Modalities of the Absolute
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-11-05 · 2:01:44 · 15,169 words
with Cathy Newman
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologysubjectivityphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culturecapitalismsexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctness
A lecture at a Historical Materialism-adjacent event in which Žižek defends the philosophical concept of abstraction against both holistic and pseudo-Marxist critics, arguing via Hegel and Marx that concrete universality is always mediated through an exceptional, pathological particular. He develops this thesis through the figures of capitalist labor, abstract subjectivity (Cogito), Samuel Beckett's literary method, and a sustained critique of Judith Butler's liberal-historicist conception of the subject versus Lacan's notion of a constitutively barred, divided subject. The Q&A extends the discussion to the nature of the Lacanian Real, psychoanalysis under biopolitics, psychosis, sexual difference, and the Eternal Feminine.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The structure whereby the very agent of destruction offers itself as the cure, exemplified by philanthropist-speculators like Soros and Gates, and biodegradable war bullets that make fields bloom.
Not a universal that simply holds across all instances, but a singular exceptional case in which universality becomes 'for itself', the concrete particular that directly embodies or reveals the universal (capitalism for modes of production; Cogito for subjectivity).
Following Marx, abstraction (of labor, of the subject) is not merely a theoretical operation but a real social process, with capitalism, labor becomes universal 'in real practice,' not just conceptually.
The libidinal profit extracted from a subject position, here used to ask what particular jouissance is gained from proclaiming oneself 'a nobody' or renouncing one's particular identity.
as “abstract universality”
A universal that merely holds across all epochs without becoming explicit as such, e.g. labor exists in all societies but only becomes 'universal in real practice' with capitalism.
The object-cause of desire that is not one particular object among others but a stand-in for a void, gives body to the excess in desire over every determinate object; sustains the universal subject.
as “the plus as embodied identity”
The dialectical reversal whereby the '+' in LGBT+ need not stand for unknown future identities but can itself be directly embodied as a specific identity, parallels the structure of object a as stand-in for void.
as “perversion as the obscene supplement of power”
Perversion is not subversive but always the other obscene side of the existing power structure; it enacts what ideology officially forbids without undermining it.
The Lacanian discourse of classification and report of established knowledge, Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Encyclopedia are pure examples; contrasted with the hysterical questioning that drives real scientific or philosophical discovery.
as “the barred subject”
The Lacanian subject divided not between this and that determinate content but between something and nothing, its incompletion is structural and ahistorical, not reducible to contingent political exclusions.
Historicism says everything contingently changes; genuine historicity (Marx/Hegel) holds that change is grounded in an ahistorical-but-transhistorical antagonism, the motor of historical variation is itself not fully variable.
The ideological dream that a capitalist modernity avoiding its constitutive antagonism is possible, Žižek (via Jameson) argues fascism is the historical proof of this dream's impossibility.
as “Urverdrängung (primordial repression)”
The constitutive exclusion that is not of any particular content but of 'being at home' itself, what makes human history dynamic rather than a naturalistic change of contents.
Žižek's characterization of Beckett's method: from concrete historical materials (post-war displaced persons, Vichy terror) he abstracts a quasi-Platonic idea of homeless horror whose formal truth exceeds the original context.
Not a hard Kantian noumenon behind appearances but something fragile and virtual, it appears in the gaps between symbolic formations and can dissolve, as in the erotic derealization example.
as “the Fragile Absolute”
The absolute is not a hard transcendent substance but something experienced as absolute yet highly fragile, it can vanish in an instant, like erotic enchantment dissolving into disgust at bare materiality.
Lacan's extreme formulation that normality is just a successful version of psychosis, Žižek treats it as a serious open clinical-theoretical question about whether the psychotic structure is ahistorical.
as “hysterical questioning”
The genuinely subversive subjective position of refusing one's symbolic identity by asking 'Why am I what you are telling me I am?', for Lacan more radical than perversion, which remains the other side of power.
as “ideological interpellation”
The operation by which ideology addresses and constitutes subjects in a particular identity, the target of hysterical questioning ('But why am I what you tell me I am?').
The discourse specific to capitalism tentatively modeled by Lacan as an analyst-discourse variant with the surplus-object a as agent, Miller's formulation, discussed here as still an open question.
Stories he reaches for 6
At Shabbat, a rich Rabbi, a rich merchant, and then a poor Jew each profess to be 'a nobody before God.' The rich merchant kicks the Rabbi and asks: 'But who is this guy who simply says he is also a nobody?', illustrating that claiming to be nobody still yields a surplus profit.
“who is this guy who simply can say that he is also a nobody? — what particular libidinal profit do you get precisely from proclaiming yourself a nobody?”
Žižek saw the mediocre Billy Bathgate film, assumed there must be a better novel behind it, then found the novel even worse, yet between the two something like a great work seemed to shimmer. The Real appears as a mirage between two inadequate actualizations.
“in between the two as a mirage appears some really great work. But retroactively, you find it nowhere. This would be the Platonic Real almost.”
Žižek credits Alenka Zupancic with the rhetorical move: Merkel, by welcoming immigrants, shows more confidence in German strength than the panicking Alternative for Germany. True nationalism is open, xenophobic nationalism is weakness.
“isn't Angela Merkel... the only true proud nationalist and believer in German greatness? Because only if you really trust yourself can you say: Come here, you are not a threat to us.”
Beckett's short play dedicated to Havel shows a theater director terrorizing an actor to stage a scene of police interrogation, then the 'prisoner' looks directly at the audience, implicating the liberal humanitarian spectators as participants in the same structure of terrorizing gaze.
“a very subtle one of a formal parallel between real police interrogation, the way movie—sorry, theater director terrorizes actors, and the way we humanitarians enjoy this perversely.”
The US military requested proposals for biodegradable bullets loaded with seeds so bombed terrain would become fertile, the weapon itself remedies the environmental damage it causes.
“imagine bombing a country to make it green, full of plants, with no waste left on the ground.”
Tom Cruise's repulsive pick-up-artist character in Magnolia may be his true self, through whose lens all his noble roles should be read, applying Marx's logic of capitalism as exception.
“maybe this is his true self... And we should read all his noble parts and so on through the lenses of this.”
Works invoked 33
Ninotchka film
Source of the coffee-without-milk / coffee-without-cream joke used to illustrate the symbolic inscription of absence and the limits of AI computation.
The forward's praise of Understanding (Verstand) as the greatest of forces is repeatedly invoked; contrasted with Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right as genuine speculative rather than university discourse.
Philosophy of Right book
Classified by Ruda as pure university discourse; Žižek defends it against dismissal, noting one finds 'wonderful things' even in 'bureaucratic' late Hegel.
Grundrisse book
The passage on labor becoming universal 'in real practice' only with capitalism is the key text for Žižek's theory of concrete universality.
Science of Logic book
Paired with the Phenomenology as Hegel's only two real books (per Ruda); the dash at the beginning is the subject of Comay and Ruda's Dash.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič's recent book praised as 'exploring new territory'; the title pairs with Žižek's Incontinence of the Void as question and answer.
The Birds film
Hitchcock film; mentioned because Jessica Tandy (Beckett's favorite for Not I) played the mother in it.
Billy Bathgate film
The 'shitty movie' (Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman) that seemed to promise a better source novel, used to illustrate the Lacanian Real as a mirage appearing between two inadequate actualizations.
Žižek's own book referenced for the discussion of Miller on capitalist discourse and the Lacanian discourses; title from Beckett.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book; title explained in the Q&A as naming the experience of an absolute that is real but fragile and can vanish at any moment.
The Unnamable book
Called 'the greatest' of Beckett's works but 'almost too sublime', recommended along with Malone Dies and Mercier and Camier.
Also classed as university discourse by Ruda but defended by Žižek: despite its non-creative report mode, it contains 'wonderful precise formulations.'
Not I play
Beckett play reduced to a speaking mouth, praised as 'maybe the greatest' and a supreme example of productive abstraction; Beckett's preferred actress was Jessica Tandy.
The 'triple orgy' book co-authored with Butler and Laclau, rereading it allowed Žižek to formulate more precisely his accusation that Butler is 'basically a liberal.'
Catastrophe play
Beckett's short late play dedicated to Havel; Žižek reads it as a subtle critique of the liberal humanitarian spectacle, the actor-as-prisoner looking at the audience implicates the viewers.
Malone Dies book
Beckett's great novel of postwar homeless anxiety, its concrete historical context (displaced persons, bureaucracy of repatriation) is abstracted into a Platonic idea of horror more true than documentation.
Magnolia film
Tom Cruise's disgusting pick-up-artist role is taken as his symptomatic truth, through which all his noble roles should be re-read.
Called 'a mega great Western'; Henry Fonda's villainous role is the paradigm case of the symptomatic exception that reveals the hidden truth of an actor's persona.
She book
Called 'one of the most beautiful colonialist novels', the buried feminine kingdom in Africa exemplifies the masculine myth of the Eternal Feminine as hidden substantial foundation.
Faust play
The finale's 'Das Ewig-Weibliche' makes Žižek want to 'become Goebbels like: throw that book on fire', exemplary statement of the anti-feminist Eternal Feminine mythology.
Fort Apache film
John Ford Western in which Fonda plays a righteous but secretly cruel general, read through the lens of his Sergio Leone role.
Sexy Beast film
Žižek loves Ben Kingsley's ridiculously evil character here as the key to re-reading Gandhi.
Young Mr. Lincoln film
Celebrated by Cahiers du Cinéma in the 60s; Fonda as Lincoln seen through the lens of his villainous roles reveals the problematic dimension of his good persona.
Ilyenkov's book; audience member raises it; Žižek agrees with Ilyenkov's thesis that what appears as abstract is actually the only true concrete, but defends retaining the term 'abstraction' for Hegelian reasons.
Beckett and Politics book
Emilie Morin's 10-year-old book demonstrating the political saturation of Beckett's post-war work; read in pirated copy; praised for the historical background to Malone Dies.
Dash book
Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda's book on two moments in Hegel (end of Phenomenology, start of Logic); praised for the insight distinguishing creative Hegel from university-discourse Hegel.
La Nausée (Nausea) book
Sartre's novel used as the wrong model of the Real, the experience of bare inert materiality as reality. Žižek argues this is not the Lacanian Real but merely miserable reality after the Real has dissipated.
Mercier and Camier book
Beckett's first post-war novel (published later); recommended for its progressive abstraction of the idea of travel and movement.
Éric Laurent's book; mentioned by an audience member in the question about psychoanalysis as the other side of biopolitics.
Merleau-Ponty's text praised for its account of the difficulty of relating to one's own body as an object, cited in the discussion of erotic derealization.
Sans Objet book
Frank Fischbach's book arguing that the Cartesian Cogito is merely the philosophical form of capitalist commodification, the main polemical target for Žižek's defense of abstract subjectivity.
Žižek's book in progress at time of talk; described as addressing universal ontology and how to avoid both monism and dualism of sexual difference.
Winterreise other
Schubert's song cycle called 'the greatest song collection' of classical music; its power lies precisely in its abstraction, reducing narrative to emotional form exceeds any concrete biographical reconstruction.
People invoked 37
Bannon cited Heidegger as 'his guy' in a Spiegel interview, Žižek notes the extraordinary and dangerous coincidence of alt-right populism and Heideggerian anti-technology critique.
Udi Aloni positive
'My Jewish friend' described as a deeply spiritual Jewish person facing property confiscation in Israel for BDS association, context for the Auschwitz joke.
Agon Hamza positive
Mentioned as a colleague participating in the next day's event (reading Marx at Friends Meeting House) and in a previous conversation at the venue.
Emilie Morin positive
Author of Beckett and Politics (10 years old at time of talk); praised for demonstrating how Beckett's post-war novels are saturated with political references to displaced persons, Vichy, etc.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Called 'my good friend who will soon go further than me'; her book What Is Sex? is praised; she originated the rhetorical move on Merkel-as-true-nationalist and the joke about Incontinence of the Void / What Is Sex? as question and answer.
Mentioned as one of several thinkers who used the synagogue nobody joke.
Rebecca Comay positive
Co-author with Frank Ruda of Dash; praised alongside Ruda for the analysis of the dash in Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic.
Evald Ilyenkov positive
Praised for The Abstract and the Concrete (the distinction between abstract empirical concreteness and concrete universality matches Žižek's); described as a tragic figure, 'the only almost sincere Marxist' who died by suicide.
Mentioned as an early example of the dis-sublimation move (thinking of the body as meat and fat beneath the skin), Žižek argues this is not subversive but a standard technique also used by Christian theologians.
Richard Wagner negative
Cited as having the 'most disgusting version' of the Eternal Feminine ideology: woman is noble as long as she stays in shadow; if she becomes politically active she turns into devil itself.
Mentioned for his early criticism of Kafka and the legend that while imprisoned in Romania after 1956 he said 'Kafka was right.' Žižek also defends late Hegel against those who dismiss his Encyclopedia following Ruda's distinction.
Cited as an example of the dangerous coincidence of opposites: claims Heidegger as 'my guy' while fighting for 'ordinary people's rights,' illustrating how the alt-right appropriates philosophical critique.
Jacques Lacan positive
Core theoretical authority throughout: the barred subject, objet petit a, surplus enjoyment, the discourses, the Real, Urverdrängung, and the claim that perversion is not subversive are all deployed from Lacan against Butler.
Wendy Brown positive
Described as 'more intelligent than Judith [Butler]'; mentioned as having participated in a conversation in the same room about genealogy of human capital.
Frank Ruda positive
Co-author (with Rebecca Comay) of Dash, praised for the insight that Hegel's Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right are 'pure university discourse', Žižek is 'mad' he didn't see it first; will be present the next day.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty positive
Cited approvingly for his Phenomenology of Perception's account of the difficulty of relating to one's own body as an object.
Judith Butler negative
Accused of being 'basically a liberal': her subject is expansively open, exclusions are historically contingent and reversible, the Lacanian bar is misread as Kantian apriorism. Long sustained critique occupies the central section.
Mentioned as having participated in a conversation at the same venue with Wendy Brown and Agon Hamza on human capital.
Alain Badiou positive
Contrasted with Lacan: Badiou's formula is 'subject without object,' whereas Lacan holds there is no subject without object (objet petit a).
E. L. Doctorow negative
Žižek told Doctorow his novel Billy Bathgate was worse than the bad film adaptation, Doctorow refused to meet him after; used as illustration of the Real appearing between two failed versions.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly for his 'absolutely unambiguous' rejection of alternate modernities, the argument that fascism is the historical example of an alternate modernity that avoids liberal antagonism.
Beckett's Catastrophe was dedicated to Havel; the play is read by Žižek as subtly critical of the liberal humanitarian spectacle around Havel's imprisonment.
Samuel Beckett positive
Žižek's 'real hero' of abstraction; developing a book on him; praises his materialist-Platonist method of abstracting concrete political horror into a formal idea that is more truthful than historicist documentation.
Carl Jung negative
'The ultimate enemy' in Žižek's field: Jung rehabilitates pre-modern archetypal wisdom and the idea that deep in personality lies a deeper truth, whereas Freud finds only the basic lie/fantasy, making Jung the opposite of psychoanalytic modernity.
Mladen Dolar positive
Credited with 'Beyond Interpellation,' a text developed thirty years ago, for showing that hysteria is the counter to ideological interpellation.
Elizabeth Warren negative
Her DNA test for Cherokee ancestry is criticized: Žižek argues she 'deserved what she got' from the Cherokee Tribal Council because blood-quantum logic reproduces racist categories.
One of the three authors of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, mentioned in passing as Žižek rereads the 'triple orgy' book and sharpens his critique of Butler.
Russell Grigg positive
Australian Lacanian who argued (30 years ago) that psychosis/paranoia is much more ahistorical than hysteria, using Akhenaten as evidence, Žižek engages this seriously as an open question.
Mentioned only as the book Bannon had on his table, not assessed by Žižek directly beyond noting the 'extraordinary coincidence.'
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Credited with the formula that borderline is today's hysteria; also for the brilliant suggestion that capitalist discourse is analyst discourse with the link functioning differently. Qualified: 'when he was still a good theorist.'
Ian Bostridge positive
British tenor who wrote a 500-page book on Schubert's Winterreise; praised as 'not an idiot', used to illustrate the failure of reducing Winterreise's abstraction to a concrete biographical situation.
Author of The Other Side of Biopolitics, mentioned by an audience member in the context of psychoanalysis vs. biopolitics.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe negative
The finale of Faust ('Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan') makes Žižek want to 'become Goebbels' and throw the book on fire, exemplary anti-feminist mythology of the Eternal Feminine.
Karl Marx positive
The Grundrisse passage on labor becoming universal in real practice is treated as the paradigm case of concrete universality; Žižek also invokes Marx's view of capitalism as pathological exception that keys all other modes of production.
Frank Fischbach negative
French Deleuzian-Marxist whose book Sans Objet argues the Cartesian Cogito is a product of capitalist abstraction, Žižek rejects this by defending abstract subjectivity on Hegelian-Marxist grounds.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud's universe is 'utter contingency,' modern science, the basic fantasy at the core of personality is a form of stupidity, not deeper truth; Urverdrängung is the key structural concept deployed here.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central throughout: Žižek deploys the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality, the praise of Understanding (Verstand) in the Phenomenology, and the self-dividing structure of identity.
What it argues
defense of abstraction as concrete universalitycapitalism as pathological exception that unlocks universal truthLacanian divided subject versus Butler's liberal-expansive subjectBeckett and the political efficiency of abstraction in literaturesurplus enjoyment and the object a as sustaining particular identityhysteria as the only truly subversive position versus perversionthe Lacanian Real as fragile virtual mirage rather than hard noumenon
Dialectical moves 11
“The thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses — the biodegradable bullet seeds the very field it destroys; Soros's philanthropy repairs the damage his speculation causes.”
The coincidence-of-opposites structure shows how the agent of destruction doubles as the agent of repair, which Žižek reads as the dominant ideological form today.
“Capitalism is the exception, yet as exception it is the universal key for all other modes of production.”
The pathological particular reveals universal truth not despite but because of its pathological character, the model for concrete universality.
“Labor was always a universal category, but only with capitalism does it become universal in real practice.”
The potential universality latent in all history becomes explicit only through the exceptional, distorted form capitalism gives it.
“The moment he accepted that no change in his subjective identity is needed, precisely this open attitude of no change was the most radical change.”
Accepting one's current identity without desire for change is itself the transformative event, renouncing object a enacts the deepest subjective shift.
“Far from being ahistorical, the Lacanian bar is the very form of historicity — the condition that makes historical change possible at all.”
What Butler reads as an ahistorical Kantian limit is in fact the structural ground without which no historical movement could occur.
“Perversion is always the other obscene side of the power structure itself; the only truly subversive position is hysterical questioning.”
Post-68 privileging of perversion as transgression is inverted: perversion is systemic, hysteria is the genuine disruption.
“White liberals, precisely by renouncing their particular identity, assert themselves all the more as universal.”
The ostensible self-erasure of the guilty white progressive secretly reinstates a universal position of judgment and instruction, surplus enjoyment hidden in self-abnegation.
“Beckett's abstraction is not a mystification of concrete horror but its form, and that form is subjectively more true than the concrete circumstances.”
Formalist abstraction in literature grasps what historicist documentation cannot: the excess of form over content is already operative in reality itself.
“The Real is not behind appearances but more Real in appearance — the fragile mirage that disappears is more real than the bare material it seemed to veil.”
Inverts the commonsense notion that stripping away illusion reveals the Real; the dissolution of the erotic trance leaves only miserable reality, not truth.
“Something always ultimately divides into itself — to become fully what you are is always a division.”
Žižek's Beckettian-Hegelian formula: identity is achieved only through internal self-splitting, not through totalization.
“Woman is the original plus — the original subject more than man.”
Sexual difference is radically asymmetric: woman figures the excess or plus that marks the incompletion of any symbolic identity, making her structurally closer to the void of subjectivity.
