Moebius Strip, Cross Cap, Klein Bottle: The Twisted Space of Subjectivity
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-10-20 · 2:30:44 · 19,041 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologysexuality-genderreligion-theologysubjectivitycinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalcapitalismscience-physicsethics
Žižek delivers a lecture using Lacan's three topological figures, Möbius strip, Cross-cap, and Klein bottle, as a framework for Hegelian dialectics, mapping them onto Being, Essence, and Notion respectively. He applies this schema to topics including sexual difference and the LGBTQ+ 'plus', suture theory, the ideological structure of capitalism versus authentic liberation (servitude volontaire), and ontological questions about subjectivity and the pre-ontological Real. The lecture concludes with cinematic analyses of 'A Conspiracy of Faith', 'Wind River', and 'Arrival', reading each as illustrations of atheist goodness, empty ritual, and the paradox of free action within determinism. A Q&A section covers Kant's radical evil, Althusser's interpellation, Hannah Arendt on Eichmann, and the Hegelian logic of rewriting the past to open the future.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Lichtung (clearing/disclosure of being)”
Heidegger's term for the historically conditioned transcendental horizon within which beings appear; Žižek acknowledges it but argues we must now risk the question of what entities are outside or beyond this horizon.
as “Cross-cap (logic of Essence/reflection)”
The Cross-cap models the Hegelian logic of Essence: a redoubled Möbius strip where the continuous passage is interrupted by a cut, producing 'pure difference', a difference that precedes the two terms it differentiates, illustrated by sexual difference and class struggle.
as “Möbius strip (dialectics of Being)”
Žižek uses the Möbius strip as the topological model for the Hegelian order of Being, where any feature pushed to its extreme passes continuously into its opposite, freedom into terror, love into hatred, with no stable difference or identity.
as “Klein bottle (subjectivity and the pre-ontological Real)”
Žižek uses the Klein bottle as the model of the Hegelian Notion: the closed ideological universe we inhabit is not solipsist but is itself part of a wider reality, with the subject corresponding to the bottle's paradoxical 'snout', the blind spot by which inside connects to outside.
A difference that does not differentiate two already-constituted terms but precedes them and is itself the impossible ground of any identity; sexual difference and class struggle are names for this deadlock, not labels for pre-existing groups.
as “point de capiton (quilting point)”
Following Lacan, Žižek uses the quilting point to describe the suturing element that holds together two otherwise disintegrating symbolic universes, illustrated by Stephen King's Dark Tower.
Žižek insists suture has two irreducible directions: no interior without an exterior stand-in for the excluded outside (the standard materialist reading), but equally no exterior without a subjective supplement that constitutes objective reality.
Žižek uses the Stalinist category 'sub-kulak', those who have the subjective attitude of kulaks without the objective social criteria, as a paradigm case of how every objective classification must include a pseudo-element that objectifies a subjective stance.
as “plus (as ontological surplus)”
In the LGBTQ+ formula, '+' is not merely an epistemological marker of an incomplete list but a positive ontological entity embodying the negativity or impossibility constitutive of any universality, the element that gives body to what cannot be classified.
as “perversion as instrument of power”
Lacan's thesis, endorsed by Žižek, that perversion is the necessary obscene underside of every political power structure, not a subversive position, the pervert knows what he is for the Other and serves it.
Žižek argues (following Dolar) that the hysterical question, 'Why am I what you tell me I am?', is the most elementary gesture of ideological critique, more radical than perversion, and that subjectivity as such is feminine-hysterical.
Žižek emphasizes that for Lacan the original lost object is not a romantic incestuous object but the subject itself as object, the baby's uncertainty about what it is for the Other.
Marx's point that capitalism is actually universal, the abstract form of commodity exchange is a real fact of social life, not merely a conceptual imposition, so universality under capitalism is not just ideology but operative reality.
Hegel's term for society's outcasts who have no proper place in the social edifice; Žižek invokes it as an analogue of the proletariat embodying universality, those left behind who give body to the universal.
as “In-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-world)”
Heidegger's refusal of the subject/world gap; Žižek partly accepts this but argues that 'we and our world' together constitute a closed Klein-bottle-like space that itself stands against a pre-ontological Real.
as “liberating master”
A master whose sole function is to give subjects back to themselves, not commanding what to do but affirming 'you can do it', distinguished from the standard authoritarian master who knows better than you what you want.
as “servitude volontaire (voluntary servitude)”
Žižek distinguishes two types: capitalist voluntary servitude, where one feels free while actually enslaved to the logic of capital, and authentic voluntary servitude, where consciously serving a cause (or a liberating master) is itself the first act of freedom.
Žižek's position that authentic goodness requires viewing the world with an inhuman eye, accepting its cruel indifference without any big Other as guarantor of meaning, and that genuine Christian gesture (solidarity, compassion) is only possible for an atheist.
as “epistemological obstacle vs. ontological impossibility”
The key Hegelian move beyond Kant: what appears as our inability to know the thing-in-itself is recast as a real gap or impossibility in the thing itself, indeterminacy is not our limitation but part of what is.
as “ontological incompleteness of reality”
Žižek reads quantum physics (via Bohr) as showing that indeterminacy is not merely an epistemic limitation but a feature of reality itself, we 'catch God with his pants down', revealing an incompleteness analogous to unrendered video-game backgrounds.
A ritual emptied of its original substantive content that nonetheless functions as authentic precisely because it is performed by modern subjects who know it is empty, the improvised death-face in Wind River being the key example.
Following Althusser but with Dolar's correction: the moment of 'hey you' is never simple acceptance but always accompanied by anxiety ('why me?'), and it is in this gap that subjectivity and freedom enter.
as “displaced belief”
Following Robert Pfaller, Žižek argues that most beliefs today are beliefs of/for others, nobody believes in the first person, but beliefs function through figures of the Other ('my children need it', 'not to offend grandma'), constituting sincere hypocrisy.
Kant's concept of evil done not for profit but for its own sake, which formally mirrors the good act done purely from duty; Žižek argues Kant steps back from this consequence and that goodness comes dangerously close to radical evil.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order whose absence (in atheism) or collapse reveals that goodness and ethical engagement must be groundless, without the big Other as ultimate guarantee, one is thrown back on pure act.
as “future anterior”
The Lacanian temporal structure 'what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming'; Žižek uses it to argue that opening the future requires rewriting the past symbolically, not just identifying spaces of choice within a determined present.
Stories he reaches for 6
Haitian slaves used the universalist form of French Enlightenment rights against France itself, claiming not just inclusion in French universality but a more consistent universality than the French had achieved, one of history's two or three greatest events.
“We want to be not only part of the same universality as you French are, we want to correct you and be more universal than you are.”
The iconic Viking helmet with horns was never archaeologically found; it was invented for early stagings of Wagner's operas and then retroactively attributed to actual Vikings, a case of ideology creating its own historical past.
“Those helmets with horns...were not stupid it would have been extremely unpractical. It was invented for the staging of early Wagner's operas.”
Žižek reverses the usual Pascalian lesson (act as if you believe and belief will come): if you already truly believe, you should externalize it in ritual so you don't have to constantly believe, ritual provides a minimal distance and liberates you from obsessive inner belief.
“Act as if you believe externalized your belief in rituals and you don't have to believe you can be free.”
Soviet collectivization required 'sub-kulak' as a category: defined ostensibly as an objective social class, it actually picked out those who merely had the subjective attitude of a kulak, a pure objectivization of a subjective stance inserted into an otherwise objective taxonomy.
“It was really those who, although they are not in any objective sense kulaks, are suspected of having the subjective attitude of kulaks.”
The Dark Tower sutures two parallel universes (modern New York and the violent 'Mid-World') in King's novel/film; destroy the tower and both realities disintegrate, a naively vivid image of Lacan's point de capiton.
“The Dark Tower...holds it together. If this tower is destroyed, our reality will disintegrate.”
Following Frank Ruda, Žižek highlights the neglected detail that even unchained prisoners in Plato's cave would not leave voluntarily, they must be forced out. This requires a liberating master, and the prisoner must volunteer to be forced, creating a dialectics of master and volunteer.
“The exit from the cave begins when one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains but when he is forced out.”
Works invoked 21
Hegel's major work referenced in the context of the Dash at its concluding paragraph and its unresolvable relationship to the Logic, one of only two real Hegelian 'books'.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's large book on Hegel and Lacan; he mentions experiencing 'post-coital depression' after finishing it and wrote subsequent books as responses to its problems.
Philosophy of Right book
Read by Žižek not as a model for the future but as a systematic articulation of a form of life already in disintegration, the owl of Minerva flying at dusk.
Lukács cited as the canonical articulation of Marxist transcendentalism: all our ways of relating to the world are overdetermined by concrete historical practice.
Science of Logic book
The second of Hegel's two genuine books (per Ruda); the Dash that opens the Logic mirrors the one at the Phenomenology's end.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič's book (MIT Press); praised for developing the thesis that femininity is 'plus', not a counterposition to masculinity but an impossible supplement; Žižek says the title was stupidly imposed by MIT Press.
Žižek's own new book (then just out); title taken from Samuel Beckett; he frames it as part of the 'Lacanian troika' project on ontology.
Being and Time book
Heidegger's foundational work on being-in-the-world; Žižek acknowledges its critique of modern metaphysics but argues we must go beyond its transcendentalism.
Arrival film
Used to illustrate the paradox of free action under determinism and the celebration of human finitude over holistic New Age readings; Žižek also argues the heroine makes the narcissistically wrong choice.
Left Behind book
Tim LaHaye's novels; Žižek is 'ashamed to mention' them and calls the authors 'total creeps' but uses the rapture/left-behind narrative as illustration of capital's logic of surplus population.
Armageddon film
Called a 'disgusting example' of the Hollywood formula where the father sacrifices himself to enable the romantic couple; contrasted unfavorably with Blade Runner 2049's non-Hollywood resolution.
Danish noir used as the central illustration of Christian atheism: the atheist detective performs the authentic Christian gesture while the religious serial killer relies on the big Other.
Kant avec Sade essay
Lacan's text cited for the claim that Kant, not irrational unconscious philosophy, is the true historical origin of psychoanalysis.
The Dark Tower film
Simplifies the novels but the image of two universes held together by a quilting point is useful for illustrating suture.
Described as 'much more sympathetic and serious' than the Left Behind novels; cited alongside them in the discussion of the 'left behind' theological-economic motif.
Kant's text cited for the concept of radical evil and Kant's retreat from the consequences of his own discovery, radical evil as formally mirroring the good act.
Inuit film praised as genuinely good despite Žižek's resistance to politically correct third-world cinema; used to illustrate that the fetish of 'original authentic version' is itself European colonial modernism.
Blade Runner 2049 film
Described as possibly the best film about post-human capitalism; praised for the Wallace vs. state-apparatus antagonism and the father-daughter resolution; faulted for being too humanist in not dwelling on what new being might emerge from replicant consciousness.
Beyond Interpellation essay
Mladen Dolar's text (cited as 30 years old) developing how hysteria is the most elementary gesture of ideological critique, more radical than Althusserian interpellation.
Wind River film
Described as 'modest, naive, but at some level I like it'; used as the key example of empty ritual, the improvised death-face paint, and the two dimensions of modern subjectivity and authentic gesture.
Belgian film (not seen by Žižek at time of talk) described to him as depicting God as a sadistic game-master; he enthusiastically connects it to his gnostic reading of Christ as God's apology.
People invoked 30
Mary Wollstonecraft positive
Cited approvingly as an example of how the empty universalist form of rights was appropriated by the excluded, women using the logic of universal rights to demand their own inclusion.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Close friend and collaborator ('Lacanian troika'); praised for her work on sexual difference, the plus, and universality; her book What Is Sex? (MIT Press) is cited on femininity as 'plus'; her 'ferocious attacks' on Žižek are welcomed.
Todd McGowan positive
Organizer of the event; described as a friend; Žižek jokes he is one of the 'miserable creatures' who doesn't like Blade Runner 2049.
Robert Pippin negative
Described as a good Hegelian but criticized for reading the Philosophy of Right as a model for the future, when Žižek argues it describes a form of life already in disintegration.
Blaise Pascal positive
Žižek reverses the usual Althusserian reading of Pascal's wager: instead of 'act as if you believe and you will believe', rituals externalize belief and free you from having to believe internally.
Denis Villeneuve positive
Director of both Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, both of which Žižek analyzes at length; praised for the depth of the films.
Rebecca Comay positive
Co-author with Ruda of a forthcoming MIT Press book on Hegel's Dash; mentioned approvingly.
History and Class Consciousness cited as example of Marxist transcendentalism, the view that our relation to the world is overdetermined by concrete historical practice.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for interpreting Kant's transcendental constitution as actually a form of impotence rather than omnipotence, the subject constitutes reality as a kind of Plato's cave.
Jacques Lacan positive
Core reference throughout: topology (Möbius strip, Cross-cap, Klein bottle), point de capiton, sexual difference as deadlock, the big Other, objet petit a as the subject as object, Kant avec Sade.
Louis Althusser negative
Interpellation theory is criticized as wrong (anxiety of 'why me?' is the real moment); his insistence on the materiality of ideological apparatuses is found suspicious; his reading of Pascal is reversed; his failure to theorize immaterial belief is lamented.
Frank Ruda positive
Co-author with Rebecca Comay of forthcoming book on Hegel's Dash (MIT Press); also wrote an unpublished text rehabilitating Plato's cave as theory of ideology, focusing on being forced to be free; Žižek quotes him extensively.
Robert Pfaller positive
Austrian friend cited for the concept of 'beliefs of others' (interpassivity/displaced belief): beliefs that function socially without anyone holding them in the first person.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek endorses her point that the first step of feminism is to recognize one's servitude before liberating oneself, and her proposal to 'sabotage' by demanding the master give clear orders rather than playing liberal equality.
Taylor Sheridan positive
Director of Wind River; the film is described as 'modest, naive, but at some level I like it' and used as a key philosophical example of empty ritual.
Adolf Eichmann negative
Held up as the paradigmatic un-Kantian: his defense that he was a good Kantian following orders is refuted because a Kantian cannot displace responsibility onto authority.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for rehabilitating the concept of goodness against pseudo-Nietzschean dismissals.
Graham Harman negative
Object-oriented ontology is said to give wrong answers to right questions; Harman's reproach that Žižek still treats the subject as exceptional is noted but rejected.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited as source of Žižek's formula 'courage of hopelessness' in the context of groundless ethical acts.
Stephen King positive
Žižek says he doesn't like King's Dark Tower novels but finds the basic idea of a quilting point (point de capiton) 'beautifully naive' and philosophically illuminating.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Criticized (via Bohr) for remaining Kantian, his uncertainty principle is still epistemological; Bohr goes further by making indeterminacy ontological.
Mladen Dolar positive
Third member of the 'Lacanian troika'; credited with 'Beyond Interpellation' (Žižek's source for hysteria as critique of ideology); forthcoming Écrits collection (Bloomsbury).
Referenced in passing for the concept of episteme, illustrating how deconstructive thought reduces ontological questions to questions of discursive regime.
Martin Heidegger positive
Major reference for being-in-the-world and Lichtung/disclosure of being as the transcendental horizon; Žižek accepts his critique of modern metaphysics of subjectivity but argues we must move beyond even Heidegger's transcendentalism toward the pre-ontological Real.
Ted Chiang positive
Identified as the Chinese-American author of the short story on which Arrival is based; described as an extraordinary writer who publishes rarely.
Hannah Arendt negative
Appreciated personally but criticized for taking Eichmann's self-description as a good Kantian seriously; Žižek argues Eichmann was the opposite of a Kantian.
Walter Benjamin positive
Briefly invoked for the idea of unearthing deadlocks and openings abandoned in the past, 'redemptive' rewriting of history, as a path toward the future.
Niels Bohr positive
Cited as showing that indeterminacy is ontological, not merely epistemological (contra Heisenberg); Žižek uses this as the physics parallel to the Hegelian move from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Fundamental philosophical reference for the Being/Essence/Notion triad, dialectical passage into opposites, the owl of Minerva, the rabble (Pöbel), and the rewriting of the past; Žižek defends Hegel against conservative and Nietzschean readings.
Immanuel Kant positive
Crucial reference for the subjective supplement constituting objective reality, the categorical imperative (du kannst, denn du sollst), radical evil, suspicion of pure goodness, and as the founder of psychoanalysis avant la lettre (per Lacan's Kant avec Sade).
What it argues
Lacanian topology as philosophical method (Möbius strip, Cross-cap, Klein bottle)Sexual difference and the LGBTQ+ 'plus' as ontological surplusSuture, representation, and the two-sided relation of interior and exteriorVoluntary servitude: capitalist freedom vs. authentic liberationChristian atheism and groundless goodnessEmpty ritual and modern subjectivityOntological incompleteness of reality and quantum physics
Dialectical moves 14
“A feature pushed to its extreme passes into its opposite: being turns out to be nothing, radical freedom turns out to be self-destructive terror, love brought to extreme turns into hatred.”
The Möbius-strip structure of Being: any determination, carried through completely, reverses into its contrary, this is the basic dynamic of Hegelian dialectics.
“Sexual difference is not the difference between two sexes but the name of a deadlock in reaction to which every sexual position tries to stabilize itself.”
Sexual difference is not a difference between pre-constituted terms but the ontological antagonism that makes any sexual identity possible and unstable.
“The '+' is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation but a positive entity in itself—it gives body to the negativity that characterizes every universality.”
What appears as a modesty marker for incompleteness is recast as the positive ontological surplus that constitutes universality.
“Men stand for particularity, not universality; women—as 'plus'—stand for the universality of being human.”
Žižek inverts the standard male-chauvinist anthropology: it is the masculine position that is particular and the feminine position that embodies universality as surplus.
“We are enslaved precisely when we feel free, because this feeling is the very form of our servitude.”
The capitalist subject's sense of freedom as self-entrepreneur is not freedom but the ideological form taken by their enslavement to capital.
“In authentic liberation, the subjective experience of 'I am a slave' means I am in some sense already free; in capitalism, the feeling 'I am free' means I am enslaved.”
The reversal of the common sense pairing of freedom-feeling and actual freedom: recognizing one's unfreedom is the first act of liberation, while the feeling of freedom is servitude.
“To display authentic Christian goodness—the gesture of compassion and solidarity in a meaningless world—you have to be an atheist.”
Genuine Christian ethics is only possible once one abandons the big Other as guarantee of meaning; theism undermines the unconditional character of the ethical act.
“The serial killer Johannes still relies on the big Other (God/devil) in a negative way; the atheist detective Mørck is the true carrier of the Christian ethical gesture.”
The irony that the murderer preserves a (negative) religious structure while the atheist performs the authentic Christian act.
“An empty ritual improvised by two modern subjects who know it is empty is more authentic than any 'authentic' ethnic ritual.”
Authenticity does not reside in immersion or belief but in the formal gesture itself, modernity and the awareness of emptiness paradoxically enable genuine ritual function.
“There is no X in the sense of something that eludes us (Kantian epistemological limit); X is already ontological—the gap is in reality itself.”
The Hegelian move: the impossibility of knowing the thing-in-itself is not our cognitive limitation but reflects a real incompleteness or self-contradiction in the object.
“Accepting the brutal Real in all its senseless indifference, we are pushed to full ethico-political engagement—this is the ultimate Möbius strip reversal.”
Radical acceptance of meaninglessness and indifference is not quietism but paradoxically generates the strongest ethical commitment.
“To open the future, the first thing to do is to change the past—symbolically rewrite it so that it is no longer closed.”
Freedom does not consist in finding spaces within a determined present but in retroactively transforming the meaning of the past, releasing its foreclosed possibilities.
“Those who are 'left behind by God'—the Tuaregs, the rabble—can all of a sudden through rewriting the past turn out to be the very model of the future.”
What appears as remainder or waste in a given historical constellation can be revealed, through retroactive reinterpretation, as the site of future hope.
“Hegel is not a philosopher of winners or conservative reconciliation; philosophy, as the owl of Minerva, only articulates the conceptual structure of a form of life already in disintegration.”
Contra the conservative reading of Hegel, his system describes sunset, not sunrise, it retrospectively comprehends what is already dying, thereby anticipating what is to come.
