Lacanian Theology and Buddhism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012 · 1:27:34 · 12,717 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturereligion-theologysexuality-genderideologyphilosophy-generalconsciousness-mindliberalism-political-correctness
In this seminar-style talk (likely in California), Žižek ranges across Lacanian theory, aesthetics, and ethics through a series of digressions. He develops Lacan's formulas of sexuation via Joan Copjec's distinction between mathematical and dynamic sublimes, explores object a through Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, the Italian Rossini obsessional neurotic, and Hollywood films (Sound of Music, Y Tu Mamá También, Short Cuts). He then works through Kant's infinite judgment as the logical basis of the Freudian death drive and the undead, connects this to Wagner, Kafka, and Kierkegaard on immortality as horror rather than bliss, and traces the three registers of Lacan's 'desire is the desire of the Other' (imaginary, symbolic, real). The talk concludes with a contrast between Western (Jewish-Christian) notions of truth as traumatic event and Buddhist detachment, mediated via Chesterton, Badiou on love, and a haiku digression.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 28
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's logical schema distinguishing masculine (all grounded in exception) from feminine (non-all, no totalization) positions, which Žižek via Copjec maps onto mathematical vs. dynamic sublimes rather than Kantian beautiful vs. sublime.
The register of rules and the big Other; in chess, the purely formal rules defining each piece's moves, independent of imaginary identification.
as “non-all”
The feminine side of Lacan's formulas of sexuation: without a founding exception, the set cannot be totalized, associated here with the mathematical/quantitative sublime.
Kant's qualitative, intensive sublime, which Žižek aligns with the masculine formula of sexuation and with German (Wagner) operatic intensity.
Kant's quantitative sublime of sheer excess/accumulation, which Žižek aligns with the feminine formula of sexuation and with Italian (Rossini) operatic style.
as “obsessional neurotic”
For Lacan, the obsessional neurotic's object of desire is the demand of the Other, illustrated by Rossini's Cenerentola aria where the father dreams of being overwhelmed by corrupt requests.
Žižek's critique of terms like 'African American' as presupposing a zero-level unmarked identity (plain 'American') and as opening new terrain for polite racist humiliation under the guise of political correctness.
as “surplus enjoyment / jouissance”
The logic of enjoyment whereby prohibition or censorship does not eliminate but intensifies and opens new terrain for transgressive pleasure, invoked in the political-correctness discussion.
Kant's logical form that asserts a non-predicate (e.g., 'I am undead') rather than negating a predicate ('I am not dead'), opening a third spectral domain beyond the positive/negative dichotomy.
Lacan's term for the drive as object, the libidinal substance of undeadness, the immortal life-substance that persists beyond biological life and death.
Žižek redefines death drive as Freud's name for obscene immortality, the persistence of a spectral entity beyond life and death, the exact opposite of a drive toward annihilation.
as “undead”
The third domain opened by Kant's infinite judgment, 'I am undead', neither alive nor dead but a living-dead persistence, which Žižek identifies as the Freudian death drive and Lacan's lamella.
Freud's compulsion to repeat, linked by Žižek to the death drive as the spectral insistence of the undead beyond life and death.
Lacan's formula which Žižek reads across three registers: imaginary (mimetic envy, desiring what the other desires), symbolic (desire regulated by the big Other's prescriptions), and real (radical opacity of what the Other wants from me).
as “imaginary”
First of Lacan's three registers, the domain of mirror identification and mimetic rivalry; in chess, the imaginary is the names and figures clothed on pieces.
as “object a”
The Lacanian objet petit a as phantasmatic embodiment of the void, illustrated here by the gaze, what one sees of oneself in the fascinating look of the Other, and by Ponnelle's staging of Tristan's dying vision of Isolde.
René Girard's concept of desiring what the other desires, invoked as the imaginary register of Lacan's 'desire is the desire of the Other'.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order that regulates desire without our awareness; Žižek also uses it via the Wrath of Titans dialogue, gods are the big Other, and when a god dies the big Other truly dies, making gods mortally vulnerable in a way humans are not.
as “amour de soi / amour-propre”
Rousseau's distinction between authentic self-love and mediated envious self-love; Žižek uses it to argue that the origin of evil is not egotism but competitive envy, amour-propre.
Badiou's term (invoked by Žižek) for the capitalist's perverted fidelity to capital as a kind of event-substitute, real in form but ideologically captured.
Used in a Badiouian-Althusserian sense: the typical capitalist is interpellated by the event of capital accumulation and ready to sacrifice everything for it, making him a perverted subject of fidelity rather than a mere hedonist.
as “known unknowns / unknown unknowns”
Žižek extends Rumsfeld's epistemological schema by adding the fourth, Freudian category: things we know but don't know that we know, the unconscious as unknown knowledge.
as “objective appearance”
The way things really appear at the level of form/texture, independent of what a subject consciously believes, e.g., the adolescent who claims to hate his father but whose actual behavior reveals love.
Platonic recollection of innate knowledge, contrasted by Žižek (via Kierkegaard) with the Christian model of repetition-as-event, where truth comes from outside as a traumatic encounter rather than being recalled from within.
Kierkegaard's distinction (endorsed by Žižek and Lacan) between Socratic anamnesis (truth as inner recollection) and Christian/eventful repetition (truth as traumatic encounter from outside).
as “truth as traumatic event”
The Western (Jewish-Christian) notion that truth is not an inner journey of self-discovery but an external, painful encounter, contrasted with Buddhist detachment and aligned with Badiou's event.
The register of radical external disruption, in chess, the Real is when someone kicks the table, ending the game regardless of its internal state.
as “to fall in love”
Badiou's point (endorsed by Žižek) that love as event necessarily involves a 'fall', the horror of modern dating agencies promising love 'without the fall' encapsulates what is lost when love is risk-managed.
Stories he reaches for 7
Žižek uses Rumsfeld's known-knowns / known-unknowns / unknown-unknowns schema to expose its lacuna: the fourth category, things we know but don't know that we know, which is the Freudian unconscious. The US failed in Iraq because of this unconscious layer of prejudices.
“There is a fourth one: things that we know but we don't know that we know it and this is the Freudian unconscious.”
Tom and Jerry cartoons exemplify the death drive as obscene immortality: characters are sliced, killed, and return again and again, the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) as spectral persistence beyond death.
“You slice them you kill them they return again and again.”
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's production has Tristan die alone; Isolde appears only as an artificially lit figure behind him that he never looks at, suggesting her arrival and the Liebestod are his dying fantasy. The two-second musical pause becomes a visual fade-out, and after it she is gone, he lies alone in a grey scene.
“He is looking at our gaze, you know, seeing her.”
Žižek contrasts Kant's three judgment forms: 'I am alive' (positive), 'I am not dead' (negative, meaning alive), and 'I am undead' (infinite), the last opens a third spectral domain identified with the death drive and the living dead of horror movies.
“I am undead is not simply I am alive but it's an immanent negation I am alive as dead.”
Žižek argues the film's texture contradicts its surface: the Nazi villain is coded as a corrupted Jew (tuxedo, cigar-holder), the Austrians as small-is-beautiful fascists. The 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' scene is the Mother Superior telling Maria to go back and have sex with the Baron, obscene Catholic permission through the screen of prohibition. The 'Product of Israel' label on the orange box is the film's symptom.
“The most obscene Catholic propaganda... the Mother Superior starts to sing back to her with a clear message almost literally: No, church convent nunnery is not a place of escape, go back, seduce the guy.”
In the film, Hades tells Zeus that if the enemy's plan succeeds, humans survive through tradition/big Other while gods, being the big Other, truly die. Žižek reads this as Heidegger inverted: humans are immortal, gods are radically mortal.
“Heidegger was right to say mortals and immortals but he got it wrong it's the other way around: humans are immortal, gods are truly radically mortal.”
A fairy offers a Slovenian farmer a cow but warns his neighbor will get two. The farmer says: 'Rather kill one of my cows and kill two of the neighbor's.' An even darker version: 'I will give you anything you want but twice as much to your neighbor.' Farmer: 'Take one of my eyes.' Illustrates amour-propre / envious desire over authentic egotism.
“Rather kill one of my cows but kill two cows of the neighbor.”
Works invoked 22
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own 'big fat book', referenced for Lacanian formulas of sexuation.
Brassed Off film
The coffee-without-coffee invitation scene cited as one of the most erotic scenes in cinema and as a Hegelian dialectical example: double negation produces absolute desire.
Parsifal opera
Amfortas's undying wound cited as another Wagnerian instance of obscene immortality / the death drive.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Central example for object a, the gaze, and the death drive; specifically Ponnelle's staging where Liebestod is Tristan's dying fantasy. Žižek analyses Act III as dramatizing the undead and male sublime.
The Sound of Music film
Analyzed as 'the most obscene Catholic propaganda': surface anti-Nazi story is subverted by texture coding the Nazi as Jew and Austrians as small fascists. 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' is Mother Superior's obscene instruction to Maria to go have sex.
Žižek's documentary (described as just finished shooting its second part), in which a planned 'Climb Every Young Boy' sequence parodying Sound of Music was cut due to copyright issues.
Short Cuts film
Altman's film praised as a formal achievement: the optimism is in the Deleuzian/Spinozan open multiplicity of contingent encounters, not in any explicit political message.
Žižek's own book, referenced for Lacanian formulas of sexuation.
Der fliegende Holländer opera
The Dutchman's condemned eternal life and desire to find a woman with whom to die is Žižek's prime operatic example of the death drive as the problem of how to die.
Žižek's own book, cited for Chesterton on pagan hedonism requiring Christian prohibition and for the distinction between Western and Buddhist conceptions of truth.
Avatar film
Simply dismissed: 'I hate Avatar. I simply don't get it. It's a boring movie, the storyline is so flat non-interesting.'
Gone with the Wind film
Mentioned only as one of the two biggest box-office hits ever (alongside Sound of Music) when adjusted for inflation.
In Praise of Love book
Badiou's short book cited for the argument that love necessarily involves a 'fall', the dating-agency promise of risk-free love is the horror.
Kierkegaard's book contrasting Socratic anamnesis with Christian repetition as event, cited as one of Kierkegaard's best.
Kierkegaard's work reread by Žižek as about the horror of immortality (having an internal soul) rather than the fear of death.
Wrath of Titans film
Described as 'shitty' and 'much worse' than the first film, but containing 'a wonderful line' where Hades tells Zeus that gods are truly mortal, used to invert Heidegger's mortals/immortals.
Y Tu Mamá También film
Praised for keeping political violence as an ominous background shadow rather than making it explicit, an aesthetically superior approach to social criticism.
A Country Doctor other
Kafka short story: the boy's festering wound that prevents death rather than causing it, described as 'the best Kafka short story' and a perfect emblem of the death drive.
François Jullien's book on Chinese aesthetics and spirituality, recommended for understanding haiku and the Buddhist-adjacent tradition of detached immanence.
Figaro's 'Figaro here, Figaro there' aria also cited as obsessional neurotic happiness, though Žižek slightly prefers the Cenerentola example.
La Cenerentola opera
Don Magnifico's aria analyzed as the perfect staging of obsessional neurotic satisfaction, dreaming of being overwhelmed by corrupt demands. Žižek prefers it to Largo al factotum.
Fritz Lang 1948 melodrama used to illustrate object a as what you see of yourself in the Other's fascinating gaze.
People invoked 29
Franz Kafka positive
A Country Doctor cited as one of the best short stories, the boy's undying wound as the death drive; also as an emblem of undead immortality.
Jewish friend who confirmed that the Nazi villain in Sound of Music is dressed in a Jewish-coded way ('we Jews are that').
Mimetic desire cited in passing as what early Lacan's 'desire is the desire of the Other' resembles at the imaginary level. Žižek neither endorses nor attacks Girard here.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
His staging of Tristan und Isolde is called 'a stroke of genius', Tristan's death as fantasy of Isolde rather than real reunion; Žižek returns to this production repeatedly.
Richard Wagner positive
Described as a 'total shit, anti-Semitic and so on' personally but as a proto-Freudian artist whose operas undermine his own ideology; Flying Dutchman and Parsifal analyzed as staging the death drive as obscene immortality.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for the Frankfurt School insight that in consumerist society the most difficult thing is authentic egotism, we are caught in competitive envy.
Gore Vidal positive
Cited for the line 'the point of capitalist competition is not just that I win, the other has to lose also', illustrating amour-propre and competitive desire.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: formulas of sexuation, three registers, desire as desire of the Other, lamella, object a, the undead. Žižek praises Lacan's method of returning to the same formula and reinterpreting it.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Quoted on the paradox that pagan hedonism requires Christian prohibition to protect it; also on the distinction between Western truth-as-traumatic-encounter versus Eastern Buddhist contemplative peace. Žižek cites him from Puppet and the Dwarf.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Jameson's reading of Short Cuts as Deleuzian (Spinozan ontology of open multiplicity and contingent encounters) is endorsed by Žižek.
Called ironically 'the great American philosopher, big contribution to epistemology'; his known/unknown schema is used but exposed as missing the Freudian fourth category (unknown knowns). The Iraq War is cited as consequence of this blind spot.
Fritz Lang positive
Secret Beyond the Door cited as illustrating object a and the gaze.
Žižek mentions inquiring with Fiennes about Gemma Arterton; also notes Fiennes delivers the key dialectical reversal about gods and mortals in Wrath of Titans.
Alain Badiou positive
Co-defender of Wagner with Žižek; source of pseudo-event/pseudo-fidelity applied to capitalism; In Praise of Love cited for the 'fall in love' argument against risk-managed love; Žižek has a 'friendly problem' with Badiou's notion of eventual immortality vs. the death drive.
Fredric Jameson positive
Provided Žižek with the Deleuzian/Spinozan reading of Short Cuts as open multiplicity; also wrote a text on the film. Žižek calls him 'you evil people who like Deleuze' affectionately.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Invoked via Jameson/Deleuze as the philosophical background for Short Cuts' open-process optimism.
Briefly mentioned via a friend's anecdote about Foucault going to Iran in Khomeini's times, presented as gossip, not intellectually engaged.
Martin Heidegger negative
His mortals/immortals distinction is said to be right in form but wrong in direction, inverted by Žižek via the Wrath of Titans line.
Robert Altman positive
Short Cuts analyzed as a formal achievement whose optimism resides in its Deleuzian/Spinozan multiplicity of contingent encounters, not in any explicit leftist message.
Matsuo Bashō positive
The frog-splash haiku cited as the basic formula of haiku: zero level / material event / pure sonic event. Also has an obscene parody version Žižek loves.
Joan Copjec positive
Žižek credits her as a genius for mapping Lacanian formulas of sexuation onto Kant's two sublimes instead of the beautiful/sublime gender binary; also the subject of an extended self-deprecating anecdote about tasteless remarks.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Sickness Unto Death reread as fear of immortality rather than death; Philosophical Crumbs cited for repetition vs. Socratic anamnesis as the structure of truth.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Amour de soi vs. amour-propre distinction invoked as a precursor to the point that envy, not egotism, is the origin of evil. Žižek calls him 'not an idiot' for this insight.
Plato positive
Anamnesis discussed as Kierkegaard's foil, Platonic/Socratic truth as recollection from within, contrasted with Christian truth as external event. The slave/square experiment mentioned.
Sigmund Freud positive
Death drive and Wiederholungszwang as obscene immortality/compulsion to repeat; the unconscious as unknown knowledge (fourth Rumsfeld category).
François Jullien positive
The Detour and Access mentioned as a wonderful reading of spirituality in Chinese poetry and haiku, to be discussed in the afternoon session.
Immanuel Kant positive
Mathematical vs. dynamic sublime mapped onto sexuation; infinite judgment as logical origin of psychoanalysis and the undead. Žižek uses Kant as a key structural resource.
