Negativity in Hegel and Freud
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-10-28 · 1:35:01 · 12,077 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalideologylanguageconsciousness-mindhistory
Žižek examines whether Hegel can think the key concepts of post-Hegelian thought, repetition, the unconscious, overdetermination, language (la langue), antagonism, with a running 'yes, but' structure showing Hegel approaches each yet falls short. He argues that Freudian concepts (death drive, Wiederholungszwang, compromise formations, the Freudian unconscious) retroactively reveal the zero-level operation of Hegelian negativity, particularly through the logic of excessive fixation. He concludes that the task is not to abandon Hegel but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense, reading post-Hegelians as answers to the Hegelian question.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 28
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “death drive / Todestrieb”
The Freudian-Kierkegaardian notion of blind mechanical repetition (Wiederholungszwang) that Žižek argues retroactively reveals the zero-level operation of Hegelian dialectics, pure repetitive fixation as the very source of negativity.
Lacan's term for language in its ridiculous material dimension of wordplay, ambiguity, and contingent lateral connections operating independently of meaning, the dimension Hegel paradoxically mobilizes by playing with words rather than constructing a purified conceptual language.
The precise paradox in which one element of a set overdetermines the set itself (as in Marx's production overdetermining the production-distribution-exchange-consumption structure), distinguished from mere Wechselwirkung (mutual interaction).
The Kierkegaard-Freud notion of pure repetition that merely strives for more of the same without any Aufhebung or idealization, which Hegel cannot think.
Hegel's insight that a tautology like 'a rose is a rose' is not empty but a radical contradiction signaling that a thing doesn't fit its own concept, its most Wittgensteinian moment.
For Hegel the unconscious is the transcendental universal form of what one does as opposed to the particular conscious content, exemplified by saying 'now' and meaning a universal now, totally opposed to the Freudian unconscious of contingent particular associations.
as “reflexively redoubled efficiency”
Žižek's formulation of overdetermination: you not only influence B but over-influence the very way B influences you back, going beyond simple mutual causality.
Freudian condensation and displacement, the mechanisms of complex rhizomatic signifying associations that display no triadic dialectical structure and that Hegel cannot accommodate.
as “compromise formation”
The Freudian logic of pragmatic unconscious compromises (as in dream work), something asserted but simultaneously denied, displaced, or encrypted, which Hegel cannot think because his dialectic always reaches radical resolution.
as “spurious infinity / schlechte Unendlichkeit”
Hegel's bad infinity of endless mechanical repetition, contrasted with true (self-relating) infinity; used here to explain why capital's combination of mechanical circulation and speculative self-relation was unthinkable for Hegel.
as “automatic subject / automatisches Subjekt”
Marx's characterization of capital as both mechanical (endless repetition) and speculative-self-relating simultaneously, the monstrous mixture Hegel could not think because it collapses his distinction between spurious and true infinity.
The function of state ceremonies and parades as acts in which society reflexively inscribes and marks itself without any individual having to be consciously aware of the meaning, the proper sense of the state as the Selbstbewusstsein of society.
as “Selbstbewusstsein as object”
Lacan's (and Žižek's) reading of Hegel's self-consciousness not as a meta-subject aware of itself but as a purely formal reflexive registration, a symbolic self-inscription that occurs without anyone being consciously aware of it.
Allegory treats a present object as already lost (melancholic preemptive mourning); symbol, as in Goethe's ruin, sees future potential in present destruction, used to distinguish Hegelian from post-Hegelian repetition.
Mladen Dolar's collective label for the family of Freudian quasi-negations, Verwerfung, Verdrängung, Verleugnung, Verneinung, Verdichtung, Verschiebung, Verschiebung, Isolierung, all of which are compromise negations rather than clean dialectical negations.
Freud's mechanism of isolation: a fact is formally admitted but torn from its context and stripped of symbolic efficiency, so that acknowledgment itself functions as a mode of repression, exemplified by Chinese official ideology's admission of Mao's errors.
The hypothetical zero-level negativity in Freud: the ego must throw out part of itself in order to draw the line between self and non-self, so that the external limit between me and not-me is simultaneously an internal limitation.
Freud's compulsion to repeat, identified here as the elementary metaphysical form distinguishing humans from animals: an excessive fixation on a particular object that generates negativity by destabilizing everything else.
as “excessive attachment / fixation as negativity”
Žižek's thesis that the secret of Hegelian negativity is not negating something but getting excessively stuck onto a particular contingent element, thereby destabilizing everything else and generating the distance of negativity from within positivity.
as “Verrücktheit / structural madness”
Hegel's Foucauldian claim in the Anthropology that the possibility of madness is a structural condition of all human subjectivity, not an accidental variation but an ever-permanent shadow without which there is no human subject.
as “Versöhnung / reconciliation without synthesis”
Hegel's reconciliation is not a harmonious reunion but accepting the radical otherness of the world, abandoning every position of judging, not swallowing the object into the subject.
Lévi-Strauss's formula for the prohibition of incest, an answer to an unknown deadlock, applied here to the Kierkegaard-Freud notion of repetition: it gives us the zero-level core of Hegelian dialectics, but we can see this only if the question is Hegelian.
as “repeating Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense”
Žižek's concluding formula: the task is not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat Hegel, to say the same but with the whole horizon transformed, by reading post-Hegelians as answers to the Hegelian question.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order to which performative gestures are addressed, exemplified by the German lady who has sex once a month so she can tell her analyst she still has sex, performing for the big Other rather than for herself.
Hegel's claim that dialectical progress does not begin from a unity that splits, rather, to assert 'one' is already the most radical division, because oneness requires a tautological gap between the thing and all its predicates.
as “Herrschaft-Knechtschaft”
Hegel's master-servant dialectic, invoked to show that encountering another subject is not symmetrical recognition but an ontological scandal, by formal definition each subject is absolute, making another subject monstrous.
as “recognition / Anerkennung”
The liberal-Hegelian reading that reduces Hegel to mutual recognition in a free society, criticized by Žižek as losing the radical scandal that another self-consciousness is ontologically impossible.
Hegel's triadic movement of annihilation, preservation, and elevation, invoked here as the mechanism by which Hegelian repetition always generates sublation rather than pure mechanical recurrence.
Stories he reaches for 5
A patient's sad dream of a funeral she had attended turns out to be a wish-fulfillment: she had seen her great ex-love there and secretly hoped to meet him again, the meaning comes from a totally lateral contingent link invisible in the dream's manifest content.
“The woman brings up as totally unimportant at the end of the session: that she was surprised to meet at this funeral her great ex-love and the secret hope was that maybe I will meet him again.”
When accused of being a totalitarian who hates dialogue, Žižek says he loves dialogues, especially late Plato's, where one guy speaks all the time and the others just say 'by Zeus, so it is, Socrates.'
“I love dialogues—late Plato's dialogues—you know what happens there? One guy speaks all the time and the other says every minute 'by Zeus, so it is, Socrates.'”
Hegel notes that Spinoza died of tuberculosis (Schwindsucht, literally 'seeking-to-disappear'), and quips that he was therefore consistent: his philosophy teaches that every particular identity seeks its disappearance in substance, so he died accordingly.
“Hegel makes just a wonderful evil remark he says the basic lesson of Spinoza's philosophy is that every particular identity searches for its disappearance annihilation in substance so Spinoza was consequent and died accordingly for Schwindsucht.”