Claims 24
asserts
The Lacanian topological triad of Möbius strip, Cross-cap, and Klein bottle maps onto the Hegelian triad of Being, Essence, and Notion, providing a precise structural model for dialectical thinking.Lacanian topology and Hegelian dialectics
asserts
Sexual difference is not the difference between two pre-existing sexes but the name of a deadlock—an antagonism—in reaction to which every sexual position tries to stabilize itself.sexual difference
asserts
The '+' in LGBTQ+ is not merely an epistemological marker of incompleteness but a positive ontological entity embodying the negativity constitutive of any universality; those it designates are universality embodied, not a remainder.LGBTQ+ and universality
asserts
Femininity is not a complementary species of humanity alongside masculinity but is the 'plus'—the impossible supplement that stands for subjectivity and the questioning of every identity.sexual difference and femininity
asserts
Subjectivity as such is feminine-hysterical because the basic formula of hysteria—doubting one's identity—is the most elementary form of the critique of ideology.subjectivity, hysteria, ideology
rejects
Perversion is not subversive but is the necessary dark underside of power structures; hysteria, not perversion, is the radical questioning position.the Freudian/pre-Lacanian view that perverts are the true revolutionaries
asserts
Suture works in both directions: not only does the interior space of representation require an element that stands in for its excluded outside, but equally, external reality requires a subjective supplement to attain its full existence.suture theory and materialism
asserts
Under capitalism, the very feeling of being free is the form of one's servitude to the logic of capital—we are enslaved precisely when we feel free.capitalist ideology and freedom
asserts
Authentic liberation (as in psychoanalysis or Plato's cave) requires a dialectics of the master and the volunteer: one must voluntarily submit to a liberating master whose function is only to give you back to yourself.liberation, the master, voluntary servitude
asserts
Genuine Christian goodness—the Christ-like gesture of compassion in a meaningless, indifferent world—is only possible for an atheist who has abandoned the big Other as guarantor of higher meaning.Christian atheism, ethics, goodness
asserts
The empty, improvised mourning ritual in Wind River is more authentic than any 'authentic' ethnic practice because both participants are already modern subjects who know the ritual is improvised, and it is this distance that makes it genuine.empty ritual, modernity, authenticity
reframes
Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world, while rightly rejecting the subject/world gap, must be supplemented: 'we and our world' form a closed Klein-bottle-like structure that is itself embedded in a pre-ontological Real.Heidegger's being-in-the-world and idealism vs. materialism
rejects
Object-oriented ontology gives wrong answers to right questions: it collapses the exceptional status of subjectivity by treating the subject as merely one object among others.object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman et al.)
asserts
Quantum physics (via Bohr) shows that indeterminacy is not an epistemological limitation but an ontological feature of reality itself—reality is genuinely incomplete, not merely incompletely known.quantum physics and ontology
asserts
Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production' functions not as one mode among others but as a negative container—the placeholder for all social orders that do not fit any of his categories—serving the suturing function of a pseudo-element.Marxist modes of production and suture
rejects
Eichmann was not a Kantian but the opposite: a true Kantian cannot displace responsibility onto another's authority, whereas Eichmann's 'I was following orders' is precisely the un-Kantian abdication of personal responsibility.Eichmann's claim to be a good Kantian (Hannah Arendt's reading)
asserts
Hegel's Philosophy of Right should be read as a description of a form of life already in disintegration, not as a model for the future—the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.Hegel's Philosophy of Right and its political meaning
asserts
To open the future it is not enough to identify spaces of freedom within a determined present; one must first symbolically rewrite the past, making it open rather than closed.freedom, determinism, and the rewriting of the past
rejects
The 'nominalist' solution to identity politics—expand the list and add a '+' for what is left out—is insufficient because it treats '+' as mere epistemological modesty rather than as a positive ontological entity.nominalist approach to LGBTQ+ classification
asserts
The universalist form of human rights has a genuine autonomy that opens spaces for those excluded—women, Haitian slaves—beyond the ideological function of privileging some; universality is not reducible to its ideological distortion.universality and human rights
rejects
Althusser's interpellation theory is wrong because recognition is never simple—there is always an anxious moment of 'why me?', and it is in this gap that subjectivity and freedom emerge.Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation
rejects
Althusser's insistence that ideological apparatuses are material is suspicious—the big Other is not material in any straightforward sense; true materialism must be a 'materialism of the immaterial'.Althusser's materialism of ideological apparatuses
rejects
In Arrival, the heroine's choice to have a child she knows will die is almost a criminal narcissism—the truly free act would have been to refuse predestination, not to enact it.the heroine's choice in Arrival and free will under determinism
rejects
Patronizing multicultural respect for 'primitive' cultures is one of the most disgusting forms of racism; what the Native American elder in Wind River shares with Cory is the same modern distance from the ritual.multicultural condescension as racism
Quotes 15
“We are enslaved precisely when we feel free because this feeling is the very form of our servitude.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalist freedom as ideological servitude
“Sexual difference is not the difference between the two sexes but the name of a deadlock which every sexual position tries to stabilize.”Slavoj Žižek · sexual difference as ontological antagonism
“In capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free because this feeling is the very form of my servitude. While in the liberating servitude volontaire my realization that I am serving enslaved to my unconscious...is the first act of freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · two types of voluntary servitude
“To display this type of goodness which is for me the ultimate Christian gesture that Mørck did, you have to be an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian atheism
“It may be shit but shit works in its very minimal gesture of withdrawal from life engagement.”Slavoj Žižek · empty ritual as authentic
“Most of the people that I know who are beyond good and evil are beneath good and evil. They haven't even progressed to that area.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of pseudo-Nietzschean dismissal of goodness
“We caught God with his pants down. God thought something like listen humans are too stupid to move beyond atoms so why should I lose time programming micro, let's leave it indeterminate.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness of reality / quantum physics
“The plus they are embodied universality in the same way that for Marx proletarians as those with no proper place within the social edifice are the embodiment of the universality.”Slavoj Žižek · LGBTQ+ plus as embodied universality
“Philosophy is like the owl of Minerva, it takes off...philosophy can only present the conceptual structure of a mode of life which is already in disintegration.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's retrospective character of philosophy
“Pure difference in the sense of a difference which is not a difference between two established entities but a difference which precedes the two terms it differentiates.”Slavoj Žižek · pure difference as ontological prior to identity
“Subjectivity as such is feminine hysterical. The basic formula of hysterical questioning is the doubt about my identity.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as the structure of subjectivity
“A Kantian cannot ever say [I was just following orders]. You are fully responsible for what you assume as the order.”Slavoj Žižek · Kantian ethics and Eichmann's defense
“To open the future the first thing to do is to change the past...symbolically rewriting the past...so that it's no longer the closed past but an open past.”Slavoj Žižek · rewriting the past as condition of freedom
“Those who are left behind all of a sudden become the site of the hope for the future.”Slavoj Žižek · the remainder as bearer of future possibility
“We should be a materialist of the immaterial.”Slavoj Žižek · materialism of the symbolic/immaterial
Transcript 60 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Oh my god. Sorry. Where are... this is not hospitality. Where are the big words, "we are so grateful to have him, we don't really deserve him but in his magnanimity he..." okay. Thanks very much. I hope all this technology works. Just three introductory points. First, I really mean it, but I don't know how to say it that it will not be a denegation, you know, or whatever. I really like it to be here. I feel at home, definitely more than in my own country among you here. Second point, I what I am just sorry, I want to apologize due to my health state and so on and I really mean it, that I wasn't able to socialize more. But believe me, when you get heavy diabetes, heart palpitations and so on, all those things combining, well, it's not so nice to be alive. A third point, I want to do something because Todd told me that, oh you can do as much pure theory as you want, so I made a step to that direction. So I hope you will not be too disappointed if it will not be too much of those political LGBT provocations or whatever. I mean, let's have some theory. We have time. I'm open to all these questions like, was I really for Trump? My god, be serious. I just maybe in the wrong way thought, hoped that when you have a figure as a figure like Donald Trump as the leader that it will trigger, it will be in a good sense, not in a politically correct sense, a trigger warning, you know. Obviously even that doesn't work. So we can all debate all this, but what I like would like to do, and it's important I think, is that maybe you noticed it but the 70s, 80s, 90s later were more an era of deconstruction which I read it as the ultimate stage of transcendental approach, in the sense that you don't ask direct ontological questions. Like, sorry, I have to, I'm a spontaneous racist, I have to pick up someone. Like, you know, when somebody asks me who is that? I am not allowed to say, well this is Henry from California or whatever. You the question the way to say is under what discursive regime can we talk about him? You know, like all questions are reduced to these questions of, to put it in Michel Foucault's terms, to what episteme they belong and so on and so on. So I mean there were tremendous positive results of this but it means again, the total annihilation, the so-called ontological dimension in the radical sense disappears. For example, in this approach when I ask you, do you think that we have an immortal soul or not? The answer would have been in what discursive field can you even debate about this? You know, and the ultimate, he was aware of it, the ultimate thinker in this direction was of course Heidegger. What he means by disclosure of being is simply the historically conditioned, of course, transcendental horizon within which we talk about objects. So his point about science is that our scientific attitude towards the world is overdetermined, whichever term we use, by a certain historically determined ontological horizon. But, and you find all this in my books, even throughout his life Heidegger gave hints that something is missing, that that's not all. From his early to his late writing he says, but for example, this is a stone which within certain historical horizon, disclosure of being, it appears to me as a stone, but what is the stone in the... because nonetheless Heidegger was not a naive subjectivist. He was well aware that this historical disclosure of being is just an open space, opening where objects, processes appear. It's not a process of ontic creation. What what Heidegger calls Lichtung or Sein, being, is not ontic causality. Sein does not, being does not cause entities. So what what is then the status of entities outside of this ontological horizon? And he himself admits this is a mystery, I haven't yet confronted it properly. And I think that today we should risk this. That's why I am, I now wrote even a text, a benevolently polemical text, about object-oriented ontology, because I think they are giving, for me at least, I'm sorry, the wrong answers but to questions that we should confront. And I will try to make kind of a some preliminary steps into this direction today. Lacan, as we all know, often Jacques Lacan often refers to three of these topological models that you see behind my back: Möbius strip, Cross-cap, and the Klein bottle. So I want to take these as a starting point, and you will see, I hope you will be a little bit surprised where it will take us. On the top, Möbius strip is a surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space and only one boundary which has the mathematical property of being unorientable. An example it's easy to create a Möbius strip. You take a paper strip, give it a half twist, and then you join the ends of the strip to form a loop. So a line starting from the seam down the middle meets back at the seam but on the other side and so on, you know. Then the middle one, it's much more interesting already, Cross-cap is a continuously deformed Möbius strip. A two-dimensional surface in a three-dimensional space that intersects itself in an interval. The inverse image of this interval is a longer interval that the mapping into three-dimensional space folds in half. Again, you have it in the middle. Then two cross-caps glued together at their boundaries form what you have there on the bottom, a model of Klein bottle. This time with two intervals of self-intersection. Klein bottle is also a non-orientable surface, which means a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. It's again, Klein bottle, a one-sided surface which if traveled upon could be followed back to the point of origin. So what's my aim here? My aim is to show or at least indicate that this triad echoes the Hegelian triad of Being, Essence, Notion. The Möbius strip stands for the basic dynamics of the order of being, for what was traditionally called the dialectical coincidence of the opposites. Brought to its extreme, a feature passes into its opposite. Being as such turns out to be nothing, radical freedom turns out to be self-destructive terror, love brought to extreme turns into hatred, necessity reveals itself to be the highest contingency and so on and so on. There is here no proper difference or identity, just the continuous passage of one feature into its opposite. Difference only appears when in a redoubled Möbius track which gives us a Cross-cap, the continuous process of passage is interrupted by a cut. Through this redoubling of the Möbius strip, the opposite poles do not pass into another but are deprived of any shared space which would enable us to determine their difference as such. The effort of thinking is here to mediate the two opposite poles by way of determining their difference, but this effort fails again and again. Identity and difference, essence and appearance, cause and effect, substance and its accidents are all the time reflected into each other and what eludes this reflexive mediation is not some deeper identity of the opposites but their difference as such. So brought to its end, the logic of reflection confronts us with the paradox of pure difference in the sense of a difference which is not a difference between two established entities but a difference which precedes the two terms it differentiates. For example, from the Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference is not the difference between the two sexes but the name of a deadlock which every sexual position tries to stabilize. Or in Marxism, class struggle is not a struggle between pre-existing social groups but the name of a social antagonism in reaction to which every class position emerges. What this means is that there is no shared common space between the two sexes or classes. What they share, what holds the social space or the space of sexuality together, is ultimately antagonism itself. The image of Cross-cap in the middle, you can see it behind my back, renders this key feature in a nice imaginative way. The overall first impression is that of an organic rounded whole, like a harmonious social body. But upon a closer look, you can quickly see, perceive cracks, disharmonies in this whole. The horizontal lines of the two halves do not fit, which means we are dealing with a patched-up composite so that the rounded body looks more like a freakish montage. To get a plastic image of such redoubled Möbius strip, I want to shock you maybe, but nobody is shocked today, by mentioning one of the novels that I don't really like but the basic idea I find attractive. Stephen King's series of novels *The Dark Tower*. Why do I find it attractive? Because it relies on a beautifully naive vision of what Lacan calls *point de capiton*, the quilting point. A mysterious black tower which sutures our reality and thereby holds it together. If this tower is destroyed, our reality will disintegrate, fall apart, and we would be reduced to a barbaric universe of dark violence. But what is crucial in Stephen King's vision is that it's not only our reality, and there we have the two sides, our reality is redoubled. In the film version, you must have seen it, it opened up recently, the film version it simplifies novels a little bit, it takes place in both modern-day New York City and in so-called Mid-World, an old West-style parallel universe which stands for the barbaric universe of violence. And so sorry, that's the idea. Two universes like two Möbius strips, they are held together precisely by something like Dark Tower which is I think a naive image of again what Lacan calls the quilting point, *point de capiton*, and this is the function of suturing. And to get an idea of why Cross-cap, I think I would like to delve a little bit with what I already developed in some of my books with the complexity of the notion of suture. This complexity is lost in the predominant use of the term where suture concerns the relationship between the closed circle of ideological representation and its external site of production. The idea of suture is that in order to close the circle of representation, there has to be in it a symptomatic element which sutures the field of representations in so far as it functions as a stand-in for the excluded outside. It is an element which within the space of representation holds the place of the excluded external production. However, this notion of suture, materialist as it may appear to be, has to be supplemented by its opposite. The external reality in order to attain its full existence has to be supplemented, sutured, by a subjective element. And you know it's crucial to maintain this, not ambiguity, in some sense of vagueness, but these two aspects. Again, at least when I was young, when the theory of suture was popular, it was read, interpreted almost exclusively in the first sense. The idea, the idea was that we live in our idealized world of representations which are just a theater of shadow which mirrors actual site of production. But this mirroring is never perfect, so there has to be a suturing element, something which appears as one representation but it really holds the place within the space of representation of its outside. Okay, I used in my books all the time repeatedly the same examples, so why not to repeat them one time more? For example, it's my reading that, even a little bit of critique of Marx, that in Marxism, I tend to agree with those who claim that the Marxist, or rather Marxist of Marx, because it was never part of Marxism, notion of so-called Asiatic mode of representation is such a suturing element. If you look at it superficially, it's just one in the line of modes of production. We have so-called primitive pre-class free state societies, then we have Asiatic mode of production, then we have ancient Greek slave societies, feudal societies, capitalist societies, and whatever will come afterwards, no. Maybe communism, but maybe communism will not be as nice as people expect, whatever. But I think that the hidden logic is this one. I try to be here at a very elementary level. Marx originally, as it's clear, only enumerated five stages: so-called primitive pre-class societies, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and let's not go into all that, social and communism, whatever you call it. Then he discovered that there are many modes of production, or rather social orders, which do not fit any of these five. And I claim, it can be proved, now of course I will not do it now, that the Asiatic mode of production, although it appears to be one among the others, its only actual theoretical meaning is like that joke from Borges quoted by Foucault, you know, a special category of dogs, all dogs who do not belong to this list. It simply means all social orders which do not fit any of my modes of production. It's just a negative container. But it is needed as a pseudo-element because it sutures the space of representation. And okay, I will not lose time here. My this appears to be the materialist logic. The actual productive reality is outside, it's just sutured in the theater of shadows and so on. Sorry, it's always represented in a limited way. And it's interesting, my good friend whom I envy, she will be the next big name, really big, bigger than me I predict, Alenka Zupančič. She developed nicely how in, how precisely in the post-Hegelian universe, this became a big topic, the imperfection of every representation at all levels. Like, can political representation really cover society, or is there always some excess which cannot be properly represented? Or even marriage and love, sexual love. Can marriage or any other sexual social-regulated form of sexuality, can it cover the field of actual sexuality and so on and so on. So again, this sounds materialist, but I think it's absolutely crucial to also include the opposite logic. It's not only no interior without exterior. That is to say, to close, to suture the circle of interior representation, you need a suturing element, this pseudo-element which is, I'm ashamed of using this old structuralist jargon, which is the placeholder of a lack of what is excluded and so on. It's part of true materialism for me, paradoxically, although it will sound subjectivist, to improve also the opposite. No exterior without interior. That's for example the lesson of Immanuel Kant. To build out of the confusion of subjective impressions, to construct out of it the image of external reality, we need to add what? Precisely a subjective gesture. You have to add something to obtain out of confused pre-ontological real, let's call it reality, reality that we know as existing really out there, you need a subjective supplement. Or objective reality only exists through this subjective addition. Okay, I will not go into it in detail, because I have here, I just hope I can share you with you all this, what I am working now. A wonderful book will appear relatively soon by MIT Press, written together by my good German friend Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay, on Dash. Dash like the sign which occurs at two crucial places in Hegel's phenomenology in Hegel's work. Dash you find it at the very end before that quote from Schiller, concluding paragraph of Phenomenology, and at the very beginning of Hegel's logic. And the idea, I think this part was written by Frank Ruda, is that Hegel basically wrote only two books, Phenomenology and Logic. Okay, he wrote some early stuff which are not proper books, and then his two systematic works, Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right. But they are not really books, they are pure university discourse, they are manuals written in very legal way, manuals for university courses. But what Frank Ruda demonstrates in a wonderful way is how elusive, impossible to determine the difference between the two. This would be the another Cross-cap if you want. They don't really fit together. You cannot bring them together. All attempts to construct some harmonious whole like first Hegel elaborated concrete historical context in Phenomenology then he moved to its logical structure and his logic, they all fail. But I think okay, of course one can say a lot here about class struggle and if you allow me just to improvise a little bit, I forgot there are too many in which of my books, but I was proud of that discovery. I didn't invent it, of how objective reality needs a subjective supplement. I forgot where, maybe doesn't matter. In a in the most tragic maybe period of Soviet Union, the late 20s, early 30s, the collectivization of agriculture. You know the official formula was dekulakization: liquidate the kulaks, the rich farmers. The problem is then how to categorize them socially. You know, they tried to establish objective criteria like at the beginning it was, I don't know, if you employ other farmers to work for you, and if you have more than they even tried to quantify ten cows or whatever, how much field, you are a kulak. If you have just a big farm without employing, you are a half-kulak or whatever. But then it never functioned. And at the end, they introduced a category of sub-kulak. And although they tried to define it as an objective social category, it's clear from how it functions that it was really those who, although they are not in any objective sense kulaks, are suspected of having the subjective attitude of kulaks. You know, here you have an objective social categorization where you have to include into it as just another objective element, we have large kulaks, small kulaks, and then we have this mysterious sub-kulak. But it's just an objectivization of a of a subjective stance. But okay, let's not lose time let's go on. Now things get really interesting when we raise the question, how do we pass from Cross-cap to Klein bottle. I think the first thing to do is to realize the radical asymmetry of the two poles. There are not two, as it still appears within the model of Cross-cap. There is only one and its remainder or excess, the mark of its impossibility. In short, the difference is not between the two ones, one and the other. There is only the one, but this one is but impossible, the one and its difference. Let me take the perhaps unexpected case of sexual difference. This was already mentioned. I will now like to I would like to elaborate a little bit more yesterday in the debate at the first session. To resolve the problem of exhaustive classification that would have listed all sexual positions so that nobody would be left out or rather left behind. And incidentally I'm so sorry, I hope you don't mind these improvisations, how you know as an old Marxist I like to read theology, but in this Protestant capitalist view how if you really want to hear what capital or market is saying you should look at what God is saying you know. Like, did you notice this strange phenomenon in the last decades, the popularity of the religious topic of left behind. You know you have your greatest American writers, I'm ashamed to mention them, how are they called those total creeps? Tim LaHaye or you know that series *Left Behind*. Those people dear to God before Armageddon, they are taken in a rapture and we the majority are left behind to suffer the horrors of Armageddon. But you have also how is that series called now, *The Leftovers* or *The Remainders*, which is much more sympathetic and serious. But okay, why this obsession with left behind? I will propose here, I'm ashamed almost of it, an extremely vulgar economist reading. God as usual here with the logic of left behind listens carefully to the voice of the market of big capital because isn't the big discovery lately that it's becoming more and more clear that with robotization, digitalization and so on most of us working force will be soon left behind. The model that is emerging is, okay, it's not as with God where usually just two three percent are taken and percent are left behind, the idea is that like percent of us are left behind. And I think this would be one way to read what is also false in some of the leftist politics. For example, in Europe, I'm getting tired on this focus on refugees, we should take care of them, of course we should. But are we aware, I read very good analysis that those refugees who reach Europe are as a rule the privileged refugees, those who can afford it to be blackmailed by by criminals who organize illegal transports, tremendous amounts of money, and they're the privileged one. I mean, I say stop talking about refugees who are already halfway out and focus on those left behind. What interests me is those who are still in Syria, in Afghanistan, I don't know where and so on and so on. So okay, let's go on so that I don't get lost here. So again, what does this mean? Yes, sexual difference. and all these sexual positions and we already mentioned this yesterday morning you know how this designation which is I think the usual LGBT Q plus. Now there are some debates, do you leave out Q, do you add even more, but the point is this plus which serves to include all those left out. It's a kind of a nominalist-empiricist modesty. Our classification is never exclusive and to be open to new discoveries and so on, we have to include all those who are not yet included. But this however raises the question: is plus in LGBTQ+ just a stand-in for the missing positions, like does it just mean and others, or can can one be directly a plus? The properly dialectical answer is yes. In the series there is always one exceptional element, again I'm back to Möbius strip, which clearly does not belong to the series and thereby it gives body to plus. In the case of LGBT lists, I notice that I read carefully those classifications, like some authority in New York, City of New York proposed a list of categories and then you are free to choose your identity there. I I saw there at least three categories which are a stand-in for plus. First you have allies. It's really like sub-kulaks. Why? Because you learn that allies are honest non-LGBT individuals. Like allies are defined as those who in their sexual orientation are heterosexual standard, but they have a sympathy towards us and so on and so on. It's again it's it's it's sub-kulak. That is to say that they cheat, they include into a series a subjective determination which has nothing to do with sexuality. Then asexuals is always listed as a category. Those who negate the entire field of sexuality. There is a group which claims usually with some of this post-human ideology behind that the future will be asexual and sexuality will disappear. It will make our society less envious, much more harmonious and so on. Then another category that is listed is questioning. Questioning as an identity you have men, women, lesbians, bisexuals and then you have questioning. It simply means floating around unable to adopt a determinant position. Now from the Lacanian standpoint we should pass from X, sorry from plus, as the sign of an infinite ethical task, like that's how it's usually. Plus means our work is never done. Be careful every categorization every list is still oppressive, maybe some are excluded and so on, to the ontological deadlock. I mean and here I see the subversion of LGBT. I think that instead of treating them as another positive entity and then you say okay let's expand the list and everybody will be satisfied, but what if they are the plus embodied? That's the greatest praise I can think about them. What if they embody this floating around unable to find a determinant position and so on and so on? Or to go even to the end, and I refer here to Alenka Zupančič, I think she develops this in her new book *What Is Sex?