Mentioned as honest reformer shocked by Catholic indulgences; initially pro-Jewish, later fiercely anti-Semitic after Jews refused to convert. Contrasted with Catholic logic of covered transgression.
Gioachino Rossini positive
Preferred over Wagner for embodying the Italian/mathematical sublime; Cenerentola and Largo al factotum cited as perfect stagings of obsessional neurotic satisfaction.
What it argues
Lacanian formulas of sexuation and the two sublimesdeath drive as obscene immortality / the undeaddesire as desire of the Other across three registersobject a and the gazepolitical correctness, enjoyment, and censorshipWestern vs. Buddhist notions of truth and attachmentfilm texture and ideological subtext
Dialectical moves 10
“The death drive is not the drive toward death; it is Freud's name for obscene immortality.”
By inverting the intuitive meaning, Žižek reveals that the death drive names the terrifying persistence of the undead beyond biological life.
“Immortality is not a reward but the ultimate nightmare; the real problem is not how to become eternal but how to die.”
The inversion reframes the Western philosophical-religious desire for eternal life as itself the horror that culture repeatedly stages.
“Humans are immortal; gods are truly, radically mortal.”
Because humans survive through tradition and the big Other, they are in a sense immortal; when a god dies, the big Other itself is extinguished, making gods genuinely mortal.
“The only way to maintain pagan hedonism today is to protect it with Christian prohibitions.”
Chesterton's paradox (endorsed by Žižek) shows that prohibition is not the enemy of enjoyment but its very condition, you need the Catholic frame to really enjoy sex.
“'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' is not a message of spiritual striving but a call to go back, seduce the man, and fuck him — the most obscene Catholic propaganda.”
The apparent spiritual exhortation is revealed as license for transgression mediated by the Catholic screen.
“Far from being egotists, we are too much caught in competitive envy — what we need for ecology is more healthy egotism, not appeals beyond petty interests.”
The standard critique of consumerist selfishness is inverted: authentic self-interest is actually compatible with cooperation, while envy (not egotism) is the origin of evil.
“Political correctness does not censor racist enjoyment; it explodes a whole new terrain of humiliations done in a more elegant and therefore more aggressive way.”
The logic of prohibition: censoring a slur opens a richer space of politely coded racism.
“That which appears in Buddhism as the origin of evil (excessive attachment, the Fall) is precisely what Western tradition identifies as the origin of transcendence and truth.”
The Buddhist fall into attachment is the Christian/Badiouian event of truth, the two traditions invert the valence of the same structure.
“Love without the fall is horror; the dating-agency promise of 'love without the fall' is the true nightmare.”
Badiou's point (endorsed by Žižek) that love is constitutively an event requiring vulnerability, risk-managed love is not love.
“The Sound of Music tells at the level of its texture exactly the opposite of its official anti-Nazi story.”
Ideological analysis of form versus content: the Nazi villain is coded Jewish, the Austrian heroes are coded small-is-beautiful fascists.
Claims 19
asserts
Joan Copjec's genius was to map Lacanian formulas of sexuation onto Kant's two sublimes (mathematical/dynamic) rather than onto the ugly beautiful/sublime gender binary.Lacanian sexuation and Kantian aesthetics
asserts
Wagner's operas systematically undermine his own anti-Semitic ideology at the level of their dramatic and musical structure.Wagner's operas and ideology
asserts
Ponnelle's staging of Tristan und Isolde makes Isolde's final Liebestod Tristan's dying fantasy rather than a real reunion, which is the correct interpretation of the opera's structure.Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
reframes
The Freudian death drive is not a drive toward annihilation but Freud's name for obscene immortality — the persistence of the undead beyond life and death.Freudian death drive
asserts
Kant's infinite judgment ('I am undead') opens a third domain beyond the positive/negative dichotomy and is the logical origin of psychoanalysis.Kantian logic and psychoanalysis
asserts
Immortality is presented in serious art (Wagner, Kafka) and even shitty films as the ultimate nightmare, not a reward — the horror is not dying but being unable to die.immortality and death drive in culture
asserts
Gods, not humans, are truly mortal: humans survive through tradition and the big Other, but when a god dies the big Other dies with it.mortality, gods, and the big Other
asserts
Lacan's formula 'desire is the desire of the Other' means three entirely different things across the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers and should not be collapsed into one reading.Lacanian desire and the three registers
rejects
Buddhism is not compatible with Lacanism because the Buddhist approach treats attachment as the origin of evil, whereas Žižek (with Badiou) holds that this excess/fall is precisely the site of the event and of truth.Buddhism-Lacanism compatibility
rejects
Political correctness (e.g., replacing 'Black' with 'African American') does not eliminate racist enjoyment but opens new terrain for more elegant and therefore more aggressive racist humiliation.political correctness as censorship of enjoyment
reframes
The origin of evil is not egotism but envious competitive desire (amour-propre) — we need more authentic egotism, not appeals to altruism, including in ecology.egotism, evil, and ecological ethics
reframes
The typical capitalist is not a hedonist egotist but someone perverted into a kind of quasi-Badiouian fidelity to capital accumulation as event.capitalism and subjectivity
asserts
The Sound of Music is the most obscene Catholic propaganda: its surface anti-Nazi message is undermined by its texture which codes the Nazis as Jews and the Austrians as small-is-beautiful fascists.The Sound of Music and ideology
asserts
Catholic Church logic (indulgences, confession) and the 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' message both operate by promising covered transgression — you can do whatever you want as long as you remain within the Catholic frame.Catholicism and enjoyment
reframes
Rumsfeld's epistemological schema is incomplete: it omits the Freudian fourth category — things we know but don't know that we know — which is the unconscious.Rumsfeld's epistemology and the unconscious
reframes
Robert Altman's Short Cuts is not merely a dark critique of alienation; its optimism is in the form itself — the Deleuzian/Spinozan open multiplicity of contingent encounters.Short Cuts and form as ideology
asserts
Great cinema achieves density at the level of texture that counteracts the narrative without vulgarly announcing a political message.film aesthetics and ideological texture
reframes
Kierkegaard's 'sickness unto death' refers not to fear of dying but to the horror of being immortal — having an eternal soul is the real nightmare.Kierkegaard on death and immortality
asserts
Chesterton is right that Western religious truth (Jewish-Christian) is a traumatic external encounter rather than inner contemplative peace, in contrast to Buddhist detachment.Western vs. Oriental notions of truth
Quotes 14
“The death drive is precisely this idea of obscene immortality. Not the great immortal idea but the terrifying immortality where the whole problem is not how to become eternal but how to die.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as obscene immortality
“Heidegger was right to say mortals and immortals but he got it wrong it's the other way around: humans are immortal, gods are truly radically mortal.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of mortality — gods vs. humans
“There is a fourth one: things that we know but we don't know that we know it and this is the Freudian unconscious and that's why Americans were in trouble in Iraq.”Slavoj Žižek · the unconscious as Rumsfeld's missing fourth category
“The only way today to maintain the spirit of pagan hedonism is to protect it by Christian prohibitions.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton's paradox: prohibition as condition of enjoyment
“It's easy to be polite in a polite way. It's easy to be vulgar in a vulgar way. It's a little bit more difficult to be vulgar in a polite way.”Slavoj Žižek · politeness, vulgarity, and political correctness
“You prohibit it, censor it, oh my God, you explode a whole new terrain of humiliations — that's the logic of enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · prohibition intensifies enjoyment
“The real is I come and with my evil stupid smile I kick the table and fuck off it's over even if you were winning.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real as external disruption of the symbolic game
“That which appears to Buddhist attitude as the origin of evil — excessive attachment — I claim is precisely the origin of transcendence of goodness.”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhist fall as Western event of truth
“Love without the fall is the horror. The dating-agency promise — we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall — that's the horror.”Slavoj Žižek · love as constitutive fall / event
“The origin of evil is not egotism the origin of evil is this reversal — to put it simply the Other is not just the one whom you ignore to be happy, it means more to you to destroy the Other than your own happiness.”Slavoj Žižek · envy (amour-propre) as root of evil, not egotism
“Desire is not an intimate simple authenticity — it's regulated by the big Other.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic constitution of desire
“The typical capitalist is not the egotist hedonist democratic individual materialist — it's absolutely a kind of perverted interpellation to an event.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalist as perverted Badiouian subject of fidelity
“If you are radically spiritual you should have the force to abstract obliterate the obscenity.”Slavoj Žižek · genuine spirituality absorbs its own obscene double
“Psychoanalysis is not simply external to philosophy — it's the very core of philosophy which philosophy, once it becomes a system of knowledge, had to ignore.”Slavoj Žižek · psychoanalysis as repressed core of philosophy
Transcript 22 turns
unknown
Yes. I begin
Yes. I begin
Slavoj Žižek
here. I will do what I was asked for, but I will not speak about Buddhism blah-blah, but nonetheless I would like to somehow connect it, link it to what we were talking about, to the line here. So, speaking about what I did already that's one [unintelligible] days ago. You remember what I said? I want to share these thoughts with you. I say this expression, this is California, you know, the biggest thing you can do is share your experience, you know. Ah, sorry, I'm evil. I cannot resist it. Let me tell you a dirty story where Joan Copjec almost killed me. I was explaining Lacanian formulas of sexuation once. You know, the idea being what Joan Copjec and she chaired the session advocated that it's a very beautiful theory that, you know, Immanuel Kant himself opposes masculine and feminine identity as sublime and beautiful. I mean it's disgusting male chauvinism of course, like women are beautiful, men are sublime. This means of course all the greatness is you know on which side and so on, no? But then Joan Copjec did something tremendous. Did you already hear about Lacan's, okay, I do it in my book and repeatedly in my Tarrying with the Negative, in my big fat book Less Than Nothing, this Lacan's so-called formulas of sexuation, the paradoxes of symbolic order. If you have a totality, an all, it must be grounded in an exception. If there is no exception, then it's non-all, you cannot totalize it and so on and so on. So the genius of Joan Copjec, this was already years ago almost, was to link this Lacanian formalization of sexual difference not to beautiful-sublime like in this anti-feminist way women are just cute beautiful if you want this abyss of deep sublimity you turn to men, but to two modes of the sublime. You know that Kant distinguishes between mathematical sublime and dynamic sublime. Mathematical sublime is quantitative sublime, it's simply too much to grasp. And dynamic sublime is the sublime of intensity, qualitative, like I don't know an explosion of energy like I don't know. I experienced once this and let me advise you it's not nice. I mean it's romantic to look like were you already when the lightning strikes but really close to where it strikes, you know, I tell you it's not nice, you know, because like you are in the shit, you know, it's no longer the nice distance. Okay, so incidentally what you mentioned, you the young Che Guevara, you are writing now, I am sorry, it's my nature to be evil. Are you writing the diaries, you go on with the diaries? Yeah, the motorcycle diaries. Yeah, yeah, and now you have what, and now you are a star. What do you have now, Porsche
here. I will do what I was asked for, but I will not speak about Buddhism blah-blah, but nonetheless I would like to somehow connect it, link it to what we were talking about, to the line here. So, speaking about what I did already that's one [unintelligible] days ago. You remember what I said? I want to share these thoughts with you. I say this expression, this is California, you know, the biggest thing you can do is share your experience, you know. Ah, sorry, I'm evil. I cannot resist it. Let me tell you a dirty story where Joan Copjec almost killed me. I was explaining Lacanian formulas of sexuation once. You know, the idea being what Joan Copjec and she chaired the session advocated that it's a very beautiful theory that, you know, Immanuel Kant himself opposes masculine and feminine identity as sublime and beautiful. I mean it's disgusting male chauvinism of course, like women are beautiful, men are sublime. This means of course all the greatness is you know on which side and so on, no? But then Joan Copjec did something tremendous. Did you already hear about Lacan's, okay, I do it in my book and repeatedly in my Tarrying with the Negative, in my big fat book Less Than Nothing, this Lacan's so-called formulas of sexuation, the paradoxes of symbolic order. If you have a totality, an all, it must be grounded in an exception. If there is no exception, then it's non-all, you cannot totalize it and so on and so on. So the genius of Joan Copjec, this was already years ago almost, was to link this Lacanian formalization of sexual difference not to beautiful-sublime like in this anti-feminist way women are just cute beautiful if you want this abyss of deep sublimity you turn to men, but to two modes of the sublime. You know that Kant distinguishes between mathematical sublime and dynamic sublime. Mathematical sublime is quantitative sublime, it's simply too much to grasp. And dynamic sublime is the sublime of intensity, qualitative, like I don't know an explosion of energy like I don't know. I experienced once this and let me advise you it's not nice. I mean it's romantic to look like were you already when the lightning strikes but really close to where it strikes, you know, I tell you it's not nice, you know, because like you are in the shit, you know, it's no longer the nice distance. Okay, so incidentally what you mentioned, you the young Che Guevara, you are writing now, I am sorry, it's my nature to be evil. Are you writing the diaries, you go on with the diaries? Yeah, the motorcycle diaries. Yeah, yeah, and now you have what, and now you are a star. What do you have now, Porsche
unknown
diaries or helicopter diaries? Sorry, it's in my nature to be evil. Yeah,
diaries or helicopter diaries? Sorry, it's in my nature to be evil. Yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
sorry, seriously, what you said, you know, about that Italian you mentioned what opera excess, no? That I think that in music you find, I've written about it, a wonderful example of this. Italian versus German sublime. German sublime is masculine even if Wagner all the time has this bullshit about you know this like Isolde dying excess, but I think I've proven this and even I was in Bayreuth once, they invited me, I debated with [unintelligible] this idea that this is a nice rereading that you know basically just a story of Tristan and Isolde, no, Wagner's, yes, that the proper way to understand act three, you know, you know the story like this ridiculous missed encounters, Tristan is dying, when Tristan dies Isolde comes and then she dies, they don't die together. One French director who is very traditional but here he was very good, he died, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, you must know it, I refer to it all the time, it was a stroke of a genius. His reinterpretation was that Tristan dies alone. That you know after act two they are discovered as lovers and to be cynical Isolde said okay I had my fun now I play it safe, let's stay with my husband, no? And the idiot Tristan is there waiting for her. So the reading is but it's done so well in a cinematic way that Tristan waits for her, gets crazy and then the only way for him to die is with her. So you know the very last song so-called Liebestod, the death, that this is Tristan's imagination, fantasy. I developed it's very nice how he cannot die without her so the only way to die is to imagine her and ah, you know why it may surprise you why me and Alain Badiou defend Wagner. We know he was total shit, anti-Semitic and so on, but I claim what he was doing in his operas is precisely undermining his own ideology. Okay but I will not go into this now, just to make the point that it's such a wonderful staging. It plays precisely with object a as you know when do you experience object a? Precisely because it's a pure how to put it phantasmatic embodiment of the void. Ah, now sorry if I refer in a very primitive male chauvinist way to femininity but isn't it that when a woman feels attractive, I mean maybe this is a male myth, I don't care, but how do they say the Italians, I like it, se non vero ben trovato, no? It's a nice theory, screw it if it's true or not, that it's you probably don't know it, Secret Beyond the Door, a nice late Hollywood Fritz Lang, not so late, '48 I think, melodrama where a woman is attracted by a guy and there is a wonderful phrase how she is seduced. She says to her friend, another woman, you know the way this guy looked at me I felt that he sees in me things like sexual potentials that I even wasn't aware that I have them. You know this idea that object a is what you see of you in the other's gaze, like when you see fascinating gaze on you, you know. Okay so let's go on. Something like this it is staged, it's wonderful. Tristan is dying, the scene is in colors, the usual, the trees, that island where Tristan is dying, Cornwall and so on. And he then looks into the camera, okay camera, the hall, the podium, and drops [unintelligible] and then Isolde comes but you know how as a kind of a outgrowth artificially lighted behind him and he never looks at her. It's as if he is looking at our gaze, you know, seeing her. And then it's done so depressingly wonderful