Claims 14
asserts
Abstraction is not a falsification of concrete reality but has its own positive efficiency and symbolic power — 'the strength of the negative' in Hegel's sense.abstraction
asserts
Capitalism is an exceptional, pathological mode of production, but precisely because of this it provides the universal key for understanding all other modes of production, including their class antagonism.capitalism as concrete universality
rejects
Abstract subjectivity (the Cartesian Cogito) is not merely an ideological mystification of commodification but a genuine historical emergence — like abstract labor in capitalism — of a universality that was always already potentially there.Fischbach's critique of the Cogito as mere bourgeois abstraction
asserts
Judith Butler's subject is fundamentally a liberal subject: potentially all-inclusive with only historically contingent exclusions, not constitutively divided in its very concept.Judith Butler's theory of the subject
asserts
The Lacanian bar dividing the subject is not an ahistorical Kantian a priori but the formal condition of historicity itself — the exclusion of 'being at home' that makes history possible.Lacanian divided subject versus Butler's historicism
rejects
Perversion is not subversive but always the obscene other side of power; only hysterical questioning is genuinely subversive.post-68 celebration of perversion over hysteria
rejects
The dream of 'alternate modernity' (a capitalism without its antagonism) is an ideological illusion; fascism is the historical actualization of that dream.alternate modernity thesis (Nehru, Latin America)
asserts
Beckett's abstraction from concrete historical circumstances is not a mystification but a materialist capture of the formal truth of those circumstances, more true than documentary concreteness.Beckett's literary method and pseudo-Marxist critique of it
rejects
The Lacanian Real is not a hard Kantian noumenon behind appearances but something fragile and virtual that appears in the gaps between symbolic formations and can vanish.conception of the Real as thing-in-itself
rejects
Elizabeth Warren's DNA test for Native American ancestry reproduces the racist logic of blood-quantum rather than challenging it; the Cherokee Tribal Council's rejection was the correct response.progressive identity politics and blood-based ethnic identity claims
rejects
The celebration of the Eternal Feminine or a feminine principle is deeply anti-feminist because it consigns women to a silent substantial grounding role while excluding them from active social life.Eternal Feminine / feminine principle (Goethe, Jung, Wagner)
rejects
Jung's depth psychology rehabilitates a pre-modern archetypal wisdom that contradicts Freud's radical modernism — the discovery that the core of personality is a basic fantasy / fundamental lie, not a deeper truth.Jungian psychology
asserts
White liberals who renounce asserting their particular identity secretly assert themselves all the more as universal, extracting a specific surplus enjoyment from that very renunciation.white liberal identity politics and surplus enjoyment
asserts
Today's big tech philanthropist-moguls (Soros, Gates, Musk) embody the structure of the problem-as-its-own-cure: their half-day humanitarian work addresses the damage done by their other half-day of speculative exploitation.ideological function of billionaire philanthropy
Quotes 18
“The thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses.”Slavoj Žižek · coincidence of opposites as dominant ideological structure
“Capitalism is the exception. And Marx is not a teleological philosopher. He says that capitalism exploded for quite contingent reasons in a certain specific constellation.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as pathological exception, not telos of history
“Only with capitalism labor becomes universal in real practice.”Slavoj Žižek · concrete universality of labor under capitalism
“Concrete universality is a concrete singular example in which universality becomes for itself.”Slavoj Žižek · definition of concrete universality
“What particular libidinal profit do you get precisely from proclaiming yourself a nobody?”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment hidden in self-abnegation
“The joke — the joke was the Jewish surplus enjoyment there.”Slavoj Žižek · Jewish irony as surplus enjoyment in extremis
“One of the worst legacies of '68 is the celebration of perversion at the expense of hysteria.”Slavoj Žižek · post-68 inversion: perversion overvalued, hysteria undervalued
“Perversion is always the other obscene side of the power structure itself. Ultimately there is nothing subversive in perversion.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion as systemic, not subversive
“Hysterical questioning is: 'But why am I what you are telling me that I am?'”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as ideological counter-interpellation
“Butler's vision of subject is simply: subject is potentially open or all-inclusive, and there are some historical contingent limitations.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Butler's liberal expansive subject
“Historicity is not an abstract historicity. Historicity, things change because they are grounded, based on an ahistorical antagonism.”Slavoj Žižek · historicism vs. historicity proper
“Beckett is a materialist Platonist. From all these concrete experiences he abstracts the almost Platonic idea of homeless horror.”Slavoj Žižek · Beckett's literary method as materialist Platonism
“The Real is not some hard core that we cannot ever grasp, it's something like — something that appears in between, in the cracks of different symbolic formation.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian Real as virtual, not noumenal
“The Absolute is something we experience, but it's not a real absolute in the sense of existing out there. It's just a very fragile mirage you see it for a moment then you don't see it.”Slavoj Žižek · Fragile Absolute
“Something always ultimately divides into itself. I think this is the true Hegelian formula, not the Maoist bullshit 'one divides into two.'”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian self-division versus Maoist binary division
“We feel great! We Europeans, although we screwed it up with racism, we invented some great thing: open multiculturalism, human rights, and we should be proud of it.”Slavoj Žižek · rhetorical reversal on immigration: openness as European pride
“In reality itself already form is active in excess over the concrete content.”Slavoj Žižek · excess of form over content is real, not merely formal
“Normality is just a successful version of psychosis.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian ordinary psychosis
Transcript 35 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. Sorry for this kind introduction. I just want to say about this, all these manipulations and so on, I know it’s the topic of the day, how we are, you know, manipulated in all possible ways and so on. But in a strange way, I am not in such a mega panic about it. Or maybe this, what I will say now, makes it even more dangerous. Namely, don’t underestimate the stupidity of computers nonetheless. For me, the problem is not they will know everything that we think, but no, they will totally misread us, and that will then be the information for the social Big Other and so on. So my basic advice when you are in a situation that you described is lie directly. Like, I know because my wife is doing a research project on all these machinery, you know, they ask you something and if there is a little bit of oscillation in your voice, they try to detect that you are hiding something. The lesson is not tell the truth, but learn to lie. And it’s a great thing. It took me long years. You know, I look you into the eye and I say a lie with total sincerity and so on. Like then, I will do the serious stuff, don’t be afraid. But to tell you how I succeeded with this, I was in the United States two-three weeks ago for ten days, and now that there is more severe control on immigration, I wanted to avoid that nightmare, especially on JFK Terminal or which, because usually the same time as flights from Europe, some flights from China and elsewhere arrive, and nothing against them—the point is then it takes two to three hours at least. So I did something. I called Lufthansa and said I have a terrible pain in my knee and so on. And it was wonderful. At the exit of the plane, a guy was waiting for me with a wheelchair. thirteen to fourteen minutes after the plane touched ground, I was already in a taxi. And I felt so good, you know. And you know what's the—I only made one mistake, typical of my primitive Balkan spirit. When we approached a taxi stand, I saw there only one taxi and I saw some other people coming. So I couldn’t resist it, forget about me being crippled, I grabbed my baggage and started to run towards the taxi. So the guy gave me like a perplexed look or whatever, no. No, I’m quite serious. The worst thing is when you lie, you know, and remember, my God, at least this we should learn from Trump. You know, I say you are dead, you say no, I am alive, you can see it. You should just—if somebody shows you something that empirically falsifies it, you should say something like shamelessly, no, this doesn’t mean anything, you totally miss the point. Then if the guy proves you wrong with details, you should answer something like: why are you now redirecting the debate into the details? You know, like—okay, but let's not lose time. Let's be a little bit more serious. To disappoint you today, the topic is Beckett, abstraction and so on. And if you want all that multiple or sex absolute, you get it in—on Wednesday. It will be a little bit more boring, mostly on subjectivity, abstract subject. Its—the title could be—so please don't be bored—a defense of abstraction. I want to rehabilitate the notion of abstraction. In all versions which oppose abstraction. It can be this holistic one, you know, we are always part embedded in a totality, or—or in a pseudo-Marxist one. The direct reference or relying on some form of concrete totality is misleading. So I would like to begin, I hope I didn’t already use this here, with a political paradox. I like when you find in newspapers among the news some minor data which are nonetheless I think—which tell so much, this data about the weird predicament we are in. The US military, I read, is now searching for—and this is not a joke, I will read you a long quote—for bullets which would be biodegradable and they would contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. You don’t believe me, here is the quote: "Firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations. But after the job is done, the environment suffers. Not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, but they can also prove to be a hazard for local wildlife. Not to mention the impact that chemical residues such as bullet metals and rust can have on future plant growth and sustainability. The US military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. Already back in January the US Department of Justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable training ammunition loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants. This effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects." End of quote. So these bullets are first to be used for training and then for real warfare. So imagine bombing a country to make it green, full of plants, with no waste left on the ground. The same structure—the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses—is widely visible in today’s ideological landscape. Take the figure of financier and philanthropist George Soros. Soros stands for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation combined with its counter-agent, the humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Even his daily routine is marked by a self-eliminating counterpoint: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities such as providing finances for cultural and democratic causes in post-communist countries, writing essays and books and so on, which ultimately fight the effects of his own speculation. The two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros: the cruel businessman destroys or buys out competitors, aims at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade. Meanwhile, Bill Gates as the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind asks questions like—it’s a quote from Bill Gates: "What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?" and so on. Okay, I don’t have time to develop this now, but what I want to draw your attention to is this paradox how now, today's corporations learn to develop their own pseudo-leftist, should I call them, organic intellectuals like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and so on. They even flirt with the idea capitalism cannot survive the way we know it, we need some kind of socialism and so on and so on. What interests me is this coincidence of the opposites. How, again, the very agent of destruction, if you want, can be—offers itself, himself, herself as a cure against it. And we find this phenomenon at different levels and that’s where the alt-right is winning, drawing attention to this. For example, did you read the recent interview—it’s very interesting—by Steve Bannon in Der Spiegel? Oh, you know what’s the interesting part? The guy who interviews him in his office finds a book on the table. You know which book this is? The life of Heidegger. And then he asks Steve Bannon: what's this? And Bannon says, quote it, just go Spiegel Bannon you find also English translation, Bannon says: Heidegger, this is my guy, you know. And he said that Heidegger is warning about the dangers of modern technology and this is the same fight as his fight, both are fighting for ordinary people's rights and—I mean, it's quite extraordinary, these coincidences. Okay, so—but what I will tell you now is another form of this danger. Maybe she—by she I mean Elizabeth Warren—is a hope of the American Democratic Party, although I don’t think it’s as easy as that. She walks a very careful line, at the same time neutralizing a more radical left. But you maybe followed this scandal, no? Of scandal, okay, it’s not a scandal, of—she did the DNA test, is there Cherokee Native American blood in her? And I think she deserved what she got. Because I think, okay, I know the progressive idea, I admit it’s not racial purity, I am not white, I have some Indian or Native American whatever blood. But our position should not be this one. What will be now, that—it’s nonsense as an ethical ideal. What does this mean? That now, to be a public person, to advance your career, it helps if you have a little bit of non-white blood or whatever. You know who is for me the real hero in all this? Not only Trump, predictably made bad-taste remarks back, but did you read it? The Cherokee Tribal Council rejected her. Said: sorry, being one of us is not a question of having like one-tenth of a percent of blood but it’s a question of culture and so on and so on. Because you know, the danger in this is as if to say—the Nazis used this, or American racists, you know—how much Black or Native American blood do you have? And I don’t think we can—the right way is to use this same approach. I think we should simply, strictly ignore it. It’s very dangerous to repeat things at this level. But okay, this was just a very brief easy introduction. Now comes unfortunately pure theory. I will then towards the end, if you survive this, I will go a little bit to explain the Hegelian notion of concrete universality into figures like Tom Cruise and why are they idiots and so on. So to give you a promise. Because you know my point will be, you know, actors are usually identified by a certain screen persona. Even—and this is not their real personality, but neither is it simply the person they play on screen. For example, John Wayne usually plays a certain guy and so on and so on. But what interests me really are moments when an actor plays a role against his or her screen persona. And this is for me almost the symptomatic truth. If, out of this standpoint of exception, if you approach through these specific lenses his other roles, you discover strange things. I'll just briefly because I will not have time to go into it in detail later. Think about Henry Fonda. This is old, you don’t know him, maybe you saw—it’s nonetheless a mega great Western—*Once Upon a Time in the West*. One of the last films by Henry Fonda where he plays with obvious pleasure a very bad guy: rapist, sadistic killer and so on and so on. But I think it’s not just that this—this role is an exception. You should, I think, take it as lenses through which see also his other roles. And then you discover, for example, in one of John Ford’s greatest Westerns, *Fort Apache*, where he plays a righteous, principled—principled American general of the American Army fighting Native Americans, Indians. From this standpoint you can all of a sudden see also the cruel, brutal dimension of that character. Or he plays in *Young Mr. Lincoln*, a movie celebrated very much in the sixties by *Cahiers du Cinéma*, he plays young Lincoln. But again, from this experience, you can see what is wrong in his precisely good persona. Another example, and I met him once through Ralph Fiennes and he laughed, but I think he was a little bit uncomfortable about it: he was Ben Kingsley. I told him: forget Gandhi, blah. I told him: I like you in *Sexy Beast*, you saw *Sexy Beast*? Where he’s an extremely—so ridiculously evil, brutal character. And I told him: what if through the lenses of this weird guy we approach—we approach, for example, Gandhi? And read Gandhi’s biography, you will discover a whole series of very strange features of Gandhi. He was not as innocent as—you know, incidentally, my Indian anti-Gandhi friend told me a nice detail. You know Gandhi was all the time to protest making hunger strikes and so on, you know. You know which was his last hunger strike? Workers did organize a strike against one of Gandhi’s billionaire big industrial friends and he went on hunger strike to stop the strike against the big guy. But what I want to say is that—but you see my principle. You have a certain universality, a nice character, and the properly dialectical thing is to take the exception and use it as a key to bring out the other covered-up, more evil, also universal dimension. Another example, now I come to the guy Tom Cruise. Did you see his film—it’s some twenty years old already—*Magnolia*? Where he plays an extremely disgusting guy, a guy who is basically, if I remember correctly, organizing some training of sex how to seduce easily women with all the vulgarity, like the whole point is to fuck them, get—and I had this idea, but maybe this is his true self, you know what I mean? And we should read all his noble parts and so on and so on through the lenses of this. And now you will say: but what am I talking here, what has this to do with Historical Materialism? Ah, it has. Because I’m just, ha-ha, applying Marx to this topic. That’s Marx’s theories of capitalism. Capitalism is for Marx a weird, exceptional, paradoxical mode of production. It’s based on instability, self-destructive and so on. Like, one obvious thing: what for—and this is great about capitalism—what for other modes of production is an abnormal state—instability and so on—for capitalism is the normal state. Capitalism’s the exception. And Marx is not a teleological philosopher. He is not saying all the history points towards capitalism. He says that capitalism exploded for quite contingent reasons in a certain specific constellation. It’s an exception, a pathological formation, but as such it provides the clue for all others. You know, to give you another example, there is a wonderful passage from *Grundrisse*—you can easily download it, locate it in the English translation—when Marx talks, and that’s the crucial distinction, about the concept of labor. Where he says of course labor is a universal category, it existed in all societies from I don’t know when. Maybe the earliest, maybe not if you count gathering, hunting as labor, but the point is labor is a universal category. But then Marx uses a wonderful ambiguous expression, very Hegelian. He says that although in all societies there is labor, so in this sense it’s a universal notion, only with capitalism labor becomes universal in real practice. An expression like that. That is to say, only with capitalism, when you work, you are not just participating in a universal activity, but you relate to yourself as universal. Because in market economy you don't identify yourself with a certain type of labor. You can change labor, change job, whatever. The point is that you relate to yourself as universal. You are not what you immediately are. You experience yourself as universal, which means ultimately indifferent towards particular forms of activity. And it can be demonstrated in a nice way that—that the same goes for desire and for subjectivity itself, I am tempted to say. That in the same way, of course, this is where the usual critics of Cartesian subjectivity are wrong when they claim—I am now developing, writing a text against a guy who benevolently, but nonetheless, and maybe you should read it—ah, unfortunately I think it’s not translated into English—a guy called Frank Fischbach, a French Deleuzian-Marxist who criticizes my reference to Cartesian Cogito, claiming that Cogito as abstract subject—the title of his book is *Sans Objet* (Without Object). He claims that only in modern bourgeois society with market economy and the reign of abstraction is such a universal subject Cogito, deprived of all particularities, is such an object imaginable. Outside modern society people always experienced themselves as rooted in concrete circumstances. So that’s his argument against me, that by privileging, celebrating Cartesian Cogito, I, ha-ha, reproduce the structure of commodification where abstraction rules and so on and so on. But I think we can easily answer him. First, I think that with subject, if you are strictly a Marxist, it’s exactly the same as with labor. Yes, of course, there was no subject prior to modernity. But it was there in the same sense as—in the same sense as universal labor was there. Only with capitalist modernity a universal dimension, which was in itself potentially there, became—became explicit, became posited as such. So I think, you see the paradox, capitalism is something exceptional, pathological and so on, but its meaning is universal. It’s not just one among—precisely because of its pathological character, in the sense of structural imbalance, instability and so on and so on. It’s a—to use Marx, a universal clue for all modes of production. To iso—because as Marx put it, class struggle only with capitalism it becomes visible as such. Prior to capitalism class struggle was just a one among—was always covered up as estates, different hierarchies, not class struggle as such. Second approach, now of this moment I am almost a little bit proud. I want to give it to you, second aspect of—no sorry—of abstract subjectivity. It’s that—what Lacan’s position is not—here is a great difference between Lacan and Alain Badiou. Badiou’s formula is subject without object. He uses it. For Lacan, there is no subject without object. Every subjectivity has to rely on an object, ultimately on object cause of desire. I will not go into more complexities here, I will just give you, repeat an old joke, but it’s a new interpretation. I used it years ago, it’s a joke used among others by Derrida and others. Here you can see in what sense the Lacanian subject implies, relies on an object. You know, it’s an old joke like in a—in a synagogue on, I don’t know when they gather, Saturday, Sunday, I think it’s Shabbat, believers gather and each of them makes—okay, they don’t have a confession, a speech, whatever public. And first, a rich mighty Rabbi says: "Oh dear God, I’m nobody, I’m not worthy of your attention, blah, I’m nobody." Then a rich merchant stands up and says: "Oh dear God, I’m also nobody, not worthy of your attention," and so on. Then a poor Jew stands up and says: "God, I’m also a nobody." And then the rich merchant kicks the rich Rabbi and says: "But who is this guy who simply can say that he is also a nobody?" you know, and so on. You know what is right here? This idea that to be a nobody implies—you should ask, and this is what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment object: what particular libidinal profit do you get precisely from proclaiming yourself a nobody? Now I will give you, to provoke you, a very problematic example. I was often attacked for it. How in our West—just ask yourselves, Western societies, just ask yourselves a simple question: which social groups are allowed to assert their particular identity? And I claim—and I am not the only one to notice it—that the more you go towards the marginals, the oppressed, the more you are allowed. Like in United States, if you are whatever you call it—Native American, Indian, whatever, I will not go into my old jokes why I find these titles problematic—it’s wonderful if you dance your tribal dances, blah, all that bullshit. If you are a black, it’s okay. Although like if you are Muslim Brotherhood black, problems can begin. With Asians, Japanese, Chinese, it’s okay. And so on and so on. Italy still tolerable. But then the more we move, you know, like Scandinavians, Germans, eh-eh. If a white Protestant says, "Let’s assert our identity," you are the worst racist and so on. Now, what do I find