*. Incidentally, it's a stupid title imposed on her by MIT Press. For her, the minimal formula of sexual difference is not MF, masculine feminine, it's not only also MF and some plus, like you know we don't all fit it and so on, but it's M plus. Women, femininity as such is plus. Masculine phallic identity plus something to be added. Femininity is not another identity, a counterposition to complement the masculine position, but it's impossible supplement. This failure of classification so that you don't have clear categories but a disturbing plus, this classification is sexuality. So it is not enough to say that sexual classification always fails. This failure of identity is constitutive of sexuality. So again to defend, I don't like this patronizing word, the most radical transgender position, I am not saying in this liberal way yes we heterosexuals do not have the full right they should also be admitted. No, in some way they are more sexualized than we are. They are sexuality even paradoxically sexual difference as it at its purest. This of course in no way implies that women are somehow less than men, just an enigmatic addendum to male identity. Quite on the contrary, plus stands for subjectivity itself as the questioning of every identity. This is why, it's my old thesis, subjectivity as such is feminine hysterical. The basic formula of hysterical questioning is the doubt about my identity. And in here I've written about it just to remind you, here I think that we should we should reject one of the bad legacies of I am sorry to tell you I am old enough to remember it, where the idea was this one, and it was secretly strongly anti-feminist because usually hysterics are associated with femininity. The idea was that hysterical position is that of just provoking the master you know and really it it conceals a demand for a more authentic strong master while perverts are the true revolutionaries. Or as even Freud somewhere says in a wrong way I think that perverts actually do what hysterics only dream about. Lacan, to his profit and even feminist profit, radically opposes this version. For him yes perversion is predominantly masculine. There is even a great debate in psychoanalysis in what specific sense we can talk about a feminine perversion. But for Lacan perversion and this is so important today in our freakish time when all this perverted hidden obscene underside is becoming public in our political discourse, perversion is the necessary dark side obverse side of power structure. Lacan says that every political power structure needs a pervert to be its instrument. And it's hysteria, not perversion, which is the radical questioning. Which is why and this was developed by my other good friend Mladen Dolar already thirty years ago in a wonderful text called *Beyond Interpellation*. This is why exaggerating a little bit and in so far as we accept Louis Althusser's idea of ideological interpellation as constitutive of ideological subjectivity, like I become ideological subject by way of accepting identity conferred to me by the social big other. You know society tells me I don't know if you're a woman you are a woman you are a mother you are a scientist you are whatever. But Dolar's beautiful idea is that if interpellation is this basic ideological identification then hysteria already in its form is the most elementary gesture of the critique of ideology is you the big other are telling me I am of course in your a mother a wife mistress, but this is the big hysterical question why am I what you are telling me that I am? This self-doubt. And it's also important to see the whole Lacanian background of this. You know I I get almost a Joseph Goebbels reaction of pulling my gun and start shooting when Lacan's notion of lost object of desire is read as this stupid metonymic romantic oh we always miss the object, object is always eluding us, it's some impossible incestuous object. No, as it is clear with Lacan already in early Lacan, Seminar on Psychosis, the original lost object it's me the subject myself as object. The original question of desire is not this boring romantic metonymy: I want you but of what if I really want something else and you are just a standing and so on. No the original scene of desire is already as a small baby I see that I am something for the other. Parents, brothers, sisters play their libidinal games with me but it's never clear to me what am I for the other. It's this original questioning and that's why for me perverts are the bad guys because pervert is exactly the one who doesn't question but he knows. A pervert knows what he is for the other, an instrument of its the other's enjoyment and so on and so on. Okay, one can also to refer back to yesterday's debate, one can also make the same point in terms of nominalism versus realism. From the nominalist perspective, as we said yesterday I just recapitulating it, plus is a sign of the excess of reality which we cannot ever fully grasp with our conceptual frame. Is this boring empiricist motive you know reality is always more rich than our categorical apparatus and so on and so on. So plus in this sense signals that our classification will never be complete, that something will always elude it. So we should be aware of this and keep our mind open for new entities, properties and so on. Again, as it was made clear yesterday in that debate with Todd McGowan and others, there is no universality per se for this view. There is there are only always incomplete lists of particulars. And here politically, as it was already said yesterday and I want to supplement it, this this is clear because this is also how the vulgar Marxist, I think pseudo-Marxist, historicization works. You know in our predominantly nominalist times, this is how I would like to write it but I am too stupid too old, many people wrote it, Schopenhauer among the philosophers, a manual, manual of how to win every debate. You know that even when you are and I think one of the rules is always, I debate something and I am losing the argument, the nominalist escape. Like let's say I debate femininity, I am losing. There is always a safe way out to say, but what woman are you talking about? There is no woman as such, there are only black, lesbian, hetero women and so on and so on. It's an it's an easy way out. Or to put it in more correct Marxist terms, the idea is to always find a particular bias, spin, of every universality. You know the story like human rights, yeah but do they not secretly or even not so secretly privilege you know the usual list: white males of certain property, education and so on and so on. Okay, we should do this, there is an element in this, although already here, to repeat what was said yesterday, the role of this empty universality is much more ambiguous. It's not just an ideological form that justifies oppression, like we pretend to be universalists, human rights, but secretly we privilege some of them. You should never forget that from the very beginning the universal form gained a certain autonomy and opened up the space for an explosion. First women, who were clearly disprivileged, but Mary Wollstonecraft and so on you remember like why not we also if the form is universal. Then the biggest maybe I think one of definitely two three biggest events in the last maybe one thousand years, the Haiti Revolution where blacks in Haiti simply said it was an incredible event like we are also we don't want any to put it ironically what Haiti blacks were saying is thanks for Alex Haley Roots and that Hollywood production no, we don't want to go back and search for our roots, we want to be not only part of the same universality as you French are, we want to correct you and be more universal than you are. But this is not all. Marx is well aware that universality is not just cannot be reduced to this nominalist perspective it's all always historicized specific overdetermined by some specific context, it's also part of our actuality. The point of Marx is that capitalism in this sense is universal. It's actually universal. Let's say I'm a merchant from China, you're a merchant from Latin America. Of course we can say we never really understand each other, each of us has its own cultural horizon. But from the capitalist standpoint it doesn't matter, the universal form of commodities is operative there. So for Marx this is the other side of his historicizing, capitalism is a social formation where abstract universality is a fact of actual life. To be a modern capitalist subject means that you treat yourself as universal, not determined by any particular form and so on and so on and so on. So again to go on, that's the nominalist view. In the terms of transgenderism we should just arrive to establish again a list of all sexual identities with the awareness that something will always elude us. From the Hegelian realist perspective on the contrary the point is not that through the notion's self-articulation we can establish a complete list of particular species. Plus, the marker of what is left out, is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation but a positive entity in itself, an entity which gives body to the negativity that characterizes every universality. So that's the beauty of it. I don't have time to go into it in detail but it was again hinted yesterday that first debate, that universality is universality is actualizes itself in this plus. It's not that we have that we who have our position in a normative structure, for example in the patriarchal society we who are fully in the in the normative way men, women, that we have our post but the plus is just some obscure remains. No, the plus they are embodied universality in the same way that for Marx for example proletarians as those with no proper place within the social edifice are the embodiment of the universality. Or even for Hegel, but that's a more complex story, that what he calls rabble, Pöbel, the outcasts, they are universality they are universality embodied. What this means again is that humanity is not a genus with two species, men and women, or then we can add other species. Sexual difference is a difference between men as a species of a genus humanity and woman as a plus, the element which stands for the universality of being human. So we should here turn around the standard male chauvinist anthropology where men are perceived to be more universal and women introduce the element of particularity. No men stand for particularity. Men you know like human genus has two species, man as a species and woman as the out-of-place element which stands for its universality. Okay, enough of abstract philosophizing, now we come to something that I hope will be a little bit more amusing which is, so how do we come from all this, these were still the contradictions tensions antagonisms of Cross-cap to Klein bottle. Ah here I hope I will surprise you a little bit. I would like to begin in a big philosophical way. If there is a doxa of 20th century philosophy, it is the position defined by Heidegger's notion from his *Being and Time* of In-der-Welt-sein, being in the world. It goes like this, that the big mistake of modern metaphysics of subjectivity is that it posits a gap: here am I with my representations, out there is reality. And then the big problem emerges, how can I break the circle of my representations and get in touch with reality out there? Can I do it at all or are we condemned to Berkeley, the Irish bishop Berkeley type of solipsism: all I have are my representations. Heidegger's answer, well-known answer, is that this very question is a false question, it's a scandal, because it first creates a gap between me my representations and actuality, it creates a pseudo-problem and then it spends all its energy trying to cover up the gap. Heidegger's answer, as you know, is that we should abandon the whole image of myself with my mental inside of representations and external reality outside. I am from the very beginning outside myself, in the world. I think that we should nonetheless abandon this idea, not totally it makes a point there is no inner self, but that in some sense we do live in a closed universe like prisoners of Plato's cave. My idea is to rehabilitate from a materialist standpoint or retell the story of Plato's cave and to do it I think we can do it precisely with reference to the model of Klein bottle. I will just, I hope this all works, explain what's my idea. The outside on the top is let's call it the pre-ontological real in quantum physics, quantum waves whatever you want. You fall in the abyss of void inconsistency and then this is subjectivity and we as constituted subjects are here. This is when we are in here we look up and the same curved space from inside this is Plato's cave. The problem is that there is that, I call it snout or whatever, that strange tube, but it's the blind spot we don't see it, that's our position. What do I mean by this? Now I will do, if you are religious pray with me so that this will function because I, ah let's hope, now I will first to make this clear I will show you the the brief it's with some stupid music I'm so afraid how Klein bottle is formed. Just a little point, but I like it. Watch it please. Listen carefully to the dialogue. It's much shorter than the other clip. Your after now is crucial, I will immediately comment after it. Okay. You know what happened to me when I showed to people a couple of times this clip. It's always this laughter and then because I asked people I hope you are perverted in the same way they told me although it's the pure play of forms you get a feeling that something really dirty is going on you know with all this. Some guy even approached me and said I know what this is. I'm sorry for trigger warning if you are too sensitive, but it's a guy with such a long penis that he can twist it and fuck himself anally you know that was his you know there is some admit it there is something really dirty going on here. Okay, sorry, yes. No. Sorry sorry sorry. I have to you see now things are happening which I will try to ah I think I I did it. Uh-huh, is it this one or what? Oh. Sorry. Ah no, sorry. I got it I got it I got it. This is okay. So again we are inside and this is not an idealist perspective because the point is just the same point which was made wonderfully in quantum physics by Niels Bohr that to be true materialists we should not ask ourselves if you are inside that bottle but can we reach a reality what is outside. The question is that snout, that obscene protuberance, like how do I fit reality. The whole, the whole image together is part of reality. So let me elaborate this a little bit. Our universe of ideological meaning is closed, we are within that circle. But it's not closed in this modern solipsist way. My answer would have been of course we are in the world, but what is closed and enclosed is we and our world. This is the closed circular space. So I want now to make this clear by mentioned two cases of crazy ideology, or even three cases of crazy ideology, which that is to say line of thoughts which is madness from the modern biological, evolutionary or whatever standpoint, but it makes deep sense as a theory of ideology following this model. First one is do you remember that medieval usually paintings where you our stars and so on the universe is interpreted as a big cupola and then the painting goes like somebody arrives to the edge and breaks through and sees, I mean of course this is not how our real universe is built, but this is definitely how our ideology is done. We do live in *Truman Show* world ideologically. Or to give you another example of this, my favorite one which I mention a couple of times in my books. I forgot the name some English bishop who was friend of Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it. He had a problem. He was a good biologist and he saw that Darwin is right. So his problem was how to unite this with the fact that if you take the Bible literally the world should be created and something years ago and so on. And he provided, I'm sorry if I'm too repetitive you must know it, an ingenious solution. Which is that of course the Bible cannot be wrong. The world was created and something years ago and I don't know which one was it no earlier some guy even did I love the British man here British did had this in the typical British empiricist way that at in the morning in year minus God created the world. I like this idea like after having a good English breakfast and so on then he... So you know what's the solution? That God directly created fossils and so on to give us a false sense of opening. Now of course I don't buy this as cosmological theory. But I do buy it as the best theory of ideology, sorry. I think this is how ideology always works: creating its own past and so on. You know, since you Henry know your uncle or who creates classical music, the last news it amused me so much, do you know that now I read an analysis that you know our representation of Vikings, those helmets with horns, you know that they never never found any of them they were not stupid it would have been extremely unpractical. It was invented for the staging of early Wagner's operas. Nothing to do with Vikings but today everybody assumes that they had this extremely unpractical stupid whatever. So what I'm okay I will not even lose words here. But I want to do something, now comes the I hope more amusing but very problematic part for some of you. Concluding part. First, I will refer here to my good friend Frank Ruda who now wrote a short text, it will take time before it will be published but it's a wonderful text on also rehabilitating Plato's cave as theory of ideology. But he does something wonderful here. He focuses on an aspect which is totally neglected in usual readings of Plato because you know people are afraid of it like it's too authoritarian and so on and so on. Namely, Plato does not say that we are caught, this is the usual image we are we the ordinary people who only observe on the wall the spectacle of theater of shadows that we are there chained and cannot leave. Plato makes it clear that even if we get rid of our chains we would not want to be free. And Plato was the first to formulate this wonderful paradox, we have in some sense to be forced to be free. Here is if you permit me some quotes from Ruda: "The exit from the cave begins when one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains but when he is forced out. This clearly must be the place for the libidinal but also epistemological, political and ontological function of the master. This can only be a master who does neither tell me what precisely to do nor one whose instrument I could become but he must be, this good master, the one who just gives me back to myself. And in a sense one might say this could be connected to Plato's anamnesis theory remembering what one never knew as it were. And it implies that the proper master just affirms or makes it possible for me to affirm that I can do this without telling me what this is and thus without telling me who I am." End of quote. The point Ruda makes here is a subtle one. It's not only that if I am left to myself in the cave even if without chains I prefer to stay there so that a master has to force me out. But in a much more subtle way I have to volunteer to be forced out. Similarly to the way in which when a subject enters psychoanalysis he volunteers to do it. He voluntarily accepts the psychoanalyst as some kind of, I know it's not the discourse of the master, his master. Another quote from Ruda: "A question arises at precisely this point from using the reference to the master in psychoanalytic term. Does this mean that those who need the master are always already in the position of the analysand patient? If politically such a master is needed to become who one is and this can be structurally linked to liberating the prisoner from the cave to forcing him out after the chains are taken off and he still does not want to leave, the question arises how to link this with the idea that the patient, analysand, must per definition be a volunteer, not simply slave or bondsman. Psychoanalysis only works when you demand it, when you volunteer to go to make an analysis. So in short there must be a dialectics of master and volunteers here. A dialectics because the master to some extent constitutes volunteers as volunteers, liberates them from previously seemingly unquestionable position." So end of quote. But what further complicates the picture is that capitalism, quote again the last one from Ruda, relies massively on unpaid and thereby structurally voluntary labor. One has to distinguish not only between different types of master figures, the standard master who knows better than you what you want, orders you to do it, and this more subtle liberating master, a master whose function is only to as it were to bring out in you what you are able to do. His message is not do this but you can do it and it's up to you to choose it. Not only with different but also between different types of volunteers. And end of quote. So here to conclude I would like to say this that I would like just very briefly because I would like then to conclude with two clips from movies to point out how we have two types, two levels of servitude volontaire of voluntary servitude. First we have this let's call it authentic submission serving a liberating master and servitude volontaire with regard to market mechanisms. In capitalist servitude we simply feel free while in authentic liberation we accept voluntarily servitude as serving a cause and not just serving ourselves. In today's cynical functioning of capitalism I can know very well what I am doing and I continue to do it. Here the liberating aspect of my knowledge is suspended. While in the authentic dialectics of liberation the awareness of my situation is already the first step of liberation. In other words, in capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free because this feeling is the very form of my servitude. I mean to give you a simple example today when the situation gets worse for ordinary people, at least in Europe, welfare state is disappearing, you have to you get only as a precarious worker you get short-term contract, you have to provide yourself health insurance. Here comes ideology and tells you but this is wonderful, it's a new freedom. You can choose you are the term is self-entrepreneur, even if you are a beggar you are a self-entrepreneur. Like you steal from someone dollar and then you can choose will you take a holiday, will you invest in your healthcare or whatever. So my point is that here our very feeling free as a subject of choice is the form of our servitude to the logic of capital. While in the liberating servitude volontaire our my realization that I am serving enslaved to my unconscious to whomever is the first act of freedom. And here I nonetheless agree with Judith Butler with all my disagreements with her who said that the first step of feminism before you even liberate yourself you must recognize yourself as your servitude. Which is why she made a wonderful proposal that the first stage of feminism should always be and it's a wonderful dialectical moment to sabotage because we live in liberal times. So even if you still have as a woman a masculine master they like to play the liberal game, you know I'm just taking care of you we are equal let's debate it and so on and so on. And I love this idea of Judith that the first step should be of a woman: no please I'm your servant give me clear answers, orders, don't bullshit me about we are equal we have a dialogue and so on and so on. Why does this work? Because in today's ideological constellation a master cannot do this. It's almost discursively impossible more or less to do it directly. So the point is that a subjective experience of I am free is the very form of servitude and the subjective experience of I am a slave it means for me in order to say this I am in some sense already free. So in this confused situation now if you allow me another just not more than ten minutes, how can we act freely? Ah now comes my favorite part. Let me show you two movie clips. The first one is you probably didn't see it, it's from a Danish noir, I use this often I'm sorry if some of you know it, *A Conspiracy of Faith*. It's the hero is he designates himself as terminally depressed detective Carl Mørck, a burnt-out depressed detective basically an honest guy, and his counter-point is Johannes, a handsome blond serial killer of children who is interested not only in killing the children but in destroying their parents' faith, religious faith. So I want to show you some four minutes long the final confrontation of the two in a lone wooden sea cottage where Johannes holds in trained as his prisoners Mørck, the detective, and two kidnapped children, a boy and a girl. Now let's do this. If you it will be in Danish but it doesn't. Okay, let's stop. If you are too sensitive here, you know the boy really survived at the end he is not drowned and so on. But what I want to say is this that okay it's clear that Mørck the detective is a true atheist while Johannes continues to rely on a big other, when God failed to appear in his crisis devil helped him and so on and so on. So the first irony is that it's the serial killer who still in a negative way keeps the religious structure while Mørck is an atheist. However, Johannes is clearly wrong when he claims that when he was drowning the kid God did not show up. Every authentic Christian will tell you God did appear two times even, when Mørck offered himself to die instead of the kid and when the girl, small kid sister, refused to take revenge and stab Johannes. But which God appears here? It's not an all-powerful transcendent agent which ultimately takes care of us but a Christ-like impotent witness offering compassion and solidarity, displaying pure goodness in the face of a meaningless indifferent world. This is what I mean by my what I call my Christian atheism. One has to gather the strength to view the world with an inhuman eye, in all its cruel indifference and meaninglessness. Without big other as the ultimate guarantee of a higher order or meaning, goodness can only emerge at this point. In other words I think that to display this type of goodness which is for me the ultimate Christian gesture that Mørck did, you have to be an atheist. That's another story. Let me go on. At this razor's edge the ultimate Möbius strip reversal takes place: accepting the brutal real in all its senseless indifference, accepting it we are pushed to full ethico-political engagement. Now I want to show you another clip where we have a similar reversal which characterizes the dialectics of ethical substance. Let's imagine a substantial ritual of mourning which is gradually in the process of secularization emptied of its content, it appears as a nonsense. The miracle is that precisely as such, as an empty ritual, it can remain operative in a more authentic way than ever. I will show you now the final two minutes of a movie which is okay, modest, naive, but at some level I like it and this one is more popular I hope you've seen it. Taylor Sheridan's *Wind River*. The story of Natalie Hanson, a Native American girl found raped and frozen in the mid of winter on a desolate Wyoming reservation. Cory, a hunter, film's hero whose girl also disappeared three years ago and Jane, a young FBI agent, try to unravel the mystery. So in the final scene Cory goes to Hanson's house where he finds a desperate Martin, Natalie's the raped and killed girl's father, sitting outside with a death face, a mix of blue and white paint on his face. And here we get the final dialogue. Okay, so just to recapitulate. At the beginning of this scene Cory asks Martin with painted death face how did he learn to do it and Martin replies I I don't I've just made it up it's no one left to teach it. And then Martin informs him that his son returns from return from prison and then he will go to pick him up at the bus station. This is crucial: as soon as I wash this shit off my face. And then he says I should go and get him eventually just sit here for a minute get time to sit with me, Cory says yes and they sit there silently. The first beauty of this ending is I think maybe slightly damaged by these final words they state the obvious they don't fit in but the underlying problem is that of a ritual of mourning which enables us to survive an unbearably traumatic loss. And the glimmer of hope provided by the ending is that Martin and Cory will be able to survive through such a minimal ritual of just sitting silently. We should not dismiss lightly Martin's statement "as soon as I wash this shit off my face" as grounded in the fact that his death face is not done in the old authentic way but just improvised by him. It would remain shit even if it were to be done authentically the old way. Martin has already irretrievably lost his ancient ethnic substance. He is already a modern subject, unable to practice death face with full immersion. However, the miracle is that although he knows this, he assumes all this, improvising a death face and just sitting there with it works as authentic in its very artificial improvisation. It may be shit but shit works in its very minimal gesture of withdrawal from life engagement. So again we should bear in mind here another nice point of the series that of the scene that Cory is a white man living in a reservation. And what Martin asks him to do is not some of my friends read it this way, I think they are totally wrong, is not to show solidarity with a grieving Native American and participate in a ritual which is meaningless to him like I don't believe in your shit but okay I'm your friend I will sit there. Such a patronizing respect for a primitive culture is one of the most disgusting versions of racism. The message of Martin's request is that he shares with Cory the distance that Cory probably feels towards the Native American ritual. Cory's white man's distance is already Martin's and it is this distance which makes the ritual authentic. Not it's not part of some ridiculous immersion into a native culture and so on and so on. And that's the beauty of it you know. What survives is a pure empty ritual. It's not legitimized in any deep faith and so on it's just a kind of empty gesture. And as such performed precisely by two modern subjects it's more authentic than all the authentic bullshits and so on. Now I will conclude just to tell you my last part but I've exploited so much your patience was to be a brief reading of *Arrival*, you know Villeneuve, the one who did *Blade Runner What attracts me in that movie these are all approaches to same ethical gesture. I hope I will not lose time that you've seen it. These heptapods arrive on earth blah blah so they are more holistic they move in circular time they know the past the future and so on. It's totally wrong to read the movie in this New Age way: we humans are caught in our consecutive time linear temporality but the truly wise people or humanoids whatever they are spiritual heptapods move in a circular time and so on are more holistic and so on. There is if you read the movie in this way playing with this shitty holistic critique of ours you totally miss it. I think it's I say this with all the irony it's absolutely on the side of us humans. You know why? You remember if you've seen the movie that at the end when the two heroes asked the those aliens why did they come here to save us they say because years from now we will need you. Now this is a wonderful enigmatic question. They know everything the future and so on, why would they need us to save them? It's not that we know something even more deep and so on. We know precisely how to reduce how to ignore. The film ultimately celebrates precisely our non and this this is the act of the heroine. What she does is something much more terrifying than a simple free act. You know, I will not go into it if you've seen the movie, she makes a choice to have her child with her love although she knows that the child will die of leukemia etc. The point is not is this a good decision or not, the point is this one that that we learn through her that there is nonetheless a crack on this perfect determinism. When you know the future, what happens when you don't act accordingly? Because this is what those stupid squid-like, I hate squids I hate calamari and so on, what those heptapods are not able to do. They see the future and actualize it, do it. But the greatness is in our human finitude and limitation. Because this the true act is the act of not only of freely choosing but while accepting that the world is predetermined, to act against this predestination and ruin everything as it were. Ruin everything in the sense change the past in I think itself I think that the correct materialist point here is not past is what it was, but we have a free space we can change the future. I more and more think that the future is predetermined but we can change the past and maybe in this circular way change the future and so on and so on. So I will stop now I exploited you way too much but I in I'm sorry for my confused talk I just wanted to give you a hint in what direction me together with my friends, with the Stalinist you know the KGB units they were usually in three troika you know liquidators. We consider ourselves as our Lacanian troika and we are all working on this on this topic especially on ontology. This is what I tried to develop in my publicity this is like clip you know it should be there minute of promotion of publicity and so on in my new new book which just came out *Incontinence of the Void*, it's not obscene it's Sam Beckett from whom I took this, Alenka Zupančič in her wonderful book which is doing very well *What is Sex?* and then Mladen Dolar the third member he will now published we ironically call it his *Écrits* over pages collected text with Bloomsbury as a big volume. So I'm not so much worried about all these polemics and so on. We are in the middle of trying to penetrate some new space. Maybe even probably we will fail. But I think that we live in an incredible time philosophically, you know something new is emerging really new we don't yet know what and I think we with our orientation are at least in the right space. Again I'm sorry for talking so long and so on you know but I love to be here I'm just sorry I cannot be more active. Thanks very much for your patience. Now you will organize democracy.