because after Isolde dies sings the last notes there is already in Wagner one-two seconds of a break and then like ten maybe fifteen seconds of orchestral music. That one-two seconds break is used by Wagner, is used by Ponnelle as visual equivalent to fade out, fade in. So that when Isolde stops singing, she is really like this in a totally artificial light, the focus, but behind him, Tristan is there with us, you get fade out, the stage gets dark, and then two seconds later she must have run away very quickly, you get back and you see Tristan alone, all the scene is gray without her, lying there, no? I mean it's so efficient, it's so well done, but again this intensity there is male intensity, male sublime, like you know it's too strong blah blah. I much, I'm so sorry I don't have it here to play it for you, I much prefer the Italian, this quantitative sublime, you find it in Rossini, in a typical area of Rossini, I've written about it, for example you know the best known one from Figaro "Largo al factotum" or even a better one I claim from Cenerentola, the evil father. It's, it is a wonderful intersubjective complication, it's the best staging of obsessional satisfaction. Because Lacan provides a very precise definition of obsessional neurotic. For Lacan, obsessional neurotic is someone whose object of desire is the demand of the other. Now people say what does this bullshit mean? It's very simple. I remember from my mother. My mother was always complaining, you are just exploiting me, you are sending me on errands this that. Then of course, evil as I am, I was like fuck you so nothing. And then she was immediately desperate, what am I of no use, please allow me to do. You know precisely the object of eternal complaint was her object of desire, you know? In this quite literal sense, my desire, if I am and my God I am an obsessional neurotic, the object of my desire is your demand like. And how what, this is then Rossini stages the most beautiful at least two areas coordination he renders it to this area of obsessional neurotic's full happiness. For example in Cenerentola, okay "Largo al factotum" they Figaro here Figaro there we all know him, but this one is it's a father of the two evil daughters you know and then the Cenerentola, how do you translate this in English? I don't know, the ash lady, you know Cenerentola, you know, sorry, Cinderella, my God I'm so stupid, yes. Okay, so you have the father when he thinks that the prince will marry one of his two daughters staging a small show for the daughters, it's wonderful, imagining how will it be when one of his daughters will become the queen. How of course what he imagines is that all the sleazy guys around will come for him to intervene and he will demand like corruption, he dreams about being the focus of corruption, okay. And it's done in such a precise way. First he describes the situation: I will be sitting there, people will approach me, a lady flirting "Oh can I go to bed with you if you provide a post for my son", another guy giving you pieces of gold and so on and so on. And then he imagines the whole dialogue of how he answers them "Oh maybe but I don't see enough money there", maybe what, okay. Then comes the first subjective twist where he fakes, and that's the sublime, that it's too much, you know. He starts to sing "No all of you demanding of me this that sorry I cannot I cannot", you know. He dreams about being overwhelmed by demands and then it's so beautiful, just the last twist is when he says "Oh what a happiness, I am so happy to be" and with Figaro it's the same, you know, first he complains "Figaro here Figaro there everybody wants things from me", no? And then the end is "Oh what a happiness to be this". I prefer this ah, what happened, okay I didn't lose my thread. What happened with Joan Copjec is this one. People said this is bullshit, this is just abstract logic, give us one example where this really works like, give an example of these two logics of sublime which would have anything whatsoever to do with sexual difference, no? Ha ha, they talked with the wrong guy. I did it, it was so disgusting. I gave the example which well all I can tell you is without being too indiscreet that I asked many ladies who are my friends and I wasn't doing this with them and they confirmed it. Okay, now let me be a little bit disgusting. When a man does cunnilingus to a woman and a woman says "Yes, yes, more, more". I was literally told that there is a usual standard miscommunication. Woman, according to the formulas of sexuation, means this in a quantitative sense like "go on quantitatively more", while typically man means "she wants me whatever to bite her or what" you know, to be more intense, more forceful. And this is the typical misunderstanding. Now what then happened is that because this was in California is that Joan Copjec, who is a little bit prudish very nice lady, got pale and looked at me very evil. And she should have learned that you don't do this with me because she provoked me into a slightly tasteless outbreak. I told her "What is it Joan? Was this not your experience? We are in California, share your experience". And then we had this the ultimate film noir dialogue because you know she told me "Slavoj, I mean it, I will kill you". You know what was my answer? "I love you too". No this is elegant. But my long theory that you know any idiot it's easy to be polite in a polite way. You are just polite. It's easy to be vulgar in a vulgar way. It's a little bit more difficult but every British gentleman or lady can do this to be vulgar in a polite way. You know this kind of a cold politeness which can be even and that's incidentally for me the problem with political correctness. That for example I remember when Blacks you no longer I mean it's preferred even now I think to say I think it's racism even worse instead of Black to say African American. But the problem is this is that in this way a whole new area of racist humiliations is opened, done in a much more elegant but for this reason much more aggressive way. First for obvious reasons of content, you know why I am against these hyphenated identities. African American, Indian American and so on because it always here we are again at the logic of the master signifier it always presupposes a zero level without hyphen like Englishmen are not English Americans they're just Americans you know. So but okay what I wanted to say is that I remember twenty years ago when this was introduced you don't say Black you say African American. Do you know that there is a whole series of rather tasteless but some of them even appear to me a little bit maybe funny jokes made of this where simply in movies with wonderful effects they replace Black with you know you know that early horror movie one of these wonderful modest horror classics from early fifties, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Now all my friends are saying Creature from the African American Lagoon and so on and but I'm serious here you see this is the danger of this politically correct strategy. You play with fire. You think you censor it but you know it's precisely the logic of enjoyment that we mentioned, you prohibit it, censor it, oh my God, you explode a whole new terrain of of humiliations and so on and so on, no? So again ah yes now back to back to speaking about this Italian as it were excessive effect, what I appreciated, I wanted to ask you seriously was this done on purpose if you talked with the director. I'm talking about how do you really translate that *Y Tu Mamá También*, like "I will fuck also your mother" or what? *Y tu mamá también*, yeah. Does it mean this like "I also did it with your mother"? Did it, yes. "I also fucked your mother". I mean it's the most beautiful movie precisely because don't didn't most of you have my absolute dream I had it is when you are in elementary school early teens to have an attractive teacher lady and to do it with her. Isn't this the absolute dream of all. But what I mean now I'm more serious in this film that's what I wanted seriously to ask you, obviously it was done with purpose but did the guy really know what I like it so much is that the film although in itself if you just tell the story is simply the two young guys, the lady, blah blah. But isn't it that in a okay not too refined but nonetheless very nice way why very nice way? Because it always remains a background. It's this political violence background like I remember you with your friend when you didn't have time just to screw the lady you are on the street and then isn't it you pass a place where you just see how police is beating some people in the back. You know I like this how the movie never makes this direct vulgar step into "Oh now we will confront this", it just remains this kind of a political corruption and violence background. It's already at the beginning because isn't it clear that was it, don't take it personally, was it your father or the other guy's father who because of corruption had to escape. The other guy. Ah, so yours is clean, okay yeah. No but now I'm serious, what I sorry what I like so much is this elegance you know that they didn't go then into this vulgar open social criticism you know that it remains just a kind of a ominous shadow. You know which is also nice I forgot the title, there was a movie about four friends growing up and their love adventures in an American city. Sorry forgot the title if you are very interested I have it in one of my books I can find it. You know these growing up maturity films which is done in such a nice way you if you look the film the first time it's done so on the edge of subliminal that you even don't notice it. How all the time there is some kind of a thin shadow of some impending catastrophe. For example they found an abandoned pool of water in an abandoned construction site and they jump in, swim. But then you see that my God it must be dangerous because just beneath water there are some remainders of some steel construction and all the time that the boys are jumping in you know you fear like my God will someone hit that or whatever. Or the same whenever they cross in this small this the film takes place in this American small town through which a highway runs this desert highway, just two lanes with a lot of long traffic I mean large long direction traffic so you know whenever they cross the street they just miss a large truck you know it's wonderful all the time but it remains totally in the background it's kind of a and then maybe it's a compromise but it still works for me you wait you read this hermeneutic like oh when will the big catastrophe hit? It doesn't. At the end they finish their studies, happy ending but then you get the surprise you know after the final credits because this film takes place in early sixties they say that guy died in Vietnam, that guy was murdered in a robbery you know it kind of you learn only at the at the very end. But I like very much because this because I claim let me give you two further analysis from me. I claim this is what comes close to what I was improvising you remember apropos Van Gogh and Munch these density you know so that this is it's clear that for me movie becomes art. You have a certain narrative to say, but it's not just transparent narrative it's as if at the very level of the texture of film there must be some density which counteracts the narrative but it must be done not in a vulgar way. You know you know which film I often use, and sorry if you know this theory for what for me is one of the masterpieces of American cinema Robert Altman *Short Cuts*. The official story of the movie is of course some kind of stupid leftist, I'm a leftist but I hate this kind of stupid leftism, stupid leftist critique of American alienation, the silent despair of this middle class suburban lives and so on. But it's not all so dark. Nonetheless while I watched the film I had this indescribable feelings that it didn't hit me as such a dark film. And then I got it I spoke with Fredric Jameson who now wrote a wonderful text on *Short Cuts* that it's the form itself in what sense? You know what's the narrative structure? This I think eight-nine parallel stories and the totally contingent encounters which can be sometimes catastrophic sometimes not and so on and Fredric Jameson gave me this idea, now you the two evil people who like Deleuze he told me that this is this very Deleuzian this always reminded he told me Fredric Jameson to Spinoza read by Deleuze you know this optimist ontology it's open process multiplicity meaning or rather sense is not teleologically guaranteed but sense comes from all these contingent encounters so what I like is this that you don't have the in this usual vulgar socialist realism way at the end a guy for this would be the lowest if he were to include I mean he I mean Altman some guy I don't know poor homeless black Latino who would at the end says "Oh" like who would have spoken the party line you know "Oh these are all alienated". No you don't need the direct positive message, positive message it's already in the very form. And Fredric Jameson has a very nice idea of how there is nonetheless one moment at the end when a family shares bread, a cake and he reads this as a kind of optimist proletarian communion, the leftist okay but let me go on another example which I use in my books which is much more vulgar but works also. For a long time of this tension, for a long time I was intrigued by the fact of how is it called *The Sound of Music*. Why was it such a mega hit? Because you know if you I mean we all say oh whatever what's that bullshit called such a boring movie I mean another *Avatar*, I hate *Avatar*. I mean did you see *Avatar*? I simply don't get it. It's a boring movie, the storyline is so flat non-interesting you know. Okay but now you know if you adjust it to inflation then the two hits are I think one is still *Gone with the Wind* and two is let's be serious *Sound of Music*, you know. Okay did you see *Sound of Music*? If you are not be ashamed I I pardon you if you didn't see some bullshit Eisenstein whatever but Fellini but if you didn't see *Sound*. Okay I claim that it's precisely a similar tension. Maybe you know my idea I read it about how the official story is to make you feel good, no? The official story is honest Austrians fighting the Nazi threat. But I claim look closely at gestures, how people are dressed and you get basically the opposite message. The Nazis, you know, there is a bad Nazi guy who wants to take over on behalf of the Nazis the Salzburg games, he is dressed like a corrupted Jew. I mean I know because with my friend Dudi Aloni I was watching the film and he said "No but we are that, we Jews are that". So you know it's this typical non-German associated dress code associated with with ordinary people with corrupted Jewish bankers and so on. You know this tuxedo thing, this cigarette cigar holders whatever. And the Austrians are clearly painted as like small is beautiful fascists. Not this big aggressive fascist but this you know small deeply rooted and I think this is the genius of the film it in order to make you feel good in front of the big other yo-yo anti-fascist resistance no but at the level of its texture it tells you exactly the opposite story. Which is why the movie has a symptom I love it. You know that the movie has sorry one of the legendary mistakes by mistakes I mean this how to call it Gaddis or whatever when something is wrong continuity. You remember that do-re-mi blah-blah when Sister Maria takes the children and then she plays she Julie Andrews with some oranges and buys oranges. If you don't believe me and the movie takes place in thirty-eight nine okay put it on freeze and stop when you see the box with oranges. It says there "Product of Israel". I mean the revenge. No but seriously I've written about it you know why I am really so absolutely fascinated by that film. It's the most obscene Catholic propaganda. In what sense? I'm sorry if you know the story I would like to show it to you we don't have time okay you all know this. You know which is for me the absolutely obscene moment in the film okay at the immediate level if you saw it is I don't know what's with me but whenever I see it I flush red I cannot. You remember like I think about minutes into *Sound of Music* when children have to go to sleep and they they sing that "So Long, Farewell" and so on. I find this so obscene sorry I cannot watch it. But there is one which is maybe not so obscene but it's more are you aware first what type of obscene film this is beneath the surface. You know the first song is the nun sing "What should we do with Maria" and so on well the point of the film is she needs a good fuck no it's absolutely open no it's and then comes the absolute part. You remember how it's quite shocking how you remember the scene the evil fiancé of Baron von Trapp comes and convinces her blah blah okay so Maria is afraid of her sex awakening and escapes back into that nunnery or whatever and there's the crucial scene. She goes to Mother Superior and says "Listen I I am still in love with Baron I don't know what to do please punish me I need repentance" whatever and then comes the absolute obscenity. The you remember that famous song the Mother Superior starts to sing back to her with a clear message almost literally "No church convent nunnery is not a place of escape go back seduce the guy fuck him like crazy". And the song goes like you remember "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and so on and so on for the the one that I just finished shooting three months ago the second part *Pervert's Guide to Ideology* we wanted to do it but we were afraid because there were censorship problems they told us copyright also no. The idea was my god this could be so evil me but I am like in the movie dressed they made the perfect priest dress for me so I am okay Father Superior not Mother and a young priest comes to me with a similar complaint "I think all the time about fucking young boys what should I do" and then with a dubbed voice that I start to sing back "Climb every young boy" like and so on and then we even we already shot it but it was again fuck them imperialists the copyright problem. You remember the beginning of the film where you have camera up there from the air plane helicopter approaching town and then to Julie Andrews who runs there "The hills are alive with the sound of music" no and we already had a deal with how is it called with with Salzburg police because we lied them we told them this will be the propaganda for the film blah blah and they gave Sophie told me a very good price like just my god this was peanuts just I think euros for one day full use of police helicopter. You know the idea was this one I'm like Julie not exactly Andrews running there and the camera approaches it and then we I start with a dubbed voice to sing something like you know "the hills are alive with critique of ideology" and so on no? And then because if you look at credits then they the music orchestral goes into that other famous song blah blah Wiener schnitzel whatever "some of my favorite things" you know and then we already had it written that somebody dubbing I mean not me singing would then we would go on with that melody like you know police torture investigation forced confessions these