problematic here? And incidentally, there is of course a truth in it. But I’m not here praising white supremacists, I’m claiming that precisely when they renounce their specific identity and claim "We are guilty for all, we don’t have the right to assert our identity," they assert themselves all the more as universal, secretly. I’m not allowed to practice my rights means I am universal. And you know where you can see this universality? In how they—I witnessed this dozens of times—in what arrogant way white guys at university panels teach others what is the right thing to do. For example, I was with some Native Americans and they were all the time interrupted by the white guy: "No, what you are saying now, you are reproducing white clichés and so on. Don’t talk like this, call yourself that," and so on and so on. That’s—that’s the secret profit. You know, I claim to be universal but always ask what particular surplus enjoyment is provided by the very renunciation to my particular—to my particular identity. So again, my position is not there is some pure Cartesian subject. One always has to ask which is the object small a, the little bit of enjoyment which sustains me in this subjectivity. And there are wonderful, undescribably wonderful jokes which play with this. For example, recently in New York, my Jewish friend Udi Aloni—don’t be afraid, he is now transferring his flat on a—his daughter and moving all his modest money to American banks. You know why? In Israel, he told me, things are getting so tough now that if you are in any way associated to BDS or considered too pro-Palestinian, even if you are, my friend is pure, as pure as he can be, Jew, you can be—all your property and money can be taken from you. Because the idea is if you support BDS, you are hurting Israeli economy, this is criminal activity, so you should be fined. So that you will not consider him a bad Zionist, but he is a deeply spiritual Jewish person, and he told me an absolutely wonderful joke. Don’t be afraid, this time no trigger warning, there is nothing dirty in it, no penises, no balls hanging, whatever, you know. It’s a theological one. You should just take into account one thing: that in this circumstance—no, this joke refers to this old notion, popular from the fifties onwards, I forgot who wrote even a book on it, that God died at Auschwitz, you know. The horror there was too horrible, it’s a darkness, God was not there, he could not have allowed, no? So the story is this one. In Paradise, after they were burned in Auschwitz, a couple of Jews—there is a nice forest, meadow, trees there—a couple of Jews sit there at a bench and amuse themselves by telling ridiculous stories about accidents that happened to them when they were burned in Auschwitz. But as jokes, like one says: "Do you remember what happened to you when you were marching towards the gas oven? You slipped and broke your—your head and you died even before you were..." you know, this real—and then they all laugh, ha-ha, that was so funny. And now comes very sublime joke: God, tired after all his work, drops by, walks around, listen to it and says: "Sorry guys, I don't understand this. What's the joke?" no? And one of the Jews deceased steps towards God, patronizingly embraces him and says: "Don't worry, of course you cannot understand because you were not there," you know, because... you know what I like so much in this joke? It’s not the humanist point: Oh, God was not there. No, God can well understand the suffering there. God cannot understand how you can make a joke out of it. The joke—the joke was the Jewish surplus enjoyment there. And I must admit that the greatest tragedy of the trend which goes on now in Israel is that they—this is what makes one among the things that made Jews so great, this incredible ability to find irony even in the most desperate situations. I will not even bother you about how many jokes they have, Polish Jews, about themselves suffering in World War II and so on and so on. So—you see, always look for this, let's call it, symptomatic point. So again, when I talk about a universal subject, always remember that I’m not talking about an empty subject as it were hanging in the air. This subject, I admit that the operation of subjectivity is Lacan, Hegel used this metaphor, you know—how do you translate it into English—this Baron Munchausen stories, about how he is almost drowning in a swamp with his horse and then, you know how he saves himself? He pulls himself up, you know. Of course, in material reality this is not possible. But in—I don't want to use this term in an idealist way—this is precisely what happens in what Hegel calls self-relationship, spirituality if you want. But again, I’m not an idealist here. Always look for a specific material constellation in which this explodes. So now vaguely, I wanted to describe two things to you. First, the—because I—I explained it to you now implicitly. Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. Abstract universality is something that simply holds for all epochs. We always work—labor. Concrete universality is not just a concrete form of the universality, in the sense of "yes, but work has different structure in every epoch" and so on and so on. No, concrete universality is a concrete singular example in which universality becomes for itself. In which you as a particular entity are not just an example of universality, but you directly relate to yourself as universal. And here, we don't have time to go into it, but nonetheless, here Lacan's notion of—of object a enters. Object a sustains universality because it is precisely the object which is not—even if it appears as such—it’s not one among particular objects, but an object which is just a stand-in for a void, for the impossibility to specify an object. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a simple example. Let’s take another example which I already used here I don’t know when, probably every time that I was here. With all appreciation, nobody will accuse me now that I’m making fun of them—LGBT+. You know my standard point, no? What is the status of this plus? Is it an empirical plus? Is it meant in a British nominalist way? Which means that, like, we have—you can be a butch, a sadomaso, trisexual, whatever, all the identities, and then you have always this worry: "But did we really list all identities? What if a guy comes—oh no, sorry, I'm not that and another." So let’s add a plus, let’s be more—to—to possible future identities we don’t yet know about. But, and—I warn you—this is not a perverse point that I made. Although I’m often decried as making fun of LGBT+. They are not all stupid. Some of them are very intelligent. And a lady, an Australian lady I think, I don’t know her name here but I will quote her in my next book, already came to this idea that this notion of plus is not enough. The properly dialectical reversal is that in the same way that you can be a—a butch, trisexual, asexual, bigender, whatever you want, you can also directly be a plus as such. This very excess over every identity can again be embodied in a specific identity. Can—like—you know what I mean by this? I will give you a different example. A friend of mine was in analysis with a big Lacanian figure. And he told me something wonderful and simple. He told me that how his analysis was over. He was in analysis for years, all the time looking for: "My God, I’m not satisfied, should I change?" and so on. "No, what will happen to me?" And then he got at it: "Fuck it, why should I change? I quite like myself the way I am now." And the moment he accepted that no change in his subjective identity is needed, precisely this open attitude of no change was the most radical change. Because of course, nothing changed with him. But you get my point—his entire previous existence was under the sign of a possible change. "I am this for the time being, but I want to be something else" and so on and so on. So you can say this was the very—he renounced to his object a. And as I develop in two or three my books, this excessive element even has three forms, I think, in—or at least two forms in LGBT classification. One is—the plus as—as asexual. This is very intelligent point that—I’m repeating here old joke by Marx when he says that to be a republican is the only way to be a monarchist in general. And—isn’t it that the only way to be truly open sexually, not committed to any particular form, is to be asexual? But asexual is still a mode of sexuality. So in this sense, one position is be asexual. The other position is questioning. Questioning in the sense of basic hysterical questioning. Which is I think again, the most progressive radical subversive thing you can imagine. I will not go now into repeating my old stuff, but you know this is my eternal motive: that one of the worst legacies of '68 is the celebration of perversion at the expense of hysteria. It even had a distinct—although it was not admitted—anti-feminist taste to it. I know, I was there although not too active participant. In '68 we were saying "Hysterics are"—we didn’t say it but we meant it—"crazy women who just provoke a master but don't dare really to subvert the master but just are asking for a new better master, while perverts go to the end. They do it, what hysterics only dream about." For Lacan, no, it’s the opposite. As he emphasized, perversion is always the other obscene side of the power structure itself. Ultimately there is nothing subversive in perversion. The only truly subversive position is hysterical questioning. Hysteria is, as my friend Mladen Dolar developed thirty years ago already in a wonderful short text called "Beyond Interpellation," if the basic operation of ideology is ideological interpellation—like ideology, the Big Other, telling you you are this: mother, worker, socialist, whatever you want, deconstructionist—hysterical questioning is: "But why am I what you are telling me that I am?" And this is why Lacan says very clearly that even in science, university discourse is not productive. University discourse is the classification of science. Moments of scientific discovery are hysterical, not university discourse. And—you can ask him, Frank Ruda will be here tomorrow, in this new book that I also cannot emphasize enough that you should read, *Dash* by Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda. About—two points in Hegel: the very end of Phenomenology and the very beginning of Logic, where a dash occurs at a crucial point. So he, Frank Ruda, developed something—you know, I’m really mad at guys who do this, because it’s such a simple deep insight that you are mad at yourself—fuck him, it’s so simple why didn’t I see it, you know. His first point is that if you discount minor texts, Hegel really wrote only two books: *Phenomenology* and *Logic*. And it’s very mysterious how to distinguish them. Of course, there are passages and so on. But it’s real parallax distinction, in the sense that you can pass in the topic conceptually from one to the other, but the line of separation somehow eludes clear distinction. But then he said something else. And here I made a short critical remark in New York on a round table with him and he tried to squeeze out—I don’t think he succeeded, but you can ask him tomorrow—namely he said that the other two books by Hegel, *Philosophy of Right* and *Encyclopedia*, are pure university discourse. They are manuals for university teaching. And already the way they are written—it’s not this hysterically engaged uncertainty producing new insights—they are reports on a knowledge already established. They just resume, report something that happened somewhere else. You see, this would be again in Hegel, if you want, the clear difference, although again my critique was, as an old Stalinist bureaucrat, that don’t underestimate *Encyclopedia* and *Philosophy of Right*. Don’t fall into this trap, "We just need this creative spirit" and so on, of *Phenomenology* and *Logic*. No, we should heroically learn to assume also the bureaucratic philosophy teaching university. Because it's incredible how although they should be non-creative, how many wonderful things you discover in—even in late Hegel in *Encyclopedia*. It is as if while Hegel pretends just to report what he already developed elsewhere, all of a sudden you get wonderful precise—formulations and so on. But to go back. So—sorry—we have this questioning. And object—Lacanian object a is exactly like this plus. It’s an object which gives body to the very excess in desire over every object. Which we can also—I don’t have time to go into it now—why for Lacan the crucial source in his work of surplus enjoyment is Marxist surplus value. That is to say, how—the very surplus over objectivity reappears as an object. This happens in capitalism, which is why only in capitalism also the abstract subject can emerge. Now let's return to the reproach that I mentioned. You will say, "But again, doesn't this mean that when, if capitalist alienation will be overcome..." "They will be no surplus." Yeah, that’s the problem. What will happen? I think that there is no way back. Once this explodes, this surplus as such with all the instabilities that capitalism implies—you know, capitalism always wants more—maybe something totally different will emerge. But we cannot return to the old concrete organic unity. So in this sense, I think we should maybe even move here further from Marx, because as you said, yes, with Marx, I think you have sometimes this illusion that you can have the—this permanent expansion, "let's move further, develop more and more" without surplus object, without capitalist surplus profit and so on and so on. It—things are getting very complex here. But this doesn’t matter. What I want to say again is that I want to defend here, again, in this sense, the abstract subjectivity. Perfect. No problem. I just wanted to check because there is I am so—ah, it's there, sorry. I don't have to do this unpleasant impolite gesture, I saw it now there, there, okay. Now I will do second part and then Brecht—sorry—Beckett, who is—who is my real hero. You know, I developed it in a text—was it the one which was finally published digitally by *Independent*? I found in Beckett the most wonderful formula you can imagine. He said that something always ultimately divides into itself. I think this is the true Hegelian formula, not the Maoist bullshit "one divides into two." No, to become fully what you are is always a division, because you have to exclude something. Now how does this apply to the divided subject? Please, have a little bit patience and let's go through—let's go through Judith Butler. I will try to—I want to control in a—confront, sorry, in a very—I want to confront—no no no, I don't have any problem here. My God, I’m an old totalitarian, you know. If I hate—this is why, to—now you will really hate me. I am all for opening ourselves up more to the refugees, but in a controlled way. Strictly registered everything and so on. I had in Germany an interesting debate with immigrants, and it was that period, you remember two-three years ago, when the dream was Norway, no? "We want to go to Norway." At the same time they said, "We are not cattle, we don’t want to be registered," and so on. But I told them, "But are you crazy? Norway—and I know the situation there—is the most controlled state you can imagine. Everybody is registered precisely to guarantee your rights, you know." Like the state takes care of everything. So okay, sorry. This is why—and then I had another debate with them and it slipped—I didn't think about it, I wonder—a political improvisation if you would agree with it. My good friend who will soon go further than me, I envy her she should drop that because she is too good, she is really now with her last book *What Is Sex?* exploring new territory. She recently did an interview in Slovenia where she proposed a line of argumentation against anti-immigrant racists which I think work—can work perfectly. His idea was, you know anti-immigrants claim, "We who want to be open towards immigrants, we are weak, despising ourselves, not able to assert ourselves," but the anti-immigrant Right are proud people ready to protect, defend their country. His idea was in political debate to turn this around. His idea was: isn't Angela Merkel, in so far as she did some good thing inviting immigrants, isn’t she the only true proud nationalist and believer in German greatness? Because only if you really trust yourself can you say: "Come here, you are not a threat to us, we will be able..." You know what trust in Ger—and her point is that on the other hand we should not admit, concede to the Alternative for Germany or all those—no, they—the—no they are not strong. What kind of a strength is this, like Trump today, when some hundred a—a colony of refugees is approaching and you are all in a panic? Sorry, this is not strength. You don’t trust yourself. This is extreme weakness. So don't you agree politically, I like this idea, just to provoke, that we should stand—"No! If you are like Corbyn once said—immigrants are open—this is true great belief in Britishness and so on, you know." And all those Boris Johnson guys, they are panicky guys. They are nobody. They don't trust the greatness of British nation. You see my point, that—that we should strike them where it hurts. We shouldn’t accept the way they paint us, this humiliating, you know, "Oh, you are weak, you feel guilty." No! Our attitude should be, "We feel great! We Europeans, although we screwed it up with racism, we invented some great thing: open multiculturalism, human rights, and we should be proud of it. And that’s why we welcome immigrants. You are the real cowards." Okay, let's go on. So I said Judith Butler, Lacan, subjectivity. What does this mean? This will be, I warn you, a little bit more theoretical. Recently I reread that—I call it "triple orgy" book—Ernesto, Judith and me, *Contingency, Hegemony, Universality* whatever, and I think that only now I was able to formulate in a precise way my accusation. Once I told this to her and she was so mad at me like if look would have been able to kill. I accused her of being a—not even covered, but a liberal, basically a liberal. And this is the worst thing you can say to her. Why? Let’s go through it. Butler’s starting point is that both Lacan and herself, Judith Butler, they both endorse the premise that the process of interpellation, symbolic identification of a subject is incomplete. Our identity is never fixed, always open. However, the precise status of this incompleteness is different. For Butler, the part of subjectivity excluded or ignored by interpellation is historically variable and as such submitted to possible change. The ignored or excluded part can be reintegrated into subject's symbolic identity. You get the point, it’s very simple one. For Butler, the hegemonic patriarchal binary heterosexual normativity excludes totally or puts in a subordinate position other sexual identities. So the task of progressive struggle is to bring all that excluded inside. From a—such a reading, Lacan’s bar, the bar of exclusion, impossibility, of division, that divides the subject, cannot but appear as an ahistorical transcendental a priori indifferent to political struggles for hegemony. Because that’s her reproach to Lacan. Lacan remains a Kantian, you know like the Kantian bar that separates phenomena from the in-itself, a part is a priori excluded. The bar that divides the subject is eternalized. Substantial quote from Judith Butler: "The notion of the uncompleted or barred subject appears to guarantee a certain incompletion of interpellation. You call me this but what I am eludes the semantic reach of any such linguistic effort to capture me. Is this eluding of the call of the other accomplished through the installation of a bar as the condition and structure of all subject constitution? Is the incompleteness of subject formation that hegemony recognizes one in which the subject in process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? In other words, should—should—should not the incompletion of subject formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation of all possible subject formations and strategies, and hence as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition?" End of quote. So the subject Butler talks about here, I claim, remains the liberal subject. The subject engaged in the process of continuously expanding the content of his, her, its identifications. A last short quote from Butler: "My understanding of hegemony is that its normative and optimistic moment consists precisely in the possibilities for expanding the democratic possibilities for the key terms of liberalism, rendering them more inclusive, more dynamic, and more concrete." Here I oppose her. I think that her vision of subject is simply: subject is potentially open or all-inclusive, and there are some historical contingent limitations, like in heterosexual normativity some practices are excluded and so on and so on, but the struggle is simply the struggle for continuous expansion of what is excluded. Subject is not divided, as it were, in its very—as Hegel would have put it—in its very concept. I why—so why, why, why this? I think that first—let me try to explain. It is a philosophical topic. First, I think that—Butler tries to play the card of historicism. Like, Lacan is a Kantian ahistoricism, then there is an a priori bar which exclude something. But no, every bar which exclude something can be historically renegotiated and we can expand it and so on and so on. Why I don't agree with it. First, I think that we have strictly to distinguish here between historicism and historicity proper. The historicist position is this one: it’s an unending process, everything can be changed and so on and so on. But as Marx made it clear, from a proper dialectical Hegelian standpoint, there is history not because things simply change, you know, everything in nature changes, now this is prohibited, today tomorrow another thing is prohibited. But—things change because we are always dealing with the same basic antagonism. Why is there class struggle, different modes of formation? Because again, we live in a class society where classes are—the class bar is irreducible. And then we try to cope with it in different levels and so on and so on. So you see, the idea, and I already made this idea, and sorry if I recapitulate it briefly, apropos Fred Jameson’s wonderful criticism of the idea of alternate modernities. Like, you know, we have—that we in the West when we talk about modernity, we privilege our capitalist modernity. But the idea is why couldn't other parts of the world propose an alternate modernity which would not be our capitalist liberal modernity? That was the hope of Latin America, this was already Nehru's hope in India and so on: we can have our own modernity. Jameson absolutely unambiguously rejects this option. Why? His point is that—that this view is ahistorical in the sense that it makes capit—it makes capitalist alienation-antagonism just a specific moment that can be avoided. What do I mean by this? Jameson says that when we talk modernity we basically talk about capitalism. And the dream of alternate capitalism is precisely the dream that there can be another capitalist modernity which would somehow avoid all the bad parts, to put it naively: antagonism, social destabilization and so on and so on. In this sense, as Jameson hints it, we in Europe already had in the first half of twentieth century one big alternate modernity. It’s called fascism. Fascism is precisely alternate modernity: we can have modernity, industry, everything without liberalism, without social antagonisms and so on and so on. So what’s the mistake of this idea of alternate modernity? It historicizes too easily capitalist antagonism. It doesn’t see that antagonism, this instability, class struggle is part of the very concept of modernity. You cannot say we’ll do it in another way. That’s the ultimate ideological dream. In other words, now I come to my point. Of course there are alternate modernities. We have liberal capitalist modernity, we have fascist modernity, we have populist modernity, whatever. But properly Marxist idea is this one: they are all different ways to cope with a certain truly universal traumatic antagonism, the antagonism that defines, characterizes the capitalist mode of production. So you see the beauty: the tension is not between particular versions of capitalism, but between every particular form of capitalism and its universal antagonism. Every particular form of capitalism tries to gentrify, control, reduce the tension which is inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. And this is my formula for every historicism. Historicity for proper historicity, as Marx made it clear, historicity is not an abstract historicity. Historicity, things change because they are grounded, based on an ahistorical antagonism. Now this antagonism is not ahistorical in an absolute sense. But nonetheless, it is transhistorical in the sense that it is the form of the historicity in which we live today. And so I—I don’t have time to go further into it but my—I would have said, my point here would have been that in this sense, when Lacan speaks about a divided subject, he is raising a much more subtle point. His point is: of course everything changes, we have different versions of subjectivity, and of course every concrete subjectivity excludes something, includes something else. But in order precisely to have this field of possible historical changes, there has to be some more basic exclusion. Now Judith Butler will enter and say "Exclusion of