Oh my god. Sorry. Where are... this is not hospitality. Where are the big words, "we are so grateful to have him, we don't really deserve him but in his magnanimity he..." okay. Thanks very much. I hope all this technology works. Just three introductory points. First, I really mean it, but I don't know how to say it that it will not be a denegation, you know, or whatever. I really like it to be here. I feel at home, definitely more than in my own country among you here. Second point, I what I am just sorry, I want to apologize due to my health state and so on and I really mean it, that I wasn't able to socialize more. But believe me, when you get heavy diabetes, heart palpitations and so on, all those things combining, well, it's not so nice to be alive. A third point, I want to do something because Todd told me that, oh you can do as much pure theory as you want, so I made a step to that direction. So I hope you will not be too disappointed if it will not be too much of those political LGBT provocations or whatever. I mean, let's have some theory. We have time. I'm open to all these questions like, was I really for Trump? My god, be serious. I just maybe in the wrong way thought, hoped that when you have a figure as a figure like Donald Trump as the leader that it will trigger, it will be in a good sense, not in a politically correct sense, a trigger warning, you know. Obviously even that doesn't work. So we can all debate all this, but what I like would like to do, and it's important I think, is that maybe you noticed it but the 70s, 80s, 90s later were more an era of deconstruction which I read it as the ultimate stage of transcendental approach, in the sense that you don't ask direct ontological questions. Like, sorry, I have to, I'm a spontaneous racist, I have to pick up someone. Like, you know, when somebody asks me who is that? I am not allowed to say, well this is Henry from California or whatever. You the question the way to say is under what discursive regime can we talk about him? You know, like all questions are reduced to these questions of, to put it in Michel Foucault's terms, to what episteme they belong and so on and so on. So I mean there were tremendous positive results of this but it means again, the total annihilation, the so-called ontological dimension in the radical sense disappears. For example, in this approach when I ask you, do you think that we have an immortal soul or not? The answer would have been in what discursive field can you even debate about this? You know, and the ultimate, he was aware of it, the ultimate thinker in this direction was of course Heidegger. What he means by disclosure of being is simply the historically conditioned, of course, transcendental horizon within which we talk about objects. So his point about science is that our scientific attitude towards the world is overdetermined, whichever term we use, by a certain historically determined ontological horizon. But, and you find all this in my books, even throughout his life Heidegger gave hints that something is missing, that that's not all. From his early to his late writing he says, but for example, this is a stone which within certain historical horizon, disclosure of being, it appears to me as a stone, but what is the stone in the... because nonetheless Heidegger was not a naive subjectivist. He was well aware that this historical disclosure of being is just an open space, opening where objects, processes appear. It's not a process of ontic creation. What what Heidegger calls Lichtung or Sein, being, is not ontic causality. Sein does not, being does not cause entities. So what what is then the status of entities outside of this ontological horizon? And he himself admits this is a mystery, I haven't yet confronted it properly. And I think that today we should risk this. That's why I am, I now wrote even a text, a benevolently polemical text, about object-oriented ontology, because I think they are giving, for me at least, I'm sorry, the wrong answers but to questions that we should confront. And I will try to make kind of a some preliminary steps into this direction today. Lacan, as we all know, often Jacques Lacan often refers to three of these topological models that you see behind my back: Möbius strip, Cross-cap, and the Klein bottle. So I want to take these as a starting point, and you will see, I hope you will be a little bit surprised where it will take us. On the top, Möbius strip is a surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space and only one boundary which has the mathematical property of being unorientable. An example it's easy to create a Möbius strip. You take a paper strip, give it a half twist, and then you join the ends of the strip to form a loop. So a line starting from the seam down the middle meets back at the seam but on the other side and so on, you know. Then the middle one, it's much more interesting already, Cross-cap is a continuously deformed Möbius strip. A two-dimensional surface in a three-dimensional space that intersects itself in an interval. The inverse image of this interval is a longer interval that the mapping into three-dimensional space folds in half. Again, you have it in the middle. Then two cross-caps glued together at their boundaries form what you have there on the bottom, a model of Klein bottle. This time with two intervals of self-intersection. Klein bottle is also a non-orientable surface, which means a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. It's again, Klein bottle, a one-sided surface which if traveled upon could be followed back to the point of origin. So what's my aim here? My aim is to show or at least indicate that this triad echoes the Hegelian triad of Being, Essence, Notion. The Möbius strip stands for the basic dynamics of the order of being, for what was traditionally called the dialectical coincidence of the opposites. Brought to its extreme, a feature passes into its opposite. Being as such turns out to be nothing, radical freedom turns out to be self-destructive terror, love brought to extreme turns into hatred, necessity reveals itself to be the highest contingency and so on and so on. There is here no proper difference or identity, just the continuous passage of one feature into its opposite. Difference only appears when in a redoubled Möbius track which gives us a Cross-cap, the continuous process of passage is interrupted by a cut. Through this redoubling of the Möbius strip, the opposite poles do not pass into another but are deprived of any shared space which would enable us to determine their difference as such. The effort of thinking is here to mediate the two opposite poles by way of determining their difference, but this effort fails again and again. Identity and difference, essence and appearance, cause and effect, substance and its accidents are all the time reflected into each other and what eludes this reflexive mediation is not some deeper identity of the opposites but their difference as such. So brought to its end, the logic of reflection confronts us with the paradox of pure difference in the sense of a difference which is not a difference between two established entities but a difference which precedes the two terms it differentiates. For example, from the Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference is not the difference between the two sexes but the name of a deadlock which every sexual position tries to stabilize. Or in Marxism, class struggle is not a struggle between pre-existing social groups but the name of a social antagonism in reaction to which every class position emerges. What this means is that there is no shared common space between the two sexes or classes. What they share, what holds the social space or the space of sexuality together, is ultimately antagonism itself. The image of Cross-cap in the middle, you can see it behind my back, renders this key feature in a nice imaginative way. The overall first impression is that of an organic rounded whole, like a harmonious social body. But upon a closer look, you can quickly see, perceive cracks, disharmonies in this whole. The horizontal lines of the two halves do not fit, which means we are dealing with a patched-up composite so that the rounded body looks more like a freakish montage. To get a plastic image of such redoubled Möbius strip, I want to shock you maybe, but nobody is shocked today, by mentioning one of the novels that I don't really like but the basic idea I find attractive. Stephen King's series of novels *The Dark Tower*. Why do I find it attractive? Because it relies on a beautifully naive vision of what Lacan calls *point de capiton*, the quilting point. A mysterious black tower which sutures our reality and thereby holds it together. If this tower is destroyed, our reality will disintegrate, fall apart, and we would be reduced to a barbaric universe of dark violence. But what is crucial in Stephen King's vision is that it's not only our reality, and there we have the two sides, our reality is redoubled. In the film version, you must have seen it, it opened up recently, the film version it simplifies novels a little bit, it takes place in both modern-day New York City and in so-called Mid-World, an old West-style parallel universe which stands for the barbaric universe of violence. And so sorry, that's the idea. Two universes like two Möbius strips, they are held together precisely by something like Dark Tower which is I think a naive image of again what Lacan calls the quilting point, *point de capiton*, and this is the function of suturing. And to get an idea of why Cross-cap, I think I would like to delve a little bit with what I already developed in some of my books with the complexity of the notion of suture. This complexity is lost in the predominant use of the term where suture concerns the relationship between the closed circle of ideological representation and its external site of production. The idea of suture is that in order to close the circle of representation, there has to be in it a symptomatic element which sutures the field of representations in so far as it functions as a stand-in for the excluded outside. It is an element which within the space of representation holds the place of the excluded external production. However, this notion of suture, materialist as it may appear to be, has to be supplemented by its opposite. The external reality in order to attain its full existence has to be supplemented, sutured, by a subjective element. And you know it's crucial to maintain this, not ambiguity, in some sense of vagueness, but these two aspects. Again, at least when I was young, when the theory of suture was popular, it was read, interpreted almost exclusively in the first sense. The idea, the idea was that we live in our idealized world of representations which are just a theater of shadow which mirrors actual site of production. But this mirroring is never perfect, so there has to be a suturing element, something which appears as one representation but it really holds the place within the space of representation of its outside. Okay, I used in my books all the time repeatedly the same examples, so why not to repeat them one time more? For example, it's my reading that, even a little bit of critique of Marx, that in Marxism, I tend to agree with those who claim that the Marxist, or rather Marxist of Marx, because it was never part of Marxism, notion of so-called Asiatic mode of representation is such a suturing element. If you look at it superficially, it's just one in the line of modes of production. We have so-called primitive pre-class free state societies, then we have Asiatic mode of production, then we have ancient Greek slave societies, feudal societies, capitalist societies, and whatever will come afterwards, no. Maybe communism, but maybe communism will not be as nice as people expect, whatever. But I think that the hidden logic is this one. I try to be here at a very elementary level. Marx originally, as it's clear, only enumerated five stages: so-called primitive pre-class societies, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and let's not go into all that, social and communism, whatever you call it. Then he discovered that there are many modes of production, or rather social orders, which do not fit any of these five. And I claim, it can be proved, now of course I will not do it now, that the Asiatic mode of production, although it appears to be one among the others, its only actual theoretical meaning is like that joke from Borges quoted by Foucault, you know, a special category of dogs, all dogs who do not belong to this list. It simply means all social orders which do not fit any of my modes of production. It's just a negative container. But it is needed as a pseudo-element because it sutures the space of representation. And okay, I will not lose time here. My this appears to be the materialist logic. The actual productive reality is outside, it's just sutured in the theater of shadows and so on. Sorry, it's always represented in a limited way. And it's interesting, my good friend whom I envy, she will be the next big name, really big, bigger than me I predict, Alenka Zupančič. She developed nicely how in, how precisely in the post-Hegelian universe, this became a big topic, the imperfection of every representation at all levels. Like, can political representation really cover society, or is there always some excess which cannot be properly represented? Or even marriage and love, sexual love. Can marriage or any other sexual social-regulated form of sexuality, can it cover the field of actual sexuality and so on and so on. So again, this sounds materialist, but I think it's absolutely crucial to also include the opposite logic. It's not only no interior without exterior. That is to say, to close, to suture the circle of interior representation, you need a suturing element, this pseudo-element which is, I'm ashamed of using this old structuralist jargon, which is the placeholder of a lack of what is excluded and so on. It's part of true materialism for me, paradoxically, although it will sound subjectivist, to improve also the opposite. No exterior without interior. That's for example the lesson of Immanuel Kant. To build out of the confusion of subjective impressions, to construct out of it the image of external reality, we need to add what? Precisely a subjective gesture. You have to add something to obtain out of confused pre-ontological real, let's call it reality, reality that we know as existing really out there, you need a subjective supplement. Or objective reality only exists through this subjective addition. Okay, I will not go into it in detail, because I have here, I just hope I can share you with you all this, what I am working now. A wonderful book will appear relatively soon by MIT Press, written together by my good German friend Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay, on Dash. Dash like the sign which occurs at two crucial places in Hegel's phenomenology in Hegel's work. Dash you find it at the very end before that quote from Schiller, concluding paragraph of Phenomenology, and at the very beginning of Hegel's logic. And the idea, I think this part was written by Frank Ruda, is that Hegel basically wrote only two books, Phenomenology and Logic. Okay, he wrote some early stuff which are not proper books, and then his two systematic works, Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right. But they are not really books, they are pure university discourse, they are manuals written in very legal way, manuals for university courses. But what Frank Ruda demonstrates in a wonderful way is how elusive, impossible to determine the difference between the two. This would be the another Cross-cap if you want. They don't really fit together. You cannot bring them together. All attempts to construct some harmonious whole like first Hegel elaborated concrete historical context in Phenomenology then he moved to its logical structure and his logic, they all fail. But I think okay, of course one can say a lot here about class struggle and if you allow me just to improvise a little bit, I forgot there are too many in which of my books, but I was proud of that discovery. I didn't invent it, of how objective reality needs a subjective supplement. I forgot where, maybe doesn't matter. In a in the most tragic maybe period of Soviet Union, the late 20s, early 30s, the collectivization of agriculture. You know the official formula was dekulakization: liquidate the kulaks, the rich farmers. The problem is then how to categorize them socially. You know, they tried to establish objective criteria like at the beginning it was, I don't know, if you employ other farmers to work for you, and if you have more than they even tried to quantify ten cows or whatever, how much field, you are a kulak. If you have just a big farm without employing, you are a half-kulak or whatever. But then it never functioned. And at the end, they introduced a category of sub-kulak. And although they tried to define it as an objective social category, it's clear from how it functions that it was really those who, although they are not in any objective sense kulaks, are suspected of having the subjective attitude of kulaks. You know, here you have an objective social categorization where you have to include into it as just another objective element, we have large kulaks, small kulaks, and then we have this mysterious sub-kulak. But it's just an objectivization of a of a subjective stance. But okay, let's not lose time let's go on. Now things get really interesting when we raise the question, how do we pass from Cross-cap to Klein bottle. I think the first thing to do is to realize the radical asymmetry of the two poles. There are not two, as it still appears within the model of Cross-cap. There is only one and its remainder or excess, the mark of its impossibility. In short, the difference is not between the two ones, one and the other. There is only the one, but this one is but impossible, the one and its difference. Let me take the perhaps unexpected case of sexual difference. This was already mentioned. I will now like to I would like to elaborate a little bit more yesterday in the debate at the first session. To resolve the problem of exhaustive classification that would have listed all sexual positions so that nobody would be left out or rather left behind. And incidentally I'm so sorry, I hope you don't mind these improvisations, how you know as an old Marxist I like to read theology, but in this Protestant capitalist view how if you really want to hear what capital or market is saying you should look at what God is saying you know. Like, did you notice this strange phenomenon in the last decades, the popularity of the religious topic of left behind. You know you have your greatest American writers, I'm ashamed to mention them, how are they called those total creeps? Tim LaHaye or you know that series *Left Behind*. Those people dear to God before Armageddon, they are taken in a rapture and we the majority are left behind to suffer the horrors of Armageddon. But you have also how is that series called now, *The Leftovers* or *The Remainders*, which is much more sympathetic and serious. But okay, why this obsession with left behind? I will propose here, I'm ashamed almost of it, an extremely vulgar economist reading. God as usual here with the logic of left behind listens carefully to the voice of the market of big capital because isn't the big discovery lately that it's becoming more and more clear that with robotization, digitalization and so on most of us working force will be soon left behind. The model that is emerging is, okay, it's not as with God where usually just two three percent are taken and percent are left behind, the idea is that like percent of us are left behind. And I think this would be one way to read what is also false in some of the leftist politics. For example, in Europe, I'm getting tired on this focus on refugees, we should take care of them, of course we should. But are we aware, I read very good analysis that those refugees who reach Europe are as a rule the privileged refugees, those who can afford it to be blackmailed by by criminals who organize illegal transports, tremendous amounts of money, and they're the privileged one. I mean, I say stop talking about refugees who are already halfway out and focus on those left behind. What interests me is those who are still in Syria, in Afghanistan, I don't know where and so on and so on. So okay, let's go on so that I don't get lost here. So again, what does this mean? Yes, sexual difference. and all these sexual positions and we already mentioned this yesterday morning you know how this designation which is I think the usual LGBT Q plus. Now there are some debates, do you leave out Q, do you add even more, but the point is this plus which serves to include all those left out. It's a kind of a nominalist-empiricist modesty. Our classification is never exclusive and to be open to new discoveries and so on, we have to include all those who are not yet included. But this however raises the question: is plus in LGBTQ+ just a stand-in for the missing positions, like does it just mean and others, or can can one be directly a plus? The properly dialectical answer is yes. In the series there is always one exceptional element, again I'm back to Möbius strip, which clearly does not belong to the series and thereby it gives body to plus. In the case of LGBT lists, I notice that I read carefully those classifications, like some authority in New York, City of New York proposed a list of categories and then you are free to choose your identity there. I I saw there at least three categories which are a stand-in for plus. First you have allies. It's really like sub-kulaks. Why? Because you learn that allies are honest non-LGBT individuals. Like allies are defined as those who in their sexual orientation are heterosexual standard, but they have a sympathy towards us and so on and so on. It's again it's it's it's sub-kulak. That is to say that they cheat, they include into a series a subjective determination which has nothing to do with sexuality. Then asexuals is always listed as a category. Those who negate the entire field of sexuality. There is a group which claims usually with some of this post-human ideology behind that the future will be asexual and sexuality will disappear. It will make our society less envious, much more harmonious and so on. Then another category that is listed is questioning. Questioning as an identity you have men, women, lesbians, bisexuals and then you have questioning. It simply means floating around unable to adopt a determinant position. Now from the Lacanian standpoint we should pass from X, sorry from plus, as the sign of an infinite ethical task, like that's how it's usually. Plus means our work is never done. Be careful every categorization every list is still oppressive, maybe some are excluded and so on, to the ontological deadlock. I mean and here I see the subversion of LGBT. I think that instead of treating them as another positive entity and then you say okay let's expand the list and everybody will be satisfied, but what if they are the plus embodied? That's the greatest praise I can think about them. What if they embody this floating around unable to find a determinant position and so on and so on? Or to go even to the end, and I refer here to Alenka Zupančič, I think she develops this in her new book *What Is Sex?*. Incidentally, it's a stupid title imposed on her by MIT Press. For her, the minimal formula of sexual difference is not MF, masculine feminine, it's not only also MF and some plus, like you know we don't all fit it and so on, but it's M plus. Women, femininity as such is plus. Masculine phallic identity plus something to be added. Femininity is not another identity, a counterposition to complement the masculine position, but it's impossible supplement. This failure of classification so that you don't have clear categories but a disturbing plus, this classification is sexuality. So it is not enough to say that sexual classification always fails. This failure of identity is constitutive of sexuality. So again to defend, I don't like this patronizing word, the most radical transgender position, I am not saying in this liberal way yes we heterosexuals do not have the full right they should also be admitted. No, in some way they are more sexualized than we are. They are sexuality even paradoxically sexual difference as it at its purest. This of course in no way implies that women are somehow less than men, just an enigmatic addendum to male identity. Quite on the contrary, plus stands for subjectivity itself as the questioning of every identity. This is why, it's my old thesis, subjectivity as such is feminine hysterical. The basic formula of hysterical questioning is the doubt about my identity. And in here I've written about it just to remind you, here I think that we should we should reject one of the bad legacies of I am sorry to tell you I am old enough to remember it, where the idea was this one, and it was secretly strongly anti-feminist because usually hysterics are associated with femininity. The idea was that hysterical position is that of just provoking the master you know and really it it conceals a demand for a more authentic strong master while perverts are the true revolutionaries. Or as even Freud somewhere says in a wrong way I think that perverts actually do what hysterics only dream about. Lacan, to his profit and even feminist profit, radically opposes this version. For him yes perversion is predominantly masculine. There is even a great debate in psychoanalysis in what specific sense we can talk about a feminine perversion. But for Lacan perversion and this is so important today in our freakish time when all this perverted hidden obscene underside is becoming public in our political discourse, perversion is the necessary dark side obverse side of power structure. Lacan says that every political power structure needs a pervert to be its instrument. And it's hysteria, not perversion, which is the radical questioning. Which is why and this was developed by my other good friend Mladen Dolar already thirty years ago in a wonderful text called *Beyond Interpellation*. This is why exaggerating a little bit and in so far as we accept Louis Althusser's idea of ideological interpellation as constitutive of ideological subjectivity, like I become ideological subject by way of accepting identity conferred to me by the social big other. You know society tells me I don't know if you're a woman you are a woman you are a mother you are a scientist you are whatever. But Dolar's beautiful idea is that if interpellation is this basic ideological identification then hysteria already in its form is the most elementary gesture of the critique of ideology is you the big other are telling me I am of course in your a mother a wife mistress, but this is the big hysterical question why am I what you are telling me that I am? This self-doubt. And it's also important to see the whole Lacanian background of this. You know I I get almost a Joseph Goebbels reaction of pulling my gun and start shooting when Lacan's notion of lost object of desire is read as this stupid metonymic romantic oh we always miss the object, object is always eluding us, it's some impossible incestuous object. No, as it is clear with Lacan already in early Lacan, Seminar on Psychosis, the original lost object it's me the subject myself as object. The original question of desire is not this boring romantic metonymy: I want you but of what if I really want something else and you are just a standing and so on. No the original scene of desire is already as a small baby I see that I am something for the other. Parents, brothers, sisters play their libidinal games with me but it's never clear to me what am I for the other. It's this original questioning and that's why for me perverts are the bad guys because pervert is exactly the one who doesn't question but he knows. A pervert knows what he is for the other, an instrument of its the other's enjoyment and so on and so on. Okay, one can also to refer back to yesterday's debate, one can also make the same point in terms of nominalism versus realism. From the nominalist perspective, as we said yesterday I just recapitulating it, plus is a sign of the excess of reality which we cannot ever fully grasp with our conceptual frame. Is this boring empiricist motive you know reality is always more rich than our categorical apparatus and so on and so on. So plus in this sense signals that our classification will never be complete, that something will always elude it. So we should be aware of this and keep our mind open for new entities, properties and so on. Again, as it was made clear yesterday in that debate with Todd McGowan and others, there is no universality per se for this view. There is there are only always incomplete lists of particulars. And here