are the few and so on fuck it imperialists prevented you know but again you know what's the message of that one of that scene "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"? It's precisely this message that you get from from some priests as the ultimate perversion. The message is not "it's prohibited" but "come to us just fake that you are one of us and we will cover you then secretly you can do whatever you want" you know it's this much more obscene call I quote I think in *Puppet and the Dwarf* Chesterton who got this in a wonderful way Chesterton said that the only way today to maintain the spirit of pagan hedonism is to protect it by Christian prohibitions. That the whole point of Christian prohibitions is to establish a space for you can do whatever you want which is why for which is why as this is the most intelligent Catholic propaganda you get it sometimes like their real message is not sex is sinful and so on. Their real message is even some priests play with this openly almost openly okay is and they are in a way right: if you want just direct brutal pleasure it will become mechanic you will not enjoy it. You need us as the screen to really enjoy sex. So the point is not too much sex the point is you must pretend to be Catholic you know and it's true that both big versions Catholicism Protestantism involve this type of dialectic the Catholic version is basically you can do whatever you want just confess at the end of the week you know. And here was the genius of Catholic Church in early 15th 16th century late 14th you know this is what shocked speaking about retroactivity no like punish ah they are geniuses you know what shocked Martin Luther not King the old guy anti-Semitic and so on no but he was honest you know first he was for Jews because he thought Jews remain Jews because Catholic Church was corrupted they were right. His message to Jews was "now I did ordering in Christianity now you can join us". The Jews didn't and then he became fiercely no. But what I want to say is that you know this is the utmost perversion do you know that the church was selling like crazy how do you call this you pay for your sins indulgences yes but you know that they make this dialectical move into retroactivity at the end they were selling even for big sins indulgences for future. Like let's say I don't know you are my daughter as a good father I wish all the best for you but I cannot stand another guy to take you know so I want to kill you better than so I go in advance I buy the indulgence and then I know I am already covered you know the ultimate. So okay so that's the Catholic logic. The Protestant logic is even better you know what's basically the Protestant rule: you can do whatever you want just feel a little bit guilty you know that's. But in Catholicism typically you don't which is why Nietzsche preferred Catholicism no? Because but okay again going back to this same thing in Islam too. That I don't know enough about it. Yeah pretty much the same thing you wish something but how does here okay we don't have time to go into this now I'm cheating again but you know what really interested me how does it because some I am spontaneously as a leftist more Shi'a but some Sunnis try to convince me that don't no no Shi'a are more filthy Catholics or whatever you know. Yeah because of Imam Hussein and his suffering and that whole narrative and you know the back yeah yeah the original trauma but in Islam there is no original sin so it's a fundamentally different thing in fact when they proselytize to non-Muslims they're at a superior position because they're outside of the sin yeah but once you become inside it's a point system. But nonetheless how would you okay we don't have time to go it now it's madness but nonetheless it would very much interest me you know I know rationally rationally in the simple sense reading books no what's the difference between Shi'a Sunni. But who's to put it I don't really know you know what I mean. Well it was Ali and Umar. I know but that's what I know this is the official story no but what does this mean libidinally for example one thing I know because a friend of mine gave me one you know that they are this is also another element for Shi'a are the Catholics you know because you know that in Iran they don't have this absolute prohibition I have a plate with young Muhammad. I mean you can paint even Muhammad in Iran but the friend told me try to enter this with this plate Saudi Arabia and it's the last time I see you if you this you know what is absolutely prohibited so they are much more relaxed with regard to for example no this iconoclasm all that bullshit by they are much softer I was told you know. But look at Iran Iran is a Shi'a country they celebrate Norouz as our new year not Muhammad's birthday. Sorry you celebrate? We celebrate Norouz as a new year versus Muhammad's birthday because in other in Sunni countries it's Muhammad's birthday. Yeah yeah so where is your heart Shi'a or Sunni? Okay it's too intimate a question you know okay let's drop it okay okay let's move we are losing time. No what sorry you back to Buddhism that's where we started off. Yeah yeah you want to bash me back you will not get it okay let me go since who to answer your question that's where it lies. Yeah yeah okay. No we but you know what's so tragic we are close to that that how the same line repeated itself as it were in Buddhism you know you have these three stages you have the original Buddhism which is closest towards the called Hinayana then you have Mahayana which is for me the end the regression and then you have the the Tibetan kind okay but immediately we go to that I just want to finish this line to say that in even in vulgar films like this no I love this and Hitchcock is full of this you know with again we don't have time to go read that book we try to develop there a lot of it that I co-edited whatever you wanted to know about Lacan but didn't dare to ask Hitchcock or what how with Hitchcock it's always that the form itself movement of the camera and so on tell their own story which tends to undermine the official narrative and that's what makes the texture of it no? Okay. Let's go to where we were yesterday and with this don't worry I will come to Buddhism uh another line very brief I would like to develop here. You remember when I talked apropos Vertigo about that crack in space where as if from another spectral domain. I think and I'm sorry some of you know this line but I think that this domain of neither life or death but undead however call it spectral. This begins with Kant and this is why basically Lacan says very strangely. Once Lacan was asked okay if we do a little bit of primitive history of ideas where does it begin psychoanalysis not he meant not of course with Freud but you know like what are the origins and of course Lacan was totally opposed to the idea that in some this Schopenhauer whatever deep will irrationalism he said in Kant. In Kant's not even practical reason critique of pure reason. Where and I have a nice answer I hope. I'm sorry some of you know this line but it's nice. You know that Kant distinguishes there between you have a positive judgment negative judgment and what he calls infinite judgment. How are they structured? Positive judgment you assert a predicate "I am alive" or "I am dead" you assert a predicate. Negative
sorry, seriously, what you said, you know, about that Italian you mentioned what opera excess, no? That I think that in music you find, I've written about it, a wonderful example of this. Italian versus German sublime. German sublime is masculine even if Wagner all the time has this bullshit about you know this like Isolde dying excess, but I think I've proven this and even I was in Bayreuth once, they invited me, I debated with [unintelligible] this idea that this is a nice rereading that you know basically just a story of Tristan and Isolde, no, Wagner's, yes, that the proper way to understand act three, you know, you know the story like this ridiculous missed encounters, Tristan is dying, when Tristan dies Isolde comes and then she dies, they don't die together. One French director who is very traditional but here he was very good, he died, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, you must know it, I refer to it all the time, it was a stroke of a genius. His reinterpretation was that Tristan dies alone. That you know after act two they are discovered as lovers and to be cynical Isolde said okay I had my fun now I play it safe, let's stay with my husband, no? And the idiot Tristan is there waiting for her. So the reading is but it's done so well in a cinematic way that Tristan waits for her, gets crazy and then the only way for him to die is with her. So you know the very last song so-called Liebestod, the death, that this is Tristan's imagination, fantasy. I developed it's very nice how he cannot die without her so the only way to die is to imagine her and ah, you know why it may surprise you why me and Alain Badiou defend Wagner. We know he was total shit, anti-Semitic and so on, but I claim what he was doing in his operas is precisely undermining his own ideology. Okay but I will not go into this now, just to make the point that it's such a wonderful staging. It plays precisely with object a as you know when do you experience object a? Precisely because it's a pure how to put it phantasmatic embodiment of the void. Ah, now sorry if I refer in a very primitive male chauvinist way to femininity but isn't it that when a woman feels attractive, I mean maybe this is a male myth, I don't care, but how do they say the Italians, I like it, se non vero ben trovato, no? It's a nice theory, screw it if it's true or not, that it's you probably don't know it, Secret Beyond the Door, a nice late Hollywood Fritz Lang, not so late, '48 I think, melodrama where a woman is attracted by a guy and there is a wonderful phrase how she is seduced. She says to her friend, another woman, you know the way this guy looked at me I felt that he sees in me things like sexual potentials that I even wasn't aware that I have them. You know this idea that object a is what you see of you in the other's gaze, like when you see fascinating gaze on you, you know. Okay so let's go on. Something like this it is staged, it's wonderful. Tristan is dying, the scene is in colors, the usual, the trees, that island where Tristan is dying, Cornwall and so on. And he then looks into the camera, okay camera, the hall, the podium, and drops [unintelligible] and then Isolde comes but you know how as a kind of a outgrowth artificially lighted behind him and he never looks at her. It's as if he is looking at our gaze, you know, seeing her. And then it's done so depressingly wonderful because after Isolde dies sings the last notes there is already in Wagner one-two seconds of a break and then like ten maybe fifteen seconds of orchestral music. That one-two seconds break is used by Wagner, is used by Ponnelle as visual equivalent to fade out, fade in. So that when Isolde stops singing, she is really like this in a totally artificial light, the focus, but behind him, Tristan is there with us, you get fade out, the stage gets dark, and then two seconds later she must have run away very quickly, you get back and you see Tristan alone, all the scene is gray without her, lying there, no? I mean it's so efficient, it's so well done, but again this intensity there is male intensity, male sublime, like you know it's too strong blah blah. I much, I'm so sorry I don't have it here to play it for you, I much prefer the Italian, this quantitative sublime, you find it in Rossini, in a typical area of Rossini, I've written about it, for example you know the best known one from Figaro "Largo al factotum" or even a better one I claim from Cenerentola, the evil father. It's, it is a wonderful intersubjective complication, it's the best staging of obsessional satisfaction. Because Lacan provides a very precise definition of obsessional neurotic. For Lacan, obsessional neurotic is someone whose object of desire is the demand of the other. Now people say what does this bullshit mean? It's very simple. I remember from my mother. My mother was always complaining, you are just exploiting me, you are sending me on errands this that. Then of course, evil as I am, I was like fuck you so nothing. And then she was immediately desperate, what am I of no use, please allow me to do. You know precisely the object of eternal complaint was her object of desire, you know? In this quite literal sense, my desire, if I am and my God I am an obsessional neurotic, the object of my desire is your demand like. And how what, this is then Rossini stages the most beautiful at least two areas coordination he renders it to this area of obsessional neurotic's full happiness. For example in Cenerentola, okay "Largo al factotum" they Figaro here Figaro there we all know him, but this one is it's a father of the two evil daughters you know and then the Cenerentola, how do you translate this in English? I don't know, the ash lady, you know Cenerentola, you know, sorry, Cinderella, my God I'm so stupid, yes. Okay, so you have the father when he thinks that the prince will marry one of his two daughters staging a small show for the daughters, it's wonderful, imagining how will it be when one of his daughters will become the queen. How of course what he imagines is that all the sleazy guys around will come for him to intervene and he will demand like corruption, he dreams about being the focus of corruption, okay. And it's done in such a precise way. First he describes the situation: I will be sitting there, people will approach me, a lady flirting "Oh can I go to bed with you if you provide a post for my son", another guy giving you pieces of gold and so on and so on. And then he imagines the whole dialogue of how he answers them "Oh maybe but I don't see enough money there", maybe what, okay. Then comes the first subjective twist where he fakes, and that's the sublime, that it's too much, you know. He starts to sing "No all of you demanding of me this that sorry I cannot I cannot", you know. He dreams about being overwhelmed by demands and then it's so beautiful, just the last twist is when he says "Oh what a happiness, I am so happy to be" and with Figaro it's the same, you know, first he complains "Figaro here Figaro there everybody wants things from me", no? And then the end is "Oh what a happiness to be this". I prefer this ah, what happened, okay I didn't lose my thread. What happened with Joan Copjec is this one. People said this is bullshit, this is just abstract logic, give us one example where this really works like, give an example of these two logics of sublime which would have anything whatsoever to do with sexual difference, no? Ha ha, they talked with the wrong guy. I did it, it was so disgusting. I gave the example which well all I can tell you is without being too indiscreet that I asked many ladies who are my friends and I wasn't doing this with them and they confirmed it. Okay, now let me be a little bit disgusting. When a man does cunnilingus to a woman and a woman says "Yes, yes, more, more". I was literally told that there is a usual standard miscommunication. Woman, according to the formulas of sexuation, means this in a quantitative sense like "go on quantitatively more", while typically man means "she wants me whatever to bite her or what" you know, to be more intense, more forceful. And this is the typical misunderstanding. Now what then happened is that because this was in California is that Joan Copjec, who is a little bit prudish very nice lady, got pale and looked at me very evil. And she should have learned that you don't do this with me because she provoked me into a slightly tasteless outbreak. I told her "What is it Joan? Was this not your experience? We are in California, share your experience". And then we had this the ultimate film noir dialogue because you know she told me "Slavoj, I mean it, I will kill you". You know what was my answer? "I love you too". No this is elegant. But my long theory that you know any idiot it's easy to be polite in a polite way. You are just polite. It's easy to be vulgar in a vulgar way. It's a little bit more difficult but every British gentleman or lady can do this to be vulgar in a polite way. You know this kind of a cold politeness which can be even and that's incidentally for me the problem with political correctness. That for example I remember when Blacks you no longer I mean it's preferred even now I think to say I think it's racism even worse instead of Black to say African American. But the problem is this is that in this way a whole new area of racist humiliations is opened, done in a much more elegant but for this reason much more aggressive way. First for obvious reasons of content, you know why I am against these hyphenated identities. African American, Indian American and so on because it always here we are again at the logic of the master signifier it always presupposes a zero level without hyphen like Englishmen are not English Americans they're just Americans you know. So but okay what I wanted to say is that I remember twenty years ago when this was introduced you don't say Black you say African American. Do you know that there is a whole series of rather tasteless but some of them even appear to me a little bit maybe funny jokes made of this where simply in movies with wonderful effects they replace Black with you know you know that early horror movie one of these wonderful modest horror classics from early fifties, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Now all my friends are saying Creature from the African American Lagoon and so on and but I'm serious here you see this is the danger of this politically correct strategy. You play with fire. You think you censor it but you know it's precisely the logic of enjoyment that we mentioned, you prohibit it, censor it, oh my God, you explode a whole new terrain of of humiliations and so on and so on, no? So again ah yes now back to back to speaking about this Italian as it were excessive effect, what I appreciated, I wanted to ask you seriously was this done on purpose if you talked with the director. I'm talking about how do you really translate that *Y Tu Mamá También*, like "I will fuck also your mother" or what? *Y tu mamá también*, yeah. Does it mean this like "I also did it with your mother"? Did it, yes. "I also fucked your mother". I mean it's the most beautiful movie precisely because don't didn't most of you have my absolute dream I had it is when you are in elementary school early teens to have an attractive teacher lady and to do it with her. Isn't this the absolute dream of all. But what I mean now I'm more serious in this film that's what I wanted seriously to ask you, obviously it was done with purpose but did the guy really know what I like it so much is that the film although in itself if you just tell the story is simply the two young guys, the lady, blah blah. But isn't it that in a okay not too refined but nonetheless very nice way why very nice way? Because it always remains a background. It's this political violence background like I remember you with your friend when you didn't have time just to screw the lady you are on the street and then isn't it you pass a place where you just see how police is