claiming that families are drug addicted, alcohol, years ago still probably even now, and these are official documents not some left lunatics but official, of the people of Inuits and natives are taken and putting into state institutions, boarding schools. Okay, what's the problem? The problem is that I'm quoting official statistics, you know how many of them are sexually abused in those boarding schools? not one eight, I mean you know we have so many, it's so select- and this I find a little bit hypocritical. Like, such a tragedy, mega tragedy is going on there and now we have happy Canada with Justin Trudeau. Of course he did some good things but mainly cosmetic, you know? Okay, so again to go back to that. The way this moralistic leftists they simply enjoy spreading bad news instead of pragmatically focusing on how to solve problems because you know this is for me part of the surplus enjoyment of the left which I already detected years ago when I noticed that the best left theory is always a very convincing explanation after the revolution fails of why it had to fail, you know? When things go wrong the leftists write a wonderful book *Up From Trotsky*, "why," you know? This sense of morals, for example today when it's fashionable, I don't like Germans too much, all of them. But this horrible thing how Germany is now making compromises, horrible, Pegida, they are slowly closing the borders. Okay, but fuck you, they were by far the best, the miracle. What did others do? I mean you focus on the only guy in Europe who behaved half-decently with refugees. And nobody talks about, you want to see true horror? Go to my country. Go to all this Slavic post-communist countries, up, they are not Slavic, Lithuania and so on. I read somewhere in official media, but it's just a small note, talking about racism. You know now to protect them from Putin there are a couple of American battalions in Lithuania or Latvia, in one of the two. You know that their government officially protested to NATO, claiming that there are some black soldiers there and this causes unease among the population. So if they can send units without black people and so on? And my own country Slovenia, I cannot believe my years what is happening. Recently I've read in the main Slovene right-wing, very popular weekly magazine, a guy it's such a crazy conspiracy theory that I almost like it, it's almost subversive. It's a brutal attack on George Soros, claiming that he is the most dangerous and evil guy today in the world. Why? Because he is organizing the European the invasion of Europe by Negroid Islamic hordes, that's the term he uses. And he says that this is done by Soros as he calls him a "Talmudo-Zionist." So I like this theory because it says that you know we live under a wrong impression that there is some kind of a conflict in the Middle East between the Jews and the radical Muslims. No, no, he has a theory, behind Muslim migrants and radicalism it's all really a Jewish plot, you know? I mean it's and you know what shocked me? It appeared in a big media and people laughed a little bit, they just... like what worries me is this lethargy where the only thing you actually do is this morally satisfying complaining, you know? "Horrible, did you see what they are doing? Horrible, did you see what they are doing?" and so on. This moralistic left, I mean typical leftist meeting in Europe today is "Oh it's horrible, our countries are getting fascist, did you see what they are doing, what they are doing?" I mean this is for me a clear case of total lethargy, the the care is just to safeguard your your your moral your moral superiority. I'm here for like what what I would have done in Germany. First, I would have mobilized much more, maybe they are doing it, they don't, but the first thing to ask is where is the self-organization, maybe you know more, among the refugee immigrants themselves? To mobilize them, to bring them daily and also to embarrass them, not just to treat like, when there is some event like whatever some woman is raped by immigrants, bring them in, debate it. What do they say about it and so on and so on? I mean instead of this what the left what is the left is often doing is this fake understanding: "Yes they were starved, they were terrorized, it's all an effect of
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colonialism, we should
colonialism, we should
Slavoj Žižek
understand it" and so on and so on. I mean I'm horrified by and I I and believe me when I meet real immigrants, okay now you will say we know why, yes because I apply my creative Marxist methods and I go immediately into dirty jokes, you know, and it works wonderfully, you know? We are immediately friends and so on. Sorry, any other? My God, fuck it, time is running. Okay, allow me allow me another detour because let me nonetheless go on just please a little bit a little bit with this. So you know if we, ah, now I will nonetheless make another LGBT point, maybe problematic to some of you. So also LGBT, I think that trans people are the purest symptom, but again for me, you know symptom in the Lacanian sense. Symptom does not mean just an aftereffect, secondary. Symptom is the point where the truth of a field explodes. LGBT or trans whatever you call them people embody the fact that what Lacan would have put it: *il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship. Which is why I simply don't get it when some people who attacked me now in the United States, they claim that I'm caught in gender binary. But no, for me the point of Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship" it's that precisely any gender binary always fails. That sexuality, our sexuality as such is a priori thwarted by an impossibility and so on. And my only reproach to some, not all, with many of them we are now doing books together, miracles will happen, because some people were horrified, "My God, what for an idiot would do a book on LGBT with me?" you know? It is this, I am suspicious of this obsession with ultra-categorization. It is as if it's also a way to avoid the basic deadlock. For example, you know what happened recently? It's wonderful reading. It's that some, I don't know of the city of New York agency, didn't they establish a list of, and I have it, I don't have it just here, of sex identities. You have gender queer, man to woman, woman to man, whatever. Okay, I give them the full right for this, be called what you want, it's the basic right. Although even here I would have put a limit, but not in this case. You know because their basic argument of LGBT people who advocate if I'm neither he or she we should invent another third-person pronoun singular. My problem is this one: that it is as if with another more exhaustive classification you will finally find your proper place. I know that the last time I was here, when half a year ago, I had a debate here with with Jackie Rose whose solution is let's simply split personal identity problem and law legislation, no? But I think that when you get identities, it's get in this sense problematic that it's as if again with this overclassification finally each of us, no matter how trans you are, if you don't fit into he or she you will find a proper place. No, you will not, sexuality is constituted by antagonism. And I think the greatness of LGBT people is that precisely they experience this antagonism in the heart of in the heart of in the heart of of sexuality at its purest. That's why I also, if we talk about antagonism, ah yes, I said that I don't believe that that everyone should have the right to be called addressed as what they want. Of course in the case of LGBT I agree with it. But as an abstract principle this doesn't hold. No, I think that no, the usual the legitimization that the LGBT people use is too abstract. I give them the right, okay who am I even to give them I automatically accept their right to be called he, she, it, they, whatever you want. I'm just saying that this is not a universal principle. Why not? Because there are the principle that I don't agree with is that if some designation hurts you or humiliates you then you have the right to be called differently. Now you will say isn't this self-evident? No, it's not. If we have a war criminal or a brutal capitalist speculator who wants to be called humanitarian? No, I think he should be called criminal. And the whole point is that it should hurt him and so on. So you know what I mean, I don't accept this, it's a very specific case, sexual identity. Otherwise I don't agree with it. But now comes the evil part, but I love it. You know all these sexual positions, it works in the case of sexuality where we are sexed beings, the core of your identity is at stake. But and you know that now I got the story from my friends. That's why I was warning about guys