politically, as it was already said yesterday and I want to supplement it, this this is clear because this is also how the vulgar Marxist, I think pseudo-Marxist, historicization works. You know in our predominantly nominalist times, this is how I would like to write it but I am too stupid too old, many people wrote it, Schopenhauer among the philosophers, a manual, manual of how to win every debate. You know that even when you are and I think one of the rules is always, I debate something and I am losing the argument, the nominalist escape. Like let's say I debate femininity, I am losing. There is always a safe way out to say, but what woman are you talking about? There is no woman as such, there are only black, lesbian, hetero women and so on and so on. It's an it's an easy way out. Or to put it in more correct Marxist terms, the idea is to always find a particular bias, spin, of every universality. You know the story like human rights, yeah but do they not secretly or even not so secretly privilege you know the usual list: white males of certain property, education and so on and so on. Okay, we should do this, there is an element in this, although already here, to repeat what was said yesterday, the role of this empty universality is much more ambiguous. It's not just an ideological form that justifies oppression, like we pretend to be universalists, human rights, but secretly we privilege some of them. You should never forget that from the very beginning the universal form gained a certain autonomy and opened up the space for an explosion. First women, who were clearly disprivileged, but Mary Wollstonecraft and so on you remember like why not we also if the form is universal. Then the biggest maybe I think one of definitely two three biggest events in the last maybe one thousand years, the Haiti Revolution where blacks in Haiti simply said it was an incredible event like we are also we don't want any to put it ironically what Haiti blacks were saying is thanks for Alex Haley Roots and that Hollywood production no, we don't want to go back and search for our roots, we want to be not only part of the same universality as you French are, we want to correct you and be more universal than you are. But this is not all. Marx is well aware that universality is not just cannot be reduced to this nominalist perspective it's all always historicized specific overdetermined by some specific context, it's also part of our actuality. The point of Marx is that capitalism in this sense is universal. It's actually universal. Let's say I'm a merchant from China, you're a merchant from Latin America. Of course we can say we never really understand each other, each of us has its own cultural horizon. But from the capitalist standpoint it doesn't matter, the universal form of commodities is operative there. So for Marx this is the other side of his historicizing, capitalism is a social formation where abstract universality is a fact of actual life. To be a modern capitalist subject means that you treat yourself as universal, not determined by any particular form and so on and so on and so on. So again to go on, that's the nominalist view. In the terms of transgenderism we should just arrive to establish again a list of all sexual identities with the awareness that something will always elude us. From the Hegelian realist perspective on the contrary the point is not that through the notion's self-articulation we can establish a complete list of particular species. Plus, the marker of what is left out, is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation but a positive entity in itself, an entity which gives body to the negativity that characterizes every universality. So that's the beauty of it. I don't have time to go into it in detail but it was again hinted yesterday that first debate, that universality is universality is actualizes itself in this plus. It's not that we have that we who have our position in a normative structure, for example in the patriarchal society we who are fully in the in the normative way men, women, that we have our post but the plus is just some obscure remains. No, the plus they are embodied universality in the same way that for Marx for example proletarians as those with no proper place within the social edifice are the embodiment of the universality. Or even for Hegel, but that's a more complex story, that what he calls rabble, Pöbel, the outcasts, they are universality they are universality embodied. What this means again is that humanity is not a genus with two species, men and women, or then we can add other species. Sexual difference is a difference between men as a species of a genus humanity and woman as a plus, the element which stands for the universality of being human. So we should here turn around the standard male chauvinist anthropology where men are perceived to be more universal and women introduce the element of particularity. No men stand for particularity. Men you know like human genus has two species, man as a species and woman as the out-of-place element which stands for its universality. Okay, enough of abstract philosophizing, now we come to something that I hope will be a little bit more amusing which is, so how do we come from all this, these were still the contradictions tensions antagonisms of Cross-cap to Klein bottle. Ah here I hope I will surprise you a little bit. I would like to begin in a big philosophical way. If there is a doxa of 20th century philosophy, it is the position defined by Heidegger's notion from his *Being and Time* of In-der-Welt-sein, being in the world. It goes like this, that the big mistake of modern metaphysics of subjectivity is that it posits a gap: here am I with my representations, out there is reality. And then the big problem emerges, how can I break the circle of my representations and get in touch with reality out there? Can I do it at all or are we condemned to Berkeley, the Irish bishop Berkeley type of solipsism: all I have are my representations. Heidegger's answer, well-known answer, is that this very question is a false question, it's a scandal, because it first creates a gap between me my representations and actuality, it creates a pseudo-problem and then it spends all its energy trying to cover up the gap. Heidegger's answer, as you know, is that we should abandon the whole image of myself with my mental inside of representations and external reality outside. I am from the very beginning outside myself, in the world. I think that we should nonetheless abandon this idea, not totally it makes a point there is no inner self, but that in some sense we do live in a closed universe like prisoners of Plato's cave. My idea is to rehabilitate from a materialist standpoint or retell the story of Plato's cave and to do it I think we can do it precisely with reference to the model of Klein bottle. I will just, I hope this all works, explain what's my idea. The outside on the top is let's call it the pre-ontological real in quantum physics, quantum waves whatever you want. You fall in the abyss of void inconsistency and then this is subjectivity and we as constituted subjects are here. This is when we are in here we look up and the same curved space from inside this is Plato's cave. The problem is that there is that, I call it snout or whatever, that strange tube, but it's the blind spot we don't see it, that's our position. What do I mean by this? Now I will do, if you are religious pray with me so that this will function because I, ah let's hope, now I will first to make this clear I will show you the the brief it's with some stupid music I'm so afraid how Klein bottle is formed. Just a little point, but I like it. Watch it please. Listen carefully to the dialogue. It's much shorter than the other clip. Your after now is crucial, I will immediately comment after it. Okay. You know what happened to me when I showed to people a couple of times this clip. It's always this laughter and then because I asked people I hope you are perverted in the same way they told me although it's the pure play of forms you get a feeling that something really dirty is going on you know with all this. Some guy even approached me and said I know what this is. I'm sorry for trigger warning if you are too sensitive, but it's a guy with such a long penis that he can twist it and fuck himself anally you know that was his you know there is some admit it there is something really dirty going on here. Okay, sorry, yes. No. Sorry sorry sorry. I have to you see now things are happening which I will try to ah I think I I did it. Uh-huh, is it this one or what? Oh. Sorry. Ah no, sorry. I got it I got it I got it. This is okay. So again we are inside and this is not an idealist perspective because the point is just the same point which was made wonderfully in quantum physics by Niels Bohr that to be true materialists we should not ask ourselves if you are inside that bottle but can we reach a reality what is outside. The question is that snout, that obscene protuberance, like how do I fit reality. The whole, the whole image together is part of reality. So let me elaborate this a little bit. Our universe of ideological meaning is closed, we are within that circle. But it's not closed in this modern solipsist way. My answer would have been of course we are in the world, but what is closed and enclosed is we and our world. This is the closed circular space. So I want now to make this clear by mentioned two cases of crazy ideology, or even three cases of crazy ideology, which that is to say line of thoughts which is madness from the modern biological, evolutionary or whatever standpoint, but it makes deep sense as a theory of ideology following this model. First one is do you remember that medieval usually paintings where you our stars and so on the universe is interpreted as a big cupola and then the painting goes like somebody arrives to the edge and breaks through and sees, I mean of course this is not how our real universe is built, but this is definitely how our ideology is done. We do live in *Truman Show* world ideologically. Or to give you another example of this, my favorite one which I mention a couple of times in my books. I forgot the name some English bishop who was friend of Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it. He had a problem. He was a good biologist and he saw that Darwin is right. So his problem was how to unite this with the fact that if you take the Bible literally the world should be created and something years ago and so on. And he provided, I'm sorry if I'm too repetitive you must know it, an ingenious solution. Which is that of course the Bible cannot be wrong. The world was created and something years ago and I don't know which one was it no earlier some guy even did I love the British man here British did had this in the typical British empiricist way that at in the morning in year minus God created the world. I like this idea like after having a good English breakfast and so on then he... So you know what's the solution? That God directly created fossils and so on to give us a false sense of opening. Now of course I don't buy this as cosmological theory. But I do buy it as the best theory of ideology, sorry. I think this is how ideology always works: creating its own past and so on. You know, since you Henry know your uncle or who creates classical music, the last news it amused me so much, do you know that now I read an analysis that you know our representation of Vikings, those helmets with horns, you know that they never never found any of them they were not stupid it would have been extremely unpractical. It was invented for the staging of early Wagner's operas. Nothing to do with Vikings but today everybody assumes that they had this extremely unpractical stupid whatever. So what I'm okay I will not even lose words here. But I want to do something, now comes the I hope more amusing but very problematic part for some of you. Concluding part. First, I will refer here to my good friend Frank Ruda who now wrote a short text, it will take time before it will be published but it's a wonderful text on also rehabilitating Plato's cave as theory of ideology. But he does something wonderful here. He focuses on an aspect which is totally neglected in usual readings of Plato because you know people are afraid of it like it's too authoritarian and so on and so on. Namely, Plato does not say that we are caught, this is the usual image we are we the ordinary people who only observe on the wall the spectacle of theater of shadows that we are there chained and cannot leave. Plato makes it clear that even if we get rid of our chains we would not want to be free. And Plato was the first to formulate this wonderful paradox, we have in some sense to be forced to be free. Here is if you permit me some quotes from Ruda: "The exit from the cave begins when one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains but when he is forced out. This clearly must be the place for the libidinal but also epistemological, political and ontological function of the master. This can only be a master who does neither tell me what precisely to do nor one whose instrument I could become but he must be, this good master, the one who just gives me back to myself. And in a sense one might say this could be connected to Plato's anamnesis theory remembering what one never knew as it were. And it implies that the proper master just affirms or makes it possible for me to affirm that I can do this without telling me what this is and thus without telling me who I am." End of quote. The point Ruda makes here is a subtle one. It's not only that if I am left to myself in the cave even if without chains I prefer to stay there so that a master has to force me out. But in a much more subtle way I have to volunteer to be forced out. Similarly to the way in which when a subject enters psychoanalysis he volunteers to do it. He voluntarily accepts the psychoanalyst as some kind of, I know it's not the discourse of the master, his master. Another quote from Ruda: "A question arises at precisely this point from using the reference to the master in psychoanalytic term. Does this mean that those who need the master are always already in the position of the analysand patient? If politically such a master is needed to become who one is and this can be structurally linked to liberating the prisoner from the cave to forcing him out after the chains are taken off and he still does not want to leave, the question arises how to link this with the idea that the patient, analysand, must per definition be a volunteer, not simply slave or bondsman. Psychoanalysis only works when you demand it, when you volunteer to go to make an analysis. So in short there must be a dialectics of master and volunteers here. A dialectics because the master to some extent constitutes volunteers as volunteers, liberates them from previously seemingly unquestionable position." So end of quote. But what further complicates the picture is that capitalism, quote again the last one from Ruda, relies massively on unpaid and thereby structurally voluntary labor. One has to distinguish not only between different types of master figures, the standard master who knows better than you what you want, orders you to do it, and this more subtle liberating master, a master whose function is only to as it were to bring out in you what you are able to do. His message is not do this but you can do it and it's up to you to choose it. Not only with different but also between different types of volunteers. And end of quote. So here to conclude I would like to say this that I would like just very briefly because I would like then to conclude with two clips from movies to point out how we have two types, two levels of servitude volontaire of voluntary servitude. First we have this let's call it authentic submission serving a liberating master and servitude volontaire with regard to market mechanisms. In capitalist servitude we simply feel free while in authentic liberation we accept voluntarily servitude as serving a cause and not just serving ourselves. In today's cynical functioning of capitalism I can know very well what I am doing and I continue to do it. Here the liberating aspect of my knowledge is suspended. While in the authentic dialectics of liberation the awareness of my situation is already the first step of liberation. In other words, in capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free because this feeling is the very form of my servitude. I mean to give you a simple example today when the situation gets worse for ordinary people, at least in Europe, welfare state is disappearing, you have to you get only as a precarious worker you get short-term contract, you have to provide yourself health insurance. Here comes ideology and tells you but this is wonderful, it's a new freedom. You can choose you are the term is self-entrepreneur, even if you are a beggar you are a self-entrepreneur. Like you steal from someone dollar and then you can choose will you take a holiday, will you invest in your healthcare or whatever. So my point is that here our very feeling free as a subject of choice is the form of our servitude to the logic of capital. While in the liberating servitude volontaire our my realization that I am serving enslaved to my unconscious to whomever is the first act of freedom. And here I nonetheless agree with Judith Butler with all my disagreements with her who said that the first step of feminism before you even liberate yourself you must recognize yourself as your servitude. Which is why she made a wonderful proposal that the first stage of feminism should always be and it's a wonderful dialectical moment to sabotage because we live in liberal times. So even if you still have as a woman a masculine master they like to play the liberal game, you know I'm just taking care of you we are equal let's debate it and so on and so on. And I love this idea of Judith that the first step should be of a woman: no please I'm your servant give me clear answers, orders, don't bullshit me about we are equal we have a dialogue and so on and so on. Why does this work? Because in today's ideological constellation a master cannot do this. It's almost discursively impossible more or less to do it directly. So the point is that a subjective experience of I am free is the very form of servitude and the subjective experience of I am a slave it means for me in order to say this I am in some sense already free. So in this confused situation now if you allow me another just not more than ten minutes, how can we act freely? Ah now comes my favorite part. Let me show you two movie clips. The first one is you probably didn't see it, it's from a Danish noir, I use this often I'm sorry if some of you know it, *A Conspiracy of Faith*. It's the hero is he designates himself as terminally depressed detective Carl Mørck, a burnt-out depressed detective basically an honest guy, and his counter-point is Johannes, a handsome blond serial killer of children who is interested not only in killing the children but in destroying their parents' faith, religious faith. So I want to show you some four minutes long the final confrontation of the two in a lone wooden sea cottage where Johannes holds in trained as his prisoners Mørck, the detective, and two kidnapped children, a boy and a girl. Now let's do this. If you it will be in Danish but it doesn't. Okay, let's stop. If you are too sensitive here, you know the boy really survived at the end he is not drowned and so on. But what I want to say is this that okay it's clear that Mørck the detective is a true atheist while Johannes continues to rely on a big other, when God failed to appear in his crisis devil helped him and so on and so on. So the first irony is that it's the serial killer who still in a negative way keeps the religious structure while Mørck is an atheist. However, Johannes is clearly wrong when he claims that when he was drowning the kid God did not show up. Every authentic Christian will tell you God did appear two times even, when Mørck offered himself to die instead of the kid and when the girl, small kid sister, refused to take revenge and stab Johannes. But which God appears here? It's not an all-powerful transcendent agent which ultimately takes care of us but a Christ-like impotent witness offering compassion and solidarity, displaying pure goodness in the face of a meaningless indifferent world. This is what I mean by my what I call my Christian atheism. One has to gather the strength to view the world with an inhuman eye, in all its cruel indifference and meaninglessness. Without big other as the ultimate guarantee of a higher order or meaning, goodness can only emerge at this point. In other words I think that to display this type of goodness which is for me the ultimate Christian gesture that Mørck did, you have to be an atheist. That's another story. Let me go on. At this razor's edge the ultimate Möbius strip reversal takes place: accepting the brutal real in all its senseless indifference, accepting it we are pushed to full ethico-political engagement. Now I want to show you another clip where we have a similar reversal which characterizes the dialectics of ethical substance. Let's imagine a substantial ritual of mourning which is gradually in the process of secularization emptied of its content, it appears as a nonsense. The miracle is that precisely as such, as an empty ritual, it can remain operative in a more authentic way than ever. I will show you now the final two minutes of a movie which is okay, modest, naive, but at some level I like it and this one is more popular I hope you've seen it. Taylor Sheridan's *Wind River*. The story of Natalie Hanson, a Native American girl found raped and frozen in the mid of winter on a desolate Wyoming reservation. Cory, a hunter, film's hero whose girl also disappeared three years ago and Jane, a young FBI agent, try to unravel the mystery. So in the final scene Cory goes to Hanson's house where he finds a desperate Martin, Natalie's the raped and killed girl's father, sitting outside with a death face, a mix of blue and white paint on his face. And here we get the final dialogue. Okay, so just to recapitulate. At the beginning of this scene Cory asks Martin with painted death face how did he learn to do it and Martin replies I I don't I've just made it up it's no one left to teach it. And then Martin informs him that his son returns from return from prison and then he will go to pick him up at the bus station. This is crucial: as soon as I wash this shit off my face. And then he says I should go and get him eventually just sit here for a minute get time to sit with me, Cory says yes and they sit there silently. The first beauty of this ending is I think maybe slightly damaged by these final words they state the obvious they don't fit in but the underlying problem is that of a ritual of mourning which enables us to survive an unbearably traumatic loss. And the glimmer of hope provided by the ending is that Martin and Cory will be able to survive through such a minimal ritual of just sitting silently. We should not dismiss lightly Martin's statement "as soon as I wash this shit off my face" as grounded in the fact that his death face is not done in the old authentic way but just improvised by him. It would remain shit even if it were to be done authentically the old way. Martin has already irretrievably lost his ancient ethnic substance. He is already a modern subject, unable to practice death face with full immersion. However, the miracle is that although he knows this, he assumes all this, improvising a death face and just sitting there with it works as authentic in its very artificial improvisation. It may be shit but shit works in its very minimal gesture of withdrawal from life engagement. So again we should bear in mind here another nice point of the series that of the scene that Cory is a white man living in a reservation. And what Martin asks him to do is not some of my friends read it this way, I think they are totally wrong, is not to show solidarity with a grieving Native American and participate in a ritual which is meaningless to him like I don't believe in your shit but okay I'm your friend I will sit there. Such a patronizing respect for a primitive culture is one of the most disgusting versions of racism. The message of Martin's request is that he shares with Cory the distance that Cory probably feels towards the Native American ritual. Cory's white man's distance is already Martin's and it is this distance which makes the ritual authentic. Not it's not part of some ridiculous immersion into a native culture and so on and so on. And that's the beauty of it you know. What survives is a pure empty ritual. It's not legitimized in any deep faith and so on it's just a kind of empty gesture. And as such performed precisely by two modern subjects it's more authentic than all the authentic bullshits and so on. Now I will conclude just to tell you my last part but I've exploited so much your patience was to be a brief reading of *Arrival*, you know Villeneuve, the one who did *Blade Runner What attracts me in that movie these are all approaches to same ethical gesture. I hope I will not lose time that you've seen it. These heptapods arrive on earth blah blah so they are more holistic they move in circular time they know the past the future and so on. It's totally wrong to read the movie in this New Age way: we humans are caught in our consecutive time linear temporality but the truly wise people or humanoids whatever they are spiritual heptapods move in a circular time and so on are more holistic and so on. There is if you read the movie in this way playing with this shitty holistic critique of ours you totally miss it. I think it's I say this with all the irony it's absolutely on the side of us humans. You know why? You remember if you've seen the movie that at the end when the two heroes asked the those aliens why did they come here to save us they say because years from now we will need you. Now this is a wonderful enigmatic question. They know everything the future and so on, why would they need us to save them? It's not that we know something even more deep and so on. We know precisely how to reduce how to ignore. The film ultimately celebrates precisely our non and this this is the act of the heroine. What she does is something much more terrifying than a simple free act. You know, I will not go into it if you've seen the movie, she makes a choice to have her child with her love although she knows that the child will die of leukemia etc. The point is not is this a good decision or not, the point is this one that that we learn through her that there is nonetheless a crack on this perfect determinism. When you know the future, what happens when you don't act accordingly? Because this is what those stupid squid-like, I hate squids I hate calamari and so on, what those heptapods are not able to do. They see the future and actualize it, do it. But the greatness is in our human finitude and limitation. Because this the true act is the act of not only of freely choosing but while accepting that the world is predetermined, to act against this predestination and ruin everything as it were. Ruin everything in the sense change the past in I think itself I think that the correct materialist point here is not past is what it was, but we have a free space we can change the future. I more and more think that the future is predetermined but we can change the past and maybe in this circular way change the future and so on and so on. So I will stop now I exploited you way too much but I in I'm sorry for my confused talk I just wanted to give you a hint in what direction me together with my friends, with the Stalinist you know the KGB units they were usually in three troika you know liquidators. We consider ourselves as our Lacanian troika and we are all working on this on this topic especially on ontology. This is what I tried to develop in my publicity this is like clip you know it should be there minute of promotion of publicity and so on in my new new book which just came out *Incontinence of the Void*, it's not obscene it's Sam Beckett from whom I took this, Alenka Zupančič in her wonderful book which is doing very well *What is Sex?* and then Mladen Dolar the third member he will now published we ironically call it his *Écrits* over pages collected text with Bloomsbury as a big volume. So I'm not so much worried about all these polemics and so on. We are in the middle of trying to penetrate some new space. Maybe even probably we will fail. But I think that we live in an incredible time philosophically, you know something new is emerging really new we don't yet know what and I think we with our orientation are at least in the right space. Again I'm sorry for talking so long and so on you know but I love to be here I'm just sorry I cannot be more active. Thanks very much for your patience. Now you will organize democracy.