what?" Ah, here comes the beautiful Lacanian answer: exclusion of nothing. That is to say, it’s not that some substantial content is excluded, not even in the pseudo-Freudian way, the—the—the incest or whatever. No, it’s—simply that we have to have what Freud in precise terms called *Urverdrängung*, primordial repression, which is the entrance into the very form of historicity. For in order in human history, for things to change, to be dynamic and so on and so on, something is excluded, not a particular thing, but precisely what is excluded is being at home in a certain situation. It’s the form of—how should I put it—the form of home, of being rooted in something itself is excluded. What Lacan calls—this is why Miller developed this nicely long ago, when he was still good theorist, when he says that the ultimate division of the subject is not between this and that, between something and something, but between something and nothing. And I don’t have time to jump through all of this now, but I would say that—this nothing is the subject itself in some sense. The paradox of the subject is that the moment you have a subject, the "something" is not all. There is a crack in the order of "somethings." It’s precisely again the structure of "plus" that we get. Plus does not stand for some primordial object of desire which is excluded. Plus simply means that there is always a gap, that the list of objects is never complete and so on and so on, all that stuff. Okay, I spoke too long. So maybe I will just give you a quick hint. I will again, if you are properly enrolled through Lou or whoever, I propose to do the same, I mean into this class, and if obviously I talk too much and we will not be able—I propose to do the same thing that I promised and even—so strange that I don’t like doing it every year—I will send the chapter or two to you so that you can get the whole line of argumentation. So we don’t have time for it now, let me just quickly come to Beckett. Beckett is for me the great writer of abstraction, of this positive character of abstraction. Why? I recently read, sorry—I recently read a wonderful book on a—on a—do I have—Beckett. Maybe you know the name, the Emilie Morin, M-O-R-I-N, ten years old book, *Beckett and Politics*. It was given to me, a pirated copy of course. What I like in this book is that on the one hand it demonstrates very convincingly how all work of Beckett is totally impregnated, penetrated by political references. For example, his great post-World War II novels, exemplarily *Malone Dies*. You cannot understand their context if you don’t go into the specific situation, you know, '45, '46, when millions of refugees, immigrants were returning home, they were homeless and there was an immense bureaucracy of how to register them, dispense with them, take care—all that is the background of that weird universe of *Malone Dies* and so on and so on. And okay, I will not give you all the examples, but—but now comes the crucial point. What Beckett does is that although again, it’s—you learn a lot if you simply get this thick background, which is incidentally incredibly interesting. For example, do you know how much Beckett was throughout the fifties involved in black anti-racist struggle and so on? It’s incredible. But nonetheless, it would be wrong to apply mechanically a pseudo-Marxist rule and claim "Yes, but doesn't Beckett mystify it? Instead of giving a clear report of a specific situation—Western Europe, the confusion after the end of the World War II, millions literally of displaced persons, concrete situations, hospitals, prisons, temporary camps, how to dispel them, how to—relocate them—he abstracts it into some kind of a general idea of—of abstract homeless anxiety, horror and so on." But I think that precisely this is Beckett’s strength: that the truth is not this false concrete. When you make an abstraction like this, Beckett is a materialist Platonist. From all these concrete experiences—refugees, prisons during Vichy terror and Nazi occupation of France, confusion afterwards and so on and so on—he, Beckett, abstracts the—almost Platonic—idea of homeless horror or whatever. And that's now the key point. This is not a mystification of concrete forms of horror, but it's the very form of horror which is subjectively in a way more true than—than concrete horror. The—how? I will give you another example which I wanted to develop, we'll not have time. It's a very short one, you get it five, six, seven versions on YouTube, the one which is the shorter one and most famous is not even the best, directed by David Mamet with even Harold Pinter playing the director, it's *Catastrophe*. A short late play dedicated to Václav Havel. But—Beckett is more tricky, intelligent here. You know, Havel was condemned in Czechoslovakia by the communist regime and then there was a big festival, whatever, celebration in the West celebrating Havel. And you know what happens in this play which Beckett wrote for this occasion? Beckett begins with what describes as a tough interrogation of an actor. There are just three persons, I think: director, actor and his secretary who writes things down. So first level is: oh my God, they are questioning, terrorizing—then you learn quickly that this is not really a police interrogation but a director staging a scene of police interrogation. Because he said, "No, this doesn't look good, change his dress a little bit, put—put—put his sleeves, pull his sleeves up a little bit," and so on and so on. And then the most magic moment is the very ending when—after people applaud—also we in the hall who witness this performance—the prison—the actor who plays the prisoner—no, the actor who plays an actor who plays the prisoner—raises his head and looks at us directly. The idea being a very subtle one of a formal parallel between real police interrogation, the way movie—sorry, theater director terrorizes actors, and the way we humanitarians enjoy this perversely, this game of "Oh, we sympathize with the guy being terrorized there" and so on and so on. Basically this play is critical of Havel himself. But again, in this subtle way like always from a concrete experience abstract the general form of here brutal interrogation and then abstract it into an idea which should warn you how—how dangerous it is to repeat the very thing that you can—that you are apparently condemning through staging it in a certain way. And—Beckett explicitly made this point, where he said that the ultimate target is neither the terror of theater practice nor—police interrogation as such, but precisely the false potentially terrorist dimension of this humanitarian spectacle where you express sympathy and so on and so on. So here I—again, the crucial point here is to see how this abstraction is not, as some primitive pseudo-Marxist would have put it, a primitive ideological abstraction like the concrete circumstances are obliterated and so on and so on. No, this split between content and form, this excess of the form over content is part of reality itself. In reality itself already form is active in excess over the concrete content. And I think this is precisely Marx's position. I’m getting a little bit stupid, tired, so why don't we stop now with one hour twenty-five and we pretend for some minutes that we live in democracy. So if you want to ask some questions. No no no, wait, we will do it. If you want, again, three things just to finish. If you want to get, because I’m now writing something on Beckett, I’m always a little bit retarded, in delay, but I like to read later Beckett. Three things I propose you to read by Beckett. Okay, *The Unnamable* is the greatest but it’s almost too sublime I cannot—it’s—it’s *Malone Dies*. And already, do you know the title, I’m so stupid—his first after World War II novel—*Mercier and Camier*, something like this, two names? It was published only in It’s also—is the point, two guys want to go to a trip traveling, but then how the idea of traveling movement is gradually abstracted from all—this one. Then of course the absolute one is *Malone Dies*, where you can feel this context, concrete historical, but at the same time you feel how this context—it’s wrong to reduce it just in a historicist way to that context. You know, even the late Lukács got it. You know, György Lukács was very critical of—of Kafka. In contrast to Brecht. Who—didn't Brecht say that Kafka is the only true Marxist writer or whatever? But what I want to say is that—that’s the probably a myth, but a beautiful myth, that—you know Lukács collaborated in fifty-six uprising against the Soviets and he was then arrested and kept for almost a year with others in a—castle in—in Romania. And the myth is that he said there: "My God, Kafka was right, this is like Kafka's castle," you know, the way he was there. So again, maybe I will go on a little bit more on Wednesday. The idea here is that of the proper efficiency of abstraction. Let me give you a concluding remark. All normal people know—here I’m a traditional lover of European classical music—that the greatest song collection is of course Schubert's *Winterreise* (Winter Journey). And do you know the first song? You just learn that a guy goes on *Winterreise*, on a winter journey, abandoning the house where his beloved was. And I refer here to—isn't this a British tenor who is also not an idiot—Ian Bostridge? He wrote a wonderful book, five hundred pages on *Winterreise*, and he demonstrates wonderfully how—why did the idiot at the beginning leave the home where his beloved was? There are hints that she rejected him, he was afraid to commit himself, parents threw him out. But—but the whole point is that if you try to reduce it to a concrete situ—to a concrete situation you miss it. The truth is in this—in this abstraction itself. This is I think the basic dialectical point again: the strength—not the strength, that is too pathetic—the symbolic efficiency, actuality of abstraction itself. What do you lose if you simply translate abstraction? For example, apropos *Malone Dies*, if you say: forget about all those mystifications, you should know we’re in France '46 and so on and so on. No, this is not the truth. The truth is precisely in the abstraction itself. Now I really shut up and we are in democracy. Okay, we've got some time for questions and we ask you to use the microphones, um, because it's being recorded. Here. That’s good, because now in these politically sensitive times—sorry, just a—when I was in New York ten days ago, there was a debate and I couldn't control it. There was a mic there and people were waiting in line and the first two were men. And instantly, instantly, somebody shouted, "Why did you exclude women? Where are women?" And they have absolutely no sense of irony. Because my instant answer was: "I excluded women because they are stupid and I hate them." You cannot say this today. If you say this, you know, there is absolutely no sense of irony. Sorry. Thanks for the lecture, Zizek. Cut the crap! Throw the knife at me. Actually there is a book by Evald Ilyenkov which is called *The Abstract and the Concrete*. I know it, it was translated even in my own language twenty years ago. You know that Ilyenkov incidentally loved Wagner? Yes, I do, he has an article about him. Yes, yes. And interestingly, can't we make this shift? What you call abstract is exactly the concrete because he says that— Yeah, but concrete universality! Yeah, yeah, concrete universality. So he says that what can be concrete is only universality, only the general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the empirical concreteness is abstraction. Absolutely. And then his—when—when he talks about aesthetics, he is exactly talking about this, that direct and straightforward documentation is abstraction, whereas obliqueness is the only possible view, universally viewing the world is the only possible way to be concrete. Okay, I will put it—sorry. No no, what I want to say is that here I really agree with you. So why use the word abstract if what you call abstract was really the true concrete? You know why, I will tell you why. Because I always quote, almost in all of my books, that key passage of Hegel, which is usually misunderstood, from the forward to *Phenomenology*, where Hegel surprisingly praises understanding, *Verstand*, the force of abstraction as the greatest of all forces, the force that can tear apart what in nature belong together and so on. And the—the reason I like the term abstraction is that I think it’s crucial to note how for Hegel—I will give you now another example, repeating myself but you were not here—from—I used it two times here of how to arrive at the actual, not empirical, concrete network, you have to pass through abstraction. The example I use—I’m sorry, you all remember it, I even remember the last time in the other hall where then Jacqueline Rose corrected me that at the end there’s—you know the example from Proust how he sees his grandmother—no, doesn’t see, he hears her voice. And remembering her as a nice gentle old lady, when he—Marcel, the hero in one of the novels, not really—when he hears her voice he all of a sudden notices how her voice is vulgar, common, cracking voice of an old stupid woman. And now comes the key. Then when he visits her in Paris and sees her in reality, this perception of voice abstracted from her totality colors her entire perception, and she notices that she is a stupid old blah. What I’m saying is that this is the Hegelian concrete universality, that it’s always partial. It’s not this holistic yin-yang whatever. You take out one element, you abstract it, and from this standpoint you see all in a new way. In this sense, another Beckett, I hope we all agree maybe the greatest, *Not I*. Where you have an even more brutal abstraction to the eye—sorry, to the—to the—to the mouth. Mouth alone speaks and—and—Beckett has good taste, if I remember it correctly, although there is also a TV version with Julianne Moore and so on. But you know who was Beckett’s favorite actress for this role? Jessica Tandy, the one who plays mother in Hitchcock’s *The Birds*, you know and so on. Strange. But what I want to say is that—yeah, I greatly appreciate Ilyenkov, but—to tell you something that will maybe fascinate you. Ilyenkov was a—correct me if I’m wrong, that’s what I heard that—an extremely tragic figure. Because he was something almost unthinkable: he was an honest sincere Marxist. And he ended up killing himself, I think, no? While you have some other philosophers—do you know his name—who was anti-Marxist but knows how to—a historian of philosophy who did books about medieval thinking and so on. And he survived the dark era by doing the usual thing: in prefaces you put in a quote from—from Lenin and whatever. And it’s interesting how the guy who was, it’s clear from his work, openly a non-Marxist but just used the excuse of "I’m just doing history of philosophy to ignore Marxism," he survived. But the one who was the victim, this is just a beautiful sad lesson, was the only almost sincere Marxist Evald Ilyenkov, no? It’s—it’s a true tragedy, maybe there should be a colloquium on him. Are you doing it in Moscow? It’s here soon at Historical Materialism in a few days. Oh, I’m sorry, but I have some misunderstandings there, don’t ask me why. But I don’t think that although I made one talk for them, nobody loves me today and Historical Materialism also doesn't love me, no? Okay, sorry. Good, there. Sorry, can I ask you first—anyone said—I can’t be the only one who’s found it incredibly hot in here. Can we open any of these windows? This is—this unnatural—unnatural fall. In my country, Slovenia, three days ago it was degrees Celsius. It was an absolute record for this time. That’s why I wrote about it: "Fuck Europe, move to Svalbard Island, one hour north from north of Norway." Only place to live. Although it's more dangerous than you think because you know that—I'm not kidding, unfortunately—Arctic is now becoming the new Cold War territory. Crazy arms—okay, I’m losing time, please. So I have a question that occurred to me when I was reading *The Incontinence of the Void* for this lecture, um, and it’s a challenge to—your idea or the Lacanian idea of a primordial repression as the binary signifier. Because in—a lot of work by psychoanalytic writers inspired by Jung, there’s a whole landscape of—the feminine in the unconscious. And I wondered why you didn't really discuss that in the chapter? Because you made a—you did make a— Okay, it's clear why, because I’m sorry to be so brutal but in my field, Jung is the ultimate enemy. You know in what sense, because— Sorry, he’s being appropriated by the New Age, Eastern— It's not un- no, no, no, no, no. I mean— First, no, I will not go into all this political stuff and so on where obviously—but that’s not for me a main argument. I even think there are some people who were close to fascism and are not totally wrong or whatever. But—this—you know, the whole idea of— First, I think Jung really—I’m simplifying it to the utmost. But is—is it as if Jung—I’m simplifying it, I repeat it, but nonetheless—doesn’t Jung nonetheless think that if you go deep into human personality, you discover some—let’s call it very naively—deeper inner truth? The whole point of Freud is that if you go deep into human personality, you discover the basic fantasy which is precisely a form of stupidity, the basic lie. There is no for Freud—there is no deeper truth. But again, going back to this basic point: maybe I’m not saying who is right here, I just find Lacan’s idea of this—operation of the binary signifier a much more dialectical one. Because then the idea is that there is no primordial couple of principles: yin, yang, light, darkness, masculine, feminine. That there is only one, but this one is in itself incomplete, thwarted and so on. And that multiplicity enters because of this lack of the one. So my point is that this position—I cannot go into it now in detail of course—is in a way much more—much more radically feminist. I know it’s fashionable to say "we in modernity emphasize too much the masculine principle, we need to assert the feminine principle." But I think the worst news for feminism is to assert feminine principle in this mythic archetypal sense of, you know. Because—first even historically—I—this is an old story that I like to repeat always, I loved it. In some—those New Guinea, I don’t know where, they had a tribe which is very—matriarchy oriented, you know like—they have a central—sanctuary, whatever, sacred place which even—it’s formed like to look like vagina and so on. But there is one slight problem: women are of course prohibited access to that place. You know what I mean? What I’m saying is that—the—the—celebrating of the feminine principle can go very well with empirical, even stronger exclusion of women. Because I didn’t find not even one of these celebration of the feminine which doesn't work in this way: "Women are good but as a silent workers' substance of our being, guide and so on and so on." You know which artist—I like him, but has the most disgusting version of this? Richard Wagner, who said: "Woman is something most noble and so on, in so far as she remains is in shadow as the grounding principle taking care of men. But if woman oversteps her limitation and becomes politically, socially active, it turns into devil itself." It’s the worst thing. So—what I’m saying here is that—what you touch, we don't have time to go into it now unfortunately, but it’s very important point that you made. And my God, I’m so sad, I will really send you something, because this is what my new book is about, which I’m now finishing. The title of it is *Surprise, Surprise, Sex and the Failed Absolute*, no? It's precisely not just masculine, feminine, but—a very naive question about universal ontology, how reality is structured and so on. And my formula is precisely how to avoid both the usual monism, one principle, and—any dualism: light, darkness and so on and so on. My formula is the incomplete one. As Alenka Zupancic put it, the formula of sexual difference for me is not MF—masculine, feminine. When Lacan says there is no sexual relationship, he doesn't mean—and don’t think that I’m stupid here, the
Thank you very much. Sorry for this kind introduction. I just want to say about this, all these manipulations and so on, I know it’s the topic of the day, how we are, you know, manipulated in all possible ways and so on. But in a strange way, I am not in such a mega panic about it. Or maybe this, what I will say now, makes it even more dangerous. Namely, don’t underestimate the stupidity of computers nonetheless. For me, the problem is not they will know everything that we think, but no, they will totally misread us, and that will then be the information for the social Big Other and so on. So my basic advice when you are in a situation that you described is lie directly. Like, I know because my wife is doing a research project on all these machinery, you know, they ask you something and if there is a little bit of oscillation in your voice, they try to detect that you are hiding something. The lesson is not tell the truth, but learn to lie. And it’s a great thing. It took me long years. You know, I look you into the eye and I say a lie with total sincerity and so on. Like then, I will do the serious stuff, don’t be afraid. But to tell you how I succeeded with this, I was in the United States two-three weeks ago for ten days, and now that there is more severe control on immigration, I wanted to avoid that nightmare, especially on JFK Terminal or which, because usually the same time as flights from Europe, some flights from China and elsewhere arrive, and nothing against them—the point is then it takes two to three hours at least. So I did something. I called Lufthansa and said I have a terrible pain in my knee and so on. And it was wonderful. At the exit of the plane, a guy was waiting for me with a wheelchair. thirteen to fourteen minutes after the plane touched ground, I was already in a taxi. And I felt so good, you know. And you know what's the—I only made one mistake, typical of my primitive Balkan spirit. When we approached a taxi stand, I saw there only one taxi and I saw some other people coming. So I couldn’t resist it, forget about me being crippled, I grabbed my baggage and started to run towards the taxi. So the guy gave me like a perplexed look or whatever, no. No, I’m quite serious. The worst thing is when you lie, you know, and remember, my God, at least this we should learn from Trump. You know, I say you are dead, you say no, I am alive, you can see it. You should just—if somebody shows you something that empirically falsifies it, you should say something like shamelessly, no, this doesn’t mean anything, you totally miss the point. Then if the guy proves you wrong with details, you should answer something like: why are you now redirecting the debate into the details? You know, like—okay, but let's not lose time. Let's be a little bit more serious. To disappoint you today, the topic is Beckett, abstraction and so on. And if you want all that multiple or sex absolute, you get it in—on Wednesday. It will be a little bit more boring, mostly on subjectivity, abstract subject. Its—the title could be—so please don't be bored—a defense of abstraction. I want to rehabilitate the notion of abstraction. In all versions which oppose abstraction. It can be this holistic one, you know, we are always part embedded in a totality, or—or in a pseudo-Marxist one. The direct reference or relying on some form of concrete totality is misleading. So I would like to begin, I hope I didn’t already use this here, with a political paradox. I like when you find in newspapers among the news some minor data which are nonetheless I think—which tell so much, this data about the weird predicament we are in. The US military, I read, is now searching for—and this is not a joke, I will read you a long quote—for bullets which would be biodegradable and they would contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. You don’t believe me, here is the quote: "Firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations. But after the job is done, the environment suffers. Not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, but they can also prove to be a hazard for local wildlife. Not to mention the impact that chemical residues such as bullet metals and rust can have on future plant growth and sustainability. The US military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. Already back in January the US Department of Justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable training ammunition loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants that eliminate ammunition debris and contaminants. This effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects." End of quote. So these bullets are first to be used for training and then for real warfare. So imagine bombing a country to make it green, full of plants, with no waste left on the ground. The same structure—the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses—is widely visible in today’s ideological landscape. Take the figure of financier and philanthropist George Soros. Soros stands for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation combined with its counter-agent, the humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Even his daily routine is marked by a self-eliminating counterpoint: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities such as providing finances for cultural and democratic causes in post-communist countries, writing essays and books and so on, which ultimately fight the effects of his own speculation. The