beating some people in the back. You know I like this how the movie never makes this direct vulgar step into "Oh now we will confront this", it just remains this kind of a political corruption and violence background. It's already at the beginning because isn't it clear that was it, don't take it personally, was it your father or the other guy's father who because of corruption had to escape. The other guy. Ah, so yours is clean, okay yeah. No but now I'm serious, what I sorry what I like so much is this elegance you know that they didn't go then into this vulgar open social criticism you know that it remains just a kind of a ominous shadow. You know which is also nice I forgot the title, there was a movie about four friends growing up and their love adventures in an American city. Sorry forgot the title if you are very interested I have it in one of my books I can find it. You know these growing up maturity films which is done in such a nice way you if you look the film the first time it's done so on the edge of subliminal that you even don't notice it. How all the time there is some kind of a thin shadow of some impending catastrophe. For example they found an abandoned pool of water in an abandoned construction site and they jump in, swim. But then you see that my God it must be dangerous because just beneath water there are some remainders of some steel construction and all the time that the boys are jumping in you know you fear like my God will someone hit that or whatever. Or the same whenever they cross in this small this the film takes place in this American small town through which a highway runs this desert highway, just two lanes with a lot of long traffic I mean large long direction traffic so you know whenever they cross the street they just miss a large truck you know it's wonderful all the time but it remains totally in the background it's kind of a and then maybe it's a compromise but it still works for me you wait you read this hermeneutic like oh when will the big catastrophe hit? It doesn't. At the end they finish their studies, happy ending but then you get the surprise you know after the final credits because this film takes place in early sixties they say that guy died in Vietnam, that guy was murdered in a robbery you know it kind of you learn only at the at the very end. But I like very much because this because I claim let me give you two further analysis from me. I claim this is what comes close to what I was improvising you remember apropos Van Gogh and Munch these density you know so that this is it's clear that for me movie becomes art. You have a certain narrative to say, but it's not just transparent narrative it's as if at the very level of the texture of film there must be some density which counteracts the narrative but it must be done not in a vulgar way. You know you know which film I often use, and sorry if you know this theory for what for me is one of the masterpieces of American cinema Robert Altman *Short Cuts*. The official story of the movie is of course some kind of stupid leftist, I'm a leftist but I hate this kind of stupid leftism, stupid leftist critique of American alienation, the silent despair of this middle class suburban lives and so on. But it's not all so dark. Nonetheless while I watched the film I had this indescribable feelings that it didn't hit me as such a dark film. And then I got it I spoke with Fredric Jameson who now wrote a wonderful text on *Short Cuts* that it's the form itself in what sense? You know what's the narrative structure? This I think eight-nine parallel stories and the totally contingent encounters which can be sometimes catastrophic sometimes not and so on and Fredric Jameson gave me this idea, now you the two evil people who like Deleuze he told me that this is this very Deleuzian this always reminded he told me Fredric Jameson to Spinoza read by Deleuze you know this optimist ontology it's open process multiplicity meaning or rather sense is not teleologically guaranteed but sense comes from all these contingent encounters so what I like is this that you don't have the in this usual vulgar socialist realism way at the end a guy for this would be the lowest if he were to include I mean he I mean Altman some guy I don't know poor homeless black Latino who would at the end says "Oh" like who would have spoken the party line you know "Oh these are all alienated". No you don't need the direct positive message, positive message it's already in the very form. And Fredric Jameson has a very nice idea of how there is nonetheless one moment at the end when a family shares bread, a cake and he reads this as a kind of optimist proletarian communion, the leftist okay but let me go on another example which I use in my books which is much more vulgar but works also. For a long time of this tension, for a long time I was intrigued by the fact of how is it called *The Sound of Music*. Why was it such a mega hit? Because you know if you I mean we all say oh whatever what's that bullshit called such a boring movie I mean another *Avatar*, I hate *Avatar*. I mean did you see *Avatar*? I simply don't get it. It's a boring movie, the storyline is so flat non-interesting you know. Okay but now you know if you adjust it to inflation then the two hits are I think one is still *Gone with the Wind* and two is let's be serious *Sound of Music*, you know. Okay did you see *Sound of Music*? If you are not be ashamed I I pardon you if you didn't see some bullshit Eisenstein whatever but Fellini but if you didn't see *Sound*. Okay I claim that it's precisely a similar tension. Maybe you know my idea I read it about how the official story is to make you feel good, no? The official story is honest Austrians fighting the Nazi threat. But I claim look closely at gestures, how people are dressed and you get basically the opposite message. The Nazis, you know, there is a bad Nazi guy who wants to take over on behalf of the Nazis the Salzburg games, he is dressed like a corrupted Jew. I mean I know because with my friend Dudi Aloni I was watching the film and he said "No but we are that, we Jews are that". So you know it's this typical non-German associated dress code associated with with ordinary people with corrupted Jewish bankers and so on. You know this tuxedo thing, this cigarette cigar holders whatever. And the Austrians are clearly painted as like small is beautiful fascists. Not this big aggressive fascist but this you know small deeply rooted and I think this is the genius of the film it in order to make you feel good in front of the big other yo-yo anti-fascist resistance no but at the level of its texture it tells you exactly the opposite story. Which is why the movie has a symptom I love it. You know that the movie has sorry one of the legendary mistakes by mistakes I mean this how to call it Gaddis or whatever when something is wrong continuity. You remember that do-re-mi blah-blah when Sister Maria takes the children and then she plays she Julie Andrews with some oranges and buys oranges. If you don't believe me and the movie takes place in thirty-eight nine okay put it on freeze and stop when you see the box with oranges. It says there "Product of Israel". I mean the revenge. No but seriously I've written about it you know why I am really so absolutely fascinated by that film. It's the most obscene Catholic propaganda. In what sense? I'm sorry if you know the story I would like to show it to you we don't have time okay you all know this. You know which is for me the absolutely obscene moment in the film okay at the immediate level if you saw it is I don't know what's with me but whenever I see it I flush red I cannot. You remember like I think about minutes into *Sound of Music* when children have to go to sleep and they they sing that "So Long, Farewell" and so on. I find this so obscene sorry I cannot watch it. But there is one which is maybe not so obscene but it's more are you aware first what type of obscene film this is beneath the surface. You know the first song is the nun sing "What should we do with Maria" and so on well the point of the film is she needs a good fuck no it's absolutely open no it's and then comes the absolute part. You remember how it's quite shocking how you remember the scene the evil fiancé of Baron von Trapp comes and convinces her blah blah okay so Maria is afraid of her sex awakening and escapes back into that nunnery or whatever and there's the crucial scene. She goes to Mother Superior and says "Listen I I am still in love with Baron I don't know what to do please punish me I need repentance" whatever and then comes the absolute obscenity. The you remember that famous song the Mother Superior starts to sing back to her with a clear message almost literally "No church convent nunnery is not a place of escape go back seduce the guy fuck him like crazy". And the song goes like you remember "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and so on and so on for the the one that I just finished shooting three months ago the second part *Pervert's Guide to Ideology* we wanted to do it but we were afraid because there were censorship problems they told us copyright also no. The idea was my god this could be so evil me but I am like in the movie dressed they made the perfect priest dress for me so I am okay Father Superior not Mother and a young priest comes to me with a similar complaint "I think all the time about fucking young boys what should I do" and then with a dubbed voice that I start to sing back "Climb every young boy" like and so on and then we even we already shot it but it was again fuck them imperialists the copyright problem. You remember the beginning of the film where you have camera up there from the air plane helicopter approaching town and then to Julie Andrews who runs there "The hills are alive with the sound of music" no and we already had a deal with how is it called with with Salzburg police because we lied them we told them this will be the propaganda for the film blah blah and they gave Sophie told me a very good price like just my god this was peanuts just I think euros for one day full use of police helicopter. You know the idea was this one I'm like Julie not exactly Andrews running there and the camera approaches it and then we I start with a dubbed voice to sing something like you know "the hills are alive with critique of ideology" and so on no? And then because if you look at credits then they the music orchestral goes into that other famous song blah blah Wiener schnitzel whatever "some of my favorite things" you know and then we already had it written that somebody dubbing I mean not me singing would then we would go on with that melody like you know police torture investigation forced confessions these are the few and so on fuck it imperialists prevented you know but again you know what's the message of that one of that scene "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"? It's precisely this message that you get from from some priests as the ultimate perversion. The message is not "it's prohibited" but "come to us just fake that you are one of us and we will cover you then secretly you can do whatever you want" you know it's this much more obscene call I quote I think in *Puppet and the Dwarf* Chesterton who got this in a wonderful way Chesterton said that the only way today to maintain the spirit of pagan hedonism is to protect it by Christian prohibitions. That the whole point of Christian prohibitions is to establish a space for you can do whatever you want which is why for which is why as this is the most intelligent Catholic propaganda you get it sometimes like their real message is not sex is sinful and so on. Their real message is even some priests play with this openly almost openly okay is and they are in a way right: if you want just direct brutal pleasure it will become mechanic you will not enjoy it. You need us as the screen to really enjoy sex. So the point is not too much sex the point is you must pretend to be Catholic you know and it's true that both big versions Catholicism Protestantism involve this type of dialectic the Catholic version is basically you can do whatever you want just confess at the end of the week you know. And here was the genius of Catholic Church in early 15th 16th century late 14th you know this is what shocked speaking about retroactivity no like punish ah they are geniuses you know what shocked Martin Luther not King the old guy anti-Semitic and so on no but he was honest you know first he was for Jews because he thought Jews remain Jews because Catholic Church was corrupted they were right. His message to Jews was "now I did ordering in Christianity now you can join us". The Jews didn't and then he became fiercely no. But what I want to say is that you know this is the utmost perversion do you know that the church was selling like crazy how do you call this you pay for your sins indulgences yes but you know that they make this dialectical move into retroactivity at the end they were selling even for big sins indulgences for future. Like let's say I don't know you are my daughter as a good father I wish all the best for you but I cannot stand another guy to take you know so I want to kill you better than so I go in advance I buy the indulgence and then I know I am already covered you know the ultimate. So okay so that's the Catholic logic. The Protestant logic is even better you know what's basically the Protestant rule: you can do whatever you want just feel a little bit guilty you know that's. But in Catholicism typically you don't which is why Nietzsche preferred Catholicism no? Because but okay again going back to this same thing in Islam too. That I don't know enough about it. Yeah pretty much the same thing you wish something but how does here okay we don't have time to go into this now I'm cheating again but you know what really interested me how does it because some I am spontaneously as a leftist more Shi'a but some Sunnis try to convince me that don't no no Shi'a are more filthy Catholics or whatever you know. Yeah because of Imam Hussein and his suffering and that whole narrative and you know the back yeah yeah the original trauma but in Islam there is no original sin so it's a fundamentally different thing in fact when they proselytize to non-Muslims they're at a superior position because they're outside of the sin yeah but once you become inside it's a point system. But nonetheless how would you okay we don't have time to go it now it's madness but nonetheless it would very much interest me you know I know rationally rationally in the simple sense reading books no what's the difference between Shi'a Sunni. But who's to put it I don't really know you know what I mean. Well it was Ali and Umar. I know but that's what I know this is the official story no but what does this mean libidinally for example one thing I know because a friend of mine gave me one you know that they are this is also another element for Shi'a are the Catholics you know because you know that in Iran they don't have this absolute prohibition I have a plate with young Muhammad. I mean you can paint even Muhammad in Iran but the friend told me try to enter this with this plate Saudi Arabia and it's the last time I see you if you this you know what is absolutely prohibited so they are much more relaxed with regard to for example no this iconoclasm all that bullshit by they are much softer I was told you know. But look at Iran Iran is a Shi'a country they celebrate Norouz as our new year not Muhammad's birthday. Sorry you celebrate? We celebrate Norouz as a new year versus Muhammad's birthday because in other in Sunni countries it's Muhammad's birthday. Yeah yeah so where is your heart Shi'a or Sunni? Okay it's too intimate a question you know okay let's drop it okay okay let's move we are losing time. No what sorry you back to Buddhism that's where we started off. Yeah yeah you want to bash me back you will not get it okay let me go since who to answer your question that's where it lies. Yeah yeah okay. No we but you know what's so tragic we are close to that that how the same line repeated itself as it were in Buddhism you know you have these three stages you have the original Buddhism which is closest towards the called Hinayana then you have Mahayana which is for me the end the regression and then you have the the Tibetan kind okay but immediately we go to that I just want to finish this line to say that in even in vulgar films like this no I love this and Hitchcock is full of this you know with again we don't have time to go read that book we try to develop there a lot of it that I co-edited whatever you wanted to know about Lacan but didn't dare to ask Hitchcock or what how with Hitchcock it's always that the form itself movement of the camera and so on tell their own story which tends to undermine the official narrative and that's what makes the texture of it no? Okay. Let's go to where we were yesterday and with this don't worry I will come to Buddhism uh another line very brief I would like to develop here. You remember when I talked apropos Vertigo about that crack in space where as if from another spectral domain. I think and I'm sorry some of you know this line but I think that this domain of neither life or death but undead however call it spectral. This begins with Kant and this is why basically Lacan says very strangely. Once Lacan was asked okay if we do a little bit of primitive history of ideas where does it begin psychoanalysis not he meant not of course with Freud but you know like what are the origins and of course Lacan was totally opposed to the idea that in some this Schopenhauer whatever deep will irrationalism he said in Kant. In Kant's not even practical reason critique of pure reason. Where and I have a nice answer I hope. I'm sorry some of you know this line but it's nice. You know that Kant distinguishes there between you have a positive judgment negative judgment and what he calls infinite judgment. How are they structured? Positive judgment you assert a predicate "I am alive" or "I am dead" you assert a predicate. Negative
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judgment
judgment
Slavoj Žižek
is of course negation "I am not
is of course negation "I am not
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dead"
dead"
Slavoj Žižek
which means "I am alive". But as Kant puts it in a very nice way infinite judgment is also negation but a totally different one. In negative judgment you negate a predicate. In infinite judgment you assert a non-predicate. And you will say okay fuck off what's the shit isn't it the same no it isn't and I will give you an example and as you may expect my example is from is from Stephen King
which means "I am alive". But as Kant puts it in a very nice way infinite judgment is also negation but a totally different one. In negative judgment you negate a predicate. In infinite judgment you assert a non-predicate. And you will say okay fuck off what's the shit isn't it the same no it isn't and I will give you an example and as you may expect my example is from is from Stephen King
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okay no you know let's take it "I am dead" okay "I am dead". "I am not dead" okay it means "I am alive".
okay no you know let's take it "I am dead" okay "I am dead". "I am not dead" okay it means "I am alive".