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I hope you did it in a Stalinist way that
I hope you did it in a Stalinist way that
Slavoj Žižek
it will be just a show, you distributed the questions in advance. This this time I'll warn you when I'm stopping talking and not interrupt you. All right so I think we have microphones, is that right?
it will be just a show, you distributed the questions in advance. This this time I'll warn you when I'm stopping talking and not interrupt you. All right so I think we have microphones, is that right?
unknown
Microphone holders? And if you raise your hands I'll try and get you to be recognized in order. but we are open for questions and Slavoj if we go for about half an hour does that sound about the right
Microphone holders? And if you raise your hands I'll try and get you to be recognized in order. but we are open for questions and Slavoj if we go for about half an hour does that sound about the right
Slavoj Žižek
amount? If but already you know that's my hypocrisy. I am always tired I must open but I feel I have to do it to you. I like to speak too long so that then I can say hypocritically sorry
amount? If but already you know that's my hypocrisy. I am always tired I must open but I feel I have to do it to you. I like to speak too long so that then I can say hypocritically sorry
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we don't have time but I would love to have a long debate. You know which is the usual leftist excuse I discovered.
we don't have time but I would love to have a long debate. You know which is the usual leftist excuse I discovered.
Slavoj Žižek
When leftists want a shorter debate they evoke a mythical cleaning lady, like you know we could go on talking but that lady should go home and doesn't have time and it's pure manipulation. They don't care about that you know. So I hope there are no suffering cleaning ladies here please. I volunteered to be the cleaning lady for the... Are you transgender now or whatever? Ah. It sounds good. Okay sorry let's go on. All
When leftists want a shorter debate they evoke a mythical cleaning lady, like you know we could go on talking but that lady should go home and doesn't have time and it's pure manipulation. They don't care about that you know. So I hope there are no suffering cleaning ladies here please. I volunteered to be the cleaning lady for the... Are you transgender now or whatever? Ah. It sounds good. Okay sorry let's go on. All
unknown
right here we have a question. Down here in the... So so Todd was joking with a few of us last night that there's some spy here that's going to publish something like based on yesterday's panel like Slavoj Žižek comes out in favor of the plus. In favor? In favor of the plus, but now I think it's going to be that it's going to be Slavoj Žižek ally. That's what's that's what's going that was a joke so you're supposed to laugh. What was the last phrase in this? Slavoj Žižek ally. You're now that because you've embraced the plus. Okay the serious question is while you were talking about about the
right here we have a question. Down here in the... So so Todd was joking with a few of us last night that there's some spy here that's going to publish something like based on yesterday's panel like Slavoj Žižek comes out in favor of the plus. In favor? In favor of the plus, but now I think it's going to be that it's going to be Slavoj Žižek ally. That's what's that's what's going that was a joke so you're supposed to laugh. What was the last phrase in this? Slavoj Žižek ally. You're now that because you've embraced the plus. Okay the serious question is while you were talking about about the
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plus and universality and it was the first half of the talk when the when the Möbius strip was up, you know I was thinking you know the the plus, right, if you just if you view
plus and universality and it was the first half of the talk when the when the Möbius strip was up, you know I was thinking you know the the plus, right, if you just if you view
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it from a canted angle or if you just turn it degrees it becomes an X. And so with you know the ontology of the like Malcolm X and and the sign of universality is the plus doing something different than the X or is the plus just the X turned degrees and you know as a sign of of of universality? No okay. I cannot go in detail into it now but I think that it's not so much that it's maybe it occupies the same place. But nonetheless it's the beautiful idea properly Hegelian is this one that it's not X in the sense of pointing towards some in itself and so on that that it's it's already here as a positive entity. X is maybe what Hegel calls true infinity. In Kantian reading X would have meant or plus would have meant we never can get it either it's always and so on but the maybe it's something like this it's a very formal homology that that Cantor did with infinity. That's why he has multiple infinities that you count infinity as already counted and put it as a positive term and then you can have multiple infinities and so on and so on. And this I think is is the big Hegelian move. It's not that no we can go there we can see the way things are in themselves and so on and so on. You know it's my eternal formula with Kant X remains epistemological. It just means there is an element which eludes us we cannot get to noumenal things in themselves and so on and so on. Hegelian solution is not no we can I'm an absolute idealist I no Hegelian solution is what if this X is already ontological? What if there is an X which holds in reality itself? It's not just that we can so the the only thing that difference from Kant is again this shift from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility fact. I like this idea very much. And this is my highest speculation I'm not sure I will publish it because I don't want to so I'm trying to talk with my quantum physics friends I don't want to be caught with my pants down bluffing there no that all like extremely interesting things concerning this topic from what I can understand with my limited knowledge are happening in quantum physics just now. This theory it got Nobel Prize even now of gravitational waves and so on and so on you know all that stuff where it is precisely the basic operation what attracts me so much to quantum physics is precisely that it does the same thing. Here as I develop in my books for example Bohr criticized Heisenberg. For Heisenberg he was too Kantian. His uncertainty principle was still epistemological. We cannot measure both at the same time velocity and position and so on and so on. Bohr goes much further here no. Like X is part of reality indeterminacy is in reality itself. and the difficult
it from a canted angle or if you just turn it degrees it becomes an X. And so with you know the ontology of the like Malcolm X and and the sign of universality is the plus doing something different than the X or is the plus just the X turned degrees and you know as a sign of of of universality? No okay. I cannot go in detail into it now but I think that it's not so much that it's maybe it occupies the same place. But nonetheless it's the beautiful idea properly Hegelian is this one that it's not X in the sense of pointing towards some in itself and so on that that it's it's already here as a positive entity. X is maybe what Hegel calls true infinity. In Kantian reading X would have meant or plus would have meant we never can get it either it's always and so on but the maybe it's something like this it's a very formal homology that that Cantor did with infinity. That's why he has multiple infinities that you count infinity as already counted and put it as a positive term and then you can have multiple infinities and so on and so on. And this I think is is the big Hegelian move. It's not that no we can go there we can see the way things are in themselves and so on and so on. You know it's my eternal formula with Kant X remains epistemological. It just means there is an element which eludes us we cannot get to noumenal things in themselves and so on and so on. Hegelian solution is not no we can I'm an absolute idealist I no Hegelian solution is what if this X is already ontological? What if there is an X which holds in reality itself? It's not just that we can so the the only thing that difference from Kant is again this shift from epistemological obstacle to ontological impossibility fact. I like this idea very much. And this is my highest speculation I'm not sure I will publish it because I don't want to so I'm trying to talk with my quantum physics friends I don't want to be caught with my pants down bluffing there no that all like extremely interesting things concerning this topic from what I can understand with my limited knowledge are happening in quantum physics just now. This theory it got Nobel Prize even now of gravitational waves and so on and so on you know all that stuff where it is precisely the basic operation what attracts me so much to quantum physics is precisely that it does the same thing. Here as I develop in my books for example Bohr criticized Heisenberg. For Heisenberg he was too Kantian. His uncertainty principle was still epistemological. We cannot measure both at the same time velocity and position and so on and so on. Bohr goes much further here no. Like X is part of reality indeterminacy is in reality itself. and the difficult
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point is how to read this how to read this without falling into idealism. If you allow me just briefly because I used it in one of my books but I hope you don't know all of it it's the best story that I know of this. I took it from some from some stupid introduction to philosophy. That's for me true materialism. The idea is this one that to understand the consequences of ontological of quantum physics one should do it via a detour through video games. You know in video games reality is not fully constructed. Like if you are in a game and you see a forest in the background that forest is not fully programmed because it's not part of the rules of the game that you can go there and check it you know. So the programmer said fuck off why should I lose time programming or there is a house if it's not part of the game that you can enter the house why lose precious time programming the interior of a house. So the idea is this one I love it that we in quantum
point is how to read this how to read this without falling into idealism. If you allow me just briefly because I used it in one of my books but I hope you don't know all of it it's the best story that I know of this. I took it from some from some stupid introduction to philosophy. That's for me true materialism. The idea is this one that to understand the consequences of ontological of quantum physics one should do it via a detour through video games. You know in video games reality is not fully constructed. Like if you are in a game and you see a forest in the background that forest is not fully programmed because it's not part of the rules of the game that you can go there and check it you know. So the programmer said fuck off why should I lose time programming or there is a house if it's not part of the game that you can enter the house why lose precious time programming the interior of a house. So the idea is this one I love it that we in quantum
Slavoj Žižek
physics when we see this ontological incompleteness of reality we caught God with his pants down. God thought something like listen humans are too stupid to move beyond atoms so why should I lose time programming micro let's leave it indeterminate but we came there we caught him and this is the beautiful theory. So the point is how to think this incompleteness without God? Or how to have that's what I find so fascinating
physics when we see this ontological incompleteness of reality we caught God with his pants down. God thought something like listen humans are too stupid to move beyond atoms so why should I lose time programming micro let's leave it indeterminate but we came there we caught him and this is the beautiful theory. So the point is how to think this incompleteness without God? Or how to have that's what I find so fascinating
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in quantum physics
in quantum physics
Slavoj Žižek
this idea of ontological cheating. You can borrow for the future something can come into existence but before the big other notices it before it's registered it disappears. I still think I'm here very old-fashioned that quantum physics in the age of Copenhagen orthodoxy avoided these problems but now they are coming back and I expect a lot from what is happening there. But again it's the same topic the status of ontological opening indeterminacy and so on and so on. And here I think we should move beyond Kant's transcendentalism. Sorry I was too long I will be shorter from now on. I would like to do a new age comment on that child maybe more than all our fabricated wisdom there is a wisdom in that innocent sound of a child you know. Sorry please. Thank you I want to return to your statements about the last scene in the Danish film, I can't remember the name of the film. *Flaskepost fra P* in Danish but it's a beautiful Chestertonian translation in English *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Thank you very much. You can download it Pirate Bay you get all of them. I'll pay four dollars I'll do whatever thank you. Um I want to make sure I understood you correctly but then I wanted to ask a question about it. I I think you said something like the true act or the best act of goodness comes when you no longer believe in a god, perhaps a god that's some kind of absolute controlling power, as an atheist but then nonetheless you perform this act of goodness. And I have two questions about that, one what do you mean by goodness and two is there a relationship with courage there and what might that relation be? Very good point. But basically I gave another version of my formula which I took from Agamben, courage of hopelessness and so on. You know no what I mean it's very naive I know I don't elaborate this notion but what I am I am tempted following Badiou here to rehabilitate goodness because I'm so tired of this fashionable pseudo-Nietzschean way of claiming goodness is bourgeois blah beyond good and evil. Most of the people that I know who are beyond good and evil are beneath good and evil. They haven't even progressed to that area and so on. By by goodness I mean it in a very Kantian way, a pure form of empathy taking care of others where there is no narcissistic calculation and so on. I leave it consciously open because I don't want to commit myself then to some interpretation because things get here very paradoxical even with Kant himself. Because Kant always suspects pure goodness which must be done just for the sake of duty no. He always suspects that there are hidden what Kant calls pathological which simply means empirical motivations like you pretend to be good but it's to impress the others or whatever to feel good. But I think that there is a much more refined logic at work there. What Kant is really afraid is encountering goodness is like encountering something noumenal which doesn't fit our reality in our reality. So I think that Kant precisely wants this suspicion of but we can never be sure maybe it was just that I did it for some narcissistic satisfaction and so on not to confront the trauma of an ethical act. And so my it's very good question that you asked because in some sense as I develop this widely goodness comes strangely close to what Kant calls but then abandons the term radical evil. Evil which is also and that's the big enigma that Kant is trying to escape. Is there radical evil? He you know in his wonderful the the late text *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone* he first gives some hints that radical evil is if not possible at least imaginable. Radical evil in the sense that you are evil not for any profit but simply for the sake of it. Which for Kant then comes in a formal way strangely close to to his definition of good act, of doing your duty. So can you elevate evil into your duty? Then Kant sees the problem he steps back and reinterprets quickly like secretly radical evil as just an internal egotistic tendency towards evil. He doesn't want to allow for that. So I find this very nice reading where Kant precisely is afraid of the consequences of his own discovery. You know this is Kant at his best. He
this idea of ontological cheating. You can borrow for the future something can come into existence but before the big other notices it before it's registered it disappears. I still think I'm here very old-fashioned that quantum physics in the age of Copenhagen orthodoxy avoided these problems but now they are coming back and I expect a lot from what is happening there. But again it's the same topic the status of ontological opening indeterminacy and so on and so on. And here I think we should move beyond Kant's transcendentalism. Sorry I was too long I will be shorter from now on. I would like to do a new age comment on that child maybe more than all our fabricated wisdom there is a wisdom in that innocent sound of a child you know. Sorry please. Thank you I want to return to your statements about the last scene in the Danish film, I can't remember the name of the film. *Flaskepost fra P* in Danish but it's a beautiful Chestertonian translation in English *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Thank you very much. You can download it Pirate Bay you get all of them. I'll pay four dollars I'll do whatever thank you. Um I want to make sure I understood you correctly but then I wanted to ask a question about it. I I think you said something like the true act or the best act of goodness comes when you no longer believe in a god, perhaps a god that's some kind of absolute controlling power, as an atheist but then nonetheless you perform this act of goodness. And I have two questions about that, one what do you mean by goodness and two is there a relationship with courage there and what might that relation be? Very good point. But basically I gave another version of my formula which I took from Agamben, courage of hopelessness and so on. You know no what I mean it's very naive I know I don't elaborate this notion but what I am I am tempted following Badiou here to rehabilitate goodness because I'm so tired of this fashionable pseudo-Nietzschean way of claiming goodness is bourgeois blah beyond good and evil. Most of the people that I know who are beyond good and evil are beneath good and evil. They haven't even progressed to that area and so on. By by goodness I mean it in a very Kantian way, a pure form of empathy taking care of others where there is no narcissistic calculation and so on. I leave it consciously open because I don't want to commit myself then to some interpretation because things get here very paradoxical even with Kant himself. Because Kant always suspects pure goodness which must be done just for the sake of duty no. He always suspects that there are hidden what Kant calls pathological which simply means empirical motivations like you pretend to be good but it's to impress the others or whatever to feel good. But I think that there is a much more refined logic at work there. What Kant is really afraid is encountering goodness is like encountering something noumenal which doesn't fit our reality in our reality. So I think that Kant precisely wants this suspicion of but we can never be sure maybe it was just that I did it for some narcissistic satisfaction and so on not to confront the trauma of an ethical act. And so my it's very good question that you asked because in some sense as I develop this widely goodness comes strangely close to what Kant calls but then abandons the term radical evil. Evil which is also and that's the big enigma that Kant is trying to escape. Is there radical evil? He you know in his wonderful the the late text *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone* he first gives some hints that radical evil is if not possible at least imaginable. Radical evil in the sense that you are evil not for any profit but simply for the sake of it. Which for Kant then comes in a formal way strangely close to to his definition of good act, of doing your duty. So can you elevate evil into your duty? Then Kant sees the problem he steps back and reinterprets quickly like secretly radical evil as just an internal egotistic tendency towards evil. He doesn't want to allow for that. So I find this very nice reading where Kant precisely is afraid of the consequences of his own discovery. You know this is Kant at his best. He
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says something and then he does all possible things to to blur it and so on and so on. But I still think that that Lacan was right when he says in at the beginning of his writing *Kant avec Sade* he says something very important. He says that in the history of ideas if we want to look for the starting point out of which later psychoanalysis developed it's Kant. It's not all that irrational philosophy of the unconscious whatever. It's Kant. It's Kant. So the only thing that I can do now quickly to answer you is that goodness is a again again one of those plus mysterious categories and so on. It's it's goodness is for me some kind of the ultimate free act but free act in the sense of it has to be it has to be groundless in some sense. And and not only the most radical philosophers have seen that. Yeah absolutely. Yeah because that would be for me of course the definition of courage that you can stand on your own without relying on any figure of the big other and here Kant is already as I developed in a couple lines much more radical than people usually take it. When he has this motto of unconditional duty you know like *du kannst, denn du sollst*, you can do it because you have to do it. His point is not there is no excuse for not doing your duty like you cannot say I know this is my duty but sorry I'm in a hurry I have some friends whatever. There is also no excuse to do your duty. You know it's very clear that for Kant for example sorry here my friends are I cannot say if I have
says something and then he does all possible things to to blur it and so on and so on. But I still think that that Lacan was right when he says in at the beginning of his writing *Kant avec Sade* he says something very important. He says that in the history of ideas if we want to look for the starting point out of which later psychoanalysis developed it's Kant. It's not all that irrational philosophy of the unconscious whatever. It's Kant. It's Kant. So the only thing that I can do now quickly to answer you is that goodness is a again again one of those plus mysterious categories and so on. It's it's goodness is for me some kind of the ultimate free act but free act in the sense of it has to be it has to be groundless in some sense. And and not only the most radical philosophers have seen that. Yeah absolutely. Yeah because that would be for me of course the definition of courage that you can stand on your own without relying on any figure of the big other and here Kant is already as I developed in a couple lines much more radical than people usually take it. When he has this motto of unconditional duty you know like *du kannst, denn du sollst*, you can do it because you have to do it. His point is not there is no excuse for not doing your duty like you cannot say I know this is my duty but sorry I'm in a hurry I have some friends whatever. There is also no excuse to do your duty. You know it's very clear that for Kant for example sorry here my friends are I cannot say if I have
Slavoj Žižek
to do as my duty something that nonetheless as a collateral damage as they say now hurts you to say sorry guy but I cannot help it it's my duty to do it. No, I am also fully responsible for doing my duty. I cannot put the blame onto others. This is where for example I claim although I appreciate her very much Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took she took seriously Eichmann's defense that I was just a perfect Kantian. No, a perfect because Eichmann precisely projected the source of authority onto Hitler: I was just following orders and so on. No a Kantian cannot ever say that. You are fully responsible for what you assume as the order. So Eichmann simply he was absolutely not a Kantian ethical ethical figure and so on. We have I think time for two more questions and I think there's a question. How does this guy count? Why two and so on I don't get. Here on the right. Ah now you show so your political cards. I'm doing my duty. Okay that's right. I'm also still here so talking about duty uh I'm still elaborating the question so I'm sorry if it's a little confusing but I'm thinking of what you said about philosophy today being at the point of a breakthrough maybe and I saw where you pointed at in the Klein's bottle where you think that philosophers maybe today in terms of vision. And honestly I haven't read Ruda's book it's not out yet. No but it's even a manuscript I hope it will. Right so I mean I don't know exactly how he is talking about Plato's cave. Obviously that's one of the most commonly cited myths in philosophy but there seems to be an interesting repression because I can't help but thinking that when the philosopher comes back to the cave and I'm thinking about imposing freedom that you said, they kill him. Nobody ever writes about this but when the philosopher goes back to the cave and wants to liberate the man they kill the philosopher. They don't want to be liberated. So what's the duty of the philosopher what why do you think we're at a breakthrough today maybe I'm a little bit more. I was saying we are at the breakthrough at this level. My point with cave would just be that the task of philosophy is not just go out of the cave but to say do you see that snout do you see how you are part of the cave do you just to you should go not go out breakthrough but back into that pro... you know that philosopher shouldn't be a naive realist. And this brings me back to what you are asking my big problem I tried to to deal with it in my mega not in a qualitative but quantitative sense mega fat book *Less Than Nothing* that I was I had a post-coital depression after finishing it. So I wrote another book just five hundred pages for was it Lacan called the the absolute recoil. After that it's just dragging on it was *Disparities* then it's now *Incontinence of the Void* and now it's a new one almost finished. Because my big problematic problem is this one. We have the ultimate transcendental approach Heidegger and even most of Marxists and so on. Their form of transcendentalism is historical practice they say all our the way we relate to the world is always from Georg Lukács in his *History of Class Consciousness* developed this, you know is part of our concrete historical practice and so on. So is this the ultimate horizon how to move out of this transcendental approach without regressing into any kind of naive realism where into what I think at least object-oriented ontology falls. Like no we are just one among the objects and so on and then Graham Harman reproaches me for I think you still think that subject is some exceptional being. I'm saying no maybe first I don't think subject is a mega actant. I think the basic feature of subjectivity Hegel saw this very clearly is precisely a certain type of passivity, withdrawal and so on. The problem is not that we as subjects are omnipotent. Already in Kant if you read Kant in a refined way Adorno wrote about it you can see how his idea of transcendental constitution we as transcendental subjects constitute reality is really a form of impotence. It means transcendental categories are our Plato's cave. You know so again my point is how to break out of this I think debilitating false alternative: naive realism or still transcendentalism. That's for me the task today. Sorry I was too long. I will be shorter from now on. Over here. I would like to do a New Age comment on that child maybe more than all our fabricated wisdom there is a wisdom in that innocent sound of a child you know. Sorry please. No I'm glad I'm actually glad you said that because that might lead in the direction of my question. So I appreciated your theoretical points at the beginning very much and my question is about the examples that you used particularly the clips. And not so much kind of a challenge in interpretation but how you would respond to an alternative interpretation of all of the clips that you showed. So the moment at the end of *Wind River* what unites them isn't just sort of the empty ritual but also the grief and particularly parental grief. And it seems to me that that's also obviously a part of *Arrival* in terms of the embracing of actual parental grief, her choice to have the child even though she knows that she will die. Um and then it also the other clip you showed centers around the loss of children as a way to undermine faith. So I'm just wondering if you could speak to little speak a little bit to whether or not sort of grief is also providing sort of a moment in being that you could interpret somehow within the framework you're talking about. It's a very nice complex question I'm now too perplexed stupid to answer it publicly. All I will say is something very problematic and I wonder if you would agree. I think that nonetheless sorry I forgot her name a nice actor but how she is called in the movie, the lady, the mother in *Arrival*, that in some sense she made the wrong decision. It was almost a criminal decision. Why why I mean it's a very common sense what I'm saying but when you know that your future child daughter in that case will only suffer have a short meaningless life why? Isn't there a terrible narcissism in it? Like she wants her happy a couple of years of motherhood and fuck off if the daughter will die in a... so it's almost a kind of ontological catastrophe. But the the catch is that in this ontological catastrophe she follows he follows this holistic prediction like you will get and so on. Why why doesn't the true act would have been to say no, let no, let's not do it precisely. And that's the big enigma which is missing maybe in the movie which incidentally it's interesting to know it's based on a short story written by Chang, a Chinese guy who lives here in the United States and he's an extraordinary guy he writes