like the Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook and so on. They are so, it's I my paranoia was right, why they are so fanatically for LGBT? One of them I get an interview I will quote it, I got it, said "but isn't it the same with class difference? We should also exit from class binary." And one of them said, "Look, it's unfair to say I'm a capitalist, I help workers, I want a special category" and so on. So I took the [unintelligible] and composed my list. Why class binary? Why not "bi-class"? A proletarian sub-employing and exploiting other proletarians. Then "masturbatory cross-class": a small company self-employed owner exploiting himself. "Class queen": a motherly capitalist who takes care of her workers but tolerates no trade unions. PTC, "proletarian to capitalist"; CTP, "capitalist to proletarian." "Class bender," "pan-class," "non-class," "trans-class," "third class," "class fluid," "non-binary trans-class," "person of trans-class experience." Then my favorite: because one of the genders in New York is also "two-spirit." But this is perfect! Aren't people like Bill Gates and George Soros two-spirit capitalists? One spirit, ruthless manipulator; the other spirit, generous humanitarian and so on. Then you have "precarious proletarian," "digital capitalist." Then "CBC boots": a capitalist brutally exploiting another capitalist and and my reaction to this is from the great British proletarian opera, you know, Gilbert and Sullivan, *Mikado*, you know? They are all on the list and none of them will be missed, you know? No, but you see you see my point here that you should this is for me, of course I am all for it, renaming and so no, but just be careful and always ask the brutal Leninist question: how does renaming effectively function? And another thing that you should time is running. Okay I will I really want so many more things to say that I want to go into another thing. Yes, the name Lacan's name for this impossibility at the core of sexuality is sexual difference. Sexual difference for Lacan is not men and women, but it's some as it were self-difference inner obstacle self-impediment which ruins everything. So here people who attacked me on LGBT made a reproach to me and then to Lacan with which I don't agree. One was, and I don't have sorry the names here, two criticisms which appear to me quite crazy, at least the second one. The one was that, and it sounds almost convincing, that sexual difference is Lacan's fundamental fantasy. This is a theory popular in some circles that Lacan remained too phallocentric, and they the Lacan they like is the Lacan of precisely of the surplus, of *objet petit a*. And they of course quote as their sacred passage from Lacan when Lacan says that object small a, this surplus enjoyment, is asexual. But the way they read it is simply that there is some almost Deleuzian multitude plurality of partial drives whatever, and that sexual difference is edipalization, comes other words as a kind of fundamental fantasy constraint onto it. Here ah, if you are a Lacanian you get into your own bureaucratic theology and get it. First, Lacan doesn't write, doesn't say that object a is asexual, but that it is a, but write in cursive, like *objet petit a*, "a-sexual." What he means is sexual in the mode of object small a, which doesn't mean simply beyond sexual difference, but filling in the gap of the impossibility of sexual difference. So sexual difference but again, not in the sense of men-women, but in the sense in which where does we when we are men women we obfuscate sexual difference? If you have an authentic on the edge transgender person, sexual difference exists there as such, embodied in one person. So this is the first one. The second some of those advocates there was you can check it up in *Philosophical Salon* where there were attacks on me. Recently there is a text against me that I love. The reproach is this one: that I don't see that sexual difference is not only part of basic patriarchal structure, gender, which gets used for colonization and so on, but that sexual difference is, it's a pretty radical position, I almost like it, sexual difference is a notion which only functions which is an effect of of slavery and domination. So that sexual difference is the discourse of domination and servitude and slavery transposed into it. Well my answer here is my reply here is a very simple one. I can get the point, the whole argument is that some colonizers when they despised in racist terms other aboriginal people, they sometimes claim, "You see their identities mixed, they don't only they don't even have clear sexual roles" and so on and so on. But on the other hand, I'm here pro, again my horror, pro-Eurocentric modernist. I claim that isn't show me one, maybe they are, it's not a rhetorical question. Show me one traditional culture which is not based on some kind of a sexualized, precisely in the sense of gender binary, cosmology. Male principle, female principle and so on and so on. I think that the experience of and now you will say but you have androgynous and so on. Yes but these are also supplements to this basic ontological tension, Yin-Yang, masculine-feminine, light-darkness and so on and so on. The greatness of modernity is precisely as first feminist partisans of Descartes wrote somewhere, "We like Descartes because *Cogito* doesn't have a sex." I mean, so I find it very funny when partisans of of transgenderism against binary against gender binary attack me of Eurocentrism. Are they aware that in what they advocate as transgenderism or transgender position is strictly a European phenomenon, part of our culture, which absolutely you cannot translate it? Of course every civilization have those marginal androgynous and so on and so on. But it's not the same. Okay, that's what I and then so again, okay I will not go into this, I will just to amuse you a little bit conclude with something to announce what I will be doing tomorrow. So the main result, and I don't have time to develop it now, I already finished a new book now, *Void and its Excess*, where I go into it, namely into how it's not enough to do this poetry of postmodern Badiou would have put it anti-philosophical idea of philosophy always failed, at a certain point there is an excess and so on. No, there are excesses symptoms because there is no base. Because the base, the thing itself is cut fundamentally by certain impossibility and so on. And I will just maybe give a hint at where I will move tomorrow, referring to Alenka Zupančič's new book. I had the honor of reading the manuscript. I will try to show how Lacan out of these considerations proposes a uniquely beautiful theory of analytic act, of analytic interpretation, which is not just "integrate the excess or plurality enjoyfully," but to how should I put it, to provide, invent a new signifier. A new name which trans- and Alenka Zupančič gives some wonderful examples from jokes. And I will I will give okay, I will just tell you one joke which I already and then I will finish, which I already used in my books and I will try then to read as an analytic intervention. You must remember I used this joke years ago already. It's a joke that you find with many in many countries, a joke against politicians. My version is from Croatia in the '90s when they had that authoritarian right-wing president Franjo Tuđman. The joke is that he is flying on a plane with his big family above Croatia, and one person, his wife, tells him, "Franjo why don't you throw out a check for million Euros and to make a Croat happy, one Croat?" Then another guy tells him, "Why don't you throw out two checks for half a million and make two Croats happy?" and so on and so on. At the end his grandson, a person of childish innocence says, "But grandpa, why don't you throw out of the plane yourself and make all the Croats happy?" you know? This is you see this is something like a psychoanalytic intervention almost. And I spoke with a psychoanalyst who told me I can almost imagine this as an intervention. Let's invent a similar case. I know people like this. It's me obviously, but my mother was a bad case here. People who like to sacrifice themselves, not themselves, but sacrifice things for other like people who always want to help. "Don't you need help? Can I do this for you? Can I do that for you?" and so on. So like my mother was a clear case of this. She was always asking me, "Should I go to a store for you? Should I do this, should I do that?" no? And of course when I said "Please stop, I don't want anything from you," she broke down crying, you know, like "Oh my God, what should I then do with myself?" and so on, no? And so the point is this one: that when you have this, a guy who is just has this eternal tendency to sacrifice things for other. Like, "I will do this, take