Caesar as singular proper name has to die so that Octavian repeats him as Caesar the general title, Hegel's exemplary case of how repetition involves Aufhebung: the contingent individual is idealized into notional universality.
“Caesar has to die so that he repeats himself as in Augustus Octavian as Caesar the title. Octavian was the first Caesar.”
Kant simultaneously celebrates the Revolution as a sublime prognostic sign and condemns the trial against the king as the ultimate diabolical evil, a self-destruction of legality from within the form of the law, while Hegel alone was ready to think both together.
“Kant's greatness is that he was ready to think both at the same time together.”
Works invoked 21
Grundrisse book
Marx's introduction cited for the fourfold structure of production-distribution-exchange-consummation as an illustration of overdetermination in the strict Hegelian sense.
Star Wars film
Yoda's anti-attachment philosophy ('don't get attached to particular beings') is mockingly compared to Heidegger's; Žižek says seeing Yoda makes him want to become a Nazi and stomp on him.
Logic of Sense book
Named as one of Deleuze's two best books.
Praised as one of Deleuze's two best books; cited for the thesis that something radically new can emerge only through pure repetition, described as Deleuze at his most Hegelian.
Das Kapital book
Cited for the passage from money to capital formulated in purely Hegelian terms (abstract universal substance to active subject); used to show Hegel's shadow in the analysis of capital.
The Future of Hegel book
Malabou's book praised for deconstructing the idea of Hegel as the philosopher of the end of history and showing absolute knowing as the most radical opening toward the future.
Repeatedly cited: the Sinnliche Gewissheit chapter for the 'now' argument, the Einleitung for das Formelle and the experience of consciousness, the Bildung chapter for the dialectic of modern society, and the end for Versöhnung.
Cited for Kant's trauma at the trial against the king as the ultimate diabolical evil, the self-destruction of legality from within the form of law.
Longuenesse's book described as modest but very good; praised as starting a tradition of women writing excellent books on Hegel.
Mourning Sickness book
Comay's book described as excellent, a radical immanent analysis showing Hegel as far more radical than Kant on the French Revolution.
Hegel ou Spinoza book
Macherey's book cited as misreading Hegel's Schwindsucht remark as mere cruelty rather than philosophical wordplay with la langue.
Lacan's seminar on the four discourses tentatively cited as the source of the thesis that 'self-consciousness is an object.'
Goethe's letter describing his grandfather's ruined house as a symbol; used to illustrate the difference between symbol and allegory, and Hegelian vs post-Hegelian repetition.
Dreigroschenoper play
Brecht's Threepenny Opera cited for the cynical line 'Es geht auch anders aber so geht es auch' (it can be done differently but this is how it goes too), used by Žižek as his self-comment on the talk.
The Anthropologie section cited for Hegel's claim that language learning requires mechanical non-thinking internalization, and for Verrücktheit / structural madness.
Heidegger's essay cited for the passage on an entity insisting on its while; read by Žižek as describing the death drive and excessive attachment.
Michael Kohlhaas book
Kleist's novella invoked as the paradigm of excessive fixation (the two horses) that generates total civil devastation, illustrating Wiederholungszwang and freedom through indifferent fixation.
Wittgenstein's attention to how language actually functions in everyday use is invoked positively as a parallel to Hegel's analysis of tautology.
Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life cited for the Signorelli example, illustrating compromise formations and the impossibility of a Hegelian triadic resolution.
Kant's text(s) on the French Revolution as signum prognosticum cited as the sublime side of his split response.
The first book on Sein (Sein-logik) cited for Hegel's extended, traumatized treatment of infinitesimal calculus in the chapter on quantity.
People invoked 34
Avital Ronell positive
Addressed directly as the interlocutor who raised the point about negativity that prompted the talk; affectionately called 'das bitch' in a running joke about her online persona.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for the formula that the prohibition of incest is 'an answer without question', applied to the Kierkegaard-Freud notion of repetition as giving the core of Hegelian dialectics.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited for the term 'mark' / 're-mark' (remarque) to describe the state's performative self-inscription; Derridean criticism anticipated in the animal/human distinction passage.
Rebecca Comay positive
Praised for Mourning Sickness as an excellent, radical immanent reading of Hegel and the French Revolution, showing Hegel was ready to think both the sublime and the diabolical together.
Cited via a Hegel lecture on neo-platonic mysticism to illustrate the claim that one does not divide into two.
Vladimir Lenin negative
Even at his philosophical best in the Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin's limit is the notion of Wechselwirkung rather than true overdetermination.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the concept of la langue, the thesis that self-consciousness is an object, and the formula that there is no repression without the return of the repressed.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Praised for his thesis that something radically new can emerge only through repetition, but described as 'much more Hegelian than he himself thinks'; Žižek appropriates the Deleuzian insight while claiming it is really Hegelian.
Judith Butler positive
Cited for the term 'excessive attachment to a particular Seiendes' in the context of reading the Heidegger passage on entities that insist on their while.
Recipient of the Goethe letter cited; also mentioned as exemplifying the post-Revolutionary Schillerian aestheticism that cannot get over the trauma of the French Revolution.
Heinrich von Kleist positive
Michael Kohlhaas is cited as the paradigmatic example of excessive fixation (on the two horses) that generates total negativity, civil war over an indifferent object.
Gérard Lebrun positive
Described as a very good French philosopher who wrote on Kant and Hegel; cited for showing that capital's combination of spurious and true infinity is the monstrous mixture Hegel could not think.
Pierre Macherey negative
Cited from Hegel ou Spinoza for missing Hegel's pun on Schwindsucht, taking it as mere cruelty rather than philosophical wordplay.
Fredric Jameson positive
Praised for making nice points in his recent short book on the Phenomenology, especially on Hegel's pre-capitalist model of modern society, and for distinguishing liberal from leftist Hegel.
Friedrich Engels negative
Criticized along with Lenin for failing to grasp overdetermination, reducing it to Wechselwirkung (mutual interaction).
Mentioned as an example of the post-Hegelian move toward asserting a new positivity (of the will) as the foundation of abstract Hegelian thought.
Mladen Dolar positive
Žižek's friend who coined the collective label 'Freudian Ver-' for the family of Freudian quasi-negations.
Catherine Malabou positive
Praised for The Future of Hegel, which shows that Hegel's absolute knowing is the formula of the most radical opening toward the future rather than closure.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Called 'nastier than Avital' but praised for the line 'language lies, we have to torture language to make it say the truth,' used to illuminate poetry and Hegel's treatment of language.
Martin Heidegger positive
The passage on an entity insisting on its while from 'Der Spruch von Anaximander' is used to illustrate the death drive; but Žižek criticizes Heidegger's anti-attachment ethic (Yoda-like), and notes Hegel's acceptance of Heidegger's point about dead language while going further.
Béatrice Longuenesse positive
Cited as the beginning of a series of women writing excellent books on Hegel; her Hegel and the Critique of Metaphysics is described as modest but very good.
Jean Hyppolite negative
Criticized for trying to conceptualize the Freudian dialectic of repression and return in terms of Hegelian negation of negation, a move that doesn't fit because Freud's compromises are never fully resolved.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe positive
The letter to Schiller on the grandfather's ruined house is used to illustrate how symbol rises from ruin and repetition, contrasted with melancholic allegory.
Mentioned as an example of late post-Hegelian assertion of a positivity of the will.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Paired with Freud as the thinker of pure non-productive repetition; his notion of repetition reveals what Hegel cannot think, and the task is to repeat Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense.