to do as my duty something that nonetheless as a collateral damage as they say now hurts you to say sorry guy but I cannot help it it's my duty to do it. No, I am also fully responsible for doing my duty. I cannot put the blame onto others. This is where for example I claim although I appreciate her very much Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took she took seriously Eichmann's defense that I was just a perfect Kantian. No, a perfect because Eichmann precisely projected the source of authority onto Hitler: I was just following orders and so on. No a Kantian cannot ever say that. You are fully responsible for what you assume as the order. So Eichmann simply he was absolutely not a Kantian ethical ethical figure and so on. We have I think time for two more questions and I think there's a question. How does this guy count? Why two and so on I don't get. Here on the right. Ah now you show so your political cards. I'm doing my duty. Okay that's right. I'm also still here so talking about duty uh I'm still elaborating the question so I'm sorry if it's a little confusing but I'm thinking of what you said about philosophy today being at the point of a breakthrough maybe and I saw where you pointed at in the Klein's bottle where you think that philosophers maybe today in terms of vision. And honestly I haven't read Ruda's book it's not out yet. No but it's even a manuscript I hope it will. Right so I mean I don't know exactly how he is talking about Plato's cave. Obviously that's one of the most commonly cited myths in philosophy but there seems to be an interesting repression because I can't help but thinking that when the philosopher comes back to the cave and I'm thinking about imposing freedom that you said, they kill him. Nobody ever writes about this but when the philosopher goes back to the cave and wants to liberate the man they kill the philosopher. They don't want to be liberated. So what's the duty of the philosopher what why do you think we're at a breakthrough today maybe I'm a little bit more. I was saying we are at the breakthrough at this level. My point with cave would just be that the task of philosophy is not just go out of the cave but to say do you see that snout do you see how you are part of the cave do you just to you should go not go out breakthrough but back into that pro... you know that philosopher shouldn't be a naive realist. And this brings me back to what you are asking my big problem I tried to to deal with it in my mega not in a qualitative but quantitative sense mega fat book *Less Than Nothing* that I was I had a post-coital depression after finishing it. So I wrote another book just five hundred pages for was it Lacan called the the absolute recoil. After that it's just dragging on it was *Disparities* then it's now *Incontinence of the Void* and now it's a new one almost finished. Because my big problematic problem is this one. We have the ultimate transcendental approach Heidegger and even most of Marxists and so on. Their form of transcendentalism is historical practice they say all our the way we relate to the world is always from Georg Lukács in his *History of Class Consciousness* developed this, you know is part of our concrete historical practice and so on. So is this the ultimate horizon how to move out of this transcendental approach without regressing into any kind of naive realism where into what I think at least object-oriented ontology falls. Like no we are just one among the objects and so on and then Graham Harman reproaches me for I think you still think that subject is some exceptional being. I'm saying no maybe first I don't think subject is a mega actant. I think the basic feature of subjectivity Hegel saw this very clearly is precisely a certain type of passivity, withdrawal and so on. The problem is not that we as subjects are omnipotent. Already in Kant if you read Kant in a refined way Adorno wrote about it you can see how his idea of transcendental constitution we as transcendental subjects constitute reality is really a form of impotence. It means transcendental categories are our Plato's cave. You know so again my point is how to break out of this I think debilitating false alternative: naive realism or still transcendentalism. That's for me the task today. Sorry I was too long. I will be shorter from now on. Over here. I would like to do a New Age comment on that child maybe more than all our fabricated wisdom there is a wisdom in that innocent sound of a child you know. Sorry please. No I'm glad I'm actually glad you said that because that might lead in the direction of my question. So I appreciated your theoretical points at the beginning very much and my question is about the examples that you used particularly the clips. And not so much kind of a challenge in interpretation but how you would respond to an alternative interpretation of all of the clips that you showed. So the moment at the end of *Wind River* what unites them isn't just sort of the empty ritual but also the grief and particularly parental grief. And it seems to me that that's also obviously a part of *Arrival* in terms of the embracing of actual parental grief, her choice to have the child even though she knows that she will die. Um and then it also the other clip you showed centers around the loss of children as a way to undermine faith. So I'm just wondering if you could speak to little speak a little bit to whether or not sort of grief is also providing sort of a moment in being that you could interpret somehow within the framework you're talking about. It's a very nice complex question I'm now too perplexed stupid to answer it publicly. All I will say is something very problematic and I wonder if you would agree. I think that nonetheless sorry I forgot her name a nice actor but how she is called in the movie, the lady, the mother in *Arrival*, that in some sense she made the wrong decision. It was almost a criminal decision. Why why I mean it's a very common sense what I'm saying but when you know that your future child daughter in that case will only suffer have a short meaningless life why? Isn't there a terrible narcissism in it? Like she wants her happy a couple of years of motherhood and fuck off if the daughter will die in a... so it's almost a kind of ontological catastrophe. But the the catch is that in this ontological catastrophe she follows he follows this holistic prediction like you will get and so on. Why why doesn't the true act would have been to say no, let no, let's not do it precisely. And that's the big enigma which is missing maybe in the movie which incidentally it's interesting to know it's based on a short story written by Chang, a Chinese guy who lives here in the United States and he's an extraordinary guy he writes
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just one short story every five years or what it it's very one is so no I agree with you this topic of the loss of children and so on I think we can even connect it with because it's the same director Villeneuve no. Here it's incredible I don't know where do you stand almost all of my friends with the exception of of of miserable creatures like Todd and so on no where you no all of my
just one short story every five years or what it it's very one is so no I agree with you this topic of the loss of children and so on I think we can even connect it with because it's the same director Villeneuve no. Here it's incredible I don't know where do you stand almost all of my friends with the exception of of of miserable creatures like Todd and so on no where you no all of my
Slavoj Žižek
friends are mostly against the film claiming it's falsely romantic and so on whatever I'm talking about *Blade Runner But you have the same grieving because at the end surprisingly uh it's it's not the usual Hollywood formula which is disgusting of the creation of the couple is that father sacrifices himself to enable child
friends are mostly against the film claiming it's falsely romantic and so on whatever I'm talking about *Blade Runner But you have the same grieving because at the end surprisingly uh it's it's not the usual Hollywood formula which is disgusting of the creation of the couple is that father sacrifices himself to enable child
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or the
or the
Slavoj Žižek
younger gen for example a
younger gen for example a
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disgusting example I know *Armageddon*. Bruce Willis basically kills it's really not a film about an asteroid it's a film about Bruce
disgusting example I know *Armageddon*. Bruce Willis basically kills it's really not a film about an asteroid it's a film about Bruce
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Willis who doesn't want to lose Liv Tyler and that's why he hates Ben Affleck the damn but at the end he disappears literally to enable but the the mystery of *Blade Runner* is that at the end it's the opposite it's the couple of father daughter
Willis who doesn't want to lose Liv Tyler and that's why he hates Ben Affleck the damn but at the end he disappears literally to enable but the the mystery of *Blade Runner* is that at the end it's the opposite it's the couple of father daughter
Slavoj Žižek
created
created
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and her potential partner whatever he sacrifices and the there are so many interesting things I want to I think it's maybe the best film of what I call post-human capitalism. For example I love that opposition between Wallace played by Jared Leto you know the absolute corporate capitalist who is ready to risk everything just to corporate and by that I forgot the name strange one played by Robin Wright she is the representative of state apparatuses. She is the apartheid girl she says no they should not mix the races and so on and so on so this this secondary antagonism which is very important then at some point the film is almost
and her potential partner whatever he sacrifices and the there are so many interesting things I want to I think it's maybe the best film of what I call post-human capitalism. For example I love that opposition between Wallace played by Jared Leto you know the absolute corporate capitalist who is ready to risk everything just to corporate and by that I forgot the name strange one played by Robin Wright she is the representative of state apparatuses. She is the apartheid girl she says no they should not mix the races and so on and so on so this this secondary antagonism which is very important then at some point the film is almost
Slavoj Žižek
Lacanian in a too vulgar direct way like that scene of sex where you have the real flesh and blood replicant as it were colonized by that hologram girl and so on. And I wonder the what is wrong with the film in spite of its many wonderful moments is that it doesn't address the real question it's too humanist in what sense. The problem is the problem androids replicants should we accept them can they become human should we recognize them? But the film doesn't dwell on the what if something really new is emerging there what if in a way with replicants filling with that kind of awareness we humans are no longer human and so on so but nonetheless there is so much to say to say about this so but going back to your question again I think that that I like this reversal because the usual mythological idea is you grief for your lost parents and so on. What does this mean to grief for children and so on and I absolutely agree with you but okay I couldn't go into all of it but would you agree with my central point which is that one should not read in *Wind River* the final ritual as this patronizing attitude out of respect for a primitive culture and so on. They are both modern subjects it's an empty ritual and as such totally authentic and that's also my personal experience when I met some Native Americans they are geniuses in Missoula Montana they told me if they hate something much more than white racists it's white tourists who come we want to learn your organic holistic ways and so on and so on you know. And they are proud to say no we can be decadent we can be corrupted you know like they find it much more liberating to be to be designated as corrupted than to be celebrated with some holistic bullshit and so on. You know who are sorry to improvise you know who are my favorite guys here? When I was in New Zealand I met some artists there before we learned got to know each other they gave me that bullshit you know we went to a mountain we listen to a mountain and then mountain tells us how to paint it all that bullshit. Then when we become friends they told me the story because they have a two agents in this artistic group in New York and they let them know what is fashionable. For example some years ago the fashionable thing was to mix sacred topic with eroticism you know a temple in ruins a naked woman there and so on. And then you know all of a sudden when they learned this the mountain was telling them to to paint this but I totally agree with them it's so maybe in this way they were more authentic there because what we underestimate in this vision of authenticity is the pragmatic even manipulative spirit of so-called authentic cultures. Sorry just this I have to tell you my favorite example I use it in one of my books. Did you see that wonderful Inuit movie *Fast Runner*? You should it's very good a Canadian movie made by Inuit and I'm against politically correctness respects I'm the first guy to say a third world movie fuck it boring like hell. But that one is really a good one. But you know what happened? It tells an ancient story it retells an ancient Inuit myth of conflict between the two tribes. And then there was they always are a politically correct multiculturalist idiot Canadian journalist who attacked the movie as too commercially oriented just that the the original Inuit myth in the original myth the two groups sub-tribes whatever groups in conflict kill each other it's a catastrophe. Here it's a much more modest they just expel throw out from their group two bad guys and it's more or less then a happy ending and he said oh you did this to commercialize it to you know to retell it so that it would fit our time and he got an answer of a lifetime from the director who told him no your obsession with original authentic version is European modernist colonial. It's part of our tradition to retell retell the story different in every new circumstances. You know like we should the first
Lacanian in a too vulgar direct way like that scene of sex where you have the real flesh and blood replicant as it were colonized by that hologram girl and so on. And I wonder the what is wrong with the film in spite of its many wonderful moments is that it doesn't address the real question it's too humanist in what sense. The problem is the problem androids replicants should we accept them can they become human should we recognize them? But the film doesn't dwell on the what if something really new is emerging there what if in a way with replicants filling with that kind of awareness we humans are no longer human and so on so but nonetheless there is so much to say to say about this so but going back to your question again I think that that I like this reversal because the usual mythological idea is you grief for your lost parents and so on. What does this mean to grief for children and so on and I absolutely agree with you but okay I couldn't go into all of it but would you agree with my central point which is that one should not read in *Wind River* the final ritual as this patronizing attitude out of respect for a primitive culture and so on. They are both modern subjects it's an empty ritual and as such totally authentic and that's also my personal experience when I met some Native Americans they are geniuses in Missoula Montana they told me if they hate something much more than white racists it's white tourists who come we want to learn your organic holistic ways and so on and so on you know. And they are proud to say no we can be decadent we can be corrupted you know like they find it much more liberating to be to be designated as corrupted than to be celebrated with some holistic bullshit and so on. You know who are sorry to improvise you know who are my favorite guys here? When I was in New Zealand I met some artists there before we learned got to know each other they gave me that bullshit you know we went to a mountain we listen to a mountain and then mountain tells us how to paint it all that bullshit. Then when we become friends they told me the story because they have a two agents in this artistic group in New York and they let them know what is fashionable. For example some years ago the fashionable thing was to mix sacred topic with eroticism you know a temple in ruins a naked woman there and so on. And then you know all of a sudden when they learned this the mountain was telling them to to paint this but I totally agree with them it's so maybe in this way they were more authentic there because what we underestimate in this vision of authenticity is the pragmatic even manipulative spirit of so-called authentic cultures. Sorry just this I have to tell you my favorite example I use it in one of my books. Did you see that wonderful Inuit movie *Fast Runner*? You should it's very good a Canadian movie made by Inuit and I'm against politically correctness respects I'm the first guy to say a third world movie fuck it boring like hell. But that one is really a good one. But you know what happened? It tells an ancient story it retells an ancient Inuit myth of conflict between the two tribes. And then there was they always are a politically correct multiculturalist idiot Canadian journalist who attacked the movie as too commercially oriented just that the the original Inuit myth in the original myth the two groups sub-tribes whatever groups in conflict kill each other it's a catastrophe. Here it's a much more modest they just expel throw out from their group two bad guys and it's more or less then a happy ending and he said oh you did this to commercialize it to you know to retell it so that it would fit our time and he got an answer of a lifetime from the director who told him no your obsession with original authentic version is European modernist colonial. It's part of our tradition to retell retell the story different in every new circumstances. You know like we should the first
unknown
we
we
Slavoj Žižek
should break out of this duality are we modern manipulative or are we authentic? Our notion of
should break out of this duality are we modern manipulative or are we authentic? Our notion of
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authenticity is absolutely part of our modernity and the nicest thing is to discover how in a charming sense how honey how cunning tricky so-called primitives can be you know. I didn't answer your question sorry. But but I agree with you I mean with that morning for children. Slavoj until another question is asked maybe I can use chair's privilege or not privilege to to ask a question. Um maybe I would like to allow because he wrote a book where he has one New Adrian where you have one chapter attacking me personally you will burn in hell for that you know. My god my I'm just thinking I'm just thinking when we the people will take over no. Oh you will have in gulag wonderful evenings writing confessions you know like already my parents were educating me to
authenticity is absolutely part of our modernity and the nicest thing is to discover how in a charming sense how honey how cunning tricky so-called primitives can be you know. I didn't answer your question sorry. But but I agree with you I mean with that morning for children. Slavoj until another question is asked maybe I can use chair's privilege or not privilege to to ask a question. Um maybe I would like to allow because he wrote a book where he has one New Adrian where you have one chapter attacking me personally you will burn in hell for that you know. My god my I'm just thinking I'm just thinking when we the people will take over no. Oh you will have in gulag wonderful evenings writing confessions you know like already my parents were educating me to
Slavoj Žižek
hate materialists true materialists no seriously I appreciate him very much because I like people who are close to me but we fight all the time. That's the only way to do it you know. I for example many books that friends submit me to be published in some series where I have a certain control not a lot as you know. I always tell them add a criticism of me because there is something absolutely ridiculous when somebody just praises you. And even with my best friends people don't get it for example Alenka Zupančič has in a polite way women know how to do this in a polite way has ferocious attacks on me all the time. So just I thought I'd get it up front with no no laws whatsoever in terms of philosophical debt. Yeah but you will also end like Bukharin you know. No no for this bullshit you don't. Forget about that guy. Let me ask a question about Althusser to go over the gap. Um at the end of the ISA essay Althusser talks about freedom and he says the ultimate proof of my freedom is giving up my freedom in the service of God or the state. Um in that statement do you want to distinguish an objective and a subjective sense of freedom or would you want to interpret it. No I would first ask Althusser sorry to interrupt you but could you explain us what does he mean by freedom. Ideological freedom or some. I think he means real freedom he doesn't just mean ideological freedom. Okay that's my eternal problem with Althusser. Then in his general edifice structuralist where is there the ontological space for this freedom? Yeah I mean he doesn't make the distinction for him ideology is at the level of practice not at the level of mystifying ideas so for him it's always material right it's never this purely subjective as opposed to objective. But the but what is then purely subjective? You know sorry you know where I had the problem with him. For example his theory of interpellation. My god you provided the best criticism here that it's simply wrong not in a vulgar empiricist but it's it's that it's not true that recognition goes like this "hey you" and I turned around "yes I'm caught." That it's always this moment of anxiety of why me and there subjectivity enters and that's the space of freedom for me. But the question is is is the answer materialist answer or is it merely an illusion of freedom and I think Althusser's radical move was to say it's material that I mean this was his. Here we enter another problem and again Mladen Dolar developed this nicely years ago. I always find it so suspicious Althusser's emphasizing of how ideological apparatuses are material and so on. No the big other is not material. What about ideological big others like for example religion communism? They are the substance of our being you are ready to sacrifice your life for them but in some sense symbolic apparatus is precisely not material. I think I always found suspicious his insistence as if materialism means it has to exist university police or whatever and so on and so on. I mean the very the really difficult thing is to be let's call it like this materialist of the immaterial. And I think that this is neglected which is why again another theory you know when he would you agree with this supplement of mine when he quotes Pascal you know you again the force of materiality you don't believe act as if you believe and belief will come by itself. I'm tempted to propose almost the opposite reading. That like this is the story that I tell in one of my books imagine let's say you really believe in God and you're all the time obsessed by it it's horrible. My solution would be act as if you believe externalized your belief in rituals and you don't have to believe you can be free you can think about sex whatever you know. And this is basically that's how I read it Hegel's theory of marriage: you are in love it's horrible marry the girl or the boy you will see she smells bad or she dirty socks and so on and you will be cured. You know I like this idea that a ritual also gives you a a minimal distance. Why does Althusser think that why does he read Pascal in this way that you really have to believe. What interests me much more is beliefs which are socially operative my good friend you may know it Robert Pfaller the Austrian developed this which are operative but are always beliefs of others. There is nobody who in the first person believes but beliefs function like I think a lot of but this is maybe even the the basic way beliefs function today. Nobody believes in anything you always if at all you need a big other or even some figure of small other like you know my usual stories like I don't know you ask parents why do you pretend religious rituals they said not to offend our children our children need it and so on and so on. Beliefs are here always displaced and and I think that it's not the right way to like okay I put it in this way I think that this displacement is part of language as such. That's why you know I often use this example this elementary forms like we shake hands and I say oh nice to see you how are you when we both know that I am cursing myself not seeing you coming one minute before to cross to the other side of the street and that they don't care if you are dying of cancer but nonetheless although we both know not only this I'm ready to go a step further if if you would have suspected that I really mean it you would have the full right to tell me it's none of your business how I feel and so on. But nonetheless they are in a way sincere. We have a kind of a paradox of sincere lying or even sincere hypocrisy. And all this Althusser could have developed it but did not. Yeah no I mean I think in Althusser... It's sad that you did it when people ask me are you under exceptional circumstances for torture? I say yes and I usually give as an example you because you had that wonderful criticism in your fetish book of Althusser and why didn't you develop that further? I would conditionally allow torturing you to force you to
hate materialists true materialists no seriously I appreciate him very much because I like people who are close to me but we fight all the time. That's the only way to do it you know. I for example many books that friends submit me to be published in some series where I have a certain control not a lot as you know. I always tell them add a criticism of me because there is something absolutely ridiculous when somebody just praises you. And even with my best friends people don't get it for example Alenka Zupančič has in a polite way women know how to do this in a polite way has ferocious attacks on me all the time. So just I thought I'd get it up front with no no laws whatsoever in terms of philosophical debt. Yeah but you will also end like Bukharin you know. No no for this bullshit you don't. Forget about that guy. Let me ask a question about Althusser to go over the gap. Um at the end of the ISA essay Althusser talks about freedom and he says the ultimate proof of my freedom is giving up my freedom in the service of God or the state. Um in that statement do you want to distinguish an objective and a subjective sense of freedom or would you want to interpret it. No I would first ask Althusser sorry to interrupt you but could you explain us what does he mean by freedom. Ideological freedom or some. I think he means real freedom he doesn't just mean ideological freedom. Okay that's my eternal problem with Althusser. Then in his general edifice structuralist where is there the ontological space for this freedom? Yeah I mean he doesn't make the distinction for him ideology is at the level of practice not at the level of mystifying ideas so for him it's always material right it's never this purely subjective as opposed to objective. But the but what is then purely subjective? You know sorry you know where I had the problem with him. For example his theory of interpellation. My god you provided the best criticism here that it's simply wrong not in a vulgar empiricist but it's it's that it's not true that recognition goes like this "hey you" and I turned around "yes I'm caught." That it's always this moment of anxiety of why me and there subjectivity enters and that's the space of freedom for me. But the question is is is the answer materialist answer or is it merely an illusion of freedom and I think Althusser's radical move was to say it's material that I mean this was his. Here we enter another problem and again Mladen Dolar developed this nicely years ago. I always find it so suspicious Althusser's emphasizing of how ideological apparatuses are material and so on. No the big other is not material. What about ideological big others like for example religion communism? They are the substance of our being you are ready to sacrifice your life for them but in some sense symbolic apparatus is precisely not material. I think I always found suspicious his insistence as if materialism means it has to exist university police or whatever and so on and so on. I mean the very the really difficult thing is to be let's call it like this materialist of the immaterial. And I think that this is neglected which is why again another theory you know when he would you agree with this supplement of mine when he quotes Pascal you know you again the force of materiality you don't believe act as if you believe and belief will come by itself. I'm tempted to propose almost the opposite reading. That like this is the story that I tell in one of my books imagine let's say you really believe in God and you're all the time obsessed by it it's horrible. My solution would be act as if you believe externalized your belief in rituals and you don't have to believe you can be free you can think about sex whatever you know. And this is basically that's how I read it Hegel's theory of marriage: you are in love it's horrible marry the girl or the boy you will see she smells bad or she dirty socks and so on and you will be cured. You know I like this idea that a ritual also gives you a a minimal distance. Why does Althusser think that why does he read Pascal in this way that you really have to believe. What interests me much more is beliefs which are socially operative my good friend you may know it Robert Pfaller the Austrian developed this which are operative but are always beliefs of others. There is nobody who in the first person believes but beliefs function like I think a lot of but this is maybe even the the basic way beliefs function today. Nobody believes in anything you always if at all you need a big other or even some figure of small other like you know my usual stories like I don't know you ask parents why do you pretend religious rituals they said not to offend our children our children need it and so on and so on. Beliefs are here always displaced and and I think that it's not the right way to like okay I put it in this way I think that this displacement is part of language as such. That's why you know I often use this example this elementary forms like we shake hands and I say oh nice to see you how are you when we both know that I am cursing myself not seeing you coming one minute before to cross to the other side of the street and that they don't care if you are dying of cancer but nonetheless although we both know not only this I'm ready to go a step further if if you would have suspected that I really mean it you would have the full right to tell me it's none of your business how I feel and so on. But nonetheless they are in a way sincere. We have a kind of a paradox of sincere lying or even sincere hypocrisy. And all this Althusser could have developed it but did not. Yeah no I mean I think in Althusser... It's sad that you did it when people ask me are you under exceptional circumstances for torture? I say yes and I usually give as an example you because you had that wonderful criticism in your fetish book of Althusser and why didn't you develop that further? I would conditionally allow torturing you to force you to
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finish
finish
Slavoj Žižek
that book it would be really important. Uh I think discretion requires that I ask somebody else to ask a question at this stage. Uh more questions is there a ah sorry yes sorry sorry sorry I noticed it's my spontaneous bourgeois that I'm more directed towards the right and I'm neglecting the left I noticed it. Please. Okay I'll speak yeah thank you. I wanted to return to your statements about the last scene in the Danish film I can't remember the name of the film. *Flaskepost fra P* in Danish but it's a beautiful Chestertonian translation in English *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Thank you very much. You can download it Pirate Bay you get all of them yeah. Okay I'll pay four dollars I'll do whatever thank you. Um I wanted to make sure I understood you correctly but then I wanted to ask a question about it. I I think you said something like the true act or the best act of goodness comes when you no longer believe in a god, perhaps a god that's some
that book it would be really important. Uh I think discretion requires that I ask somebody else to ask a question at this stage. Uh more questions is there a ah sorry yes sorry sorry sorry I noticed it's my spontaneous bourgeois that I'm more directed towards the right and I'm neglecting the left I noticed it. Please. Okay I'll speak yeah thank you. I wanted to return to your statements about the last scene in the Danish film I can't remember the name of the film. *Flaskepost fra P* in Danish but it's a beautiful Chestertonian translation in English *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Thank you very much. You can download it Pirate Bay you get all of them yeah. Okay I'll pay four dollars I'll do whatever thank you. Um I wanted to make sure I understood you correctly but then I wanted to ask a question about it. I I think you said something like the true act or the best act of goodness comes when you no longer believe in a god, perhaps a god that's some
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kind
kind
Slavoj Žižek
of absolute controlling power, as an atheist but then
of absolute controlling power, as an atheist but then
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nonetheless you perform this act of goodness. And I have two questions about that, one what do you mean by goodness and two is there a relationship with courage there and what might that relation be? Very good point. Yeah but basically I gave another version of my formula which I took from Agamben, courage of hopelessness and so on. You know no what I mean it's very naive I know I don't elaborate this notion but what I am I am tempted following Badiou here to rehabilitate goodness because I'm so tired of this fashionable pseudo-Nietzschean way of claiming goodness is bourgeois blah beyond good and evil. Most of the people that I know who are
nonetheless you perform this act of goodness. And I have two questions about that, one what do you mean by goodness and two is there a relationship with courage there and what might that relation be? Very good point. Yeah but basically I gave another version of my formula which I took from Agamben, courage of hopelessness and so on. You know no what I mean it's very naive I know I don't elaborate this notion but what I am I am tempted following Badiou here to rehabilitate goodness because I'm so tired of this fashionable pseudo-Nietzschean way of claiming goodness is bourgeois blah beyond good and evil. Most of the people that I know who are
Slavoj Žižek
beyond good and evil are beneath good and evil. They haven't even progressed to that area and so on.