you to lunch to make you happy, do this for you, keep your children in the afternoon, whatever doing favors." Well the analytic answer would have been of course something like, "Why don't you sacrifice yourself and make all of us happy?" But not in the sense of killing yourself, but literally sacrifice your-self, sacrifice get rid of the structure of your self-ego which pushes you into this direction all the time. But now you will say but what is so bad about doing good things to others? I can tell you from my own examples: there is always a dirty economy behind it. Now I'll make a half a confession. You might understand. I know whenever I like to help other people, and even in such a way that they think that I am against them, that they don't notice it. You think I am a good guy? Ho ho, I looked into myself and discovered what's my secret dream. It's that I will be doing this and you will not even notice it, you will maybe even mock me, attack me. And then at a certain point you will notice this how good I was. And you will be so embarrassed and you will want to apologize and I will feel so good. You see how disgusting it is? I'm doing all this just to create that scene of "you will feel bad and I will be wounded and I will feel so good that you feel bad" and so on. So I will try again to de- because you know why? Because this is what Lacan means by at the end of the analysis a new signifier should be produced. It's a much more complex notion. I will develop this tomorrow and a little bit more, I dropped it out I talk too much, into theory, philosophy, but then we will have Frank Ruda, Comrade Ruda. And now minutes for democracy if you want it. I mean, yeah. I can who wants to comment or question, just in front of the guy? That. Please. Yes, I I couldn't help notice how how [unintelligible] stance you had against the identity politics of the uh the... no I'm fine, I've got a loud enough voice than this. No, take the mic. Take the mic because there may be people at the back. And for the recording too. Hello, I yeah... I couldn't help notice the the the parallels you have with the anti-identitarian left. For example the the I go on a board called Leftypol. It's full of anti-identitarians who criticize both the identity politics of the right, especially those on Pol, and that which is on the left, such as those you might find on Tumblr. And I've been thinking: the whole thing about class not being a struggle... it's why do people make these things identities when sometimes they can be concrete facts such as in a Marxist view or even in the Lacanian view? Why do they make them identities? Give me an example, I'm sorry, quite sincerely, I don't get clearly what are you aiming at. Are you speaking now which identity are you mentioning? Sexual identity or more class identity? Well, the the process of creating the identities. For example, I saw a there was a funny meme where there was some person where there was someone on Twitter saying "rich-splaining" and defined it as "when a rich person explains something to a poor person" and followed by a funny caption of saying "class war's over guys." It's I I why do these why are things turned into identities? And why why do we get this identitarian and thus the moralistic sense, sentiment, that comes out of this identity politics? Okay, I will now ask you a rough question because I'm not sure, like, where do you stand here? Are you? I am I'm iden- anti-identitarian, a very staunch Marxist. Ah, perfect! Then we agree! Because you know what's for me the basic problem? Identity politics is for me the politics of coexistence. The goal is not to destroy the other but "can't we all live together with our identities, recognize..." and of course at a certain level this holds. Like, but not at the basic class level. There, I'm sorry, class struggle does not mean we should get over it and have some identity politics where proletarians can be fully proletarian and bourgeois fully bourgeois and whatever. No, it's it's it's a totally different type of antagonism. It's a radical antagonism. And my problem with identity politics is that this type of antagonism disappears or is even translated into identity antagonism. For example, in United States, I noticed how class issues tend to be retranslated into identity issues. For example, the usual when they speak about Mexicans, if you listen to many academic texts it's almost as if it's not economic struggle but what appears as economic struggle is our is our is our intolerance of the Mexicans. And then you even go a step further into some pseudo-Freudianism and says, "We project our fears onto Mexicans, but what are these fears? We should look deeper into ourselves and locate it" and so on. So again, my reproach against identity politics is first I'm an old old-fashioned universalist. I think a priori that's my subjectivity with that LGBT point, we don't want to be hurt. Well, sometimes you have to be hurt. For example, I'm not changing the topic, another point I wanted to develop. One way I was attacked when I was in Ramallah, I think I did a very proper anti-anti-Muslim point. I said we should attack of course the honor killings and so on, but I just listed a series of other examples from Canada to Mexico to my own country where also horrible things are happening to women, no, to minorities, no? And I just say that we have to be fair and locate all the these horrors, and you know what reply I got? A pretty horrifying reply for me. It was that while apparently I was criticizing violence against women, children and so on, by talking about it, I was reproducing it verbally. I totally oppose it, you know for what reason? It's an old humanist saying by Edward Bond. It's a little bit too naive but I agree with it. He said somewhere that if you don't want to confront confront Hiroshima in theater openly, you will probably confront it in reality again. That is to say I think that to that things like rape and horrors and torture whatever, we have to confront them in a brutal way. We must be hurt. These are horrible things. Otherwise we will follow that way to which I often refer, yes, immediately, mockingly: you know now that as we learn from Americans torture is called enhanced interrogation technique? So I ironically proposed once: why don't we call rape enhanced seduction technique or whatever? You know, like, all the horror disappears. No, you must be that's why I'm totally opposed, of course within certain limits I know what it means to be really terrified and so on, but hurt, but to this trigger warning system now in Ameri- I mean, sorry, university is not an isolated place where you are safe. University should precisely expose us to the brutality of life. Of course not at the level of being really raped, but to confront the horror. Only this works. And that's for me the fear of all these trigger warnings, people must feel safe. No, people must not feel safe. People must be safe. And the worst thing is that to make you feel safe where you are not really safe. So you see, my problem with again my problem with identity politics is that it simply... for example the moment with LGBT, the moment I just said that, I'm not saying this devalues LGBT, but the fact that all the big business is emphatically supporting it. It says something. We should at least ask: is then this a totally neutral field? Can we somehow combine LGBT with other struggles? How? I was instantly attacked for "class essentialism." Class in this identity politics "class essentialism" is a label which you get if you just even mention class in any way. I know when they say there are multiple struggles (class, race, sex), class never really occurs there. And things get especially problematic as it often happens when the very progressive identity politics gets caught into gets a very weird class connotation. How often I encountered in the United States that beneath the critique of male chauvinism and so on, anti-feminism, it was really upper-middle-class white academics silently targeting allegedly primitive Mexican workers who don't read their whatever. You know, I simply think of course it's not the simple old bourgeois-proletarian, but something that we should still call class struggle antagonism is going on, getting stronger and stronger. And my source would be here like somebody whom you really cannot accuse to be a leftist, Peter Sloterdijk. He wrote a book on I quote it often on capitalism as a cupola, where he in a wonderful develops how this logic Hollywood, you know if you are disoriented look at a good Hollywood blockbuster no, like like although they're very problematic films but like *Hunger Games*, *Elysium*. Hollywood, we are moving towards this people live in a cupola, protected, majority's out and so on. And this tension I reject to claim that this basic tension is simply one on at the same level with others. This is the radical tension that still defines