Slavoj Žižek
But you know this basic expression from
But you know this basic expression from
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horror movies. What if I say what if I don't say "I am not dead" what if I say "I am undead" you know what this is totally different. It means you are the living dead it opens this is why Kant calls it infinite judgment because it opens a third domain of indistinction where "I am undead" is not simply "I am alive" but it's an immanent negation "I am alive as dead"
horror movies. What if I say what if I don't say "I am not dead" what if I say "I am undead" you know what this is totally different. It means you are the living dead it opens this is why Kant calls it infinite judgment because it opens a third domain of indistinction where "I am undead" is not simply "I am alive" but it's an immanent negation "I am alive as dead"
Slavoj Žižek
and that's the Freudian drive I claim. What I developed this in my books everywhere but but. You can see it in every everyday dichotomy there's actually a an infinite any place you've got a
and that's the Freudian drive I claim. What I developed this in my books everywhere but but. You can see it in every everyday dichotomy there's actually a an infinite any place you've got a
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positive
positive
Slavoj Žižek
and negative there's also the infinite. Give me an example because I'm a woman you know in what sense symbolically like the male chauvinist idea is that women cannot think in abstract terms you need to give examples well I don't know if it's holds for women but I am like that so give me when you say in everyday life can you give me I want to steal it from you. I guess any choice so like if you want a drink of water you can either have it or you can not have it or you can have something else. Ah yes but here it's precisely the point is it's not simply something else. We are still the coordinates are still
and negative there's also the infinite. Give me an example because I'm a woman you know in what sense symbolically like the male chauvinist idea is that women cannot think in abstract terms you need to give examples well I don't know if it's holds for women but I am like that so give me when you say in everyday life can you give me I want to steal it from you. I guess any choice so like if you want a drink of water you can either have it or you can not have it or you can have something else. Ah yes but here it's precisely the point is it's not simply something else. We are still the coordinates are still
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those of just
those of just
Slavoj Žižek
alive or dead you know. It's not something else. It's life reflected within death so that as dead you are alive infinitely. And what I claim is that Lacan's name for this undeadness is lamella which Lacan calls says it is drive itself as an object. And what I want to say is that just to give you a hint it's crucial what Freud calls death drive is did you notice it if you read Freud carefully it's basically its exact opposite. It's Freud's name for immortality. Death drive is think about undead. Death drive is something which persists goes on beyond life and death. Which is why for me I always use this example which I already mentioned the nicest example of death drive are for me Tom and Jerry cartoons and so on you know you slice them you kill them they return again and again which is why Freud linked death drive to *Wiederholungszwang* compulsion to repeat. It's this spectral entity which insists beyond beyond life and death which is why here I had a problem with friendly problem with the guy who comes this Thursday AB Alain Badiou no because you know for him immortality is the great eventual immortality no? And for him being towards death is just this human animal no but I claim that if there is a big discovery in psychoanalysis it's precisely this idea of obscene immortality. You know not the great oh immortal idea but the terrifying immortality where the whole problem is not how to become eternal but how to die. And this is coming back to Wagner. This is did you notice this? This is why they he really was a proto-Freudian I claim. This is what is so great in Wagner's operas take already from the first one *Flying Dutchman*. What does Flying Dutchman want? He is precisely condemned to eternal life. He wants to find a woman with whom he can die and achieve peace. Let's go to the end Amfortas the Kingfisher Fisher King sorry in *Parsifal*. It's exactly the same. He has this strange wound which is the same as for me you know which is for me at least apart from animal stories the best Kafka's short story. Do you know that story "A Country Doctor" where okay it's much more complicated but basically a doctor goes to a country house and finds a young boy who has a big disgusting wound somewhere here and that wound is open life crawling in it and as Kafka says very precisely this wound is not threatening him with death this wound is what prevents him to die is something that just go on a kind of an obscene undead life. This is this is the death drive and again all around in Wagner you have precisely this problem of how to die properly how to avoid being immortal. Immortality is presented as the ultimate nightmare. And you know who was aware of this people usually don't get it Kierkegaard when he speaks about *Sickness Unto Death*. He means also read him close what he basically means is the exact opposite. He says that it's not that we are afraid to die what we are even more afraid is immortality because as he says if we are just a species on earth which dies okay no problem I die no worry it's okay but the point is what if we do have an internal soul? That's the horror. That's difficult to accept and which is why I was quite shocked you see how even in totally shitty films you can find pearls. Did you see I had the misfortune of seeing him because of my small son did
alive or dead you know. It's not something else. It's life reflected within death so that as dead you are alive infinitely. And what I claim is that Lacan's name for this undeadness is lamella which Lacan calls says it is drive itself as an object. And what I want to say is that just to give you a hint it's crucial what Freud calls death drive is did you notice it if you read Freud carefully it's basically its exact opposite. It's Freud's name for immortality. Death drive is think about undead. Death drive is something which persists goes on beyond life and death. Which is why for me I always use this example which I already mentioned the nicest example of death drive are for me Tom and Jerry cartoons and so on you know you slice them you kill them they return again and again which is why Freud linked death drive to *Wiederholungszwang* compulsion to repeat. It's this spectral entity which insists beyond beyond life and death which is why here I had a problem with friendly problem with the guy who comes this Thursday AB Alain Badiou no because you know for him immortality is the great eventual immortality no? And for him being towards death is just this human animal no but I claim that if there is a big discovery in psychoanalysis it's precisely this idea of obscene immortality. You know not the great oh immortal idea but the terrifying immortality where the whole problem is not how to become eternal but how to die. And this is coming back to Wagner. This is did you notice this? This is why they he really was a proto-Freudian I claim. This is what is so great in Wagner's operas take already from the first one *Flying Dutchman*. What does Flying Dutchman want? He is precisely condemned to eternal life. He wants to find a woman with whom he can die and achieve peace. Let's go to the end Amfortas the Kingfisher Fisher King sorry in *Parsifal*. It's exactly the same. He has this strange wound which is the same as for me you know which is for me at least apart from animal stories the best Kafka's short story. Do you know that story "A Country Doctor" where okay it's much more complicated but basically a doctor goes to a country house and finds a young boy who has a big disgusting wound somewhere here and that wound is open life crawling in it and as Kafka says very precisely this wound is not threatening him with death this wound is what prevents him to die is something that just go on a kind of an obscene undead life. This is this is the death drive and again all around in Wagner you have precisely this problem of how to die properly how to avoid being immortal. Immortality is presented as the ultimate nightmare. And you know who was aware of this people usually don't get it Kierkegaard when he speaks about *Sickness Unto Death*. He means also read him close what he basically means is the exact opposite. He says that it's not that we are afraid to die what we are even more afraid is immortality because as he says if we are just a species on earth which dies okay no problem I die no worry it's okay but the point is what if we do have an internal soul? That's the horror. That's difficult to accept and which is why I was quite shocked you see how even in totally shitty films you can find pearls. Did you see I had the misfortune of seeing him because of my small son did
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you see part two
you see part two
Slavoj Žižek
of of the first one was *The Clash of Titans* the second one was the *Wrath of Titans*. It's much worse. Also the women are not in the first one there is that Gemma Arterton who is nice and sexy of course that's another point. I even inquired with Ralph Fiennes "How is she?" she told me you don't have a chance she has now a beautiful young Italian husband. I said okay life is not perfect sorry let me go on no but now I'm serious there is a wonderful line there if it some of you saw the movie but don't see it because of this it's shitty it's much worse even than when gods debate among themselves I think it's precisely Ralph Fiennes that is to say how do you pronounce it Hades Hades? Hades yes who says to Zeus and it's a wonderful reversal of Heidegger maybe even I don't know I should ask Ralph that the scenario writer was some intellectual who planted this evil. He says that we gods if the plan of the enemy succeeds no and we die he says that people don't die they are immortal in the sense of even if they
of of the first one was *The Clash of Titans* the second one was the *Wrath of Titans*. It's much worse. Also the women are not in the first one there is that Gemma Arterton who is nice and sexy of course that's another point. I even inquired with Ralph Fiennes "How is she?" she told me you don't have a chance she has now a beautiful young Italian husband. I said okay life is not perfect sorry let me go on no but now I'm serious there is a wonderful line there if it some of you saw the movie but don't see it because of this it's shitty it's much worse even than when gods debate among themselves I think it's precisely Ralph Fiennes that is to say how do you pronounce it Hades Hades? Hades yes who says to Zeus and it's a wonderful reversal of Heidegger maybe even I don't know I should ask Ralph that the scenario writer was some intellectual who planted this evil. He says that we gods if the plan of the enemy succeeds no and we die he says that people don't die they are immortal in the sense of even if they
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humans even if they
humans even if they
Slavoj Žižek
physically die they survive in tradition big big as we big other is here no? But basically now I translate the guy into Lacanian no basically he says but with us gods because we are big other and when we die big other also dies we are really mortal. You know when a god dies there is no human trick I die but I live for eternity through tradition myths or whatever. And it's a very nice theory I find it that yes Heidegger was right to say mortals and immortals but he got it wrong it's the other way around: humans are immortal, gods are truly radically mortal. Okay another point I want to make just to connect yeah yeah it will come to your fucking Buddhism. You know this is also another nice point how to read Lacan. What is so great about Lacan is how he all the time returns to the same phrase or example and reinterprets it all the time. For example from already late forties I think he's really early writing Lacan repeats "Desire is the desire of the Other". But it means absolutely different things. And we have here that's why I want to tell you this a wonderful illustration of the basic Lacanian triad: imaginary, symbolic, real. You know to understand this let me give you a very simple example: chess. The symbolic are the rules. The imaginary are all these how we identify figures: king, queen, whatever, fortress. You know how you can get the gap between symbolic and imaginary. Are you aware that all this we call it a king, a queen, whatever, fortress it's just to make it attractive for us. All that really defines a king is which moves he can do. And we can also put it General Secretary or just a logical operator you can see here how symbolic identity is just a figure which can you know what's the rule only one move in each direction and if he is lost you are fucked up the game is over no? But you see imaginary is then all that we put on it the cloth on. And the real would be the simple radical externality. You play chess the real is I come and with my evil stupid smile I kick the table you know and fuck off it's over even if you if you were winning no? So again let's go through this three how am I yes and you will see that I'm not cheating how am I coming to Buddhism here because I claim and I had a problem when I was in Korea with this where they attacked me some Lacanians there there is a Lacanian group not all of them there although interesting that it's exactly in Korea which is as far as I know the only far east country where the majority is Christian did you know this it's I didn't know it it's over percent around percent I think they're Christian okay but Lacanians are some people who claim Buddhism and that Lacan basically is compatible with Buddhism I think not and I think it precisely concerns drive object a and so on and so on. Okay let me so we will come immediately to that let me just begin with this first for in the early Lacan "Desire is the desire of the Other" means simply envy competitiveness and so on. I desire what you desire it's this mirror competitive like what René Girard would have called mimetic all the mimetic bullshit or whatever no. And but here already things get and Girard knew it also in his own way complicated with Lacan. Here I think and it's so strange that Lacan didn't do it. Here we should read early Lacan this idea of desire is the desire of the other of the structure of envy like and I had a wonderful example of this I had a friend who is now a big Slovenian analytic philosopher he is a pig I don't want even now to talk with him but I remember how my ex-wife told me this when this guy the analytic philosopher in Slovenia was young he wanted to seduce my not yet wife at that point. But what was so funny this guy was so ethically disgusting he had no constraints which means he openly said what if you are a gentleman you don't say no there was a third philosopher who was a kind of authority for this friend of mine and that third philosopher liked my future wife but he didn't have time to seduce her so he told this bad guy philosopher "Do you do seduce her I see she likes you blah blah" no okay sorry for this complication but the point is then when this guy the disgusting analytic philosopher in Slovenia he was making passes at her in a very brutal way like you know simply embracing and that she was pushing him off and then he says "But wait a minute that guy told me you should like" you know he invoked that other guy as an authority you know. How dare you? It's like it's officially attested this you know like you should do you know I got it's not like it's not my desire I'm just realizing that the desire of the Other. How dare you oppose? And he says it with such totally idiotic I love this sincere surprise you know "What are you doing? It's wrong you know like it's not that me I want to fuck you but you know it's all the big Other" so okay so the it is strange that what Lacan doesn't do is to quote Rousseau was not an idiot here you know Rousseau's wonderful distinction very Lacanian one between what are the two terms *amour de soi* and *amour-propre* I think that is to say one is the honest egotism and the other is this mediated egotism with envy and Rousseau saw something which only today intelligent theories of rational choice ethical actions see that you know like okay put it this way stupid Catholics often claim that out of egotism you know what's the standard Catholic criticism of our predicament today: oh old values we neglected them today people are just consumerist egotists they all care only about their profit well-being and they claim a Slovenian big theologian likes to use this term that the only ethics you can arrive at this level is a pack among the wolves you know we are all wolves *homo homini lupus* but we say okay it's a little bit better if we make a minimal pack no but okay and all that stuff. Rousseau was the first one to see and it's a very deep insight simple but deep how there is absolutely no contradiction between authentic egotism by authentic egotism he means where you really care for your well-being and collaborating with others and so on and so on. The origin of evil is not egotism the origin of evil is this reversal when as I think the guy who just died Gore Vidal put it nicely once when he said "the point of capitalist competition is not just that I win the other has to lose also" you know this idea that to put it very simply the Other is not just the one whom you ignore to be happy. No it means more to you to destroy the Other than your own happiness you know. You have obstacle to your happiness but the focus of your interest shifts onto the obstacle itself like to give you an example of this logic. In Slovenia I think I already mentioned this to you we are an evil nation envy is our principle you must also have it we have these wonderful sayings like you know a fairy an okay magician comes to a Slovenian farmer and tells him "I will give you a cow but I warn you I will give to your neighbor two cows". You can imagine what's the Slovenian farmer's answer "Rather kill one of my cows but kill two cows of the neighbor". Or we have even a much more evil version the guy says "I will do to you whatever you want but remember I will do it twice or give it twice as much to your neighbor". Slovenian farmer says "Take one of my eyes" so that you know and so on. So again this logic of envy is not egotist logic and from here we should move further. I claim that it's not true that in everyday life we are egotists. Adorno already even the good old Frankfurt school Adorno wonderfully developed this how in our consumerist societies where you know literally you want what others want it's very maybe the most difficult thing is to be an authentic egotist you know because we are so much caught into this competitive logic screw the other and so on and so on what more matters. And this is why that would be my point I did it with some ecological debate with you know when ecologists and I totally agree with them here I mean in principle in the struggle but I don't agree with them when they claim that you know we are just egotists thinking about our well-being not about our children we should rise above our petty interests to ah no I think that precisely what we need for ecology is more healthy egotism. My point and here I again I would really like to ask him I think already even mentioned this here for example capitalism typically a typical capitalist is in a certain perverted way I know I already mentioned this here extremely ethical okay it's what Alain Badiou would have called pseudo-event pseudo-fidelity but it's still like what's a typical capitalist he is not no I just want pleasure no typical capitalist works night and day is ready to sacrifice his life his family neglects family just that the capital turns over and so on and so on it's typical perverted it's in Badiou's term the typical capitalist is not the egotist hedonist democratic individual materialist it's absolutely a kind of a perverted interpellation to an event like there is something for which I am ready to risk everything. So again we don't need any appeals we just have to tell people you are an hedonist egotist so please really be it. So this would be the first meaning let's go back of desire is the desire of the other that what we desire is but and then we there here we can make all the variations one is in my desire I imitate the other's desire and don't underestimate to what extent this works like I had a friend it's an empirical case and I promise to you on okay I'm an atheist I cannot say on God's that this friend of mine to whom this happened is not me. There was he heard that in a certain class which he was then on which he joined there is a beautiful girl so he when he joined that class he immediately pretended to whatever fell in love tried to seduce that girl but of course what made that girl attractive to him is the fact that she was she had this mythic status she is the beauty no you know how he discovered it it was incredible. He got it basically I think I'm not sure like he did sleep blah blah and then he dropped her and I asked him "what went wrong?" you know what he told me? That he this he was just told there is a fatal beauty in that class he got the wrong one they meant another girl and it's incredible how when he learned this he dropped this one so literally his desire was the other's desire and don't underestimate this don't underestimate this it may be an extreme vulgar case but okay this is it. Then we have the second meaning. This is imaginary imaginary mirror mimesis the second meaning which would have been the the symbolic one where desire and this is the standard Lacanian meaning "Desire is the desire of the Other" where you capitalize the A. It simply means what you desire not only in the sense of legitimate ways to desire like what is socially permitted but even transgressive forms are all prescribed by the symbolic order