Ludwig Feuerbach negative
Called 'the original sinner' of post-Hegelian thought for asserting a positivity of being missed by Hegel, the worst example of the wrong post-Hegelian move.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for characterizing capital as 'automatic subject,' for the fourfold structure of production in the Grundrisse illustrating overdetermination, and for his return to Hegel's Logic after 1848 as crucial for Capital.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek argues Freud retroactively reveals the zero-level of Hegelian negativity; the death drive, compromise formations, and contingent associations are the key to understanding Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure of the entire talk; Žižek defends Hegel against both idealist and post-Hegelian critiques, arguing his limits are internal to his own system and that post-Hegelians are best read as answers to Hegelian questions.
Immanuel Kant negative
Criticized for the split in his thought on the French Revolution, celebrating it as sublime sign while condemning the trial of the king as diabolical evil, and for trying to prove that pure diabolical evil is impossible.
Güven Güzeldere positive
Described as a good friend, a secular Turk who moved from Duke (Jesse Helms country) to elsewhere; cited for a cognitive science experiment showing humans fixate on impossible objects while monkeys pragmatically move on.
Mentioned briefly as part of the post-Hegelian move toward asserting a positivity beyond Hegel's realm of shadows.
Mentioned as an economist Hegel was reading, whose influence nonetheless left Hegel's model of modern society at a pre-capitalist level.
Frauke Berndt positive
Credited (from Frankfurt am Main University, met in Chicago) as the source of the Goethe letter example on the ruin as symbol.
What it argues
Hegel's limits versus Freud and Kierkegaard on repetitionthe Freudian unconscious as retroactive revelation of Hegelian negativitycompromise formations versus radical dialectical resolutionexcessive fixation as the zero-level of negativityoverdetermination and reflexive redoublingla langue: language's material contingency mobilized against itselfreading post-Hegelians as answers to the Hegelian question
Dialectical moves 9
“The true critique of Hegel is not that he is too focused on the new, but that precisely because he cannot think pure repetition, he cannot think the radically new.”
Repetition and novelty are secretly the same: it is only through non-productive repetition that something genuinely new can emerge, so Hegel's failure to think the one is his failure to think the other.
“Hegel's tautology ('a rose is a rose') is not a trivial identity but the most radical contradiction—it signals that a thing does not fit its own concept.”
What looks like pure sameness is in fact a gap between the thing and all possible predicates, making tautology the formal site of contradiction.
“What Hegel was not able to see in modern economy is not some totally un-Hegelian dimension but his own shadow in it.”
Hegel's blind spots are not foreign to his method but are cases where his own categories appear in phenomena he misrecognizes.
“Even where Hegel appears to be at his most idealist—Selbstbewusstsein, self-consciousness—he is talking about the unconscious.”
Hegel's self-consciousness is not psychological awareness but a formal reflexive registration that occurs without any conscious subject, making his most idealist concept his most materialist one.
“The zero-level of negativity is its opposite: not that you negate something but that you get excessively stuck onto something.”
Negativity does not originate from active negation but from an excessive attachment to a particular element that destabilizes everything else, positivity pushed to excess becomes negativity.
“One does not divide into two; to assert the one is already the most radical division.”
Unity is not prior to difference; positing oneness already involves a tautological gap, so the very form of identity is a division.
“The only way to read what is truly great in post-Hegelians is to read them as answers to the Hegelian question.”
Post-Hegelian concepts (Freudian repetition, Kierkegaardian fixation) are not simply breaks from Hegel but solutions to a problem Hegel posed, you can only grasp them if you hold the Hegelian question.
“Far from Hegelian reconciliation meaning that everything is reunited in a harmonious synthesis, reconciliation is precisely reconciliation with the irrational madness of the world.”
Versöhnung is not the overcoming of contradiction but the acceptance of irreducible otherness and irrationality.
“The Freudian Kierkegaardian notion of repetition is where we get Hegel's secret at its purest—but we can see this only if the question is Hegelian.”
Freud/Kierkegaard gives us the content (zero-level of dialectics), but only Hegel provides the form (the question) that lets us see it as such.
Claims 20
asserts
Freud's death drive retroactively reveals the zero-level operation of Hegelian negativity that Hegel himself could not fully explicate.relationship between Hegel and Freud
asserts
Hegel cannot think pure non-productive repetition (Kierkegaard-Freud), and for this very reason he cannot think the radically new.Hegel's limits on repetition and novelty
asserts
Something truly new can emerge only through pure repetition—radical change means saying the same thing but with the entire horizon transformed.repetition and radical novelty
asserts
Hegel's tautological repetition ('a rose is a rose') is not empty but a contradiction signaling that a thing does not fit its own concept.tautology and contradiction in Hegel
asserts
The Hegelian unconscious (transcendental universal form) is totally opposed to the Freudian unconscious (contingent particular associations and compromise formations).Hegel's versus Freud's conception of the unconscious
reframes
What Hegel cannot see in modern economy is not some un-Hegelian dimension but his own shadow in it—capital's self-relating movement is itself Hegelian.Hegel and political economy / capital
asserts
Capital is a monstrous mixture of spurious infinity (mechanical repetition) and true infinity (speculative self-relation) that Hegel could not accommodate.capital as automatic subject and Hegel's limits
asserts
Hegel paradoxically fights language's imperfection not by constructing a purified conceptual language but by mobilizing la langue—contingent material wordplay—against itself.Hegel's philosophy of language
asserts
Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein is not a psychological notion but a purely formal reflexive registration—a symbolic self-inscription that occurs without anyone being consciously aware.Hegel's concept of self-consciousness
asserts
The secret of negativity is excessive fixation onto a particular contingent element: by getting stuck, everything else is destabilized and negativity is generated from within positivity.the zero-level of Hegelian negativity
asserts
The possibility of madness is structural—there is no human subjectivity without an ever-permanent shadow of madness.subjectivity and madness in Hegel
reframes
Hegelian reconciliation is not harmonious synthesis but accepting the radical irrationality and otherness of the world.Hegel's concept of reconciliation (Versöhnung)
reframes
The crucial post-Hegelian break is not the introduction of new positive foundations (Feuerbach, Marx's positivity of production, Kierkegaard's singularity of belief) but the emergence of radical repetition.the nature of the post-Hegelian break
rejects
Feuerbach is the original sinner of post-Hegelian thought for asserting a positivity of being missed by Hegel.Feuerbach's positive ontology
asserts
The task is not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense—to read post-Hegelians as answers to the Hegelian question.the proper method for engaging Hegel today
rejects
Engels and Lenin fail to grasp overdetermination, reducing it to Wechselwirkung (mutual interaction) rather than the reflexively redoubled efficiency where one element overdetermines the set.Engels and Lenin's philosophical understanding of overdetermination
asserts
Hegel's treatment of infinitesimal calculus is symptomatic: he encounters speculative movement precisely where his own theory said there should be only dead mathematical repetition.Hegel and mathematics / infinitesimal calculus
asserts
The encounter with another self-consciousness is ontologically impossible and a scandal within Hegelian space—by formal definition each subject is absolute, so another subject is monstrous.intersubjectivity and recognition in Hegel
rejects
Intersubjectivity should not be our ultimate horizon; the psychoanalytic dispositif (analyst behind the patient) correctly treats the other as object, not symmetrical subject.liberal Hegelian recognition / intersubjectivity
asserts
Chinese official ideology's formal admission of Mao's errors is a perfect case of Isolierung—saying it explicitly functions to repress any further elaboration.Chinese official ideology and Freudian Isolierung
Quotes 15
“It is never a question of simple inability. There is, in all these cases, a tiny imperceptible line of separation which compels us to supplement the assertion of impossibility or inability with a qualifying 'yes, but.'”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's structural 'yes, but' formula for Hegel's limits