understand it" and so on and so on. I mean I'm horrified by and I I and believe me when I meet real immigrants, okay now you will say we know why, yes because I apply my creative Marxist methods and I go immediately into dirty jokes, you know, and it works wonderfully, you know? We are immediately friends and so on. Sorry, any other? My God, fuck it, time is running. Okay, allow me allow me another detour because let me nonetheless go on just please a little bit a little bit with this. So you know if we, ah, now I will nonetheless make another LGBT point, maybe problematic to some of you. So also LGBT, I think that trans people are the purest symptom, but again for me, you know symptom in the Lacanian sense. Symptom does not mean just an aftereffect, secondary. Symptom is the point where the truth of a field explodes. LGBT or trans whatever you call them people embody the fact that what Lacan would have put it: *il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel*, there is no sexual relationship. Which is why I simply don't get it when some people who attacked me now in the United States, they claim that I'm caught in gender binary. But no, for me the point of Lacan's "there is no sexual relationship" it's that precisely any gender binary always fails. That sexuality, our sexuality as such is a priori thwarted by an impossibility and so on. And my only reproach to some, not all, with many of them we are now doing books together, miracles will happen, because some people were horrified, "My God, what for an idiot would do a book on LGBT with me?" you know? It is this, I am suspicious of this obsession with ultra-categorization. It is as if it's also a way to avoid the basic deadlock. For example, you know what happened recently? It's wonderful reading. It's that some, I don't know of the city of New York agency, didn't they establish a list of, and I have it, I don't have it just here, of sex identities. You have gender queer, man to woman, woman to man, whatever. Okay, I give them the full right for this, be called what you want, it's the basic right. Although even here I would have put a limit, but not in this case. You know because their basic argument of LGBT people who advocate if I'm neither he or she we should invent another third-person pronoun singular. My problem is this one: that it is as if with another more exhaustive classification you will finally find your proper place. I know that the last time I was here, when half a year ago, I had a debate here with with Jackie Rose whose solution is let's simply split personal identity problem and law legislation, no? But I think that when you get identities, it's get in this sense problematic that it's as if again with this overclassification finally each of us, no matter how trans you are, if you don't fit into he or she you will find a proper place. No, you will not, sexuality is constituted by antagonism. And I think the greatness of LGBT people is that precisely they experience this antagonism in the heart of in the heart of in the heart of of sexuality at its purest. That's why I also, if we talk about antagonism, ah yes, I said that I don't believe that that everyone should have the right to be called addressed as what they want. Of course in the case of LGBT I agree with it. But as an abstract principle this doesn't hold. No, I think that no, the usual the legitimization that the LGBT people use is too abstract. I give them the right, okay who am I even to give them I automatically accept their right to be called he, she, it, they, whatever you want. I'm just saying that this is not a universal principle. Why not? Because there are the principle that I don't agree with is that if some designation hurts you or humiliates you then you have the right to be called differently. Now you will say isn't this self-evident? No, it's not. If we have a war criminal or a brutal capitalist speculator who wants to be called humanitarian? No, I think he should be called criminal. And the whole point is that it should hurt him and so on. So you know what I mean, I don't accept this, it's a very specific case, sexual identity. Otherwise I don't agree with it. But now comes the evil part, but I love it. You know all these sexual positions, it works in the case of sexuality where we are sexed beings, the core of your identity is at stake. But and you know that now I got the story from my friends. That's why I was warning about guys like the Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook and so on. They are so, it's I my paranoia was right, why they are so fanatically for LGBT? One of them I get an interview I will quote it, I got it, said "but isn't it the same with class difference? We should also exit from class binary." And one of them said, "Look, it's unfair to say I'm a capitalist, I help workers, I want a special category" and so on. So I took the [unintelligible] and composed my list. Why class binary? Why not "bi-class"? A proletarian sub-employing and exploiting other proletarians. Then "masturbatory cross-class": a small company self-employed owner exploiting himself. "Class queen": a motherly capitalist who takes care of her workers but tolerates no trade unions. PTC, "proletarian to capitalist"; CTP, "capitalist to proletarian." "Class bender," "pan-class," "non-class," "trans-class," "third class," "class fluid," "non-binary trans-class," "person of trans-class experience." Then my favorite: because one of the genders in New York is also "two-spirit." But this is perfect! Aren't people like Bill Gates and George Soros two-spirit capitalists? One spirit, ruthless manipulator; the other spirit, generous humanitarian and so on. Then you have "precarious proletarian," "digital capitalist." Then "CBC boots": a capitalist brutally exploiting another capitalist and and my reaction to this is from the great British proletarian opera, you know, Gilbert and Sullivan, *Mikado*, you know? They are all on the list and none of them will be missed, you know? No, but you see you see my point here that you should this is for me, of course I am all for it, renaming and so no, but just be careful and always ask the brutal Leninist question: how does renaming effectively function? And another thing that you should time is running. Okay I will I really want so many more things to say that I want to go into another thing. Yes, the name Lacan's name for this impossibility at the core of sexuality is sexual difference. Sexual difference for Lacan is not men and women, but it's some as it were self-difference inner obstacle self-impediment which ruins everything. So here people who attacked me on LGBT made a reproach to me and then to Lacan with which I don't agree. One was, and I don't have sorry the names here, two criticisms which appear to me quite crazy, at least the second one. The one was that, and it sounds almost convincing, that sexual difference is Lacan's fundamental fantasy. This is a theory popular in some circles that Lacan remained too phallocentric, and they the Lacan they like is the Lacan of precisely of the surplus, of *objet petit a*. And they of course quote as their sacred passage from Lacan when Lacan says that object small a, this surplus enjoyment, is asexual. But the way they read it is simply that there is some almost Deleuzian multitude plurality of partial drives whatever, and that sexual difference is edipalization, comes other words as a kind of fundamental fantasy constraint onto it. Here ah, if you are a Lacanian you get into your own bureaucratic theology and get it. First, Lacan doesn't write, doesn't say that object a is asexual, but that it is a, but write in cursive, like *objet petit a*, "a-sexual." What he means is sexual in the mode of object small a, which doesn't mean simply beyond sexual difference, but filling in the gap of the impossibility of sexual difference. So sexual difference but again, not in the sense of men-women, but in the sense in which where does we when we are men women we obfuscate sexual difference? If you have an authentic on the edge transgender person, sexual difference exists there as such, embodied in one person. So this is the first one. The second some of those advocates there was you can check it up in *Philosophical Salon* where there were attacks on me. Recently there is a text against me that I love. The reproach is this one: that I don't see that sexual difference is not only part of basic patriarchal structure, gender, which gets used for colonization and so on, but that sexual difference is, it's a pretty radical position, I almost like it, sexual difference is a notion which only functions which is an effect of of slavery and domination. So that sexual difference is the discourse of domination and