beyond good and evil are beneath good and evil. They haven't even progressed to that area and so on.
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By by goodness I mean it in a very Kantian way, a pure form of empathy
By by goodness I mean it in a very Kantian way, a pure form of empathy
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taking care of others where there is no narcissistic calculation and so on. I leave it consciously open because
taking care of others where there is no narcissistic calculation and so on. I leave it consciously open because
Slavoj Žižek
I don't want to commit myself then to some interpretation because things get here very paradoxical even with Kant himself. Because Kant always suspects pure goodness which must be done just for the sake of duty no. He always suspects that there are hidden what Kant calls pathological which simply means empirical motivations like you pretend to be good
I don't want to commit myself then to some interpretation because things get here very paradoxical even with Kant himself. Because Kant always suspects pure goodness which must be done just for the sake of duty no. He always suspects that there are hidden what Kant calls pathological which simply means empirical motivations like you pretend to be good
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but it's to impress the others or whatever to feel good. But I think that there is a much more refined logic at work there. What Kant is really afraid is
but it's to impress the others or whatever to feel good. But I think that there is a much more refined logic at work there. What Kant is really afraid is
Slavoj Žižek
encountering goodness is like encountering something noumenal which doesn't fit our reality in our reality. So I think that Kant precisely wants this suspicion of but we can never be sure maybe it was just that I did it for some narcissistic satisfaction and so on not to confront the trauma of an ethical act. And so my it's very good question that you asked because in some sense I developed this widely goodness comes strangely close to what Kant calls but then abandons the term radical evil. Evil which is also and that's the big enigma that Kant is trying to escape. Is there radical evil? He you know in his wonderful the the late text *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone* he first gives some hints that radical evil is if not possible at least imaginable. Radical evil in the sense that you are evil not for any profit but simply for the sake of it. Which for Kant then comes in a formal way strangely close to to his definition of good act, of doing your duty. So can you elevate evil into your duty? Then Kant sees the problem he steps back and reinterprets quickly like secretly radical evil as just an eternal egotistic tendency towards evil. He doesn't want to allow for that. So I find this very nice reading where Kant precisely is afraid of the consequences of his own discovery. You know this is Kant at his best. He says something and then he does all possible things to to blur it and so on and so on. But I still think that that Lacan was right when he says in at the beginning of his writing *Kant avec Sade* he says something very important. He says that in the history of ideas if we want to look for the starting point out of which later psychoanalysis developed it's Kant. It's not all that
encountering goodness is like encountering something noumenal which doesn't fit our reality in our reality. So I think that Kant precisely wants this suspicion of but we can never be sure maybe it was just that I did it for some narcissistic satisfaction and so on not to confront the trauma of an ethical act. And so my it's very good question that you asked because in some sense I developed this widely goodness comes strangely close to what Kant calls but then abandons the term radical evil. Evil which is also and that's the big enigma that Kant is trying to escape. Is there radical evil? He you know in his wonderful the the late text *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone* he first gives some hints that radical evil is if not possible at least imaginable. Radical evil in the sense that you are evil not for any profit but simply for the sake of it. Which for Kant then comes in a formal way strangely close to to his definition of good act, of doing your duty. So can you elevate evil into your duty? Then Kant sees the problem he steps back and reinterprets quickly like secretly radical evil as just an eternal egotistic tendency towards evil. He doesn't want to allow for that. So I find this very nice reading where Kant precisely is afraid of the consequences of his own discovery. You know this is Kant at his best. He says something and then he does all possible things to to blur it and so on and so on. But I still think that that Lacan was right when he says in at the beginning of his writing *Kant avec Sade* he says something very important. He says that in the history of ideas if we want to look for the starting point out of which later psychoanalysis developed it's Kant. It's not all that
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irrational philosophy
irrational philosophy
Slavoj Žižek
of the unconscious whatever. It's Kant. It's Kant. So the only thing that I can do now quickly to answer you is that goodness is a again again one of those plus mysterious categories and so on. It's it's goodness is for me some kind of the ultimate free act but free act in the sense of it has to be it has to be groundless in some sense. And not only the most radical philosophers have seen that. Yeah absolutely. Yeah because that would be for me of course the definition of courage that you can stand on your own without relying on any figure of the big other and here Kant is already as I developed in a couple lines much more radical than people usually take it. When he has this motto of unconditional duty you know like *du kannst, denn du sollst*, you can
of the unconscious whatever. It's Kant. It's Kant. So the only thing that I can do now quickly to answer you is that goodness is a again again one of those plus mysterious categories and so on. It's it's goodness is for me some kind of the ultimate free act but free act in the sense of it has to be it has to be groundless in some sense. And not only the most radical philosophers have seen that. Yeah absolutely. Yeah because that would be for me of course the definition of courage that you can stand on your own without relying on any figure of the big other and here Kant is already as I developed in a couple lines much more radical than people usually take it. When he has this motto of unconditional duty you know like *du kannst, denn du sollst*, you can
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do it because you have to do it. His point is not there is no excuse for not doing your duty like you cannot
do it because you have to do it. His point is not there is no excuse for not doing your duty like you cannot
Slavoj Žižek
say I know this is my duty but sorry I'm in a hurry I have some friends whatever. There is
say I know this is my duty but sorry I'm in a hurry I have some friends whatever. There is
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also no excuse to do your duty. You know it's very clear that for Kant for example sorry here my friends are I cannot
also no excuse to do your duty. You know it's very clear that for Kant for example sorry here my friends are I cannot
Slavoj Žižek
say if I have to do as my duty something that nonetheless as a collateral damage as they say now hurts you
say if I have to do as my duty something that nonetheless as a collateral damage as they say now hurts you
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to say sorry guy but I cannot help it it's my duty to do it. No, I am also fully responsible for doing my duty. I cannot put the blame onto others. This is where for example I claim although I appreciate her very much Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took she took seriously Eichmann's defense that I was just a
to say sorry guy but I cannot help it it's my duty to do it. No, I am also fully responsible for doing my duty. I cannot put the blame onto others. This is where for example I claim although I appreciate her very much Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took she took seriously Eichmann's defense that I was just a
Slavoj Žižek
perfect Kantian. No, a perfect because Eichmann precisely projected the source of authority onto Hitler: I was just following orders and so on. No a Kantian cannot ever say that. You are fully responsible for what you assume as the order. So Eichmann simply he was absolutely not a Kantian ethical ethical figure and so on. We have I think time for two more questions and I think there's a question. How does this guy count? Why two and so on I don't get. Here on the right. Ah now you show so your political cards. I'm doing my duty. Ah okay that's right. thank you. Um I would like to just uh look at the one of the very last things that you said uh when you said you know that the the future may be determined but the past you know is something that we can perhaps still look at. Um I'm thinking about the notion of well at least one point in Lacan where he uh I suppose maybe pausing around that notion of determinacy with regard to the analysand and of course he sorry about Sorry. about... Sorry about a point in Lacan when he talks about or perhaps avoids talking about determinacy um from the point of view of the analysand and he speaks of course about the future anterior that the that the what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming. So I wondered if maybe you wouldn't mind saying something about that but also with a with a view to your thoughts on determinacy and freedom. But also I wonder if you have seen the film *The Brand New Testament*, the Belgian... No sorry I didn't oh my god. I think you'll like it. It's it's about God and he he basically has designed the human race as a kind of game for himself. He's a sadist and uh essentially he plays with people and his daughter who is the sister of Jesus she finds out about this and she goes down to earth where she recruits new apostles and disciples and writes a brand new testament. Uh this drives God mad he comes to earth he finds her but actually he's mistaken for a homeless person by a priest who tries to help him and the priest says I'm doing this because you know God said love thy neighbor and God says I never said that. Ah no no I love all these stories I have a whole list of them maybe I will write more about it because for example do you know that there is a wonderful gnostic reading of Christ's sacrifice is that God sees admits how he screwed up things with creating the shitty world we are in and that he you know in that yakuza way you know when you offend your friend you cut off a finger and give it to him. That the death of Christ is God's apology to us humans: sorry that I screwed your life so much and so on. And there are I also quote and he is still very famous in in Norway I discovered that it's a strange name I cannot pronounce it correctly a Norwegian Protestant theologian who had this idea that the experience of Job is really the brutal primitiveness of God. And that's why I like Protestantism because beneath this notion of predetermination it's precisely what you said God is playing games. What does it mean predetermination? That God was like like okay you are you are redeemed you are saved what I will simply decide it in advance and so on and so on. So so that I don't get lost my basic reply about all this topic future past and so on. I know all these games
perfect Kantian. No, a perfect because Eichmann precisely projected the source of authority onto Hitler: I was just following orders and so on. No a Kantian cannot ever say that. You are fully responsible for what you assume as the order. So Eichmann simply he was absolutely not a Kantian ethical ethical figure and so on. We have I think time for two more questions and I think there's a question. How does this guy count? Why two and so on I don't get. Here on the right. Ah now you show so your political cards. I'm doing my duty. Ah okay that's right. thank you. Um I would like to just uh look at the one of the very last things that you said uh when you said you know that the the future may be determined but the past you know is something that we can perhaps still look at. Um I'm thinking about the notion of well at least one point in Lacan where he uh I suppose maybe pausing around that notion of determinacy with regard to the analysand and of course he sorry about Sorry. about... Sorry about a point in Lacan when he talks about or perhaps avoids talking about determinacy um from the point of view of the analysand and he speaks of course about the future anterior that the that the what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming. So I wondered if maybe you wouldn't mind saying something about that but also with a with a view to your thoughts on determinacy and freedom. But also I wonder if you have seen the film *The Brand New Testament*, the Belgian... No sorry I didn't oh my god. I think you'll like it. It's it's about God and he he basically has designed the human race as a kind of game for himself. He's a sadist and uh essentially he plays with people and his daughter who is the sister of Jesus she finds out about this and she goes down to earth where she recruits new apostles and disciples and writes a brand new testament. Uh this drives God mad he comes to earth he finds her but actually he's mistaken for a homeless person by a priest who tries to help him and the priest says I'm doing this because you know God said love thy neighbor and God says I never said that. Ah no no I love all these stories I have a whole list of them maybe I will write more about it because for example do you know that there is a wonderful gnostic reading of Christ's sacrifice is that God sees admits how he screwed up things with creating the shitty world we are in and that he you know in that yakuza way you know when you offend your friend you cut off a finger and give it to him. That the death of Christ is God's apology to us humans: sorry that I screwed your life so much and so on. And there are I also quote and he is still very famous in in Norway I discovered that it's a strange name I cannot pronounce it correctly a Norwegian Protestant theologian who had this idea that the experience of Job is really the brutal primitiveness of God. And that's why I like Protestantism because beneath this notion of predetermination it's precisely what you said God is playing games. What does it mean predetermination? That God was like like okay you are you are redeemed you are saved what I will simply decide it in advance and so on and so on. So so that I don't get lost my basic reply about all this topic future past and so on. I know all these games
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about future
about future
Slavoj Žižek
anterior and so on.
anterior and so on.
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But what I like is this idea
But what I like is this idea
Slavoj Žižek
that the moment
that the moment
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you just want to change
you just want to change
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future you leave past the way it is. It's very simple idea. You leave past the way it is which means you accept we have you know this is so-called rational approach. Let's look at the situation this is determined but there is a opening here we have a choice here we have a choice there and so on and so on. That
future you leave past the way it is. It's very simple idea. You leave past the way it is which means you accept we have you know this is so-called rational approach. Let's look at the situation this is determined but there is a opening here we have a choice here we have a choice there and so on and so on. That
Slavoj Žižek
that's
that's
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not enough if you really want to open the future the first thing to do is to change the past. Of course I am not talking magic going into the past and so on. I'm talking about symbolically rewriting the past and here I think that much more than Marx, Hegel is the true philosopher of an open future. You know I of course disagree with Robert Pippin but he
not enough if you really want to open the future the first thing to do is to change the past. Of course I am not talking magic going into the past and so on. I'm talking about symbolically rewriting the past and here I think that much more than Marx, Hegel is the true philosopher of an open future. You know I of course disagree with Robert Pippin but he
Slavoj Žižek
is a good Hegelian and he made you know when Hegel is usually accused of being kind of a neo-conservative trying to resolve contradictions of emerging bourgeois society through this corporate state that he portrays in his philosophy of right. But Pippin asks a very simple question I forgot where. But my god did we forget what Hegel says at the end of the introduction to his philosophy of right that you know philosophy is like the owl of Minerva, it takes off that is to say philosophy can only present deploy articulate the conceptual structure of he says Hegel even like he philosopher can only paint gray on gray. Philosophy can only present the conceptual structure of a mode of life which is already in disintegration. But you know what this means first? This means that if Hegel was not a total idiot and didn't know what he was doing that his philosophy of right should be read in this way, not as even many people like Brandom read it as a kind of model for future. But he is describing something whose time has already passed and Hegel was fully aware of this. He wasn't even very revolutionary but he was terribly aware of the opening of the future. For example you know what Hegel's last written text was? His comment on the British reform bill which extended a little bit in when the voting right a little bit more egalitarian. And Hegel was in a total panic like no that's the beginning of chaos and so on. So Hegel was here simply caught in a weird predicament but he saw this that the only way to open the future is not to dream about the future because if you don't rewrite the past then every dreaming about the future remains determined by the past constellation and so on and so on. So here I go nonetheless a step further we all know that usual future anterior story and so on. And it can be even given much more refined twists how when I
is a good Hegelian and he made you know when Hegel is usually accused of being kind of a neo-conservative trying to resolve contradictions of emerging bourgeois society through this corporate state that he portrays in his philosophy of right. But Pippin asks a very simple question I forgot where. But my god did we forget what Hegel says at the end of the introduction to his philosophy of right that you know philosophy is like the owl of Minerva, it takes off that is to say philosophy can only present deploy articulate the conceptual structure of he says Hegel even like he philosopher can only paint gray on gray. Philosophy can only present the conceptual structure of a mode of life which is already in disintegration. But you know what this means first? This means that if Hegel was not a total idiot and didn't know what he was doing that his philosophy of right should be read in this way, not as even many people like Brandom read it as a kind of model for future. But he is describing something whose time has already passed and Hegel was fully aware of this. He wasn't even very revolutionary but he was terribly aware of the opening of the future. For example you know what Hegel's last written text was? His comment on the British reform bill which extended a little bit in when the voting right a little bit more egalitarian. And Hegel was in a total panic like no that's the beginning of chaos and so on. So Hegel was here simply caught in a weird predicament but he saw this that the only way to open the future is not to dream about the future because if you don't rewrite the past then every dreaming about the future remains determined by the past constellation and so on and so on. So here I go nonetheless a step further we all know that usual future anterior story and so on. And it can be even given much more refined twists how when I
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look upon myself here and
look upon myself here and
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now it's always a minimum of future anterior no. I never see myself directly, I always see myself from this minimal detour and so on and so on. But what interests me here it would be this you don't find in Hegel, maybe to introduce Benjamin here, you know Walter Benjamin, and to claim that the first path towards the future is to unearth unearth the deadlocks openings which are abandoned in the past. Like rewrite the past so that it's no longer the closed past but an an open past. Hegel was not what he is usually reproached to be a conservative Nietzsche reproach this to Hegel: that Hegel always tells the story from the standpoint of winners you know like one victory another victory and just this succession of epoch. No I think
now it's always a minimum of future anterior no. I never see myself directly, I always see myself from this minimal detour and so on and so on. But what interests me here it would be this you don't find in Hegel, maybe to introduce Benjamin here, you know Walter Benjamin, and to claim that the first path towards the future is to unearth unearth the deadlocks openings which are abandoned in the past. Like rewrite the past so that it's no longer the closed past but an an open past. Hegel was not what he is usually reproached to be a conservative Nietzsche reproach this to Hegel: that Hegel always tells the story from the standpoint of winners you know like one victory another victory and just this succession of epoch. No I think
Slavoj Žižek
Hegel is Hegel is much more subtle here. Hegel is fully aware of this paradoxical dialectics that what is appears in a certain epoch as left behind, no place for it, just remainder of the past can all of a sudden through this rewriting of the past turn out to be the very model of the future. That's why to give you an idea it's madness. I'm now reading a book about Tuaregs, you know heard those crazy there are two millions of them in the very heart of Africa desert. They have a very tragic life they are now infested by Islam fundamentalism and so on and one should not also idealize them like they are all terrible racists they don't consider blacks fully human and so on just good as slaves. But nonetheless how you know the most probable theory etymology of their name Tuareg is those who are left behind by God. And I like this point that those who are left behind all of a sudden become the site of the hope for for the for the future you know. Sorry too tired to say anything. Thank you very much. And I love this city and we are here this would be the future anterior. This city I think because of all the military corporations here isn't it that you will soon get a visit by our good friend Kim no? Aren't you on the list of you know? So maybe we should already look at us as from the future anterior of our death you know we are living dead and so on. I love the city thank you very much thank you.
Hegel is Hegel is much more subtle here. Hegel is fully aware of this paradoxical dialectics that what is appears in a certain epoch as left behind, no place for it, just remainder of the past can all of a sudden through this rewriting of the past turn out to be the very model of the future. That's why to give you an idea it's madness. I'm now reading a book about Tuaregs, you know heard those crazy there are two millions of them in the very heart of Africa desert. They have a very tragic life they are now infested by Islam fundamentalism and so on and one should not also idealize them like they are all terrible racists they don't consider blacks fully human and so on just good as slaves. But nonetheless how you know the most probable theory etymology of their name Tuareg is those who are left behind by God. And I like this point that those who are left behind all of a sudden become the site of the hope for for the for the future you know. Sorry too tired to say anything. Thank you very much. And I love this city and we are here this would be the future anterior. This city I think because of all the military corporations here isn't it that you will soon get a visit by our good friend Kim no? Aren't you on the list of you know? So maybe we should already look at us as from the future anterior of our death you know we are living dead and so on. I love the city thank you very much thank you.