two faces of Bill Gates parallel the two faces of Soros: the cruel businessman destroys or buys out competitors, aims at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade. Meanwhile, Bill Gates as the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind asks questions like—it’s a quote from Bill Gates: "What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?" and so on. Okay, I don’t have time to develop this now, but what I want to draw your attention to is this paradox how now, today's corporations learn to develop their own pseudo-leftist, should I call them, organic intellectuals like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and so on. They even flirt with the idea capitalism cannot survive the way we know it, we need some kind of socialism and so on and so on. What interests me is this coincidence of the opposites. How, again, the very agent of destruction, if you want, can be—offers itself, himself, herself as a cure against it. And we find this phenomenon at different levels and that’s where the alt-right is winning, drawing attention to this. For example, did you read the recent interview—it’s very interesting—by Steve Bannon in Der Spiegel? Oh, you know what’s the interesting part? The guy who interviews him in his office finds a book on the table. You know which book this is? The life of Heidegger. And then he asks Steve Bannon: what's this? And Bannon says, quote it, just go Spiegel Bannon you find also English translation, Bannon says: Heidegger, this is my guy, you know. And he said that Heidegger is warning about the dangers of modern technology and this is the same fight as his fight, both are fighting for ordinary people's rights and—I mean, it's quite extraordinary, these coincidences. Okay, so—but what I will tell you now is another form of this danger. Maybe she—by she I mean Elizabeth Warren—is a hope of the American Democratic Party, although I don’t think it’s as easy as that. She walks a very careful line, at the same time neutralizing a more radical left. But you maybe followed this scandal, no? Of scandal, okay, it’s not a scandal, of—she did the DNA test, is there Cherokee Native American blood in her? And I think she deserved what she got. Because I think, okay, I know the progressive idea, I admit it’s not racial purity, I am not white, I have some Indian or Native American whatever blood. But our position should not be this one. What will be now, that—it’s nonsense as an ethical ideal. What does this mean? That now, to be a public person, to advance your career, it helps if you have a little bit of non-white blood or whatever. You know who is for me the real hero in all this? Not only Trump, predictably made bad-taste remarks back, but did you read it? The Cherokee Tribal Council rejected her. Said: sorry, being one of us is not a question of having like one-tenth of a percent of blood but it’s a question of culture and so on and so on. Because you know, the danger in this is as if to say—the Nazis used this, or American racists, you know—how much Black or Native American blood do you have? And I don’t think we can—the right way is to use this same approach. I think we should simply, strictly ignore it. It’s very dangerous to repeat things at this level. But okay, this was just a very brief easy introduction. Now comes unfortunately pure theory. I will then towards the end, if you survive this, I will go a little bit to explain the Hegelian notion of concrete universality into figures like Tom Cruise and why are they idiots and so on. So to give you a promise. Because you know my point will be, you know, actors are usually identified by a certain screen persona. Even—and this is not their real personality, but neither is it simply the person they play on screen. For example, John Wayne usually plays a certain guy and so on and so on. But what interests me really are moments when an actor plays a role against his or her screen persona. And this is for me almost the symptomatic truth. If, out of this standpoint of exception, if you approach through these specific lenses his other roles, you discover strange things. I'll just briefly because I will not have time to go into it in detail later. Think about Henry Fonda. This is old, you don’t know him, maybe you saw—it’s nonetheless a mega great Western—*Once Upon a Time in the West*. One of the last films by Henry Fonda where he plays with obvious pleasure a very bad guy: rapist, sadistic killer and so on and so on. But I think it’s not just that this—this role is an exception. You should, I think, take it as lenses through which see also his other roles. And then you discover, for example, in one of John Ford’s greatest Westerns, *Fort Apache*, where he plays a righteous, principled—principled American general of the American Army fighting Native Americans, Indians. From this standpoint you can all of a sudden see also the cruel, brutal dimension of that character. Or he plays in *Young Mr. Lincoln*, a movie celebrated very much in the sixties by *Cahiers du Cinéma*, he plays young Lincoln. But again, from this experience, you can see what is wrong in his precisely good persona. Another example, and I met him once through Ralph Fiennes and he laughed, but I think he was a little bit uncomfortable about it: he was Ben Kingsley. I told him: forget Gandhi, blah. I told him: I like you in *Sexy Beast*, you saw *Sexy Beast*? Where he’s an extremely—so ridiculously evil, brutal character. And I told him: what if through the lenses of this weird guy we approach—we approach, for example, Gandhi? And read Gandhi’s biography, you will discover a whole series of very strange features of Gandhi. He was not as innocent as—you know, incidentally, my Indian anti-Gandhi friend told me a nice detail. You know Gandhi was all the time to protest making hunger strikes and so on, you know. You know which was his last hunger strike? Workers did organize a strike against one of Gandhi’s billionaire big industrial friends and he went on hunger strike to stop the strike against the big guy. But what I want to say is that—but you see my principle. You have a certain universality, a nice character, and the properly dialectical thing is to take the exception and use it as a key to bring out the other covered-up, more evil, also universal dimension. Another example, now I come to the guy Tom Cruise. Did you see his film—it’s some twenty years old already—*Magnolia*? Where he plays an extremely disgusting guy, a guy who is basically, if I remember correctly, organizing some training of sex how to seduce easily women with all the vulgarity, like the whole point is to fuck them, get—and I had this idea, but maybe this is his true self, you know what I mean? And we should read all his noble parts and so on and so on through the lenses of this. And now you will say: but what am I talking here, what has this to do with Historical Materialism? Ah, it has. Because I’m just, ha-ha, applying Marx to this topic. That’s Marx’s theories of capitalism. Capitalism is for Marx a weird, exceptional, paradoxical mode of production. It’s based on instability, self-destructive and so on. Like, one obvious thing: what for—and this is great about capitalism—what for other modes of production is an abnormal state—instability and so on—for capitalism is the normal state. Capitalism’s the exception. And Marx is not a teleological philosopher. He is not saying all the history points towards capitalism. He says that capitalism exploded for quite contingent reasons in a certain specific constellation. It’s an exception, a pathological formation, but as such it provides the clue for all others. You know, to give you another example, there is a wonderful passage from *Grundrisse*—you can easily download it, locate it in the English translation—when Marx talks, and that’s the crucial distinction, about the concept of labor. Where he says of course labor is a universal category, it existed in all societies from I don’t know when. Maybe the earliest, maybe not if you count gathering, hunting as labor, but the point is labor is a universal category. But then Marx uses a wonderful ambiguous expression, very Hegelian. He says that although in all societies there is labor, so in this sense it’s a universal notion, only with capitalism labor becomes universal in real practice. An expression like that. That is to say, only with capitalism, when you work, you are not just participating in a universal activity, but you relate to yourself as universal. Because in market economy you don't identify yourself with a certain type of labor. You can change labor, change job, whatever. The point is that you relate to yourself as universal. You are not what you immediately are. You experience yourself as universal, which means ultimately indifferent towards particular forms of activity. And it can be demonstrated in a nice way that—that the same goes for desire and for subjectivity itself, I am tempted to say. That in the same way, of course, this is where the usual critics of Cartesian subjectivity are wrong when they claim—I am now developing, writing a text against a guy who benevolently, but nonetheless, and maybe you should read it—ah, unfortunately I think it’s not translated into English—a guy called Frank Fischbach, a French Deleuzian-Marxist who criticizes my reference to Cartesian Cogito, claiming that Cogito as abstract subject—the title of his book is *Sans Objet* (Without Object). He claims that only in modern bourgeois society with market economy and the reign of abstraction is such a universal subject Cogito, deprived of all particularities, is such an object imaginable. Outside modern society people always experienced themselves as rooted in concrete circumstances. So that’s his argument against me, that by privileging, celebrating Cartesian Cogito, I, ha-ha, reproduce the structure of commodification where abstraction rules and so on and so on. But I think we can easily answer him. First, I think that with subject, if you are strictly a Marxist, it’s exactly the same as with labor. Yes, of course, there was no subject prior to modernity. But it was there in the same sense as—in the same sense as universal labor was there. Only with capitalist modernity a universal dimension, which was in itself potentially there, became—became explicit, became posited as such. So I think, you see the paradox, capitalism is something exceptional, pathological and so on, but its meaning is universal. It’s not just one among—precisely because of its pathological character, in the sense of structural imbalance, instability and so on and so on. It’s a—to use Marx, a universal clue for all modes of production. To iso—because as Marx put it, class struggle only with capitalism it becomes visible as such. Prior to capitalism class struggle was just a one among—was always covered up as estates, different hierarchies, not class struggle as such. Second approach, now of this moment I am almost a little bit proud. I want to give it to you, second aspect of—no sorry—of abstract subjectivity. It’s that—what Lacan’s position is not—here is a great difference between Lacan and Alain Badiou. Badiou’s formula is subject without object. He uses it. For Lacan, there is no subject without object. Every subjectivity has to rely on an object, ultimately on object cause of desire. I will not go into more complexities here, I will just give you, repeat an old joke, but it’s a new interpretation. I used it years ago, it’s a joke used among others by Derrida and others. Here you can see in what sense the Lacanian subject implies, relies on an object. You know, it’s an old joke like in a—in a synagogue on, I don’t know when they gather, Saturday, Sunday, I think it’s Shabbat, believers gather and each of them makes—okay, they don’t have a confession, a speech, whatever public. And first, a rich mighty Rabbi says: "Oh dear God, I’m nobody, I’m not worthy of your attention, blah, I’m nobody." Then a rich merchant stands up and says: "Oh dear God, I’m also nobody, not worthy of your attention," and so on. Then a poor Jew stands up and says: "God, I’m also a nobody." And then the rich merchant kicks the rich Rabbi and says: "But who is this guy who simply can say that he is also a nobody?" you know, and so on. You know what is right here? This idea that to be a nobody implies—you should ask, and this is what Lacan calls *plus-de-jouir*, surplus enjoyment object: what particular libidinal profit do you get precisely from proclaiming yourself a nobody? Now I will give you, to provoke you, a very problematic example. I was often attacked for it. How in our West—just ask yourselves, Western societies, just ask yourselves a simple question: which social groups are allowed to assert their particular identity? And I claim—and I am not the only one to notice it—that the more you go towards the marginals, the oppressed, the more you are allowed. Like in United States, if you are whatever you call it—Native American, Indian, whatever, I will not go into my old jokes why I find these titles problematic—it’s wonderful if you dance your tribal dances, blah, all that bullshit. If you are a black, it’s okay. Although like if you are Muslim Brotherhood black, problems can begin. With Asians, Japanese, Chinese, it’s okay. And so on and so on. Italy still tolerable. But then the more we move, you know, like Scandinavians, Germans, eh-eh. If a white Protestant says, "Let’s assert our identity," you are the worst racist and so on. Now, what do I find problematic here? And incidentally, there is of course a truth in it. But I’m not here praising white supremacists, I’m claiming that precisely when they renounce their specific identity and claim "We are guilty for all, we don’t have the right to assert our identity," they assert themselves all the more as universal, secretly. I’m not allowed to practice my rights means I am universal. And you know where you can see this universality? In how they—I witnessed this dozens of times—in what arrogant way white guys at university panels teach others what is the right thing to do. For example, I was with some Native Americans and they were all the time interrupted by the white guy: "No, what you are saying now, you are reproducing white clichés and so on. Don’t talk like this, call yourself that," and so on and so on. That’s—that’s the secret profit. You know, I claim to be universal but always ask what particular surplus enjoyment is provided by the very renunciation to my particular—to my particular identity. So again, my position is not there is some pure Cartesian subject. One always has to ask which is the object small a, the little bit of enjoyment which sustains me in this subjectivity. And there are wonderful, undescribably wonderful jokes which play with this. For example, recently in New York, my Jewish friend Udi Aloni—don’t be afraid, he is now transferring his flat on a—his daughter and moving all his modest money to American banks. You know why? In Israel, he told me, things are getting so tough now that if you are in any way associated to BDS or considered too pro-Palestinian, even if you are, my friend is pure, as pure as he can be, Jew, you can be—all your property and money can be taken from you. Because the idea is if you support BDS, you are hurting Israeli economy, this is criminal activity, so you should be fined. So that you will not consider him a bad Zionist, but he is a deeply spiritual Jewish person, and he told me an absolutely wonderful joke. Don’t be afraid, this time no trigger warning, there is nothing dirty in it, no penises, no balls hanging, whatever, you know. It’s a theological one. You should just take into account one thing: that in this circumstance—no, this joke refers to this old notion, popular from the fifties onwards, I forgot who wrote even a book on it, that God died at Auschwitz, you know. The horror there was too horrible, it’s a darkness, God was not there, he could not have allowed, no? So the story is this one. In Paradise, after they were burned in Auschwitz, a couple of Jews—there is a nice forest, meadow, trees there—a couple of Jews sit there at a bench and amuse themselves by telling ridiculous stories about accidents that happened to them when they were burned in Auschwitz. But as jokes, like one says: "Do you remember what happened to you when you were marching towards the gas oven? You slipped and broke your—your head and you died even before you were..." you know, this real—and then they all laugh, ha-ha, that was so funny. And now comes very sublime joke: God, tired after all his work, drops by, walks around, listen to it and says: "Sorry guys, I don't understand this. What's the joke?" no? And one of the Jews deceased steps towards God, patronizingly embraces him and says: "Don't worry, of course you cannot understand because you were not there," you know, because... you know what I like so much in this joke? It’s not the humanist point: Oh, God was not there. No, God can well understand the suffering there. God cannot understand how you can make a joke out of it. The joke—the joke was the Jewish surplus enjoyment there. And I must admit that the greatest tragedy of the trend which goes on now in Israel is that they—this is what makes one among the things that made Jews so great, this incredible ability to find irony even in the most desperate situations. I will not even bother you about how many jokes they have, Polish Jews, about themselves suffering in World War II and so on and so on. So—you see, always look for this, let's call it, symptomatic point. So again, when I talk about a universal subject, always remember that I’m not talking about an empty subject as it were hanging in the air. This subject, I admit that the operation of subjectivity is Lacan, Hegel used this metaphor, you know—how do you translate it into English—this Baron Munchausen stories, about how he is almost drowning in a swamp with his horse and then, you know how he saves himself? He pulls himself up, you know. Of course, in material reality this is not possible. But in—I don't want to use this term in an idealist way—this is precisely what happens in what Hegel calls self-relationship, spirituality if you want. But again, I’m not an idealist here. Always look for a specific material constellation in which this explodes. So now vaguely, I wanted to describe two things to you. First, the—because I—I explained it to you now implicitly. Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. Abstract universality is something that simply holds for all epochs. We always work—labor. Concrete universality is not just a concrete form of the universality, in the sense of "yes, but work has different structure in every epoch" and so on and so on. No, concrete universality is a concrete singular example in which universality becomes for itself. In which you as a particular entity are not just an example of universality, but you directly relate to yourself as universal. And here, we don't have time to go into it, but nonetheless, here Lacan's notion of—of object a enters. Object a sustains universality because it is precisely the object which is not—even if it appears as such—it’s not one among particular objects, but an object which is just a stand-in for a void, for the impossibility to specify an object. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a simple example. Let’s take another example which I already used here I don’t know when, probably every time that I was here. With all appreciation, nobody will accuse me now that I’m making fun of them—LGBT+. You know my standard point, no? What is the status of this plus? Is it an empirical plus? Is it meant in a British nominalist way? Which means that, like, we have—you can be a butch, a sadomaso, trisexual, whatever, all the identities, and then you have always this worry: "But did we really list all identities? What if a guy comes—oh no, sorry, I'm not that and another." So let’s add a plus, let’s be more—to—to possible future identities we don’t yet know about. But, and—I warn you—this is not a perverse point that I made. Although I’m often decried as making fun of LGBT+. They are not all stupid. Some of them are very intelligent. And a lady, an Australian lady I think, I don’t know her name here but I will quote her in my next book, already came to this idea that this notion of plus is not enough. The properly dialectical reversal is that in the same way that you can be a—a butch, trisexual, asexual, bigender, whatever you want, you can also directly be a plus as such. This very excess over every identity can again be embodied in a specific identity. Can—like—you know what I mean by this? I will give you a different example. A friend of mine was in analysis with a big Lacanian figure. And he told me something wonderful and simple. He told me that how his analysis was over. He was in analysis for years, all the time looking for: "My God, I’m not satisfied, should I change?" and so on. "No, what will happen to me?" And then he got at it: "Fuck it, why should I change? I quite like myself the way I am now." And the moment he accepted that no change in his subjective identity is needed, precisely this open attitude of no change was the most radical change. Because of course, nothing changed with him. But you get my point—his entire previous existence was under the sign of a possible change. "I am this for the time being, but I want to be something else" and so on and so on. So you can say this was the very—he renounced to his object a. And as I develop in two or three my books, this excessive element even has three forms, I think, in—or at least two forms in LGBT classification. One is—the plus as—as asexual. This is very intelligent point that—I’m repeating here old joke by Marx when he says that to be a republican is the only way to be a monarchist in general. And—isn’t it that the only way to be truly open sexually, not committed to any particular form, is to be asexual? But asexual is still a mode of sexuality. So in this sense, one position is be asexual. The other position is questioning. Questioning in the sense of basic hysterical questioning. Which is I think again, the most progressive radical subversive thing you can imagine. I will not go now into repeating my old stuff, but you know this is my eternal motive: that one of the worst legacies of '68 is the celebration of perversion at the expense of hysteria. It even had a distinct—although it was not admitted—anti-feminist taste to it. I know, I was there although not too active participant. In '68 we were saying "Hysterics are"—we didn’t say it but we meant it—"crazy women who just provoke a master but don't dare really to subvert the master but just are asking for a new better master, while perverts go to the end. They do it, what hysterics only dream about." For Lacan, no, it’s the opposite. As he emphasized, perversion is always the other obscene side of the power structure itself. Ultimately there is nothing subversive in perversion. The only truly subversive position is hysterical questioning. Hysteria is, as my friend Mladen Dolar developed thirty years ago already in a wonderful short text called "Beyond Interpellation," if the basic operation of ideology is ideological interpellation—like ideology, the Big Other, telling you you are this: mother, worker, socialist, whatever you want, deconstructionist—hysterical questioning is: "But why am I what you are telling me that I am?" And this is why Lacan says very clearly that even in science, university discourse is not productive. University discourse is the classification of science. Moments of scientific discovery are hysterical, not university discourse. And—you can ask him, Frank Ruda will be here tomorrow, in this new book that I also cannot emphasize enough that you should read, *Dash* by Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda. About—two points in Hegel: the very end of Phenomenology and the very beginning of Logic, where a dash occurs at a crucial point. So he, Frank Ruda, developed something—you know, I’m really mad at guys who do this, because it’s such a simple deep insight that you are mad at yourself—fuck him, it’s so simple why didn’t I see it, you know. His first point is that if you discount minor texts, Hegel really wrote only two books: *Phenomenology* and *Logic*. And it’s very mysterious how to distinguish them. Of course, there are passages and so on. But it’s real parallax distinction, in the sense that you can pass in the topic conceptually from one to the other, but the line of separation somehow eludes clear distinction. But then he said something else. And here I made a short critical remark in New York on a round table with him and he tried to squeeze out—I don’t think he succeeded, but you can ask him tomorrow—namely he said that the other two books by Hegel, *Philosophy of Right* and *Encyclopedia*, are pure university discourse. They are manuals for university teaching. And already the way they are written—it’s not this hysterically engaged uncertainty producing new insights—they are reports on a knowledge already established. They just resume, report something that happened somewhere else. You see, this would be again in Hegel, if you want, the clear difference, although again my critique was, as an old Stalinist bureaucrat, that don’t underestimate *Encyclopedia* and *Philosophy of Right*. Don’t fall into this trap, "We just need this creative spirit" and so on, of *Phenomenology* and *Logic*. No, we should heroically learn to assume also the bureaucratic philosophy teaching university. Because it's incredible how although they should be non-creative, how many wonderful things you discover in—even in late Hegel in *Encyclopedia*. It is as if while Hegel pretends just to report what he already developed elsewhere, all of a sudden you get wonderful precise—formulations and so on. But to go back. So—sorry—we have this questioning. And object—Lacanian object a is exactly like this plus. It’s an object which gives body to the very excess in desire over every object. Which we can also—I don’t have time to go into it now—why for Lacan the crucial source in his work of surplus enjoyment is Marxist surplus value. That is to say, how—the very surplus over objectivity reappears as an object. This happens in capitalism, which is why only in capitalism also the abstract subject can emerge. Now let's return to the reproach that I mentioned. You will say, "But again, doesn't this mean that when, if capitalist alienation will be overcome..." "They will be no surplus." Yeah, that’s the problem. What will happen? I think that there is no way back. Once this explodes, this surplus as such with all the instabilities that capitalism implies—you know, capitalism always wants more—maybe something totally different will emerge. But we cannot return to the old concrete organic unity. So in this sense, I think we should maybe even move here further from Marx, because as you said, yes, with Marx, I think you have sometimes this illusion that you can have the—this permanent expansion, "let's move further, develop more and more" without surplus object, without capitalist surplus profit and so on and so on. It—things are getting very complex here. But this doesn’t matter. What I want to say again is that I want to defend here, again, in this sense, the abstract subjectivity. Perfect. No problem. I just wanted to check because there is I am so—ah, it's there, sorry. I don't have to do this unpleasant impolite gesture, I saw it now there, there, okay. Now I will do second part and then Brecht—sorry—Beckett, who is—who is my real hero. You know, I developed it in a text—was it the one which was finally published digitally by *Independent*? I found in Beckett the most wonderful formula you can imagine. He said that something always ultimately divides into itself. I think this is the true Hegelian formula, not the Maoist bullshit "one divides into two." No, to become fully what you are is always a division, because you have to exclude something. Now how does this apply to the divided subject? Please, have a little bit patience and let's go through—let's go through Judith Butler. I will try to—I want to control in a—confront, sorry, in a very—I want to confront—no no no, I don't have any problem here. My God, I’m an old totalitarian, you know. If I hate—this is why, to—now you will really hate me. I am all for opening ourselves up more to the refugees, but in a controlled way. Strictly registered everything and so on. I had in Germany an interesting debate with immigrants, and it was that period, you remember two-three years ago, when the dream was Norway, no? "We want to go to Norway." At the same time they said, "We are not cattle, we don’t want to be registered," and so on. But I told them, "But are you crazy? Norway—and I know the situation there—is the most controlled state you can imagine. Everybody is registered precisely to guarantee your rights, you know." Like the state takes care of everything. So okay, sorry. This is why—and then I had another debate with them and it slipped—I didn't think about it, I wonder—a political improvisation if you would agree with it. My good friend who will soon go further than me, I envy her she should drop that because she is too good, she is really now with her last book *What Is Sex?