servitude and slavery transposed into it. Well my answer here is my reply here is a very simple one. I can get the point, the whole argument is that some colonizers when they despised in racist terms other aboriginal people, they sometimes claim, "You see their identities mixed, they don't only they don't even have clear sexual roles" and so on and so on. But on the other hand, I'm here pro, again my horror, pro-Eurocentric modernist. I claim that isn't show me one, maybe they are, it's not a rhetorical question. Show me one traditional culture which is not based on some kind of a sexualized, precisely in the sense of gender binary, cosmology. Male principle, female principle and so on and so on. I think that the experience of and now you will say but you have androgynous and so on. Yes but these are also supplements to this basic ontological tension, Yin-Yang, masculine-feminine, light-darkness and so on and so on. The greatness of modernity is precisely as first feminist partisans of Descartes wrote somewhere, "We like Descartes because *Cogito* doesn't have a sex." I mean, so I find it very funny when partisans of of transgenderism against binary against gender binary attack me of Eurocentrism. Are they aware that in what they advocate as transgenderism or transgender position is strictly a European phenomenon, part of our culture, which absolutely you cannot translate it? Of course every civilization have those marginal androgynous and so on and so on. But it's not the same. Okay, that's what I and then so again, okay I will not go into this, I will just to amuse you a little bit conclude with something to announce what I will be doing tomorrow. So the main result, and I don't have time to develop it now, I already finished a new book now, *Void and its Excess*, where I go into it, namely into how it's not enough to do this poetry of postmodern Badiou would have put it anti-philosophical idea of philosophy always failed, at a certain point there is an excess and so on. No, there are excesses symptoms because there is no base. Because the base, the thing itself is cut fundamentally by certain impossibility and so on. And I will just maybe give a hint at where I will move tomorrow, referring to Alenka Zupančič's new book. I had the honor of reading the manuscript. I will try to show how Lacan out of these considerations proposes a uniquely beautiful theory of analytic act, of analytic interpretation, which is not just "integrate the excess or plurality enjoyfully," but to how should I put it, to provide, invent a new signifier. A new name which trans- and Alenka Zupančič gives some wonderful examples from jokes. And I will I will give okay, I will just tell you one joke which I already and then I will finish, which I already used in my books and I will try then to read as an analytic intervention. You must remember I used this joke years ago already. It's a joke that you find with many in many countries, a joke against politicians. My version is from Croatia in the '90s when they had that authoritarian right-wing president Franjo Tuđman. The joke is that he is flying on a plane with his big family above Croatia, and one person, his wife, tells him, "Franjo why don't you throw out a check for million Euros and to make a Croat happy, one Croat?" Then another guy tells him, "Why don't you throw out two checks for half a million and make two Croats happy?" and so on and so on. At the end his grandson, a person of childish innocence says, "But grandpa, why don't you throw out of the plane yourself and make all the Croats happy?" you know? This is you see this is something like a psychoanalytic intervention almost. And I spoke with a psychoanalyst who told me I can almost imagine this as an intervention. Let's invent a similar case. I know people like this. It's me obviously, but my mother was a bad case here. People who like to sacrifice themselves, not themselves, but sacrifice things for other like people who always want to help. "Don't you need help? Can I do this for you? Can I do that for you?" and so on. So like my mother was a clear case of this. She was always asking me, "Should I go to a store for you? Should I do this, should I do that?" no? And of course when I said "Please stop, I don't want anything from you," she broke down crying, you know, like "Oh my God, what should I then do with myself?" and so on, no? And so the point is this one: that when you have this, a guy who is just has this eternal tendency to sacrifice things for other. Like, "I will do this, take you to lunch to make you happy, do this for you, keep your children in the afternoon, whatever doing favors." Well the analytic answer would have been of course something like, "Why don't you sacrifice yourself and make all of us happy?" But not in the sense of killing yourself, but literally sacrifice your-self, sacrifice get rid of the structure of your self-ego which pushes you into this direction all the time. But now you will say but what is so bad about doing good things to others? I can tell you from my own examples: there is always a dirty economy behind it. Now I'll make a half a confession. You might understand. I know whenever I like to help other people, and even in such a way that they think that I am against them, that they don't notice it. You think I am a good guy? Ho ho, I looked into myself and discovered what's my secret dream. It's that I will be doing this and you will not even notice it, you will maybe even mock me, attack me. And then at a certain point you will notice this how good I was. And you will be so embarrassed and you will want to apologize and I will feel so good. You see how disgusting it is? I'm doing all this just to create that scene of "you will feel bad and I will be wounded and I will feel so good that you feel bad" and so on. So I will try again to de- because you know why? Because this is what Lacan means by at the end of the analysis a new signifier should be produced. It's a much more complex notion. I will develop this tomorrow and a little bit more, I dropped it out I talk too much, into theory, philosophy, but then we will have Frank Ruda, Comrade Ruda. And now minutes for democracy if you want it. I mean, yeah. I can who wants to comment or question, just in front of the guy? That. Please. Yes, I I couldn't help notice how how [unintelligible] stance you had against the identity politics of the uh the... no I'm fine, I've got a loud enough voice than this. No, take the mic. Take the mic because there may be people at the back. And for the recording too. Hello, I yeah... I couldn't help notice the the the parallels you have with the anti-identitarian left. For example the the I go on a board called Leftypol. It's full of anti-identitarians who criticize both the identity politics of the right, especially those on Pol, and that which is on the left, such as those you might find on Tumblr. And I've been thinking: the whole thing about class not being a struggle... it's why do people make these things identities when sometimes they can be concrete facts such as in a Marxist view or even in the Lacanian view? Why do they make them identities? Give me an example, I'm sorry, quite sincerely, I don't get clearly what are you aiming at. Are you speaking now which identity are you mentioning? Sexual identity or more class identity? Well, the the process of creating the identities. For example, I saw a there was a funny meme where there was some person where there was someone on Twitter saying "rich-splaining" and defined it as "when a rich person explains something to a poor person" and followed by a funny caption of saying "class war's over guys." It's I I why do these why are things turned into identities? And why why do we get this identitarian and thus the moralistic sense, sentiment, that comes out of this identity politics? Okay, I will now ask you a rough question because I'm not sure, like, where do you stand here? Are you? I am I'm iden- anti-identitarian, a very staunch Marxist. Ah, perfect! Then we agree! Because you know what's for me the basic problem? Identity politics is for me the politics of coexistence. The goal is not to destroy the other but "can't we all live together with our identities, recognize..." and of course at a certain level this holds. Like, but not at the basic class level. There, I'm sorry, class struggle does not mean we should get over it and have some identity politics where proletarians can be fully proletarian and bourgeois fully bourgeois and whatever. No, it's it's it's a totally different type of antagonism. It's a radical antagonism. And my problem with identity politics is that this type of antagonism disappears or is even translated into identity antagonism. For example, in United States, I noticed how class issues tend to be retranslated into identity issues. For