“True change is to say the same, but which all of a sudden functions or has a meaning at a totally different level.”Slavoj Žižek · repetition and radical novelty
“The zero level of negativity which is exactly the fundamental form of repetition is its opposite: it's not that you negate something but that you get excessively stuck onto something.”Slavoj Žižek · excessive fixation as the zero-level of negativity
“The task is not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense.”Slavoj Žižek · the proper method for engaging Hegel
“The much more crucial dimension of the post-Hegelian break is this emergence of radical repetition.”Slavoj Žižek · the real post-Hegelian break
“Content is censored but what is censored in content returns in the very form—it's a very Hegelian move.”Slavoj Žižek · censorship returning in form (Freud and Hegel)
“One does not divide into two—to assert the one is already the most radical division you can imagine.”Slavoj Žižek · identity as already division in Hegel
“What infinitesimal calculus presents us is just the formula of a pure relationship where the relata, the related terms, in itself disappear.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on infinitesimal calculus as speculative movement
“You can fight the contingency of language but how you fight it—by mobilizing the contingency itself at its most stupid, most contingent.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's philosophy of language: fighting contingency with contingency
“Kierkegaard-Freudian notion of repetition is where we get Hegel's secret at its purest—but we can see this only if the question is Hegelian.”Slavoj Žižek · Freud/Kierkegaard as answers to Hegel's question
“For us humans, to acquire this distance of negativity—I am not this—the only way to get unstuck from reality is to get excessively stuck onto a totally particular contingent element.”Slavoj Žižek · excessive fixation as the basis of free negativity
“The external limitation between what is me and not me must at the same time be an internal limitation.”Slavoj Žižek · Ausstossung: internal and external limit as one
“Hegelian reconciliation is reconciliation with the irrational madness of the world.”Slavoj Žižek · Versöhnung as acceptance of irrationality, not synthesis
“Although this doesn't mean that we all should be mad, being human presupposes the possibility of madness—structural possibility.”Slavoj Žižek · structural madness as condition of subjectivity
“The prohibition of incest is not a question to which we don't have an answer but it's an answer without question.”Slavoj Žižek · Lévi-Strauss's formula for structural answers without questions
Transcript 35 turns
Slavoj Žižek
One point that she, Avital, made towards the end really hits on what I want to develop, namely how, with all the people referring to negativity and so on and so on, I, up to a point, up to a point only, agree with Heidegger who somewhere noted that Hegel himself, the philosopher of negativity, really fails to, to explicate, to bring out the, let’s call it naively, fundamental operation of negativity. And I claim—this will be the thesis—that in a way without being aware of it, when Freud talks about death drive, that is to say this post-Hegelian topic of blind repetition, that it is only in this line of post-Hegelian thought that, as it were retroactively, we can get the zero-level operation of Hegel. So okay, let me jump in medias res and confront the question in all its brutal naivety: Can Hegel think the Freudian field? Here is my first improvised list of what, so it seems, Hegel cannot think: a series of concepts mostly elaborated by psychoanalysis and Marxism. Repetition, unconscious, overdetermination, modern mathematical science; then the dimension of language which Lacan calls la langue, language in its ridiculous aspect of, of, of playing with words, ambiguities, and so on; then the notion of antagonism, class struggle, sexual difference. Now, upon a closer look however, it becomes clear that one should be very precise about what Hegel cannot think or do. It is never a question of simple inability. There is, in all these cases, a tiny imperceptible line of separation which compels us to supplement the assertion of impossibility or inability with a qualifying "yes, but." Hegel cannot do it; yes, but he almost comes there to be able to do it. First, repetition. Of course, I'm aware that Hegel does think repetition. But—and here the let me call in this brutal throwing together of two totally disparate thinkers—in the field of Kierkegaard and Freud, as opposite as they are, they both, of course at a totally different level, propose a notion of repetition which is a non-productive repetition, a pure repetition which just strives for more of the same. Hegel's notion of repetition on the other hand always involves an Aufhebung—I don't know, sublation is the usual term. Through repetition, something is idealized, transformed from an immediate contingent reality into a notional universality, or at least through repetition the necessity of an event is, becomes, passes from an sich to für sich, from in itself to for itself. Hegel's two great examples: Caesar. First we have Caesar as the name of a person, singular name. Caesar has to die so that he repeats himself as in Augustus Octavian as Caesar the title. This is Hegel's perfect example, no? With Octavian, Caesar is no longer a single name of a contingent individual, it becomes a general title. Octavian was the first Caesar. Or, through repetition, the assertion of necessity. Hegel's example is Napoleon, of course. Napoleon had to lose two times to get the point that his time is over. The first defeat, it was possible to perceive it as a simple contingency, bad luck or whatever. You had to do it twice to get the point. The fact that Hegel misses this excess of purely mechanic repetition in no way implies that he is too much focused on the new. Now, a truly intelligent critique of Hegel—and we find it sometimes in Deleuze, sometimes not even when he talks directly about Hegel—would claim that it is precisely because Hegel cannot think the pure repetition, repetition without the movement of Aufhebung or Idealisierung, that Hegel cannot think the radically new. One would have said that it's exactly the opposite, that repetition is simply the repetition of the same, nothing new. But the idea is that in this Hegelian repetition, which is repetition sustained by Aufhebung, Idealisierung, precisely the new is not radically new but is just the explication of what was already there. And here Deleuze, although I think he is here much more Hegelian than he himself thinks, Deleuze makes here a wonderful remark that something really new can emerge only through repetition. No, he means something very precise: that when we really have a radical change—let's say we talk about something, let's say I don't know, a state—then not yet radically new is if you try to undermine the state in different ways and so on and so on, but something radically new would have emerged when you don't even have to change the terms; positively, you say state, state, but, you know, the whole horizon changes so radically that state is no longer the same state. The point being that to feel the truly radical emergence of the new, which means the change of the entire field, you must pass through this test of repetition. It’s not that true change is not to say something different; true change is to say the same, but which all of a sudden functions or whatever has a meaning at a totally different level. Here again I claim—but again you know, now what comes is the but, but nonetheless—but nonetheless in a way, my God, Hegel maybe knew it. Because isn't this his entire notion of tautological repetition, that repetition is a radical contradiction? He doesn't mean it in any stupid abstract logical way, but in a very concrete way. Here we have Hegel at his Wittgensteinian best. By Wittgensteinian I mean that he just draws attention to how tautology functions in our everyday use of language. For example when you say—Hegel's example—"a rose is a rose." Why is this a contradiction? Because after you begin "a rose is," the formal structure is that of a subject and a predicate: "a rose is..." and you expect something, and it's a total surprise that because of determinate something—a rose is blue, a plant, green, whatever you want—you get just the same. And then if we develop this further, you can see how, for example in our everyday language, when do we use repetition? For example if you say, "but man is a man." Don't you use this tautology precisely when you want to signal that someone is not at the level of the concept of a man? Like something is expected of me, I fail miserably, and then Avital das bitch will maybe come and say, "Slavoj is Slavoj, what can we do?" You know, you see the point, no? That pure repetition means exactly, exactly this: that, how to put it, pure repetition of the same tautological is a way, as Hegel would have put it, to signal that a thing doesn't fit its own concept. Let’s go further: Hegel and the unconscious. Here again things are more complex. Hegel does think the unconscious. He has his own, even very precise notion of the unconscious, but the Hegelian unconscious is totally opposed to the Freudian unconscious. It is the transcendental universal form of what I am doing as opposed to the immediate particular content which is the focus of my conscious attention. To take the most elementary, it's so ridiculously simple example, you know, from