* exploring new territory. She recently did an interview in Slovenia where she proposed a line of argumentation against anti-immigrant racists which I think work—can work perfectly. His idea was, you know anti-immigrants claim, "We who want to be open towards immigrants, we are weak, despising ourselves, not able to assert ourselves," but the anti-immigrant Right are proud people ready to protect, defend their country. His idea was in political debate to turn this around. His idea was: isn't Angela Merkel, in so far as she did some good thing inviting immigrants, isn’t she the only true proud nationalist and believer in German greatness? Because only if you really trust yourself can you say: "Come here, you are not a threat to us, we will be able..." You know what trust in Ger—and her point is that on the other hand we should not admit, concede to the Alternative for Germany or all those—no, they—the—no they are not strong. What kind of a strength is this, like Trump today, when some hundred a—a colony of refugees is approaching and you are all in a panic? Sorry, this is not strength. You don’t trust yourself. This is extreme weakness. So don't you agree politically, I like this idea, just to provoke, that we should stand—"No! If you are like Corbyn once said—immigrants are open—this is true great belief in Britishness and so on, you know." And all those Boris Johnson guys, they are panicky guys. They are nobody. They don't trust the greatness of British nation. You see my point, that—that we should strike them where it hurts. We shouldn’t accept the way they paint us, this humiliating, you know, "Oh, you are weak, you feel guilty." No! Our attitude should be, "We feel great! We Europeans, although we screwed it up with racism, we invented some great thing: open multiculturalism, human rights, and we should be proud of it. And that’s why we welcome immigrants. You are the real cowards." Okay, let's go on. So I said Judith Butler, Lacan, subjectivity. What does this mean? This will be, I warn you, a little bit more theoretical. Recently I reread that—I call it "triple orgy" book—Ernesto, Judith and me, *Contingency, Hegemony, Universality* whatever, and I think that only now I was able to formulate in a precise way my accusation. Once I told this to her and she was so mad at me like if look would have been able to kill. I accused her of being a—not even covered, but a liberal, basically a liberal. And this is the worst thing you can say to her. Why? Let’s go through it. Butler’s starting point is that both Lacan and herself, Judith Butler, they both endorse the premise that the process of interpellation, symbolic identification of a subject is incomplete. Our identity is never fixed, always open. However, the precise status of this incompleteness is different. For Butler, the part of subjectivity excluded or ignored by interpellation is historically variable and as such submitted to possible change. The ignored or excluded part can be reintegrated into subject's symbolic identity. You get the point, it’s very simple one. For Butler, the hegemonic patriarchal binary heterosexual normativity excludes totally or puts in a subordinate position other sexual identities. So the task of progressive struggle is to bring all that excluded inside. From a—such a reading, Lacan’s bar, the bar of exclusion, impossibility, of division, that divides the subject, cannot but appear as an ahistorical transcendental a priori indifferent to political struggles for hegemony. Because that’s her reproach to Lacan. Lacan remains a Kantian, you know like the Kantian bar that separates phenomena from the in-itself, a part is a priori excluded. The bar that divides the subject is eternalized. Substantial quote from Judith Butler: "The notion of the uncompleted or barred subject appears to guarantee a certain incompletion of interpellation. You call me this but what I am eludes the semantic reach of any such linguistic effort to capture me. Is this eluding of the call of the other accomplished through the installation of a bar as the condition and structure of all subject constitution? Is the incompleteness of subject formation that hegemony recognizes one in which the subject in process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted through exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static or foundational? And if this distinction is wrong-headed, how are we to think those constituting exclusions that are structural and foundational together with those we take to be politically salient to the movement of hegemony? In other words, should—should—should not the incompletion of subject formation be linked to the democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand as a quasi-transcendental limitation of all possible subject formations and strategies, and hence as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to condition?" End of quote. So the subject Butler talks about here, I claim, remains the liberal subject. The subject engaged in the process of continuously expanding the content of his, her, its identifications. A last short quote from Butler: "My understanding of hegemony is that its normative and optimistic moment consists precisely in the possibilities for expanding the democratic possibilities for the key terms of liberalism, rendering them more inclusive, more dynamic, and more concrete." Here I oppose her. I think that her vision of subject is simply: subject is potentially open or all-inclusive, and there are some historical contingent limitations, like in heterosexual normativity some practices are excluded and so on and so on, but the struggle is simply the struggle for continuous expansion of what is excluded. Subject is not divided, as it were, in its very—as Hegel would have put it—in its very concept. I why—so why, why, why this? I think that first—let me try to explain. It is a philosophical topic. First, I think that—Butler tries to play the card of historicism. Like, Lacan is a Kantian ahistoricism, then there is an a priori bar which exclude something. But no, every bar which exclude something can be historically renegotiated and we can expand it and so on and so on. Why I don't agree with it. First, I think that we have strictly to distinguish here between historicism and historicity proper. The historicist position is this one: it’s an unending process, everything can be changed and so on and so on. But as Marx made it clear, from a proper dialectical Hegelian standpoint, there is history not because things simply change, you know, everything in nature changes, now this is prohibited, today tomorrow another thing is prohibited. But—things change because we are always dealing with the same basic antagonism. Why is there class struggle, different modes of formation? Because again, we live in a class society where classes are—the class bar is irreducible. And then we try to cope with it in different levels and so on and so on. So you see, the idea, and I already made this idea, and sorry if I recapitulate it briefly, apropos Fred Jameson’s wonderful criticism of the idea of alternate modernities. Like, you know, we have—that we in the West when we talk about modernity, we privilege our capitalist modernity. But the idea is why couldn't other parts of the world propose an alternate modernity which would not be our capitalist liberal modernity? That was the hope of Latin America, this was already Nehru's hope in India and so on: we can have our own modernity. Jameson absolutely unambiguously rejects this option. Why? His point is that—that this view is ahistorical in the sense that it makes capit—it makes capitalist alienation-antagonism just a specific moment that can be avoided. What do I mean by this? Jameson says that when we talk modernity we basically talk about capitalism. And the dream of alternate capitalism is precisely the dream that there can be another capitalist modernity which would somehow avoid all the bad parts, to put it naively: antagonism, social destabilization and so on and so on. In this sense, as Jameson hints it, we in Europe already had in the first half of twentieth century one big alternate modernity. It’s called fascism. Fascism is precisely alternate modernity: we can have modernity, industry, everything without liberalism, without social antagonisms and so on and so on. So what’s the mistake of this idea of alternate modernity? It historicizes too easily capitalist antagonism. It doesn’t see that antagonism, this instability, class struggle is part of the very concept of modernity. You cannot say we’ll do it in another way. That’s the ultimate ideological dream. In other words, now I come to my point. Of course there are alternate modernities. We have liberal capitalist modernity, we have fascist modernity, we have populist modernity, whatever. But properly Marxist idea is this one: they are all different ways to cope with a certain truly universal traumatic antagonism, the antagonism that defines, characterizes the capitalist mode of production. So you see the beauty: the tension is not between particular versions of capitalism, but between every particular form of capitalism and its universal antagonism. Every particular form of capitalism tries to gentrify, control, reduce the tension which is inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. And this is my formula for every historicism. Historicity for proper historicity, as Marx made it clear, historicity is not an abstract historicity. Historicity, things change because they are grounded, based on an ahistorical antagonism. Now this antagonism is not ahistorical in an absolute sense. But nonetheless, it is transhistorical in the sense that it is the form of the historicity in which we live today. And so I—I don’t have time to go further into it but my—I would have said, my point here would have been that in this sense, when Lacan speaks about a divided subject, he is raising a much more subtle point. His point is: of course everything changes, we have different versions of subjectivity, and of course every concrete subjectivity excludes something, includes something else. But in order precisely to have this field of possible historical changes, there has to be some more basic exclusion. Now Judith Butler will enter and say "Exclusion of what?" Ah, here comes the beautiful Lacanian answer: exclusion of nothing. That is to say, it’s not that some substantial content is excluded, not even in the pseudo-Freudian way, the—the—the incest or whatever. No, it’s—simply that we have to have what Freud in precise terms called *Urverdrängung*, primordial repression, which is the entrance into the very form of historicity. For in order in human history, for things to change, to be dynamic and so on and so on, something is excluded, not a particular thing, but precisely what is excluded is being at home in a certain situation. It’s the form of—how should I put it—the form of home, of being rooted in something itself is excluded. What Lacan calls—this is why Miller developed this nicely long ago, when he was still good theorist, when he says that the ultimate division of the subject is not between this and that, between something and something, but between something and nothing. And I don’t have time to jump through all of this now, but I would say that—this nothing is the subject itself in some sense. The paradox of the subject is that the moment you have a subject, the "something" is not all. There is a crack in the order of "somethings." It’s precisely again the structure of "plus" that we get. Plus does not stand for some primordial object of desire which is excluded. Plus simply means that there is always a gap, that the list of objects is never complete and so on and so on, all that stuff. Okay, I spoke too long. So maybe I will just give you a quick hint. I will again, if you are properly enrolled through Lou or whoever, I propose to do the same, I mean into this class, and if obviously I talk too much and we will not be able—I propose to do the same thing that I promised and even—so strange that I don’t like doing it every year—I will send the chapter or two to you so that you can get the whole line of argumentation. So we don’t have time for it now, let me just quickly come to Beckett. Beckett is for me the great writer of abstraction, of this positive character of abstraction. Why? I recently read, sorry—I recently read a wonderful book on a—on a—do I have—Beckett. Maybe you know the name, the Emilie Morin, M-O-R-I-N, ten years old book, *Beckett and Politics*. It was given to me, a pirated copy of course. What I like in this book is that on the one hand it demonstrates very convincingly how all work of Beckett is totally impregnated, penetrated by political references. For example, his great post-World War II novels, exemplarily *Malone Dies*. You cannot understand their context if you don’t go into the specific situation, you know, '45, '46, when millions of refugees, immigrants were returning home, they were homeless and there was an immense bureaucracy of how to register them, dispense with them, take care—all that is the background of that weird universe of *Malone Dies* and so on and so on. And okay, I will not give you all the examples, but—but now comes the crucial point. What Beckett does is that although again, it’s—you learn a lot if you simply get this thick background, which is incidentally incredibly interesting. For example, do you know how much Beckett was throughout the fifties involved in black anti-racist struggle and so on? It’s incredible. But nonetheless, it would be wrong to apply mechanically a pseudo-Marxist rule and claim "Yes, but doesn't Beckett mystify it? Instead of giving a clear report of a specific situation—Western Europe, the confusion after the end of the World War II, millions literally of displaced persons, concrete situations, hospitals, prisons, temporary camps, how to dispel them, how to—relocate them—he abstracts it into some kind of a general idea of—of abstract homeless anxiety, horror and so on." But I think that precisely this is Beckett’s strength: that the truth is not this false concrete. When you make an abstraction like this, Beckett is a materialist Platonist. From all these concrete experiences—refugees, prisons during Vichy terror and Nazi occupation of France, confusion afterwards and so on and so on—he, Beckett, abstracts the—almost Platonic—idea of homeless horror or whatever. And that's now the key point. This is not a mystification of concrete forms of horror, but it's the very form of horror which is subjectively in a way more true than—than concrete horror. The—how? I will give you another example which I wanted to develop, we'll not have time. It's a very short one, you get it five, six, seven versions on YouTube, the one which is the shorter one and most famous is not even the best, directed by David Mamet with even Harold Pinter playing the director, it's *Catastrophe*. A short late play dedicated to Václav Havel. But—Beckett is more tricky, intelligent here. You know, Havel was condemned in Czechoslovakia by the communist regime and then there was a big festival, whatever, celebration in the West celebrating Havel. And you know what happens in this play which Beckett wrote for this occasion? Beckett begins with what describes as a tough interrogation of an actor. There are just three persons, I think: director, actor and his secretary who writes things down. So first level is: oh my God, they are questioning, terrorizing—then you learn quickly that this is not really a police interrogation but a director staging a scene of police interrogation. Because he said, "No, this doesn't look good, change his dress a little bit, put—put—put his sleeves, pull his sleeves up a little bit," and so on and so on. And then the most magic moment is the very ending when—after people applaud—also we in the hall who witness this performance—the prison—the actor who plays the prisoner—no, the actor who plays an actor who plays the prisoner—raises his head and looks at us directly. The idea being a very subtle one of a formal parallel between real police interrogation, the way movie—sorry, theater director terrorizes actors, and the way we humanitarians enjoy this perversely, this game of "Oh, we sympathize with the guy being terrorized there" and so on and so on. Basically this play is critical of Havel himself. But again, in this subtle way like always from a concrete experience abstract the general form of here brutal interrogation and then abstract it into an idea which should warn you how—how dangerous it is to repeat the very thing that you can—that you are apparently condemning through staging it in a certain way. And—Beckett explicitly made this point, where he said that the ultimate target is neither the terror of theater practice nor—police interrogation as such, but precisely the false potentially terrorist dimension of this humanitarian spectacle where you express sympathy and so on and so on. So here I—again, the crucial point here is to see how this abstraction is not, as some primitive pseudo-Marxist would have put it, a primitive ideological abstraction like the concrete circumstances are obliterated and so on and so on. No, this split between content and form, this excess of the form over content is part of reality itself. In reality itself already form is active in excess over the concrete content. And I think this is precisely Marx's position. I’m getting a little bit stupid, tired, so why don't we stop now with one hour twenty-five and we pretend for some minutes that we live in democracy. So if you want to ask some questions. No no no, wait, we will do it. If you want, again, three things just to finish. If you want to get, because I’m now writing something on Beckett, I’m always a little bit retarded, in delay, but I like to read later Beckett. Three things I propose you to read by Beckett. Okay, *The Unnamable* is the greatest but it’s almost too sublime I cannot—it’s—it’s *Malone Dies*. And already, do you know the title, I’m so stupid—his first after World War II novel—*Mercier and Camier*, something like this, two names? It was published only in It’s also—is the point, two guys want to go to a trip traveling, but then how the idea of traveling movement is gradually abstracted from all—this one. Then of course the absolute one is *Malone Dies*, where you can feel this context, concrete historical, but at the same time you feel how this context—it’s wrong to reduce it just in a historicist way to that context. You know, even the late Lukács got it. You know, György Lukács was very critical of—of Kafka. In contrast to Brecht. Who—didn't Brecht say that Kafka is the only true Marxist writer or whatever? But what I want to say is that—that’s the probably a myth, but a beautiful myth, that—you know Lukács collaborated in fifty-six uprising against the Soviets and he was then arrested and kept for almost a year with others in a—castle in—in Romania. And the myth is that he said there: "My God, Kafka was right, this is like Kafka's castle," you know, the way he was there. So again, maybe I will go on a little bit more on Wednesday. The idea here is that of the proper efficiency of abstraction. Let me give you a concluding remark. All normal people know—here I’m a traditional lover of European classical music—that the greatest song collection is of course Schubert's *Winterreise* (Winter Journey). And do you know the first song? You just learn that a guy goes on *Winterreise*, on a winter journey, abandoning the house where his beloved was. And I refer here to—isn't this a British tenor who is also not an idiot—Ian Bostridge? He wrote a wonderful book, five hundred pages on *Winterreise*, and he demonstrates wonderfully how—why did the idiot at the beginning leave the home where his beloved was? There are hints that she rejected him, he was afraid to commit himself, parents threw him out. But—but the whole point is that if you try to reduce it to a concrete situ—to a concrete situation you miss it. The truth is in this—in this abstraction itself. This is I think the basic dialectical point again: the strength—not the strength, that is too pathetic—the symbolic efficiency, actuality of abstraction itself. What do you lose if you simply translate abstraction? For example, apropos *Malone Dies*, if you say: forget about all those mystifications, you should know we’re in France '46 and so on and so on. No, this is not the truth. The truth is precisely in the abstraction itself. Now I really shut up and we are in democracy. Okay, we've got some time for questions and we ask you to use the microphones, um, because it's being recorded. Here. That’s good, because now in these politically sensitive times—sorry, just a—when I was in New York ten days ago, there was a debate and I couldn't control it. There was a mic there and people were waiting in line and the first two were men. And instantly, instantly, somebody shouted, "Why did you exclude women? Where are women?" And they have absolutely no sense of irony. Because my instant answer was: "I excluded women because they are stupid and I hate them." You cannot say this today. If you say this, you know, there is absolutely no sense of irony. Sorry. Thanks for the lecture, Zizek. Cut the crap! Throw the knife at me. Actually there is a book by Evald Ilyenkov which is called *The Abstract and the Concrete*. I know it, it was translated even in my own language twenty years ago. You know that Ilyenkov incidentally loved Wagner? Yes, I do, he has an article about him. Yes, yes. And interestingly, can't we make this shift? What you call abstract is exactly the concrete because he says that— Yeah, but concrete universality! Yeah, yeah, concrete universality. So he says that what can be concrete is only universality, only the general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the empirical concreteness is abstraction. Absolutely. And then his—when—when he talks about aesthetics, he is exactly talking about this, that direct and straightforward documentation is abstraction, whereas obliqueness is the only possible view, universally viewing the world is the only possible