example, the usual when they speak about Mexicans, if you listen to many academic texts it's almost as if it's not economic struggle but what appears as economic struggle is our is our is our intolerance of the Mexicans. And then you even go a step further into some pseudo-Freudianism and says, "We project our fears onto Mexicans, but what are these fears? We should look deeper into ourselves and locate it" and so on. So again, my reproach against identity politics is first I'm an old old-fashioned universalist. I think a priori that's my subjectivity with that LGBT point, we don't want to be hurt. Well, sometimes you have to be hurt. For example, I'm not changing the topic, another point I wanted to develop. One way I was attacked when I was in Ramallah, I think I did a very proper anti-anti-Muslim point. I said we should attack of course the honor killings and so on, but I just listed a series of other examples from Canada to Mexico to my own country where also horrible things are happening to women, no, to minorities, no? And I just say that we have to be fair and locate all the these horrors, and you know what reply I got? A pretty horrifying reply for me. It was that while apparently I was criticizing violence against women, children and so on, by talking about it, I was reproducing it verbally. I totally oppose it, you know for what reason? It's an old humanist saying by Edward Bond. It's a little bit too naive but I agree with it. He said somewhere that if you don't want to confront confront Hiroshima in theater openly, you will probably confront it in reality again. That is to say I think that to that things like rape and horrors and torture whatever, we have to confront them in a brutal way. We must be hurt. These are horrible things. Otherwise we will follow that way to which I often refer, yes, immediately, mockingly: you know now that as we learn from Americans torture is called enhanced interrogation technique? So I ironically proposed once: why don't we call rape enhanced seduction technique or whatever? You know, like, all the horror disappears. No, you must be that's why I'm totally opposed, of course within certain limits I know what it means to be really terrified and so on, but hurt, but to this trigger warning system now in Ameri- I mean, sorry, university is not an isolated place where you are safe. University should precisely expose us to the brutality of life. Of course not at the level of being really raped, but to confront the horror. Only this works. And that's for me the fear of all these trigger warnings, people must feel safe. No, people must not feel safe. People must be safe. And the worst thing is that to make you feel safe where you are not really safe. So you see, my problem with again my problem with identity politics is that it simply... for example the moment with LGBT, the moment I just said that, I'm not saying this devalues LGBT, but the fact that all the big business is emphatically supporting it. It says something. We should at least ask: is then this a totally neutral field? Can we somehow combine LGBT with other struggles? How? I was instantly attacked for "class essentialism." Class in this identity politics "class essentialism" is a label which you get if you just even mention class in any way. I know when they say there are multiple struggles (class, race, sex), class never really occurs there. And things get especially problematic as it often happens when the very progressive identity politics gets caught into gets a very weird class connotation. How often I encountered in the United States that beneath the critique of male chauvinism and so on, anti-feminism, it was really upper-middle-class white academics silently targeting allegedly primitive Mexican workers who don't read their whatever. You know, I simply think of course it's not the simple old bourgeois-proletarian, but something that we should still call class struggle antagonism is going on, getting stronger and stronger. And my source would be here like somebody whom you really cannot accuse to be a leftist, Peter Sloterdijk. He wrote a book on I quote it often on capitalism as a cupola, where he in a wonderful develops how this logic Hollywood, you know if you are disoriented look at a good Hollywood blockbuster no, like like although they're very problematic films but like *Hunger Games*, *Elysium*. Hollywood, we are moving towards this people live in a cupola, protected, majority's out and so on. And this tension I reject to claim that this basic tension is simply one on at the same level with others. This is the radical tension that still defines
Cathy Newman
us. But I talk too much. There was the gentleman there, there was a
us. But I talk too much. There was the gentleman there, there was a
unknown
lady there. You mentioned your next book which will be called *Void and its Excess*. Void and its excess, that's the working title, yes. So my question is, is the gap between psychoanalysis and philosophy that you've alluded to today and you will be alluding to is
lady there. You mentioned your next book which will be called *Void and its Excess*. Void and its excess, that's the working title, yes. So my question is, is the gap between psychoanalysis and philosophy that you've alluded to today and you will be alluding to is
unknown
that the same as the void that produces the excess? No no, I don't see an immediate connection. You know why I mentioned this gap, why I gave the title? Because now we by the term we I mean my gang of people, the so-called Slovene Lacanians but also our comrades like we are claiming maybe we should proclaim you Frank an honorary Slovene, you know, or whatever. That now there is tremendous attack on us not only by idiots like that your greatest scrotum philosopher, Roger Scruton, you know? You know that image that is
that the same as the void that produces the excess? No no, I don't see an immediate connection. You know why I mentioned this gap, why I gave the title? Because now we by the term we I mean my gang of people, the so-called Slovene Lacanians but also our comrades like we are claiming maybe we should proclaim you Frank an honorary Slovene, you know, or whatever. That now there is tremendous attack on us not only by idiots like that your greatest scrotum philosopher, Roger Scruton, you know? You know that image that is
Slavoj Žižek
in Alenka Zupančič's book, the "scroptacles" (spectacles and the sorry tasteless, please). But also by some Lacanian psychoanalysts like I heard from friends that Jacques-Alain Miller had a tremendous outburst against me in
in Alenka Zupančič's book, the "scroptacles" (spectacles and the sorry tasteless, please). But also by some Lacanian psychoanalysts like I heard from friends that Jacques-Alain Miller had a tremendous outburst against me in
unknown
United States, claiming we do politics, philosophy, it's not the real of psychoanalysis and so on. Well my answer is this one. First, Miller himself is doing quite a lot of politics lately, like he is in the in the committee to re-elect Sarkozy and so on, no? So let's drop it, who is doing what. But the basic point is this one: and this is the big problem for all those who want
United States, claiming we do politics, philosophy, it's not the real of psychoanalysis and so on. Well my answer is this one. First, Miller himself is doing quite a lot of politics lately, like he is in the in the committee to re-elect Sarkozy and so on, no? So let's drop it, who is doing what. But the basic point is this one: and this is the big problem for all those who want
Slavoj Žižek
to dissociate Lacan from philosophy. It's almost impossible. Lacan's fundamental
to dissociate Lacan from philosophy. It's almost impossible. Lacan's fundamental
unknown
reference references were always, always
reference references were always, always
Slavoj Žižek