the very beginning of Phenomenology—not Vorrede, not Einleitung, but Sinnliche Gewissheit. When I say "now," of course I mean consciously this particular moment. But the big Hegelian point: what I say is a universal "now," every now. Like the very form of language undermines my literal intention. So Hegel here, in a very almost Lacanian way, explicitly claims that when you have a gap between what somebody literally says and what he wants to say—he uses usually the verb meinen, means to say, Meinung—that the truth is in what you say, not in what you want to say or you mean to say. So again, yeah, the most radical beautiful development of this Hegelian unconscious is, of course, you find it towards the end of the Einleitung, not the long one Vorrede, to Phänomenologie des Geistes where Hegel introduces when he speaks about die Erfahrung des Bewusstseins, experience of consciousness, and passage from one to another figure of consciousness, Gestalt des Bewusstseins, he introduces the category of das Formelle, the formal aspect. He says we have one figure and then the other. For example, I don't know, very naively again from phenomenology, we have stoicism, skepticism, and then we have, we have Unglückliche Bewusstsein—how is this translated? the un, not unhappy consciousness. Now he says for the, the agent of experience him or herself, it's just that one thing disappears another one emerges. What the, the agent itself, the subject, doesn't perceive is the formal aspect, the inner necessity of this passage. But again, this Hegelian unconscious is formal universal; it's more universal in the sense that you are, as it were, bewitched, trapped by the particular content, you don't see the transcendental form. The Freudian unconscious is on the contrary the unconscious of particular contingent associations to and links, and this one can claim, maybe it's not sure, Hegel cannot think. To take a classic Freudian example, he reports on a dream of a feminine patient of him where her dream was about a funeral she effectively attended the previous day. And in the dream she appeared—I mean the dream made her very sad and so on and so on. Freud also uses this dream to exemplify his idea that except anxiety all affects cheat. So Freud provides a wonderful interpretation of this dream, and what I want to focus on is this total lateral contingency, accidentality of his reading. Freud totally suspends any hermeneutic immersion into the scene of the dream, like "oh funeral, somebody is dying, what does death mean to this woman?" or maybe it's ritual funeral, "who died there?" and discovers a totally lateral connection that as usual the woman brings up as totally unimportant at the end of the session: that she was surprised to meet at this funeral her great ex-love and the secret hope was that maybe I will meet him again. So it was basically a totally happy dream. This whole bullshit of horror, death and so on was: I meet a guy and okay let's not go on, maybe he will screw me next day or whatever. But you see—but no, you see the point. The point is that this totally contingent link is radically non-immanent. No matter how you analyze the scene of the dream, the emotional horizon and so on, you don't get it. It's just this totally contingent partial link. Link connected to this is the impossibility for Hegel to think overdetermination. Now let me be very precise here. Hegel can think overdetermination but only in the purely abstract sense of a universality, universal species which comprises itself as its own subspecies and thus encounters among its species itself in—the term he uses taken over by Marx—in its gegensätzliche Bestimmung, oppositional determination. This is basically the most elementary structure of overdetermination, and it's exactly in this sense that for example Marx in his introduction to Grundrisse where he develops this fourfold structure of production, distribution, exchange, consummation, he says that production is doubly inscribed: it's at the same time the species or rather okay the genus encompassing and one of its species, that it's doubly inscribed. This is in the strict Hegelian and even Freudian sense overdetermination. It's not simply that "yes everything is complicated, overdetermined"—no no, it means this precise paradox that, that overdetermination means that one of the elements of a set overdetermines the set itself. This incidentally—if I may be a little bit brutal—is what already people like Engels, Lenin even, don't get. Even Lenin at his philosophical best in so-called Philosophical Notebooks. Clearly there his limit is the notion of Wechselwirkung, that is to say, you know, like "no it's not just simple causality but everything is connected with everything else, if A influences B there is always a counterwirkung, counterefficiency, blah blah." That's not enough. Overdetermination means precisely this reflexively redoubled efficiency where you not only influence B, but you over-influence the very way B influences you back and so on. So Hegel can think this. But what he cannot think is again the complex network of particular links organized along the lines of condensation, displacement, Verdichtung, Verschiebung, and so on. In more general terms the Hegelian process always deals with a radical clear cuts, resolutions. What is totally foreign to Hegel—not so much foreign as he would have dismissed it as meaningless, stupid—is the Freudian logic of pragmatic opportunistic compromises, not in theory but in the logic of dreams. For example, what, you know, this is why it is so difficult and non-convincing when some authors, Jean Hyppolite among others, tried to conceptualize the Freudian dialectic of re or repression, Verdrängung, and Wiederkehr, return of the repressed, in the terms of negation of negation. First something is negated, let's say in the sense of Verdrängung, and then it returns in the guise of a symptom as return of the repressed. Yeah but the point that doesn't fit Hegel's notion of negation of negation is that, you know, a strange thing happened with Freud: it's nothing gets resolved to the end. You try to do something, you fail, you make a compromise, you blur even this one. It's all a kind of a patchwork of compromises. Recall the legendary case of forgetting the name Signorelli from Freud's Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. I have to boast here that I know German a little to be more impressive. Freud, Freud couldn't recall the name Signorelli of the painter of the Orvieto frescoes, and so he produced as substitutes the names of two other painters, Botticelli and Boltraffio. And his analysis brings to light the processes of signifying associations which linked Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The Italian village Trafoi was where he received the message of the suicide of one of his patients struggling with sexual problems. Herr, the German word for master, signor, is linked to a trip in Herzegovina where an old Muslim told Freud that after one can no longer engage in sex there is no reason to go on living and so on and so on. So we have a complex rhizomatic texture of associations and displacement which display no clear triadic structure with any final resolution. The result of the tension between let's call it thesis, the name Signorelli, and anti-thesis, its forgetting, is the compromise formation of falsely remembering two other names in which the dimension on account of which Freud was unable to remember Signorelli, the link between death and sex, returns in an even more conspicuous way. This, in a way, you don't find in Hegel. With Hegel somehow the conclusion of a dialectical process is always it explodes, radical resolution. Like first, like exemplarily for example the whole dialectic of modern society which, you know, begins in the chapter on Bildung, formation, education, in Phänomenologie des Geistes. It starts with all this: first corruption of authentic medieval master, feudal master and his servant's relationship into this flattery of Louis Quatorze, of, of Ludwig the 14th, and then it goes on through utilitarianism, French revolutionary terror, and there it achieves its radical pure form. You get the absolute as it were contradiction of self-negating negativity, of reign of terror where every subjectivity is potentially negated, of this mad dance of pure self-destruction. The problem is that precisely nothing like that happens in the Freudian space of the formations of the unconscious. There we have all the time compromise formations, you know, something is asserted but simultaneously denied, displaced, reduced, or encrypted in an often ridiculously patched up way. Now, the next point I want to make is that what complicates this figure, this reproach, is that you know what is so mysterious is that whenever people want to point out how Hegel was not able to see something, quite often when you look closely at it you see that the dimension that he was not able to see is not some modern post-Hegelian dimension but it's the very Hegelian aspect, dimension of a phenomenon he wasn't able to see in things, precisely what he should have seen if he were to be able to approach these phenomena through his own let’s call it—it’s a wrong term—methodology. Let’s take—and Fredric Jameson did here in his short recent book on Phänomenologie des Geistes some, made some nice point—let’s take the topic Hegel and economy. We know Hegel was reading Adam Smith and so on. But what is so surprising is