way to be concrete. Okay, I will put it—sorry. No no, what I want to say is that here I really agree with you. So why use the word abstract if what you call abstract was really the true concrete? You know why, I will tell you why. Because I always quote, almost in all of my books, that key passage of Hegel, which is usually misunderstood, from the forward to *Phenomenology*, where Hegel surprisingly praises understanding, *Verstand*, the force of abstraction as the greatest of all forces, the force that can tear apart what in nature belong together and so on. And the—the reason I like the term abstraction is that I think it’s crucial to note how for Hegel—I will give you now another example, repeating myself but you were not here—from—I used it two times here of how to arrive at the actual, not empirical, concrete network, you have to pass through abstraction. The example I use—I’m sorry, you all remember it, I even remember the last time in the other hall where then Jacqueline Rose corrected me that at the end there’s—you know the example from Proust how he sees his grandmother—no, doesn’t see, he hears her voice. And remembering her as a nice gentle old lady, when he—Marcel, the hero in one of the novels, not really—when he hears her voice he all of a sudden notices how her voice is vulgar, common, cracking voice of an old stupid woman. And now comes the key. Then when he visits her in Paris and sees her in reality, this perception of voice abstracted from her totality colors her entire perception, and she notices that she is a stupid old blah. What I’m saying is that this is the Hegelian concrete universality, that it’s always partial. It’s not this holistic yin-yang whatever. You take out one element, you abstract it, and from this standpoint you see all in a new way. In this sense, another Beckett, I hope we all agree maybe the greatest, *Not I*. Where you have an even more brutal abstraction to the eye—sorry, to the—to the—to the mouth. Mouth alone speaks and—and—Beckett has good taste, if I remember it correctly, although there is also a TV version with Julianne Moore and so on. But you know who was Beckett’s favorite actress for this role? Jessica Tandy, the one who plays mother in Hitchcock’s *The Birds*, you know and so on. Strange. But what I want to say is that—yeah, I greatly appreciate Ilyenkov, but—to tell you something that will maybe fascinate you. Ilyenkov was a—correct me if I’m wrong, that’s what I heard that—an extremely tragic figure. Because he was something almost unthinkable: he was an honest sincere Marxist. And he ended up killing himself, I think, no? While you have some other philosophers—do you know his name—who was anti-Marxist but knows how to—a historian of philosophy who did books about medieval thinking and so on. And he survived the dark era by doing the usual thing: in prefaces you put in a quote from—from Lenin and whatever. And it’s interesting how the guy who was, it’s clear from his work, openly a non-Marxist but just used the excuse of "I’m just doing history of philosophy to ignore Marxism," he survived. But the one who was the victim, this is just a beautiful sad lesson, was the only almost sincere Marxist Evald Ilyenkov, no? It’s—it’s a true tragedy, maybe there should be a colloquium on him. Are you doing it in Moscow? It’s here soon at Historical Materialism in a few days. Oh, I’m sorry, but I have some misunderstandings there, don’t ask me why. But I don’t think that although I made one talk for them, nobody loves me today and Historical Materialism also doesn't love me, no? Okay, sorry. Good, there. Sorry, can I ask you first—anyone said—I can’t be the only one who’s found it incredibly hot in here. Can we open any of these windows? This is—this unnatural—unnatural fall. In my country, Slovenia, three days ago it was degrees Celsius. It was an absolute record for this time. That’s why I wrote about it: "Fuck Europe, move to Svalbard Island, one hour north from north of Norway." Only place to live. Although it's more dangerous than you think because you know that—I'm not kidding, unfortunately—Arctic is now becoming the new Cold War territory. Crazy arms—okay, I’m losing time, please. So I have a question that occurred to me when I was reading *The Incontinence of the Void* for this lecture, um, and it’s a challenge to—your idea or the Lacanian idea of a primordial repression as the binary signifier. Because in—a lot of work by psychoanalytic writers inspired by Jung, there’s a whole landscape of—the feminine in the unconscious. And I wondered why you didn't really discuss that in the chapter? Because you made a—you did make a— Okay, it's clear why, because I’m sorry to be so brutal but in my field, Jung is the ultimate enemy. You know in what sense, because— Sorry, he’s being appropriated by the New Age, Eastern— It's not un- no, no, no, no, no. I mean— First, no, I will not go into all this political stuff and so on where obviously—but that’s not for me a main argument. I even think there are some people who were close to fascism and are not totally wrong or whatever. But—this—you know, the whole idea of— First, I think Jung really—I’m simplifying it to the utmost. But is—is it as if Jung—I’m simplifying it, I repeat it, but nonetheless—doesn’t Jung nonetheless think that if you go deep into human personality, you discover some—let’s call it very naively—deeper inner truth? The whole point of Freud is that if you go deep into human personality, you discover the basic fantasy which is precisely a form of stupidity, the basic lie. There is no for Freud—there is no deeper truth. But again, going back to this basic point: maybe I’m not saying who is right here, I just find Lacan’s idea of this—operation of the binary signifier a much more dialectical one. Because then the idea is that there is no primordial couple of principles: yin, yang, light, darkness, masculine, feminine. That there is only one, but this one is in itself incomplete, thwarted and so on. And that multiplicity enters because of this lack of the one. So my point is that this position—I cannot go into it now in detail of course—is in a way much more—much more radically feminist. I know it’s fashionable to say "we in modernity emphasize too much the masculine principle, we need to assert the feminine principle." But I think the worst news for feminism is to assert feminine principle in this mythic archetypal sense of, you know. Because—first even historically—I—this is an old story that I like to repeat always, I loved it. In some—those New Guinea, I don’t know where, they had a tribe which is very—matriarchy oriented, you know like—they have a central—sanctuary, whatever, sacred place which even—it’s formed like to look like vagina and so on. But there is one slight problem: women are of course prohibited access to that place. You know what I mean? What I’m saying is that—the—the—celebrating of the feminine principle can go very well with empirical, even stronger exclusion of women. Because I didn’t find not even one of these celebration of the feminine which doesn't work in this way: "Women are good but as a silent workers' substance of our being, guide and so on and so on." You know which artist—I like him, but has the most disgusting version of this? Richard Wagner, who said: "Woman is something most noble and so on, in so far as she remains is in shadow as the grounding principle taking care of men. But if woman oversteps her limitation and becomes politically, socially active, it turns into devil itself." It’s the worst thing. So—what I’m saying here is that—what you touch, we don't have time to go into it now unfortunately, but it’s very important point that you made. And my God, I’m so sad, I will really send you something, because this is what my new book is about, which I’m now finishing. The title of it is *Surprise, Surprise, Sex and the Failed Absolute*, no? It's precisely not just masculine, feminine, but—a very naive question about universal ontology, how reality is structured and so on. And my formula is precisely how to avoid both the usual monism, one principle, and—any dualism: light, darkness and so on and so on. My formula is the incomplete one. As Alenka Zupancic put it, the formula of sexual difference for me is not MF—masculine, feminine. When Lacan says there is no sexual relationship, he doesn't mean—and don’t think that I’m stupid here, the
Cathy Newman
confusion will be
confusion will be
Slavoj Žižek
on purpose—it’s not "Men are from Venus, women are from Mars," which I think is much more true than—but what I’m saying is that—when Lacan says there is no sexual relationship, he doesn't mean masculine and feminine are in eternal struggle and so on and so on. No, they are radically asymmetric. Woman is the original plus, which is why if you want in some sense she is the original subject more than man and so on. So I think—to go to the end, I know I will not convince you, but we cannot do it now—I think that—every assertion of some, like Goethe did it, my God. When I read that Goethe’s finale of *Faust*, you know, "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" (The
on purpose—it’s not "Men are from Venus, women are from Mars," which I think is much more true than—but what I’m saying is that—when Lacan says there is no sexual relationship, he doesn't mean masculine and feminine are in eternal struggle and so on and so on. No, they are radically asymmetric. Woman is the original plus, which is why if you want in some sense she is the original subject more than man and so on. So I think—to go to the end, I know I will not convince you, but we cannot do it now—I think that—every assertion of some, like Goethe did it, my God. When I read that Goethe’s finale of *Faust*, you know, "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" (The
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Eternal Feminine drags us in), I become Goebbels like: throw
Eternal Feminine drags us in), I become Goebbels like: throw
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that book on fire
that book on fire
Slavoj Žižek
and so on. That—I think that this idea of the Eternal Feminine is so deeply anti-feminist,
and so on. That—I think that this idea of the Eternal Feminine is so deeply anti-feminist,
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racist, imperialist and so on. No wonder that one of the most beautiful—I admit it—colonialist novels,
racist, imperialist and so on. No wonder that one of the most beautiful—I admit it—colonialist novels,
Slavoj Žižek
you know H. Rider Haggard’s *She*. This idea that in the
you know H. Rider Haggard’s *She*. This idea that in the
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middle of Africa in a dungeon you find a wonderful kingdom with the woman. This idea of a substantial woman secretly running things—this is the ultimate—masculine myth. For this is the basic masculine trick for me: "Yes, woman is the eternal foundation, just keep—keep her there as the eternal foundation and so on." Now I know I didn’t
middle of Africa in a dungeon you find a wonderful kingdom with the woman. This idea of a substantial woman secretly running things—this is the ultimate—masculine myth. For this is the basic masculine trick for me: "Yes, woman is the eternal foundation, just keep—keep her there as the eternal foundation and so on." Now I know I didn’t
Slavoj Žižek
answer you, but you know the point— I think woman is the multiplicity and the void. No, the woman is—I would even—you know what’s the irony of that title which as you know is from Beckett, no, *Incontinence of the Void*? With Alenka Zupancic we made this joke, because our books appeared almost at the same time, that maybe our two titles are kind of like question and answer: "What is sex? Sex is the incontinence of the void." She told—she told me. But no, you know what’s the problem here of Lacan? How to think sexual difference by—on the one way avoiding this simple constructionism, "there is no fixed identity there," just this Judith Butler version, but also how to avoid any substantial dualism. And I—I think that Lacan shows up a path here, which also again opens up a new perspective on transgender and so on. Again, believe me or not, I’m a total partisan of transgender, but in my specific sense. I think that the paradox is this one: transgender means we have men, women, and their difference as such. It’s this beautiful dialectical paradox of you have the two elements which are differentiated, and then you have their difference existing as such separately. And this is also incidentally a logic of anti-If you think this is strange, at a different level—I will not go into differences—doesn't exactly the same hold for the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism? We have the two classes, bourgeois-proletarian, and Jew stands for class struggle as such. It’s clear in anti-Semitism. Jew is the mystified figure of the class struggle as such. So again, the—the problem here for me is—this one. Freud is absolutely a modern thinker, in the sense that his ultimate word is utter contingency, his universe is the universe of modern science. While I don't have time to go into it now, but I think Jung is some kind of rehabilitation of—of pre-modern wisdom. Now I cannot go into it now, I know I didn’t satisfy you but now I will be vulgar, I’m sorry. When can a man really satisfy a woman? Never and so on. But we would have to go much more substantially into it. I think first of all, it was you. Yeah. Wait for the mic. I wanted to just sum up, first of all, thank you for the talk. And somewhere in your works you developed the idea that—there is the Real, but—how people create the Real, they—they stop talking about certain kind of events, and it is silence when they—when you try to talk about it and—you feel that you know, this noumenon is—is expanded by people themselves and in their—unspoken, un—yeah. So—could you just develop it? Oh my God, you are again asking me a mega fundamental question. My point is just this one: there is a certain notion of the Real which even some Lacanians endorse, which I think it’s totally wrong, the Real as a new version of Kant’s noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Like we live in a universe of symbolically structured appearances but there is a hard Real beyond, we cannot ever approach it. But I think that Lacan's Real is precisely—something that has—it's much more virtual than our reality. Lacan's Real is not some hard core that we cannot ever grasp, it's something like—something that appears in between, in the cracks of different symbolic formation. May I, if this will
answer you, but you know the point— I think woman is the multiplicity and the void. No, the woman is—I would even—you know what’s the irony of that title which as you know is from Beckett, no, *Incontinence of the Void*? With Alenka Zupancic we made this joke, because our books appeared almost at the same time, that maybe our two titles are kind of like question and answer: "What is sex? Sex is the incontinence of the void." She told—she told me. But no, you know what’s the problem here of Lacan? How to think sexual difference by—on the one way avoiding this simple constructionism, "there is no fixed identity there," just this Judith Butler version, but also how to avoid any substantial dualism. And I—I think that Lacan shows up a path here, which also again opens up a new perspective on transgender and so on. Again, believe me or not, I’m a total partisan of transgender, but in my specific sense. I think that the paradox is this one: transgender means we have men, women, and their difference as such. It’s this beautiful dialectical paradox of you have the two elements which are differentiated, and then you have their difference existing as such separately. And this is also incidentally a logic of anti-If you think this is strange, at a different level—I will not go into differences—doesn't exactly the same hold for the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism? We have the two classes, bourgeois-proletarian, and Jew stands for class struggle as such. It’s clear in anti-Semitism. Jew is the mystified figure of the class struggle as such. So again, the—the problem here for me is—this one. Freud is absolutely a modern thinker, in the sense that his ultimate word is utter contingency, his universe is the universe of modern science. While I don't have time to go into it now, but I think Jung is some kind of rehabilitation of—of pre-modern wisdom. Now I cannot go into it now, I know I didn’t satisfy you but now I will be vulgar, I’m sorry. When can a man really satisfy a woman? Never and so on. But we would have to go much more substantially into it. I think first of all, it was you. Yeah. Wait for the mic. I wanted to just sum up, first of all, thank you for the talk. And somewhere in your works you developed the idea that—there is the Real, but—how people create the Real, they—they stop talking about certain kind of events, and it is silence when they—when you try to talk about it and—you feel that you know, this noumenon is—is expanded by people themselves and in their—unspoken, un—yeah. So—could you just develop it? Oh my God, you are again asking me a mega fundamental question. My point is just this one: there is a certain notion of the Real which even some Lacanians endorse, which I think it’s totally wrong, the Real as a new version of Kant’s noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Like we live in a universe of symbolically structured appearances but there is a hard Real beyond, we cannot ever approach it. But I think that Lacan's Real is precisely—something that has—it's much more virtual than our reality. Lacan's Real is not some hard core that we cannot ever grasp, it's something like—something that appears in between, in the cracks of different symbolic formation. May I, if this will
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maybe make
maybe make
Slavoj Žižek
it a little bit clearer, may I use one example which I used here often, but I think not in the last three-four years, earlier. You know I had a strange experience which cost me friendship with that American writer—he died now I think—E.L. Doctorow. Did he wrote *Billy Bathgate*? You
it a little bit clearer, may I use one example which I used here often, but I think not in the last three-four years, earlier. You know I had a strange experience which cost me friendship with that American writer—he died now I think—E.L. Doctorow. Did he wrote *Billy Bathgate*? You
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know
know
Slavoj Žižek
what’s my example? I first saw the movie, which is a shitty movie: Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and so on. And you can see in the movie how—there must be some novel or whatever behind it much better. You can see that the movie is the failed version of something. So naively I thought: okay, let’s go and read the novel. Then I discovered the novel is even worse. And Doctorow learned this and says he doesn’t want to meet me and so on. But what I want to say, you see this idea, you have, sorry to simplify it, a bad novel, a bad movie. But in between
what’s my example? I first saw the movie, which is a shitty movie: Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and so on. And you can see in the movie how—there must be some novel or whatever behind it much better. You can see that the movie is the failed version of something. So naively I thought: okay, let’s go and read the novel. Then I discovered the novel is even worse. And Doctorow learned this and says he doesn’t want to meet me and so on. But what I want to say, you see this idea, you have, sorry to simplify it, a bad novel, a bad movie. But in between
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the two as a mirage appears some really great work. But retroactively, you find it nowhere. This would be the
the two as a mirage appears some really great work. But retroactively, you find it nowhere. This would be the
Slavoj Žižek
Platonic Real almost, the Real as an idea. Something—this is crucial. This is why Real is for Lacan very fragile. It can break
Platonic Real almost, the Real as an idea. Something—this is crucial. This is why Real is for Lacan very fragile. It can break
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down
down
Slavoj Žižek
at any—any moment. For example, let's
at any—any moment. For example, let's
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give
give
Slavoj Žižek
you a different—let's give you a disgusting example. Because you didn't get my usual treatment. I wasn't very disgusting today, no? So maybe a little bit. The example I use is this one. I will write about this, I think I already mentioned it even here in my next book: let’s say, I’m sorry, I will try to be as not concretely concrete as possible. Let’s say you are in an intense erotic interplay. You are—I will talk as a male chauvinist—you are very close bodily to your naked beloved woman. Now I will stop here, not go into how you are close to vagina whatever. Doesn’t it happen—and I checked it up with my feminine friends, they all report of the same—while you are in this erotic trance and so on, it can happen that all of a sudden you have a kind of a—dissolution of the fantasy effect. You all of a sudden says—and for women with penis the same holds, I learned sadly myself—like: "But this is just a miserable bad-smelling traces of urine, piece of meat." You know, like all of a sudden when you become aware of the vulgar concrete materiality of the object, you can really pass from this: "Oh my God, her cunt spread out there," I’m sorry—you fall into this total vulgarity and so on. Here the Real disappears. It’s totally wrong to say: no, here you see the body as it is in reality. No! Exactly the opposite. The Real is that thing that transpired through empirical naked body and made this body a kind of an absolute object. And then, when the Real dissipates, you just get the miserable reality. So that’s important to see, because even many Lacanians conceive of the Real following the model of, you know, Sartre’s early first great novel *La Nausée* (Nausea). You know, like when you see reality in all its nonsensical inertia. No, that’s not the Real. The Real is just this fragile something that appears and can disappear in a minute. I like this idea that—that’s why where the title of my book *Fragile Absolute* comes from: that the absolute is something we experience, but it’s not a real absolute in the sense of existing out there. It’s just a very fragile mirage you see it for a moment then you don’t see it. And why am I improvise this? Because something very amusing happened to me. Was it here or—no I think it was in the States, not here. Somebody interrupted me and said, "Oh, this is typically intellectual: that when you are enthralled by a naked body intimately holding your hand, that this idea of 'My God, but look at it, bad-smelling, maybe some dirt, disgusting body,' that this is intellectual distance." I claim: no, it's exactly the opposite. For me at least, when it happened to me—bah, I’m sorry—it was a kind of an elementary gut reaction, you know. It was not that I started to think, "But oh, look at that." No, it’s kind of—it’s a very even not deep, I hate this term, but very shattering experience. And in—in here, in the UK, you have a long tradition of this humor, making fun of this. Like, you know, I quote it two three times in my books: you know that legendary British joke that a lord in front of his palace on grass is doing—how do you call this—push-ups? And the butler comes and says: "Did your lordship not notice that the lady has already left?" and so on or something. You know, there is—I don’t think this is really subversive. The proof—and here I’m an anti-Brechtian romantic—I think there is nothing heroic, great, extraneation in this. The proof is that already in medieval times this was seriously used by Christian theologians to—to liberate you from sexuality. They’d say: "You think you’re in"—it’s a standard—no, even before Christianity, he was not before but not a Christian, Marcus Aurelius writes about this and others. Like: "You think you are enthralled holding a body, just think about this body: like, one inch beneath the skin, all the glands, the fat, the shit whatever and so on." This idea—and I claim paradoxically that this dis-sublimation is nothing really subversive. I don’t—I absolutely don’t want to celebrate it as you cynically confront the Real and so on. So again, I cannot go—I talk too much—further now, but the main point is again that the Real is—forget about this link, the Real is the substantial reality behind. The Real, there is more Real in appearances, in virtual appearance, in something that is and it’s not—is and it’s not there, how should I put it, you know. Sorry, I... Why do you