philosophers. Name it: Presocratics (Lacan has a wonderful reading of Zen in Democritus), Socrates (the basic figure of transference), Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle, Stoics, *objet petit a*, Aquinas, just name it. And the ridiculous answer I get is that Lacan was precisely fighting philosophy, like trying... but I think Lacan is doing some subversion of philosophy which is strictly immanent to philosophy. If you take from Lacan the reference of philosophy, you simply get another medical treatment science, whatever. The greatness of Lacan is that he saw that psychoanalysis as a theory has radical philosophical consequences. It ruins traditional ontology and so on and so on. Which is why Lacan is very precise in his *Kant with Sade* at the beginning when he asks where in the history of ideas does the movement which began with which culminates in Freud, where does it begin? He says, Kant. And also, I have a problem with this, that Lacan was an anti-philosopher. But listen, all philosophers from Kant onwards were anti-philosophers in the sense of none of them wanted to be called a philosopher. Kant says *Prolegomena*, "not yet philosophy, preparation." Fichte says *Wissenschaftslehre*. So is there a gap? Would you agree? Yeah, but it's a gap inherent but you know in what sense? The gap in the sense that philosophy is in itself decentered. And psychoanalysis brings us to the very fundamental gesture of philosophy which is ignored by most of the philosophers themselves. So what psychoanalysis does is to undermine philosophy for me from within, targeting the very core of philosophy. Psychoanalysis is in a way more philosophical than philosophy. It brings out what and this happens with Kant and so on. So you know what, so that we don't lose time now, why don't I begin with this tomorrow, I promise you? Because I have the entire line because then we go to Kant, Hegel and so on. Okay. The lady with spectacles. I wanted to bring you together, you have a beard, you have spectacles, together you are Groucho Marx. Um, just real quick, um looking at the difference between class antagonism and sexual antagonism. So we have class antagonism as historicizable and therefore it can be overthrown, but um is the structure of sexual difference eternal? I mean, Lacan uses the mathemes and um these kind of ways of approaching the universe... It's a very nice question, and because this is usually and I claim it has some strength the argument, the Judith Butler argument, that we, by we she means especially Joan Copjec and me and now Alenka Zupančič, all of those who refer to Lacan, that we are closet Kantians. That we propose a certain a priori formal structure which then can be actualized in different forms and so on. Well, it's a complex answer, but my basic answer would have been: no, it's not eternal. That precisely and I also wanted to talk about this on Wednesday. What is going on today with the prospect of of of what we usually call, but I don't think it's just a journalistic invention, this *Homo deus*, post-humanity and so on. There is a serious prospect today if you imagine human beings, on the one hand, totally embedded in cyberspace, totally controlled through biogenetics and so on, and no longer sexual- sex no longer necessary for reproduction, insemination. It's obvious that we will enter the post-sexual era. As a philosopher, we just have to raise the difficult question of: what do we gain, what do we lose? I try to avoid both extremes here. One extreme would be to claim in this technocratic way, you know, no sorry, critical way: oh it's the end of humanity, we will become machines and so on. The other way would be to say this I hate them, this Ray Kurzweil style of, you know: no, it will be happy singularity, we will be God-like and so on. It's it's a very difficult question because let's say there are two prospects: that we will become God-like and that we will become just machines elements. And my answer is here Stalin's answer, from a I'm sorry if I repeat old jokes, it's one of my favorite Stalinist jokes, anti- from a there is a wonderful joke about Stalin from Soviet era where they debate in '33, '34 in Politburo the question: will there be money in communism or not? First right-wingers, Bukharin people say, "Of course there will be money, it's natural. How otherwise do you exchange products?" Then leftists, some old Trotskyites, claim, "No, money is alienation, blah blah, there will be no money." Ah, Comrade Stalin intervenes and he
philosophers. Name it: Presocratics (Lacan has a wonderful reading of Zen in Democritus), Socrates (the basic figure of transference), Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle, Stoics, *objet petit a*, Aquinas, just name it. And the ridiculous answer I get is that Lacan was precisely fighting philosophy, like trying... but I think Lacan is doing some subversion of philosophy which is strictly immanent to philosophy. If you take from Lacan the reference of philosophy, you simply get another medical treatment science, whatever. The greatness of Lacan is that he saw that psychoanalysis as a theory has radical philosophical consequences. It ruins traditional ontology and so on and so on. Which is why Lacan is very precise in his *Kant with Sade* at the beginning when he asks where in the history of ideas does the movement which began with which culminates in Freud, where does it begin? He says, Kant. And also, I have a problem with this, that Lacan was an anti-philosopher. But listen, all philosophers from Kant onwards were anti-philosophers in the sense of none of them wanted to be called a philosopher. Kant says *Prolegomena*, "not yet philosophy, preparation." Fichte says *Wissenschaftslehre*. So is there a gap? Would you agree? Yeah, but it's a gap inherent but you know in what sense? The gap in the sense that philosophy is in itself decentered. And psychoanalysis brings us to the very fundamental gesture of philosophy which is ignored by most of the philosophers themselves. So what psychoanalysis does is to undermine philosophy for me from within, targeting the very core of philosophy. Psychoanalysis is in a way more philosophical than philosophy. It brings out what and this happens with Kant and so on. So you know what, so that we don't lose time now, why don't I begin with this tomorrow, I promise you? Because I have the entire line because then we go to Kant, Hegel and so on. Okay. The lady with spectacles. I wanted to bring you together, you have a beard, you have spectacles, together you are Groucho Marx. Um, just real quick, um looking at the difference between class antagonism and sexual antagonism. So we have class antagonism as historicizable and therefore it can be overthrown, but um is the structure of sexual difference eternal? I mean, Lacan uses the mathemes and um these kind of ways of approaching the universe... It's a very nice question, and because this is usually and I claim it has some strength the argument, the Judith Butler argument, that we, by we she means especially Joan Copjec and me and now Alenka Zupančič, all of those who refer to Lacan, that we are closet Kantians. That we propose a certain a priori formal structure which then can be actualized in different forms and so on. Well, it's a complex answer, but my basic answer would have been: no, it's not eternal. That precisely and I also wanted to talk about this on Wednesday. What is going on today with the prospect of of of what we usually call, but I don't think it's just a journalistic invention, this *Homo deus*, post-humanity and so on. There is a serious prospect today if you imagine human beings, on the one hand, totally embedded in cyberspace, totally controlled through biogenetics and so on, and no longer sexual- sex no longer necessary for reproduction, insemination. It's obvious that we will enter the post-sexual era. As a philosopher, we just have to raise the difficult question of: what do we gain, what do we lose? I try to avoid both extremes here. One extreme would be to claim in this technocratic way, you know, no sorry, critical way: oh it's the end of humanity, we will become machines and so on. The other way would be to say this I hate them, this Ray Kurzweil style of, you know: no, it will be happy singularity, we will be God-like and so on. It's it's a very difficult question because let's say there are two prospects: that we will become God-like and that we will become just machines elements. And my answer is here Stalin's answer, from a I'm sorry if I repeat old jokes, it's one of my favorite Stalinist jokes, anti- from a there is a wonderful joke about Stalin from Soviet era where they debate in '33, '34 in Politburo the question: will there be money in communism or not? First right-wingers, Bukharin people say, "Of course there will be money, it's natural. How otherwise do you exchange products?" Then leftists, some old Trotskyites, claim, "No, money is alienation, blah blah, there will be no money." Ah, Comrade Stalin intervenes and he
unknown
says, "No, this is just
says, "No, this is just
Slavoj Žižek
right-wing and left-wing
right-wing and left-wing
unknown
revisionism. The truth is dialectical synthesis. There will be money and there will
revisionism. The truth is dialectical synthesis. There will be money and there will
Slavoj Žižek