that since Hegel's notion of modern society, as Jameson points out, nonetheless remains basically at a pre-capitalist level. It's basically artisans, people producing, exchanging. This idea that the moment we pass into Hegel's model was still a manufacturing and so on, the idea of big large factories with mechanized machinery and with clear class division, those who own, is simply not present in Hegel. But again, what is so beautiful is that Marx in order to describe this dynamics, as we all know, had to read Hegel. You know, after, after the fiasco of the relative fiasco of the '48 revolution, Marx started to read again Hegel's logic, and it's absolutely crucial for genesis of capital. I mean, just look at Capital and you will see here and there or rather all around Hegelian references. For example the passage from money to capital is formulated in purely Hegelian terms as the passage from abstract universal substance, money as the common measure, the universality but passive abstract universality of all particular commodities, to money as active subject. Capital is money which is no longer a substance but active subject which reproduces itself in its circulation and so on and so on. So the dimension, very nice one I think I want to emphasize here, is that for example what Hegel was not able to see in modern economy is not some totally un-Hegelian dimension, but his own shadow in it. What and—okay. Then another thing: here Gérard Lebrun, a very good French philosopher who wrote a lot of Kant and Hegel, who unfortunately died recently, pointed out that maybe what made for Hegel, what made Hegel unable to think capital is that, you know, namely this—and we are back at the problem of repetition here—you know Hegel's big opposition between, usually it's translated spurious infinity, schlechte, is it schlechte or what? no, what is the bad infinity? I think it's schlechte Unendlichkeit, yes, and the good one, the true infinity. But the true infinity is precisely the subjective infinity of self-relating. And as Lebrun pointed out, Marx characterizes capital as automatic subject, automatisches Subjekt. Why, why is this paradoxical? Because what is so perverse for a Hegelian in capitalism is that it undermines this simple duality of on the one hand just the mechanical repetition, on the other hand truly speculative self-relating and so on. The movement of capital is both at the same time. At the same time A, it has this aspect of endless repetition, just endless circulation more and more and more, but at the same point—so it's automatic, almost mechanical—but at the same point it is strictly subjective, speculative, self-relating. This was probably as Lebrun puts it a monstrous mixture that Hegel was unable to think of. And maybe I claim Hegel, this is also why Hegel was not able to think mathematics. Hegel brutally reduced mathematics to the very model of pre-dialectical Verstand, abstract understanding, just formal thinking, unable to engage in a proper conceptual dynamics. But my God, it would be really worthy to reread Hegel here. For example, it’s wonderful what Hegel writes—obviously the problem obsessed him—about how do you call it? infinitesimal calculus, no? He—this is maybe one of the great symptomatic points of Hegel. Because what he there encounters is a case of mathematics which clearly functions in purely speculative way in Hegelian terms. Why? What happens there? You know, in let us say how does a circle and a line where do they touch? Like that you can have the paradox of—we have a circle where a straight line touches it. It’s just a point but this point nonetheless has a direction. So as Hegel puts it, it is as if in mathematics itself we no longer have the relation between two, two quantities but it is as if—or rather we have it but without the X, what they relate to. Both sides, the line and the circle are, as it were, reduced to zero. What infinitesimal calculus presents us is just the formula of a pure relationship where the relata, the related terms, are in itself disappear. Are—so again this is pure speculative reversal. And it’s incredible reading, I mean it’s like if one, sign check it up. This comes of course towards the end of the chapter on quantity where Hegel deals with mathematics in the first book on Sein, on logic, on the logic of being in Hegel's Great Logic. What is so obvious there—I mean what makes it so obvious that we are dealing with a trauma—is Hegel's where are we okay is Hegel's idea of is the very length sorry of this part you know it's so weird I think it's around pages he is totally traumatized check it up you know endlessly goes into it obviously he struggles terribly with but again you see it's not he found something that was totally unthinkable for him no he found himself where according to his own theory he shouldn't have found himself he found speculative movement in what should have been for him just stupid mathematical uninteresting repetition and so on and so on okay another thing another way oh my God time is running this is so evil but whatever to see Hegel is even when you speak about what I called la langue you know playing with words ambiguities all this crazy aspect of language where as it were language in the in its material texture starts to function on its own independently of content so that you have for example crazy lateral connections which have nothing to do with inner logic of meaning now you would have said oh here Hegel should be totally against a a a first here we encounter the genius of Hegel it's very interesting how Hegel always resisted this common sense temptation of saying since language is imperfect our common language we should construct a purely either formal mathematical or conceptual language where terms will be very precisely defined you know in the sense of avoiding all ambiguities and so on and so on that's how Hegel usually is perceived as pure thinking where you just need language as an imperfect tool in a way this is true Hegel does say that thinking means using language against itself that you we have to think in language but against language now if you know a little bit about Hegel you know his paradoxical answer to how do we do it not to strive as far as possible to to to introduce ambiguity clear structure in language but on the contrary to by way of mobilizing precisely the dimension that Lacan calls la langue all these stupid abstract associations and so on and so on you know I think I even I'm sorry I don't forget remember where it was but there was one German author who presented a nice German this bureaucratic work the list of all of these Hegelian playing with words for example not only the big one everybody knows this the notorious Aufhebung three meanings annihilation preservation and elevation at a higher level this is even too teleological but then for example when Hegel speaks about contradiction radical difference he says that in a contradiction the things destroys itself zugrunde gehen and this is how he arrives at the category of Grund no or even it's not even purely at this conceptual level where Hegel clearly mobilizes all the contingent ambiguities language sometimes he even is very evil I love him as a at a personal level for example you know Hegel's some people even don't get it for example Pierre Macherey in his book Hegel ou Spinoza Hegel or Spinoza claims that that Hegel how do you call that lung disease that people were dying Schwindsucht in German sorry yes yeah yeah yeah that that Spinoza died according to his philosophy from TB the guy doesn't have a point he just takes this as Hegel's cruelty no Hegel know the German term for tuberculosis is Schwindsucht Schwindsucht means suchen to search to disappear and then Hegel makes just a wonderful evil remark he says the basic lesson of Spinoza's philosophy is that every particular identity searches for its disappearance annihilation in substance so Spinoza was consequent and died accordingly for Schwindsucht and so on and not only this another wonderful detail Hegel who was no German nationalist you know when he has chosen Berlin is not the seat of the German Reich read his letters it is money money how much for some at some point it looked that he will be more paid in Amsterdam he got an invitation and it's interesting how immediately he wrote his Dutch friends can you bring me as much many as possible he was started already to learn Dutch the play words ambiguities of Dutch language and so on you know why this is beautiful because he didn't play Heidegger game Hegel here of oh there is a deeper wisdom of German language no this is what I like that you can fight the contingency of language but how you fight it by mobilizing the contingency itself at its most stupid at contingent you know it's almost the same thing as Freud when Freud says in a crucial remark that when you that the the way you can be sure that you encounter something real in a dream is when in a dream you dream about a dream a dream within a dream that's the form of the appearance of of the real so and this is one aspect we find this in Hegel on the another aspect also interesting I claim is that from the opposite side also the Freudian unconscious has often a wonderfully Hegelian reference to form in Freud also unconscious can be formal in the sense of simply the form the medium of expression I will give you now again there are much more complex examples but a wonderfully simple example when Freud reports again of a woman who told her that