within which you live. The idea is that you know it's a very simple one precisely when you think oh it's all in my imagination spontaneously I love it's a complex symbolic structure which without you being aware of it regulates your desire so simply desire is not an intimate simple authenticity it's regulated by the big other. But then in the late Lacan "Desire is the desire of the Other" gets more radical it's not imaginary it's not real it's more it's more some kind of abyss of the other you know the neighbor even God for example the Jewish God is usually like you know where you have always this doubt this radical opacity of the other's desire what does the other want from me? It was always [unintelligible] yeah yeah so but so you see how nicely Lacan does work here no it's how nicely it works in all three registers: imaginary, symbolic, real and so on. So let me nonetheless okay I cheated by just a little bit I will start with Buddhism and we will be screwing Buddha again in the afternoon a little bit also because now let's go to to ah yes ah ah ah I must annoy you one more thing I want to add to that because it's also connected with this. You remember yesterday when I talked about and I didn't finish the story that stupid story you know "I want coffee without milk not coffee without cream not coffee without milk" there is a further joke I use it in last book of mine so maybe you know it but it makes the point the underlying structure even better and sorry if you know the story did you see that British movie with how is he called my god the British actor who plays Obi-Wan Kenobi the young Alec Guinness no no the young Ewan McGregor yeah yeah okay this is one of his early films before he became a Jedi bullshitter you know when he was still the British working class hero you know did you see the film *Brassed Off*? It's a modest working class half comedy half whatever okay but did did you remember that I mean nothing dirty is said there but it's for me at least one of the most erotic scenes of invitation that I've seen. It's Ewan McGregor the homeless miner or whatever accompanies a girl who is a good one although she works for the administration who wants to close down the mine whatever. Okay he accompanies her home to her apartment block in the evening and then that's the entire dialogue no sex nothing dirty she tells him "would you care to come up to have a cup of coffee" coffee again "coffee with me". He says "I would be glad to but I don't drink coffee no" and she says "no problem I don't have any". Can you imagine a more open sexual invitation? And nothing happens. She offers something then it's no then she said we don't need it okay it's not you know the just of course because coffee is a pretext but how. The paradox is that you offer it you negate it but the result is not zero, the result is absolute desire, no? It's if I may be vulgar but precisely you shouldn't be vulgar because if you are vulgar in the film and that's how our duplication work it would have ruined everything like can you imagine the vulgarity of she telling him "it doesn't really matter because coffee was just a pretext writing for what I really want you to fuck the brain out of me" or whatever you know it wouldn't. And you know what's my point here it's not only that it wouldn't it would that it's not only that it would be vulgar it would also that's the finesse ruin the effect it would have been inherently erotically much less. I found this again a wonderful example if some of you want to write something like Hegelian dialectical techniques of seduction or whatever you know. Although I also constructed in my book an example where this would have worked in politics. I imagined a dialogue when United States were attacking Iraq for to discover weapons of mass destruction then you know it I imagined like you know Donald Rumsfeld is saying to Europeans "come help us let's attack Iraq to get weapons of mass destruction no" and we Europeans carry say "oh it's a problem we don't have good equipment to discover weapons of mass destruction" and Rumsfeld said "no problem there are no weapons". In Iraq it works perfectly you know. Ah no I will talk about him to tell you another old story. Fuck you you will not get Buddhism from them. No you will sorry ah I repeated it so many times but it's really beautiful Rumsfeld the great American philosopher big contribution to epistemology you know what I mean you know his famous line don't you remember it? It was a shock when he precisely when he tried to justify American attack on Iran sorry on Iraq I'm just running ahead Iran Iraq Iraq Iran although I spoke with a good friend of Foucault and he told me screw authentic Foucault really went to Iran in Khomeini's times to fuck young Shi'a priests and he had wonderful time there that's another story. That he says he says I'm sorry if I repeat myself but it's one he says there are things we know that we know that we know and we know that we know them like I don't know I am in Sussex and I know that I am in Sussex. Then he says there are things that we don't know but we know that we don't know them. For example I'm sorry I'm so evil. You know that with the money that you earn here Wolfgang our beloved master goes for half a year to Phuket Thailand south and have a house there no? Okay let's say I don't know how many doors Wolfgang's house in south of Thailand has but I know that I don't know this no? I hope the spy here will report this on you know I could have given a much nastier sexual example no how many boys or girls I am polite although I like to you know what's my once I was spreading rumors like this against but you and he was a little bit hurt and I told him "listen this proves that I'm a warm nice guy it would be brutal to tell you these things face to face I don't want to hurt you which is why out of politeness and my love I only say behind your back bad things about you like that" okay sorry for this okay so again or okay to put a more neutral example there are electric cars which incidentally do you know that they cost it's incredible Swiss francs which means like dollar is more like US dollars my god you can buy a Porsche because of some problem they're so expensive these shitty small cars. Okay let's go on. I don't know how many of them there are in this shitty city town but I know that I don't know this no? And then he makes a complication first step into philosophy Rumsfeld he says then "but there are things that we don't know but we even don't know that we don't know them" and that was his ultimate justification for the attack what if we know weapons of mass destruction those poisons what type but he says what if there are even things about Saddam that we don't know but we even don't know that we don't know them you know like some ultra weapons that we even don't know what to look for and so on and so on. And here you have the limitation of American philosophy Rumsfeld did you notice how he forgot one thing the fourth category? He has only things we know and we know that we know them, we don't know but we know that we don't know, and we don't know that we don't know. There is a fourth one: things that we know but we don't know that we know it and this is the Freudian unconscious and that's why Americans were in trouble in Iraq because what they didn't know is precisely for example all the complex network of their own prejudices and so on how they approached Iraq and so on this would be again a nice definition of the unconscious Lacan even uses the term an unknown knowledge something you know but you know where you can find a simple example of this? It also goes with what I called yesterday the objective appearance some things the way things really appear. I will give you an extremely simple example but it will make the point. Let's say you are you are an adolescent it's the standard thing to hate your father you think your father is a stupid confused jerk a loser and so on. There is a great possibility that you are probably right no so what I want to say is that but still observe the same guy when he actually interacts with his father and you will as a rule note something totally different a kind of a love mixed with respect and so on you know how you can even empirically experimentally assert this. When a guy is telling you "oh my father is such a jerk blah blah" just agree with him just tell him "yeah it's incredible what a stupid guy your father is" he will immediately start to defend him and so on. So no here is a nice example of how you make fun of your father blah blah but what you don't know is that okay you really are tremendously attached to him and all that all that. But isn't this the same platonic theory of anamnesis we're born with everything we know I mean like in a sense is Plato like a Freudian in that sense? Oh definitely yes although again okay there are two problems here. The first one is how exactly do we understand anamnesis because like you know that here I'm more on the side of Christianity Kierkegaard wrote a wonderful book is one of his best not repetitive *Philosophical Fragments*? No *Philosophical Crumbs* fragments yeah. Where he precisely opposes Socrates or Plato tradition versus Christ. The idea is that Socratic universe philosophical is a universe of anamnesis. There is a truth we have a deep knowledge we have to back into ourselves to discover it like you know that famous Plato's experiment with a slave we should maybe where are my slaves we should maybe repeat it with you you know I will ask you about a square you know that Plato you want to play that game sorry tasteless what I want to say is that but then for Kierkegaard Christianity is not remembering Christianity is repeating is repetition is eventual it's event it's wonderfully done so again on the other hand you know where you have Lacan's wonderful reading of I don't think it's already translated in Lacan's seminar which follows ethics on transference he goes there into this more let's call it even Kierkegaardian repetition side of Socrates object a Socrates as basically the proto-philosopher even I mean proto-philosopher in the sense that Socrates is the beginning of philosophy but at that moment something close to the position of the analyst happens which is why I think that even when Lacan attacks philosophy it's a much more refined position you know. It's like psychoanalysis is not simply external to philosophy it's the very core of philosophy which philosophy once it becomes a system of knowledge had to ignore obfuscate and so on and so on. But okay let's not get lost here my god a little bit of Buddhism okay. Let me go directly to the point ethical point and then from here we go to then ontological problem and so on and so on because it is in a way connected precisely with your question. I quote Chesterton in my book I think it's in *Puppet and the Dwarf* where he provides the basic formula which is and I agree I'm on the Christian side here Chesterton said something very simple he said okay it may be wrong but it does as an ideal type ideally he is right in an abstract global sense he draws the line sorry he draws our attention to this distinction between typical European and he means the religions of the book Islam included whatever statues of saints whatever and the Oriental Buddhist and other especially Buddhist statues of Buddha. And he says that the typical distinction is that in the West truth like let's say we are talking about a saint someone who has a contact with truth the truth is like we are we are we favor X-Files you know that they all say truths is out there. In our tradition it starts already with Jewish experience truth is not inner journey this is Gnostic bullshit. The elementary Jewish experience which remains in Christianity is that truth hurts truth is a traumatic encounter a brutal and this is here I met Badiou level no truth is an event which hurts you truth is not this
physically die they survive in tradition big big as we big other is here no? But basically now I translate the guy into Lacanian no basically he says but with us gods because we are big other and when we die big other also dies we are really mortal. You know when a god dies there is no human trick I die but I live for eternity through tradition myths or whatever. And it's a very nice theory I find it that yes Heidegger was right to say mortals and immortals but he got it wrong it's the other way around: humans are immortal, gods are truly radically mortal. Okay another point I want to make just to connect yeah yeah it will come to your fucking Buddhism. You know this is also another nice point how to read Lacan. What is so great about Lacan is how he all the time returns to the same phrase or example and reinterprets it all the time. For example from already late forties I think he's really early writing Lacan repeats "Desire is the desire of the Other". But it means absolutely different things. And we have here that's why I want to tell you this a wonderful illustration of the basic Lacanian triad: imaginary, symbolic, real. You know to understand this let me give you a very simple example: chess. The symbolic are the rules. The imaginary are all these how we identify figures: king, queen, whatever, fortress. You know how you can get the gap between symbolic and imaginary. Are you aware that all this we call it a king, a queen, whatever, fortress it's just to make it attractive for us. All that really defines a king is which moves he can do. And we can also put it General Secretary or just a logical operator you can see here how symbolic identity is just a figure which can you know what's the rule only one move in each direction and if he is lost you are fucked up the game is over no? But you see imaginary is then all that we put on it the cloth on. And the real would be the simple radical externality. You play chess the real is I come and with my evil stupid smile I kick the table you know and fuck off it's over even if you if you were winning no? So again let's go through this three how am I yes and you will see that I'm not cheating how am I coming to Buddhism here because I claim and I had a problem when I was in Korea with this where they attacked me some Lacanians there there is a Lacanian group not all of them there although interesting that it's exactly in Korea which is as far as I know the only far east country where the majority is Christian did you know this it's I didn't know it it's over percent around percent I think they're Christian okay but Lacanians are some people who claim Buddhism and that Lacan basically is compatible with Buddhism I think not and I think it precisely concerns drive object a and so on and so on. Okay let me so we will come immediately to that let me just begin with this first for in the early Lacan "Desire is the desire of the Other" means simply envy competitiveness and so on. I desire what you desire it's this mirror competitive like what René Girard would have called mimetic all the mimetic bullshit or whatever no. And but here already things get and Girard knew it also in his own way complicated with Lacan. Here I think and it's so strange that Lacan didn't do it. Here we should read early Lacan this idea of desire is the desire of the other of the structure of envy like and I had a wonderful example of this I had a friend who is now a big Slovenian analytic philosopher he is a pig I don't want even now to talk with him but I remember how my ex-wife told me this when this guy the analytic philosopher in Slovenia was young he wanted to seduce my not yet wife at that point. But what was so funny this guy was so ethically disgusting he had no constraints which means he openly said what if you are a gentleman you don't say no there was a third philosopher who was a kind of authority for this friend of mine and that third philosopher liked my future wife but he didn't have time to seduce her so he told this bad guy philosopher "Do you do seduce her I see she likes you blah blah" no okay sorry for this complication but the point is then when this guy the disgusting analytic philosopher in Slovenia he was making passes at her in a very brutal way like you know simply embracing and that she was pushing him off and then he says "But wait a minute that guy told me you should like" you know he invoked that other guy as an authority you know. How dare you? It's like it's officially attested this you know like you should do you know I got it's not like it's not my desire I'm just realizing that the desire of the Other. How dare you oppose? And he says it with such totally idiotic I love this sincere surprise you know "What are you doing? It's wrong you know like it's not that me I want to fuck you but you know it's all the big Other" so okay so the it is strange that what Lacan doesn't do is to quote Rousseau was not an idiot here you know Rousseau's wonderful distinction very Lacanian one between what are the two terms *amour de soi* and *amour-propre* I think that is to say one is the honest egotism and the other is this mediated egotism with envy and Rousseau saw something which only today intelligent theories of rational choice ethical actions see that you know like okay put it this way stupid Catholics often claim that out of egotism you know what's the standard Catholic criticism of our predicament today: oh old values we neglected them today people are just consumerist egotists they all care only about their profit well-being and they claim a Slovenian big theologian likes to use this term that the only ethics you can arrive at this level is a pack among the wolves you know we are all wolves *homo homini lupus* but we say okay it's a little bit better if we make a minimal pack no but okay and all that stuff. Rousseau was the first one to see and it's a very deep insight simple but deep how there is absolutely no contradiction between authentic egotism by authentic egotism he means where you really care for your well-being and collaborating with others and so on and so on. The origin of evil is not egotism the origin of evil is this reversal when as I think the guy who just died Gore Vidal put it nicely once when he said "the point of capitalist competition is not just that I win the other has to lose also" you know this idea that to put it very simply the Other is not just the one whom you ignore to be happy. No it means more to you to destroy the Other than your own happiness you know. You have obstacle to your happiness but the focus of your interest shifts onto the obstacle itself like to give you an example of this logic. In Slovenia I think I already mentioned this to you we are an evil nation envy is our principle you must also have it we have these wonderful sayings like you know a fairy an okay magician comes to a Slovenian farmer and tells him "I will give you a cow but I warn you I will give to your neighbor two cows". You can imagine what's the Slovenian farmer's answer "Rather kill one of my cows but kill two cows of the neighbor". Or we have even a much more evil version the guy says "I will do to you whatever you want but remember I will do it twice or give it twice as much to your neighbor". Slovenian farmer says "Take one of my eyes" so that you know and so on. So again this logic of envy is not egotist logic and from here we should move further. I claim that it's not true that in everyday life we are egotists. Adorno already even the good old Frankfurt school Adorno wonderfully developed this how in our consumerist societies where you know literally you want what others want it's very maybe the most difficult thing is to be an authentic egotist you know because we are so much caught into this competitive logic screw the other and so on and so on what more matters. And this is why that would be my point I did it with some ecological debate with you know when ecologists and I totally agree with them here I mean in principle in the struggle but I don't agree with them when they claim that you know we are just egotists thinking about our well-being not about our children we should rise above our petty interests to ah no I think that precisely what we need for ecology is more healthy egotism. My point and here I again I would really like to ask him I think already even mentioned this here for example capitalism typically a typical capitalist is in a certain perverted way I know I already mentioned this here extremely ethical okay it's what Alain Badiou would have called pseudo-event pseudo-fidelity but it's still like what's a typical capitalist he is not no I just want pleasure no typical capitalist works night and day is ready to sacrifice his life his family neglects family just that the capital turns over and so on and so on it's typical perverted it's in Badiou's term the typical capitalist is not the egotist hedonist democratic individual materialist it's absolutely a kind of a perverted interpellation to an event like there is something for which I am ready to risk everything. So again we don't need any appeals we just have to tell people you are an hedonist egotist so please really be it. So this would be the first meaning let's go back of desire is the desire of the other that what we desire is but and then we there here we can make all the variations one is in my desire I imitate the other's desire and don't underestimate to what extent this works like I had a friend it's an empirical case and I promise to you on okay I'm an atheist I cannot say on God's that this friend of mine to whom this happened is not me. There was he heard that in a certain class which he was then on which he joined there is a beautiful girl so he when he joined that class he immediately pretended to whatever fell in love tried to seduce that girl but of course what made that girl attractive to him is the fact that she was she had this mythic status she is the beauty no you know how he discovered it it was incredible. He got it basically I think I'm not sure like he did sleep blah blah and then he dropped her and I asked him "what went wrong?" you know what he told me? That he this he was just told there is a fatal beauty in that class he got the wrong one they meant another girl and it's incredible how when he learned this he dropped this one so literally his desire was the other's desire and don't underestimate this don't underestimate this it may be an extreme vulgar case but okay this is it. Then we have