not be money." And they ask him, "How do you mean this, Comrade Stalin?" and you know what he says, you can guess. "Some people will have money, other people will not have money." So I will say, will there be humanity or not? Well, some people will have all the power, other people will not. And here, I think that and I agree here with Badiou, he developed this, that now the horror is that through this latest digital control and biogenetic manipulations, that class divisions will get more and more translated into direct biological divisions. So that's one prospect. And it's not as futuristic. Usually people say, "But forget about it, we still have a..." No, it's already the present. It's already the present. A second problem that I see, you know, don't underestimate sexuality. Are we aware to what extent and I will also try to develop this tomorrow or the day after, our sexuality is rooted into some kind of a desire for knowledge. Sexuality is by definition already with small children, who knows what is happening, how? So how fundamentally what remains of a human being if you take away sexuality? I claim in some sense subjectivity is over and so on. So things are so open, things are... but my ultimate reproach to Judith Butler who makes this reproach about non-historicity is that look, I developed this in our *Triple Orgy* book, Ernesto Laclau and me and... you know what I don't get? She has a certain image, sorry, image of how sexuality is con- let's call it her, I don't want to be unjust, this performative construction theory. Gender is not naturally fixed, this playful per- blah blah. Okay. Then she tells a
not be money." And they ask him, "How do you mean this, Comrade Stalin?" and you know what he says, you can guess. "Some people will have money, other people will not have money." So I will say, will there be humanity or not? Well, some people will have all the power, other people will not. And here, I think that and I agree here with Badiou, he developed this, that now the horror is that through this latest digital control and biogenetic manipulations, that class divisions will get more and more translated into direct biological divisions. So that's one prospect. And it's not as futuristic. Usually people say, "But forget about it, we still have a..." No, it's already the present. It's already the present. A second problem that I see, you know, don't underestimate sexuality. Are we aware to what extent and I will also try to develop this tomorrow or the day after, our sexuality is rooted into some kind of a desire for knowledge. Sexuality is by definition already with small children, who knows what is happening, how? So how fundamentally what remains of a human being if you take away sexuality? I claim in some sense subjectivity is over and so on. So things are so open, things are... but my ultimate reproach to Judith Butler who makes this reproach about non-historicity is that look, I developed this in our *Triple Orgy* book, Ernesto Laclau and me and... you know what I don't get? She has a certain image, sorry, image of how sexuality is con- let's call it her, I don't want to be unjust, this performative construction theory. Gender is not naturally fixed, this playful per- blah blah. Okay. Then she tells a
unknown
certain
certain
Slavoj Žižek
pretty linear story, no? Like, in the old times there was essentialism, it gets gradually undermined, Freud a little bit, Lacan, now we know sex is contingent. Okay, once I asked her a simple question: her theory of sexuality, constructed through this contingent performativity and so on, is this an eternal theory? Or is this a specific theory of what goes on today? In other words, were already cavemen discursively reconstructing their sexual identities or not? And she replied very aggressively that that this is a totally wrong question, we shouldn't ask it, Foucault rejected this kind of questions, you know? But for me, this is the fundamental question. I claim
pretty linear story, no? Like, in the old times there was essentialism, it gets gradually undermined, Freud a little bit, Lacan, now we know sex is contingent. Okay, once I asked her a simple question: her theory of sexuality, constructed through this contingent performativity and so on, is this an eternal theory? Or is this a specific theory of what goes on today? In other words, were already cavemen discursively reconstructing their sexual identities or not? And she replied very aggressively that that this is a totally wrong question, we shouldn't ask it, Foucault rejected this kind of questions, you know? But for me, this is the fundamental question. I claim
unknown
that what, it's
that what, it's
Slavoj Žižek
very ambiguous, because again on the one hand she tells a very standard liberal story of historical progress. The zero level are stupid essentialists who think sex is natural, then it gets better and better, at the end "oh now we know it's contingent." Okay. What is the historical status of this very scheme? The standard pseudo-Hegelian answer would have been: both at the same time. It was always true, but it is visible only today. The same thing as Marx says, you remember, about universal notion of work, labor? That universal labor was all the time here, but only in capitalism, where effectively our labor field becomes contingent, universal labor is part of our experience. I just wonder and I'm it's nice that you raised that question because in my new book I will be very critical about it, namely there are obviously limits to this parallel, you know: sexual antagonism, class antagonism. Because I don't want I want precisely to avoid this meaningless alternative that either they're both eternal and then we get into some of a bad caricature of Mao where the struggle is eternal, also class struggle, or the opposite: the happy post- post-class but also post-sexual society. Which was, as you maybe know, I've written about it, a serious option in Soviet Union in the '20s. You have a whole strain of these Communist Gnostics, even Trotsky was close to them. They claimed that sexuality is the last resistance of the bourgeoisie and we should create a new man which will be distanced, no longer prone to emotions, free of sexual pleasures and so on. It was an extremely strong tendency. Lenin was wise enough to oppose it, but even Trotsky somewhere... and that's why Stalin triumphed, I claim, paradoxically. Because people, ordinary people were totally confused by all this constructivist biological talk about new post-human man already there. And Stalin did something very efficient but obscene. He said, "No, language, family, sexuali-, all this remains, it's eternal" and so on and so on, you know? It's... okay, we stop, we go on tomorrow, tomorrow I promise you. You know and tomorrow we do more philosophy, all this philosophy blah blah, and Frank Ruda teaches us that we have no freedom and so on I hope. Thanks. More bullshit tomorrow, yeah. Sorry, more bullshit. More bullshit. More bullshit tomorrow, yeah.
very ambiguous, because again on the one hand she tells a very standard liberal story of historical progress. The zero level are stupid essentialists who think sex is natural, then it gets better and better, at the end "oh now we know it's contingent." Okay. What is the historical status of this very scheme? The standard pseudo-Hegelian answer would have been: both at the same time. It was always true, but it is visible only today. The same thing as Marx says, you remember, about universal notion of work, labor? That universal labor was all the time here, but only in capitalism, where effectively our labor field becomes contingent, universal labor is part of our experience. I just wonder and I'm it's nice that you raised that question because in my new book I will be very critical about it, namely there are obviously limits to this parallel, you know: sexual antagonism, class antagonism. Because I don't want I want precisely to avoid this meaningless alternative that either they're both eternal and then we get into some of a bad caricature of Mao where the struggle is eternal, also class struggle, or the opposite: the happy post- post-class but also post-sexual society. Which was, as you maybe know, I've written about it, a serious option in Soviet Union in the '20s. You have a whole strain of these Communist Gnostics, even Trotsky was close to them. They claimed that sexuality is the last resistance of the bourgeoisie and we should create a new man which will be distanced, no longer prone to emotions, free of sexual pleasures and so on. It was an extremely strong tendency. Lenin was wise enough to oppose it, but even Trotsky somewhere... and that's why Stalin triumphed, I claim, paradoxically. Because people, ordinary people were totally confused by all this constructivist biological talk about new post-human man already there. And Stalin did something very efficient but obscene. He said, "No, language, family, sexuali-, all this remains, it's eternal" and so on and so on, you know? It's... okay, we stop, we go on tomorrow, tomorrow I promise you. You know and tomorrow we do more philosophy, all this philosophy blah blah, and Frank Ruda teaches us that we have no freedom and so on I hope. Thanks. More bullshit tomorrow, yeah. Sorry, more bullshit. More bullshit. More bullshit tomorrow, yeah.