she was dreaming that she is pregnant but she cannot say the dream became unclear it's not clear it's a mess what and then Freud discovered a very simple one but just focus on the form the idea what did this insistence oh oh it's not clear and so on all of a sudden the woman started to refer to the form of her dream or Tagtraum day dreaming that it and his solution is that the woman wasn't able to confess to herself that well she was sleeping around with many men and didn't know what was unclear was who the the father is and this unclarity unable this was too much for her to admit it even in the content of a dream it appeared as the uncertainty in the form of the dream so you know this wonderful logic where content is censored but what is censored in content returns in the very form it's a very Hegelian move so again oh my God how the time is running okay this is life let me go on so we have them nonetheless we should return to it ah another point about Hegel cannot think repetition maybe even there I am not so sure it is absolutely crucial to read Hegel's Anthropologie anthropology the beginning of his Philosophie des Geistes third part of Enzyklopädie where Hegel makes it very clear that A there is no freedom of thought outside language but that in order to learn a language you must internalize the rules in a totally non-thinking mechanic way which is why and I totally agree with it although with Hegel here although some people would have dismissed him as proto-fascist or whatever which is why I think Hegel is right to insist that why when I think it's in some of his notes on pedagogy or whatever I forgot where Hegel confronts this problem why should people read a dead learn in universities a dead language Latin is this a purely dead mechanical living thought is only in living languages and then Hegel even as it were takes into account in advance Heidegger's point which is that yes Latin is dead language the only authentic living thinking was Greek and so on and Hegel there makes a wonderful turn he says no the foundation of our thinking has to be a purely dead mechanical custom that precisely you need like you know we can be free think creatively whatever you want only if we in a totally mechanic way obey follow the rules okay so then the next point one can demonstrate that Hegel that even where Hegel appears to be at his most idealist Selbstbewusstsein self-consciousness he is talking about the unconscious that is to say that now this is a crazy thesis but Lacan developed it very convincingly I think I'm not sure it was in his L'envers de la psychanalyse the other side of psychoanalysis seminar on four discourses of psychoanalysis I think it's from where Lacan proposes a crazy statement self-consciousness is an object what does it mean by this I think something very simple which provides a crucial key of what Hegel of how the Hegelian notion of Selbstbewusstsein is to be understood Selbstbewusstsein does not mean that some kind of a meta-subject or a thinker or whoever is really aware of what is going on but something else Hegel himself provides an example when he writes about the functioning of the state and when he develops in what sense the state is the Selbstbewusstsein self-awareness of a society so that a society doesn't exist as a true subject without state but then Hegel uses some wonderful examples for example he says that this doesn't mean that the guy this is now crucial this doesn't mean that the state consciously knows what it is doing even less does it mean that the head of the state the monarch knows no Hegel says it openly the head of the monarch the sorry the head of the state the monarch is an idiot his only duty is to know to sign his name and so on what Hegel says is that state is self-consciousness of society in the sense of that all acts of state but especially let's call it celebrations parades nominations whatever are not simply functional events like but are also to use the modern language performative self-declarations so then Hegel uses a wonderful example he says for example a parade or a ceremonial meeting is where state is a state is conscious of itself but this only means that it reflexively to use the Derridean in precise the Derridean term of mark remarks itself without anyone having to be aware of it Hegel even uses the example let's say we have a ceremonial parade the king thinks how to escape his wife after the ceremony this is my specification not Hegel's to to screw that beautiful lady daughter of his servant queen thinks about her lover bureaucrats minister think about no nobody has to think about it but the very in the very form this performative dimension is is at work something similar Lacan fuck am I dreaming it sounded almost as my name and I thought I was thinking about that horrible story dimension yesterday on Italo Calvino and so on you know we are here alienated but then an original innocent feminine voice calls me out and then I go out and okay yeah yeah okay let me go on no Lacan says let us say something very stupid you know this is how one should read Hegel's notion of Selbstbewusstsein it's not a psychological notion it's a purely notion of a reflexive registration you not only do something you symbolically inscribe it register it let's say I were to and I'm even consciously convinced that I have a good time no it's much more honest the opposite example let's say consciously I'm tired of you like screw you this stupid talk here blah blah but let's say then that I were to produce a gesture a symptom which would nonetheless signal the opposite that maybe I'm narcissistic maybe I like you whatever but that I really enjoy to be here it's just a gesture a symptom isn't it that that symptom is my true self-consciousness only there I remark where I truly stand that I become aware in a purely formal way or symbolic registration that in that the whole idea that I hate you I want to be over is false and Hegel even mentions somewhere when he criticizes divorce of in marriage I don't agree with him but he makes a nice point which is that often people privately dream about cheating on their wives husbands and so on but once and you do it discreetly but once you are pushed towards let's divorce they all of a sudden discover that what they misperceived as just an external form is much more binding you know never dismiss when you say oh I don't care about my wife my husband it's just formal commitment this is never innocent forms usually matter much more than they appear to matter so I want now to give you nonetheless to elaborate to conclude a little bit more this final point on repetition what dimension of repetition this Kierkegaard Freud dimension of Todestrieb or religious repetition that Hegel cannot maybe cannot think let me quote a passage and I here I must confess I took this from Frauke Berndt whom I met in Chicago she gave a from Frankfurt am Main University she gave this example which I take from her it's a nice example since we are here in Deutsches Haus maybe I should bluff and pretend that I know something about great German classics it's a really nice passage from Goethe's letter to Schiller from August 16th or 17th when Goethe reports to Schiller on an experience his experience which made him perceive a piece of ruined destroyed reality in the city of Frankfurt as a symbol listen to this wonderful quote it's from Briefe an Friedrich Schiller in Sämtliche Werke volume four and so on you can find it whatever no okay here is the quote my grandfather's house its courtyard and its gardens had been transformed from the parochial patrician home of an old Frankfurt elder into the most useful trading and marketplace by wisely enterprising people curious coincidence during the bombardment bombardment in Napoleonic Wars conspired to see the structure perish but even today reduced for the most part to a pile of rubble it is still worth twice as much as the current owners paid my family for it years ago conceivably the whole thing may in the future be bought and restored by yet another entrepreneur and you can easily see that it would in more than one sense stand as a symbol of thousands of other instances in this industrious city and in particular in my own eyes end of quote I think it's crucially here to note the contrast between allegory and symbol allegory is melancholic as Freud pointed out a melancholic treats an object which is still here as already lost melancholy is a preemptive mourning let's say you are in love your partner is still beautiful but you already look at him or her oh my God I already see what will be become out of you years from now and so on and so on and wonderfully dirty things can be say about this procedure do you know I read somewhere that I even have quotes that some medieval theologians warning men against sinful seductive character of women practiced the same thing they told them okay you are now fascinated beautiful woman naked in front of you but just focus your mind on this same figure naked and imagine what will these breasts look years from now and so on and so on and then that's the truth do you want death and so on so that you see the shadow of the future death already in already in its present still Goethe however that's my point does the exact opposite he sees the potential for the future prosperity in the present pile of rubble in a somewhat pathetic way one could say the same about the ruins of September 11th a melancholic would see in them the truth of the arrogant