the second meaning. This is imaginary imaginary mirror mimesis the second meaning which would have been the the symbolic one where desire and this is the standard Lacanian meaning "Desire is the desire of the Other" where you capitalize the A. It simply means what you desire not only in the sense of legitimate ways to desire like what is socially permitted but even transgressive forms are all prescribed by the symbolic order within which you live. The idea is that you know it's a very simple one precisely when you think oh it's all in my imagination spontaneously I love it's a complex symbolic structure which without you being aware of it regulates your desire so simply desire is not an intimate simple authenticity it's regulated by the big other. But then in the late Lacan "Desire is the desire of the Other" gets more radical it's not imaginary it's not real it's more it's more some kind of abyss of the other you know the neighbor even God for example the Jewish God is usually like you know where you have always this doubt this radical opacity of the other's desire what does the other want from me? It was always [unintelligible] yeah yeah so but so you see how nicely Lacan does work here no it's how nicely it works in all three registers: imaginary, symbolic, real and so on. So let me nonetheless okay I cheated by just a little bit I will start with Buddhism and we will be screwing Buddha again in the afternoon a little bit also because now let's go to to ah yes ah ah ah I must annoy you one more thing I want to add to that because it's also connected with this. You remember yesterday when I talked about and I didn't finish the story that stupid story you know "I want coffee without milk not coffee without cream not coffee without milk" there is a further joke I use it in last book of mine so maybe you know it but it makes the point the underlying structure even better and sorry if you know the story did you see that British movie with how is he called my god the British actor who plays Obi-Wan Kenobi the young Alec Guinness no no the young Ewan McGregor yeah yeah okay this is one of his early films before he became a Jedi bullshitter you know when he was still the British working class hero you know did you see the film *Brassed Off*? It's a modest working class half comedy half whatever okay but did did you remember that I mean nothing dirty is said there but it's for me at least one of the most erotic scenes of invitation that I've seen. It's Ewan McGregor the homeless miner or whatever accompanies a girl who is a good one although she works for the administration who wants to close down the mine whatever. Okay he accompanies her home to her apartment block in the evening and then that's the entire dialogue no sex nothing dirty she tells him "would you care to come up to have a cup of coffee" coffee again "coffee with me". He says "I would be glad to but I don't drink coffee no" and she says "no problem I don't have any". Can you imagine a more open sexual invitation? And nothing happens. She offers something then it's no then she said we don't need it okay it's not you know the just of course because coffee is a pretext but how. The paradox is that you offer it you negate it but the result is not zero, the result is absolute desire, no? It's if I may be vulgar but precisely you shouldn't be vulgar because if you are vulgar in the film and that's how our duplication work it would have ruined everything like can you imagine the vulgarity of she telling him "it doesn't really matter because coffee was just a pretext writing for what I really want you to fuck the brain out of me" or whatever you know it wouldn't. And you know what's my point here it's not only that it wouldn't it would that it's not only that it would be vulgar it would also that's the finesse ruin the effect it would have been inherently erotically much less. I found this again a wonderful example if some of you want to write something like Hegelian dialectical techniques of seduction or whatever you know. Although I also constructed in my book an example where this would have worked in politics. I imagined a dialogue when United States were attacking Iraq for to discover weapons of mass destruction then you know it I imagined like you know Donald Rumsfeld is saying to Europeans "come help us let's attack Iraq to get weapons of mass destruction no" and we Europeans carry say "oh it's a problem we don't have good equipment to discover weapons of mass destruction" and Rumsfeld said "no problem there are no weapons". In Iraq it works perfectly you know. Ah no I will talk about him to tell you another old story. Fuck you you will not get Buddhism from them. No you will sorry ah I repeated it so many times but it's really beautiful Rumsfeld the great American philosopher big contribution to epistemology you know what I mean you know his famous line don't you remember it? It was a shock when he precisely when he tried to justify American attack on Iran sorry on Iraq I'm just running ahead Iran Iraq Iraq Iran although I spoke with a good friend of Foucault and he told me screw authentic Foucault really went to Iran in Khomeini's times to fuck young Shi'a priests and he had wonderful time there that's another story. That he says he says I'm sorry if I repeat myself but it's one he says there are things we know that we know that we know and we know that we know them like I don't know I am in Sussex and I know that I am in Sussex. Then he says there are things that we don't know but we know that we don't know them. For example I'm sorry I'm so evil. You know that with the money that you earn here Wolfgang our beloved master goes for half a year to Phuket Thailand south and have a house there no? Okay let's say I don't know how many doors Wolfgang's house in south of Thailand has but I know that I don't know this no? I hope the spy here will report this on you know I could have given a much nastier sexual example no how many boys or girls I am polite although I like to you know what's my once I was spreading rumors like this against but you and he was a little bit hurt and I told him "listen this proves that I'm a warm nice guy it would be brutal to tell you these things face to face I don't want to hurt you which is why out of politeness and my love I only say behind your back bad things about you like that" okay sorry for this okay so again or okay to put a more neutral example there are electric cars which incidentally do you know that they cost it's incredible Swiss francs which means like dollar is more like US dollars my god you can buy a Porsche because of some problem they're so expensive these shitty small cars. Okay let's go on. I don't know how many of them there are in this shitty city town but I know that I don't know this no? And then he makes a complication first step into philosophy Rumsfeld he says then "but there are things that we don't know but we even don't know that we don't know them" and that was his ultimate justification for the attack what if we know weapons of mass destruction those poisons what type but he says what if there are even things about Saddam that we don't know but we even don't know that we don't know them you know like some ultra weapons that we even don't know what to look for and so on and so on. And here you have the limitation of American philosophy Rumsfeld did you notice how he forgot one thing the fourth category? He has only things we know and we know that we know them, we don't know but we know that we don't know, and we don't know that we don't know. There is a fourth one: things that we know but we don't know that we know it and this is the Freudian unconscious and that's why Americans were in trouble in Iraq because what they didn't know is precisely for example all the complex network of their own prejudices and so on how they approached Iraq and so on this would be again a nice definition of the unconscious Lacan even uses the term an unknown knowledge something you know but you know where you can find a simple example of this? It also goes with what I called yesterday the objective appearance some things the way things really appear. I will give you an extremely simple example but it will make the point. Let's say you are you are an adolescent it's the standard thing to hate your father you think your father is a stupid confused jerk a loser and so on. There is a great possibility that you are probably right no so what I want to say is that but still observe the same guy when he actually interacts with his father and you will as a rule note something totally different a kind of a love mixed with respect and so on you know how you can even empirically experimentally assert this. When a guy is telling you "oh my father is such a jerk blah blah" just agree with him just tell him "yeah it's incredible what a stupid guy your father is" he will immediately start to defend him and so on. So no here is a nice example of how you make fun of your father blah blah but what you don't know is that okay you really are tremendously attached to him and all that all that. But isn't this the same platonic theory of anamnesis we're born with everything we know I mean like in a sense is Plato like a Freudian in that sense? Oh definitely yes although again okay there are two problems here. The first one is how exactly do we understand anamnesis because like you know that here I'm more on the side of Christianity Kierkegaard wrote a wonderful book is one of his best not repetitive *Philosophical Fragments*? No *Philosophical Crumbs* fragments yeah. Where he precisely opposes Socrates or Plato tradition versus Christ. The idea is that Socratic universe philosophical is a universe of anamnesis. There is a truth we have a deep knowledge we have to back into ourselves to discover it like you know that famous Plato's experiment with a slave we should maybe where are my slaves we should maybe repeat it with you you know I will ask you about a square you know that Plato you want to play that game sorry tasteless what I want to say is that but then for Kierkegaard Christianity is not remembering Christianity is repeating is repetition is eventual it's event it's wonderfully done so again on the other hand you know where you have Lacan's wonderful reading of I don't think it's already translated in Lacan's seminar which follows ethics on transference he goes there into this more let's call it even Kierkegaardian repetition side of Socrates object a Socrates as basically the proto-philosopher even I mean proto-philosopher in the sense that Socrates is the beginning of philosophy but at that moment something close to the position of the analyst happens which is why I think that even when Lacan attacks philosophy it's a much more refined position you know. It's like psychoanalysis is not simply external to philosophy it's the very core of philosophy which philosophy once it becomes a system of knowledge had to ignore obfuscate and so on and so on. But okay let's not get lost here my god a little bit of Buddhism okay. Let me go directly to the point ethical point and then from here we go to then ontological problem and so on and so on because it is in a way connected precisely with your question. I quote Chesterton in my book I think it's in *Puppet and the Dwarf* where he provides the basic formula which is and I agree I'm on the Christian side here Chesterton said something very simple he said okay it may be wrong but it does as an ideal type ideally he is right in an abstract global sense he draws the line sorry he draws our attention to this distinction between typical European and he means the religions of the book Islam included whatever statues of saints whatever and the Oriental Buddhist and other especially Buddhist statues of Buddha. And he says that the typical distinction is that in the West truth like let's say we are talking about a saint someone who has a contact with truth the truth is like we are we are we favor X-Files you know that they all say truths is out there. In our tradition it starts already with Jewish experience truth is not inner journey this is Gnostic bullshit. The elementary Jewish experience which remains in Christianity is that truth hurts truth is a traumatic encounter a brutal and this is here I met Badiou level no truth is an event which hurts you truth is not this
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Buddha smile I I gain peace looking deep into myself. And then okay from here then we should make a step forward in Buddhism is of course the most radical point of let's
Buddha smile I I gain peace looking deep into myself. And then okay from here then we should make a step forward in Buddhism is of course the most radical point of let's
Slavoj Žižek
call it ancient wisdom. You know the point is only that I will have to finish quickly so I don't know how just I have to point out Chesterton also says that are we aware how radically different the entire logic here is. In the sense that for Buddhist approach okay Buddhist I use here abstract terms it's not really Buddhism it's what but I'm so afraid of sounding as a racist but let's call it without any disqualification pagan approach you know it's what you find in an extremely vulgar version of course in Star Wars all that Jedi bullshit or this idea of don't get attached the origin of evil is excessive attachment like why did Anakin Skywalker go wrong? Because he got too attached first to his mother you remember in second part I think his first evil act he kills the entire tribe you know and then to to Natalie Portman no to speak in normal language. So the idea is precisely this one don't get too attached to worldly objects no? This means more even people. But as Chesterton points out the this is then experienced as a fall you fall into by getting attached no? And here we should be very precise this Buddhist view is not a view of another world I agree here with those Buddhists who emphasize that it's totally wrong brutally in a vulgar way European to read Buddhism as some kind of ascetic withdrawal and so on. No you are fully here just you how should I put it freely float here but you are not anywhere else and maybe in the afternoon I will go into this how I read in this book I mentioned to you about François Jullien "The Detour and Access", a wonderful reading of how spirituality works in this sense in a totally different way for example in Chinese poetry or even in haiku. You know the most famous haiku by the the great guy Matsuo Bashō it's something like a stale pond three okay I give you three line you know how haiku is structured three lines you know pond with stale water a frog jumps splash. And it's this is the basic formula of haiku: you have the zero level a state then something happens materially and then you have the pure event splash or whatever. I am an evil guy, when I was in Japan a friend told me that you know that in a way of mocking tradition but it's absolutely crucial that you take it seriously in the sense that it works also for the real. They told me it's very popular as a joke in Japan, now I hope this is true, they didn't make fun of me but I don't care it's such a beautiful story that to make fun of Matsuo Bashō they have an obscene version like empty toilet bowl I sit on it splash you know what I mean. I love this. Do you know why I love this? Because I think that if you are radically spiritual you should have the force to abstract obliterate the obscenity. And this is where I often had problems with like when I was in Beijing I met one of their big guys I had to be polite with him because he is the boss of Chinese Academy of Arts and he was financing my trip I really spoke to the leftists but he gave the money and he tried to make a big point immediately I'm closing down yes but you are not effective enough you really want me to stop coming black leather and with a whip you know? Yeah. No seriously ah that he told me you know for us in the East like you know divine God is everywhere even in the tiniest piece of dust you know all this shitty poetry "God is everywhere" no? And I told him wait a minute you are cheating. It's easy to take this example a tiny innocent no? I told him would you agree if I tell you let's say I'm a Nazi officer and I push the button which releases gas onto the Jews there God is also in my button there and so on and so on. And he was uncertain you know how not to so but let me go more serious. Okay let's stop here what I wanted to say is that here really we have a radical break in tradition which begins with Judaism and then Christianity Islam and so on it's I claim precisely that which appears to Buddhist attitude as the origin of evil I claim which is the origin of transcendence of goodness. Our notion is that we are in this detached state and then we fall into something get excessively attached. This excess which disturbs the natural cycle and so on this is the event. Badiou Alain literally you remember in his wonderful short book *In Praise of Love*, you know he plays even with this word it works in French and in English not in most I think other languages, the word we use is "to fall in love" *tomber*. But but and you must know the joke I was telling it all the time you know how with Badiou found the publicity where they say you know this new marriage agencies no that we will enable you by finding the right partner without you looking for it you just give us your data "we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall". That's the horror you know. Okay here I stop we go on in the afternoon and okay.
call it ancient wisdom. You know the point is only that I will have to finish quickly so I don't know how just I have to point out Chesterton also says that are we aware how radically different the entire logic here is. In the sense that for Buddhist approach okay Buddhist I use here abstract terms it's not really Buddhism it's what but I'm so afraid of sounding as a racist but let's call it without any disqualification pagan approach you know it's what you find in an extremely vulgar version of course in Star Wars all that Jedi bullshit or this idea of don't get attached the origin of evil is excessive attachment like why did Anakin Skywalker go wrong? Because he got too attached first to his mother you remember in second part I think his first evil act he kills the entire tribe you know and then to to Natalie Portman no to speak in normal language. So the idea is precisely this one don't get too attached to worldly objects no? This means more even people. But as Chesterton points out the this is then experienced as a fall you fall into by getting attached no? And here we should be very precise this Buddhist view is not a view of another world I agree here with those Buddhists who emphasize that it's totally wrong brutally in a vulgar way European to read Buddhism as some kind of ascetic withdrawal and so on. No you are fully here just you how should I put it freely float here but you are not anywhere else and maybe in the afternoon I will go into this how I read in this book I mentioned to you about François Jullien "The Detour and Access", a wonderful reading of how spirituality works in this sense in a totally different way for example in Chinese poetry or even in haiku. You know the most famous haiku by the the great guy Matsuo Bashō it's something like a stale pond three okay I give you three line you know how haiku is structured three lines you know pond with stale water a frog jumps splash. And it's this is the basic formula of haiku: you have the zero level a state then something happens materially and then you have the pure event splash or whatever. I am an evil guy, when I was in Japan a friend told me that you know that in a way of mocking tradition but it's absolutely crucial that you take it seriously in the sense that it works also for the real. They told me it's very popular as a joke in Japan, now I hope this is true, they didn't make fun of me but I don't care it's such a beautiful story that to make fun of Matsuo Bashō they have an obscene version like empty toilet bowl I sit on it splash you know what I mean. I love this. Do you know why I love this? Because I think that if you are radically spiritual you should have the force to abstract obliterate the obscenity. And this is where I often had problems with like when I was in Beijing I met one of their big guys I had to be polite with him because he is the boss of Chinese Academy of Arts and he was financing my trip I really spoke to the leftists but he gave the money and he tried to make a big point immediately I'm closing down yes but you are not effective enough you really want me to stop coming black leather and with a whip you know? Yeah. No seriously ah that he told me you know for us in the East like you know divine God is everywhere even in the tiniest piece of dust you know all this shitty poetry "God is everywhere" no? And I told him wait a minute you are cheating. It's easy to take this example a tiny innocent no? I told him would you agree if I tell you let's say I'm a Nazi officer and I push the button which releases gas onto the Jews there God is also in my button there and so on and so on. And he was uncertain you know how not to so but let me go more serious. Okay let's stop here what I wanted to say is that here really we have a radical break in tradition which begins with Judaism and then Christianity Islam and so on it's I claim precisely that which appears to Buddhist attitude as the origin of evil I claim which is the origin of transcendence of goodness. Our notion is that we are in this detached state and then we fall into something get excessively attached. This excess which disturbs the natural cycle and so on this is the event. Badiou Alain literally you remember in his wonderful short book *In Praise of Love*, you know he plays even with this word it works in French and in English not in most I think other languages, the word we use is "to fall in love" *tomber*. But but and you must know the joke I was telling it all the time you know how with Badiou found the publicity where they say you know this new marriage agencies no that we will enable you by finding the right partner without you looking for it you just give us your data "we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall". That's the horror you know. Okay here I stop we go on in the afternoon and okay.