you a different—let's give you a disgusting example. Because you didn't get my usual treatment. I wasn't very disgusting today, no? So maybe a little bit. The example I use is this one. I will write about this, I think I already mentioned it even here in my next book: let’s say, I’m sorry, I will try to be as not concretely concrete as possible. Let’s say you are in an intense erotic interplay. You are—I will talk as a male chauvinist—you are very close bodily to your naked beloved woman. Now I will stop here, not go into how you are close to vagina whatever. Doesn’t it happen—and I checked it up with my feminine friends, they all report of the same—while you are in this erotic trance and so on, it can happen that all of a sudden you have a kind of a—dissolution of the fantasy effect. You all of a sudden says—and for women with penis the same holds, I learned sadly myself—like: "But this is just a miserable bad-smelling traces of urine, piece of meat." You know, like all of a sudden when you become aware of the vulgar concrete materiality of the object, you can really pass from this: "Oh my God, her cunt spread out there," I’m sorry—you fall into this total vulgarity and so on. Here the Real disappears. It’s totally wrong to say: no, here you see the body as it is in reality. No! Exactly the opposite. The Real is that thing that transpired through empirical naked body and made this body a kind of an absolute object. And then, when the Real dissipates, you just get the miserable reality. So that’s important to see, because even many Lacanians conceive of the Real following the model of, you know, Sartre’s early first great novel *La Nausée* (Nausea). You know, like when you see reality in all its nonsensical inertia. No, that’s not the Real. The Real is just this fragile something that appears and can disappear in a minute. I like this idea that—that’s why where the title of my book *Fragile Absolute* comes from: that the absolute is something we experience, but it’s not a real absolute in the sense of existing out there. It’s just a very fragile mirage you see it for a moment then you don’t see it. And why am I improvise this? Because something very amusing happened to me. Was it here or—no I think it was in the States, not here. Somebody interrupted me and said, "Oh, this is typically intellectual: that when you are enthralled by a naked body intimately holding your hand, that this idea of 'My God, but look at it, bad-smelling, maybe some dirt, disgusting body,' that this is intellectual distance." I claim: no, it's exactly the opposite. For me at least, when it happened to me—bah, I’m sorry—it was a kind of an elementary gut reaction, you know. It was not that I started to think, "But oh, look at that." No, it’s kind of—it’s a very even not deep, I hate this term, but very shattering experience. And in—in here, in the UK, you have a long tradition of this humor, making fun of this. Like, you know, I quote it two three times in my books: you know that legendary British joke that a lord in front of his palace on grass is doing—how do you call this—push-ups? And the butler comes and says: "Did your lordship not notice that the lady has already left?" and so on or something. You know, there is—I don’t think this is really subversive. The proof—and here I’m an anti-Brechtian romantic—I think there is nothing heroic, great, extraneation in this. The proof is that already in medieval times this was seriously used by Christian theologians to—to liberate you from sexuality. They’d say: "You think you’re in"—it’s a standard—no, even before Christianity, he was not before but not a Christian, Marcus Aurelius writes about this and others. Like: "You think you are enthralled holding a body, just think about this body: like, one inch beneath the skin, all the glands, the fat, the shit whatever and so on." This idea—and I claim paradoxically that this dis-sublimation is nothing really subversive. I don’t—I absolutely don’t want to celebrate it as you cynically confront the Real and so on. So again, I cannot go—I talk too much—further now, but the main point is again that the Real is—forget about this link, the Real is the substantial reality behind. The Real, there is more Real in appearances, in virtual appearance, in something that is and it’s not—is and it’s not there, how should I put it, you know. Sorry, I... Why do you
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think
think
Slavoj Žižek
that moment you’re talking about is really a reflection of your self-disgust? Like, you recognize yourself in the other. And it was— It’s a good point, I must admit I haven’t—I haven’t thought about it, but—yes, that—although I don’t like to—ha-ha, fuck it, why shouldn't the other be, why me? No, no. But I see your point, yeah. You know when you—when you smell of someone homeless on the bus and they smell of piss and shit and they're sitting there on the bus, you’re—you’re recognizing your own state by—by the horror of it. Yeah, but strictly oppressed! And now I will speak very frankly against myself. Because I don't smell myself, but unfortunately other people always claim, "Didn't you wash?" or whatever, you know. Like, it's true that—that I have a couple of friends who are—and this is for me almost my true Stalinist ideal—who are able really to smell themselves when they—when they smell bad. But yes, yes, I agree with you, although you know the problem is nonetheless this one. Merleau-Ponty wrote wonderfully about this in his *Phenomenology of Perception*, body and so on. How difficult it is really, not just rhetorically, to relate to your own body as an object. It happened to my ex-wife and with all the divorce we went through I kind of still feel sympathy for her. You know one of the few modes of this experience that you can get: she had some problem with her eyes and she they made an operation which was not a difficult one but extremely unpleasant. They took out her eye only with local anesthesia
that moment you’re talking about is really a reflection of your self-disgust? Like, you recognize yourself in the other. And it was— It’s a good point, I must admit I haven’t—I haven’t thought about it, but—yes, that—although I don’t like to—ha-ha, fuck it, why shouldn't the other be, why me? No, no. But I see your point, yeah. You know when you—when you smell of someone homeless on the bus and they smell of piss and shit and they're sitting there on the bus, you’re—you’re recognizing your own state by—by the horror of it. Yeah, but strictly oppressed! And now I will speak very frankly against myself. Because I don't smell myself, but unfortunately other people always claim, "Didn't you wash?" or whatever, you know. Like, it's true that—that I have a couple of friends who are—and this is for me almost my true Stalinist ideal—who are able really to smell themselves when they—when they smell bad. But yes, yes, I agree with you, although you know the problem is nonetheless this one. Merleau-Ponty wrote wonderfully about this in his *Phenomenology of Perception*, body and so on. How difficult it is really, not just rhetorically, to relate to your own body as an object. It happened to my ex-wife and with all the divorce we went through I kind of still feel sympathy for her. You know one of the few modes of this experience that you can get: she had some problem with her eyes and she they made an operation which was not a difficult one but extremely unpleasant. They took out her eye only with local anesthesia
Cathy Newman
and then
and then
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to correct something they turned it around a little bit. And she had to collaborate, so she almost lost consciousness, but then it was a beautiful Stalinist moment, the doctor kept her weight, telling her: "If you lose consciousness, we will have to do all of it again," and this kind of... No, but now seriously. She told
to correct something they turned it around a little bit. And she had to collaborate, so she almost lost consciousness, but then it was a beautiful Stalinist moment, the doctor kept her weight, telling her: "If you lose consciousness, we will have to do all of it again," and this kind of... No, but now seriously. She told
Slavoj Žižek
me that her horrible moment was when the eye turned around and as it were it was almost a God-like position: she saw part of herself from the outside. You know like—it’s not from within your body as—and she told me it was—it was a nightmare. So I would nonetheless say that still this—I now agree with you—but still you displaced it onto the other. But the true thing would have been to—to look at yourself, as it were. Maybe this is not even such a great thing, maybe extreme perverts can do it. Perverts are nightmare, I don’t like them because I think only perverts can really objectivize themselves, you know. Perverts are—don't praise them too much. I mean perverts are—sorry. That’s—but it’s a nice point. I will think about it, yes. Although—no, I am not now terrorizing you like—did you feel it? But I hope some of you admit it, my God, didn’t it happen to you? It happens to me all the time, this weird Sartrean moment of nausea, of derealization, like: "Fuck it, it's all shit, it's so inert, what am I doing here?" and so on, you know. It’s—it is something. But you know what’s now my problem? And I told them they were not able to—reply to me. Some—cognitivist-biologist friends. I asked them a simple question: do you think animals—those who fuck properly, primates and so on—do you think that they are able of such an experience? Let’s say you have all your instincts, blah, a mating, do it, and then—it’s very weird. I would say no, because I would say such a disgust presupposes that you live in a fantasy universe sustained by fantasies, and it’s the fantasy which breaks down, nothing in reality. So that would have interested me very much: can they do it or not? No? It’s the same with virtuality. Sorry for repeating myself but that’s my—always a question to those who propagate Artificial Intelligence. You know the joke that I told twenty times here, that I will not even repeat it all, *Ninotchka* joke, you know: "We don’t have milk, we just have cream, so I cannot give you coffee without milk, just with cream." So again, we have three coffees: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. Materially they are the same. But symbolically they are not the same. My point: can a computer register this difference? Or it’s just, you know, that—the absence itself, that absence can also be present or absent. If you ask for—if a waiter brings you cream without milk, the milk is there as absent inscribed. It’s not the same as plain coffee. Now can the computer register this absence as such? And they didn’t give me a clear answer. Yes. I’m thinking in this room some years ago, Agon Hamza, Etienne Balibar and—oh my God, I’ve forgotten her name—Wendy Brown. Oh my God, I like her, she is more intelligent than Judith but that's what— Wendy Brown and Etienne Balibar in conversation about the genealogy of human capital. Yeah. Self-enhancement for the purposes of credit and investment and competition as the only relationality. The Lacanian clinic at the moment, you know I’m thinking of Éric Laurent's book, *The Other Side of Biopolitics*, psychoanalysis as the other side of biopolitics. The cure is always subjectivity and the division in the subject. Yeah. So my question is, could you say something about the fact that we've produced biopolitically as aspects of human capital and psychoanalysis, the treatment is to become subject with its division? It's a hard work. This is—okay, allow me to answer two days from now because it's too complex. It is a very complex question because you must know how complex already it is with Lacan. Because although all the effort in some of his late seminars is to move beyond subjectivity of capital, but the only formula that he provides is the same—like the only—and I—the position of a saint is for Lacan, saint as excrement out of this circulation. But I claim that with today’s late capitalism, I wonder if even this works or not. What about ordinary psychosis? Yeah. Although—to answer this properly I would have—I would nonetheless like to raise this question. I hope we all agree that—this traditional idea, you know historicist obsession, today’s borderline we no longer have a—hysteria and so on—they proceed too fast. I think I agree with what Miller developed some thirty years ago already, that borderline is today’s name for hysteria. He provided a wonderful, very precise formula that traditional hysteria is a master, reaction to the master, you provoke the master by hysterical question. But today that we no longer have the traditional master but the expert science and so on, it’s a very nice idea that
me that her horrible moment was when the eye turned around and as it were it was almost a God-like position: she saw part of herself from the outside. You know like—it’s not from within your body as—and she told me it was—it was a nightmare. So I would nonetheless say that still this—I now agree with you—but still you displaced it onto the other. But the true thing would have been to—to look at yourself, as it were. Maybe this is not even such a great thing, maybe extreme perverts can do it. Perverts are nightmare, I don’t like them because I think only perverts can really objectivize themselves, you know. Perverts are—don't praise them too much. I mean perverts are—sorry. That’s—but it’s a nice point. I will think about it, yes. Although—no, I am not now terrorizing you like—did you feel it? But I hope some of you admit it, my God, didn’t it happen to you? It happens to me all the time, this weird Sartrean moment of nausea, of derealization, like: "Fuck it, it's all shit, it's so inert, what am I doing here?" and so on, you know. It’s—it is something. But you know what’s now my problem? And I told them they were not able to—reply to me. Some—cognitivist-biologist friends. I asked them a simple question: do you think animals—those who fuck properly, primates and so on—do you think that they are able of such an experience? Let’s say you have all your instincts, blah, a mating, do it, and then—it’s very weird. I would say no, because I would say such a disgust presupposes that you live in a fantasy universe sustained by fantasies, and it’s the fantasy which breaks down, nothing in reality. So that would have interested me very much: can they do it or not? No? It’s the same with virtuality. Sorry for repeating myself but that’s my—always a question to those who propagate Artificial Intelligence. You know the joke that I told twenty times here, that I will not even repeat it all, *Ninotchka* joke, you know: "We don’t have milk, we just have cream, so I cannot give you coffee without milk, just with cream." So again, we have three coffees: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. Materially they are the same. But symbolically they are not the same. My point: can a computer register this difference? Or it’s just, you know, that—the absence itself, that absence can also be present or absent. If you ask for—if a waiter brings you cream without milk, the milk is there as absent inscribed. It’s not the same as plain coffee. Now can the computer register this absence as such? And they didn’t give me a clear answer. Yes. I’m thinking in this room some years ago, Agon Hamza, Etienne Balibar and—oh my God, I’ve forgotten her name—Wendy Brown. Oh my God, I like her, she is more intelligent than Judith but that's what— Wendy Brown and Etienne Balibar in conversation about the genealogy of human capital. Yeah. Self-enhancement for the purposes of credit and investment and competition as the only relationality. The Lacanian clinic at the moment, you know I’m thinking of Éric Laurent's book, *The Other Side of Biopolitics*, psychoanalysis as the other side of biopolitics. The cure is always subjectivity and the division in the subject. Yeah. So my question is, could you say something about the fact that we've produced biopolitically as aspects of human capital and psychoanalysis, the treatment is to become subject with its division? It's a hard work. This is—okay, allow me to answer two days from now because it's too complex. It is a very complex question because you must know how complex already it is with Lacan. Because although all the effort in some of his late seminars is to move beyond subjectivity of capital, but the only formula that he provides is the same—like the only—and I—the position of a saint is for Lacan, saint as excrement out of this circulation. But I claim that with today’s late capitalism, I wonder if even this works or not. What about ordinary psychosis? Yeah. Although—to answer this properly I would have—I would nonetheless like to raise this question. I hope we all agree that—this traditional idea, you know historicist obsession, today’s borderline we no longer have a—hysteria and so on—they proceed too fast. I think I agree with what Miller developed some thirty years ago already, that borderline is today’s name for hysteria. He provided a wonderful, very precise formula that traditional hysteria is a master, reaction to the master, you provoke the master by hysterical question. But today that we no longer have the traditional master but the expert science and so on, it’s a very nice idea that
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borderline
borderline
Slavoj Žižek
is the hysteria of this new epoch. Now what I don’t know—I’m not bluffing here—is to what extent—I mean the standard Lacanian position years ago was as you probably know better
is the hysteria of this new epoch. Now what I don’t know—I’m not bluffing here—is to what extent—I mean the standard Lacanian position years ago was as you probably know better
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than me,
than me,
Slavoj Žižek
was that hysteria is historical, it’s not just the—it’s clear that with every historical epoch different interpellation, mode of subjectivity, hysteria changes. Okay, what about psychosis? There was one school, my Australian friend Russell Grigg wrote a text again thirty years ago, where he claims that psychosis, paranoia and so on is much more ahistorical. And he tried to prove this with a wonderful reading of who was that one-god guy, Akhenaten, the ancient Egypt? He described what we know about him, symptoms, and claimed this is almost the same as Schreber, rays from the sun and so on, how psychosis is much more non-historical. Now I’m too stupid to—to answer this question. But you know where I do agree in my book—which one? I think it’s in *Incontinence of the Void*. And people accuse me there, always attacking Miller. No. Where I agree with my book there is that I refer to Miller, you know with all that stuff written about Lacan and four discourses and capitalism, there is a long debate of capitalist discourse, which of them it is. There are a couple of versions. As you know probably better than me, Lacan tried to at some point he was tempted by conceptualizing as the the fifth discourse: master but with places changed. Then for some people it’s, I’m tempted to this position, that this big shift in modernity. Modernity is on the one hand this capitalist hysterization, dynamic, over more and this discourse that Foucault describes of surveiller et punir, control and so on, so that capitalism is constitutively split between university expert knowledge and hysteria surplus. But the best version I heard, you know this were still moments of genius in Miller, is he said: what if the capitalist discourse is exactly the same in its formula as analyst discourse, just with—that somehow the link functions in a different way. The agent of capitalist discourse is small a, the surplus. This small a, the surplus, addresses the subject and so on and it—it works beautifully. So again, I—because of lack of my knowledge I am afraid to give you a concrete answer, but I—I agree with you that this is a key question also because it’s not clear even to me—like, do you have a position on this, to be very brutal, to what extent can psychosis be dealt with in psychoanalysis? I am not too optimistic here. Some guys that I knew, I will not name them, were very "yes we can, you just elaborate it a little bit" and so on and so on. But there are suspicions that these guys are really cheating. You know because people don't take
was that hysteria is historical, it’s not just the—it’s clear that with every historical epoch different interpellation, mode of subjectivity, hysteria changes. Okay, what about psychosis? There was one school, my Australian friend Russell Grigg wrote a text again thirty years ago, where he claims that psychosis, paranoia and so on is much more ahistorical. And he tried to prove this with a wonderful reading of who was that one-god guy, Akhenaten, the ancient Egypt? He described what we know about him, symptoms, and claimed this is almost the same as Schreber, rays from the sun and so on, how psychosis is much more non-historical. Now I’m too stupid to—to answer this question. But you know where I do agree in my book—which one? I think it’s in *Incontinence of the Void*. And people accuse me there, always attacking Miller. No. Where I agree with my book there is that I refer to Miller, you know with all that stuff written about Lacan and four discourses and capitalism, there is a long debate of capitalist discourse, which of them it is. There are a couple of versions. As you know probably better than me, Lacan tried to at some point he was tempted by conceptualizing as the the fifth discourse: master but with places changed. Then for some people it’s, I’m tempted to this position, that this big shift in modernity. Modernity is on the one hand this capitalist hysterization, dynamic, over more and this discourse that Foucault describes of surveiller et punir, control and so on, so that capitalism is constitutively split between university expert knowledge and hysteria surplus. But the best version I heard, you know this were still moments of genius in Miller, is he said: what if the capitalist discourse is exactly the same in its formula as analyst discourse, just with—that somehow the link functions in a different way. The agent of capitalist discourse is small a, the surplus. This small a, the surplus, addresses the subject and so on and it—it works beautifully. So again, I—because of lack of my knowledge I am afraid to give you a concrete answer, but I—I agree with you that this is a key question also because it’s not clear even to me—like, do you have a position on this, to be very brutal, to what extent can psychosis be dealt with in psychoanalysis? I am not too optimistic here. Some guys that I knew, I will not name them, were very "yes we can, you just elaborate it a little bit" and so on and so on. But there are suspicions that these guys are really cheating. You know because people don't take
unknown
into account that psychosis, here I’m a Lacanian, is a matter of structure, not of concrete symptom. You can have a paranoia, but it can be a hysterical paranoia and so on. Symptoms as such don't directly define the—the mental, the mental state and so on. Where things get really paradoxical is when Lacan—okay,
into account that psychosis, here I’m a Lacanian, is a matter of structure, not of concrete symptom. You can have a paranoia, but it can be a hysterical paranoia and so on. Symptoms as such don't directly define the—the mental, the mental state and so on. Where things get really paradoxical is when Lacan—okay,
Slavoj Žižek
he often flirted with these extreme formulations—but he somewhere says that normality is just a successful version of psychosis. You'd call yourself an ordinary psychotic? Yeah. You'd thought of yourself as an ordinary psychotic? And many analysts now when they do case history say
he often flirted with these extreme formulations—but he somewhere says that normality is just a successful version of psychosis. You'd call yourself an ordinary psychotic? Yeah. You'd thought of yourself as an ordinary psychotic? And many analysts now when they do case history say
unknown
that
that
Slavoj Žižek
they are ordinary psychotics. It sounds almost attractive. Is there a choice for us? It’s just that dealing with the marks on the body, meeting the—the marks—that kind of determine that destination of meeting marks on the body that are non-ontological. There’s no address, this outside of structure, yeah. And then the escabeau, so that there is like both going on. You get what I’m saying? Yeah. Sorry, my... Okay, so it’s so fascinating. We go on, but we just have to draw to a conclusion. It’s just this: so please come tomorrow because it will be kind of— Tomorrow reading Marx: Agon Hamza, Frank Ruda, and Slavoj Zizek, not here but at Friends Meeting House. There are still tickets, there are still tickets, it’s free but you need to sign up through Eventbrite. It’s in Friends Meeting House opposite Euston Station. Is that where we sometimes have courses, the opposite, the other one there? Yeah, it’s a yeah, big, very big lecture theater. Is in the basement there? I don't know, the light lecture theater. Okay, but there will be enough idiots of us there that we will recognize each other. The second masterclass will be here again on Wednesday, and Thursday at two. Thank you everyone.
they are ordinary psychotics. It sounds almost attractive. Is there a choice for us? It’s just that dealing with the marks on the body, meeting the—the marks—that kind of determine that destination of meeting marks on the body that are non-ontological. There’s no address, this outside of structure, yeah. And then the escabeau, so that there is like both going on. You get what I’m saying? Yeah. Sorry, my... Okay, so it’s so fascinating. We go on, but we just have to draw to a conclusion. It’s just this: so please come tomorrow because it will be kind of— Tomorrow reading Marx: Agon Hamza, Frank Ruda, and Slavoj Zizek, not here but at Friends Meeting House. There are still tickets, there are still tickets, it’s free but you need to sign up through Eventbrite. It’s in Friends Meeting House opposite Euston Station. Is that where we sometimes have courses, the opposite, the other one there? Yeah, it’s a yeah, big, very big lecture theater. Is in the basement there? I don't know, the light lecture theater. Okay, but there will be enough idiots of us there that we will recognize each other. The second masterclass will be here again on Wednesday, and Thursday at two. Thank you everyone.
unknown
Thank
Thank
Slavoj Žižek
you very much.
you very much.