dreams of the United States grandeur that is to say he would see already in the Twin Towers themselves the ruins that lie ahead you know like oh you may boast now but ha ha everything will fall down while a Goethe type optimist would see in the ruins of September 11th a symbol of the enterprising spirit of that other industrious city New York which was probably what Frankfurt was at least for Goethe which will soon replace the ruins with new buildings again crucially here is the rise of the symbol from ruin and repetition it is precisely through the ruin that a symbol appears when you have simply a nice big building it's not a symbol it is simply a stupid nice big building only through ruin can you get the dimension of the of the of the symbol and my point would have been that here we can maybe oppose Hegel and Kierkegaard while in Goethe like in Hegel repetition generates meaning for the post-Hegelian Kierkegaard there is just repetition no rise of new meaning repetition is asserted as such in its mechanic quality so now let's go a step further and just really if you allow me to conclude to propose my final formula because till now I'm well aware I just tried to confuse you like nothing in you you think you as it were caught Hegel by his balls and are squeezing them but no Hegel finds a way out and so on no no no I nonetheless propose this formula on the one hand at its most elementary no it is that Hegel has this radical notion of negativity contradiction brought to its extreme self-destruction which again then turns into its opposite and so on and so on while Freud remains at a level of kind of a endless compromises you mentioned this Avital and I have even a system of them all these my friend Mladen Dolar calls them this the Freudian Ver Ver as in Verwerfung rejection foreclosure is not a good term repression Verdrängung then disavowal Verleugnung denial Verneinung Verdichtung Verschiebung which are all not clear negations but this compromise negation Verdrängung you repress it but not quite as Freud hints at somewhere and Lacan proposes a beautiful formula there is no repression without the return of the repressed because if there is repression without the return of the repressed then it's Verwerfung it's just thrown out or Verschiebung it's not negated it's just instead of here it's there or Verdichtung you know all these complex modes of how acceptance itself can function as a mode of denial for example my preferred example here is what so-called Isolierung what Freud calls Isolierung is that you take something into account formally but you totally isolate it so that the fact is torn out of context and loses its symbolic efficiency for example you know that I always admire communist this Kremlinological extremely thick system of symbols and there in China on my recent visit I found a wonderful case of Isolierung the case the way Chinese official ideology relates to their past to the enormous horrors of the past for example the Great Leap Forward formally they admit it Mao committed mistakes it was horrible millions died but at the same time although they formally admit it but then I asked one of my friends there he told me but we admit it Mao was terribly wrong and so on Great Leap Forward was a great catastrophe then with my evil European spirit attitude I asked the friend okay so can I then write a book on Mao's limitations and will it be published he told me no no no we admit it why to dwell more on it we you know like you say it but the whole point of saying it is saying it as that don't saying it functions exactly as as as the way to to to block any further mention of it saying it explicitly is basically the way to in a way to repress it absolutely I admit it so fuck off stop don't like when somebody tries to dwell on it to elaborate it a party functionary tells him what are you doing whom do you really serve we admitted it so what's the point now you know so but back to Freud so it may appear that Hegel is more simple radical contradiction negativity to the end while in Freud we find this mixed confusion no but at the same time I claim it's also the opposite that only through Freud can we isolate the very core of Hegelian negativity here I come to the point which is what what would have been and this is a great debate also in Freud you know it's a very interesting crucial metapsychological debate we have all these Freudian forms of Verneinung Verwerfung Isolierung they are all forms of in a formal sense negativity but is there a zero level negativity some people claim and I don't buy that but it's a convincing theory it's so-called Ausstossung you know this idea that ego at the most elementary level in order to emerge as opposed to non-ego it's not simply I say here am I ego out there is non-ego it's also Ausstossung I have to throw out part of myself it's a very nice dialectical thought that it's not just again a question of drawing drawing the line of separation to be able to draw this line this external line line between me and not me has also I have to lose part of myself so to put it in very Hegelian speculative terms the external limitation between what is me and not me must at the same at the same time be an internal limitation it's not this I think and here comes the beauty that the zero level of negativity which is exactly the fundamental form of repetition is its opposite it's not that you negate something but that you get excessively stuck onto something like this is for Freud for example the fundamental paradox of Trieb drive and compulsion to repeat Wiederholungszwang this is even I'm tempted to claim Freud's elementary form even if not theory of metaphysics we have a human animal and animals in so far as they are animal okay now I enter very problematic waters I'm well aware of maybe exposing myself to Derridean criticism of but what the hell why not no of referring to over-simplified opposition between animal and man but it has certain pedagogic profit from it so why not so my point is simply this one that it's not that as we usually say animals are stupid stuck onto their object while we men are creatively dynamic you jump from here to there no even I spoke with some cognitivists who were doing very simple experiments with apes and so on and told me no the the immediate behavioral distinction is that man get much more stuck like my good friend Güzen Güzeldere sorry from Duke now he moved elsewhere he's incidentally a Turk and you know we associate Turkey with Muslim fundamentalism and he told me he had a wonderful experience he came from backward Turkey to United States then he put there his children to school no and he's a normal secular Turk no and his children a week later came home and said Father Jesus loves me and so on what is this learn to school then then the child told me why didn't you baptize me the teacher told me I will burn in hell blah blah okay at the end he decided that he prefers somehow the primitive Muslim fundamentalist Turkey when you can survive without all this at least compared to you know Duke is an island all around is Jesse Helms country you know okay let me go on so he told me that he made a very stupid experiment with monkey and love object you present to a monkey a preferable love object a beautiful feminine ape no and the monkey and then another inferior not so attractive the monkey tries with the first one if it doesn't go okay fuck it life is life move to the second one while with humans it's much more complex we have this fixation to an as it were to an impossible object and this is where repetition originates when it's precisely this immobilization you know things flow and then all of a sudden it is as if you get stuck onto something you are not ready to give it away and then you get caught in this circle so here I think that we should reread Heidegger there is a an extremely interesting passage in Holzwege Heidegger der Spruch von is it das Spruch or der Spruch that's my limit of German der Spruch okay I was really just testing you I knew it von Anaximander which is very mysterious because Heidegger there in a way has something quite surprising which as it were problematizes his entire notion of historicity not historicism Geschichtlichkeit Heidegger considers there the possibility that an entity ein Seiendes I quote may even insist bestehen upon its while solely to remain more present in the sense of perduring beständigen that which lingers persists beharrt in its presence in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while while as a substantive I didn't translate this don't ask me why it strikes the willful pose of persistence no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present it stiffens as if this were the only way to linger and aims solely for continuance and subsistence so things flow now I interpret Heidegger there they follow their usual course of incessant change and then all of a sudden something get stuck interrupts the flow and we this what to use the term introduced by Judith Butler this excessive attachment to a particular Seiendes here I disagree with Heidegger because Heidegger thinks as if you know like I'm consciously evil here like you know that old creep Yoda says in Star Wars you know I really Yoda is worse than ET when I see Yoda in Star Wars I became a Nazi where are my big boots to squash that stupid guy because he has this you know oh don't get attached to particular beings but I claim our own metaphysical freedom is grounded in such an excessive attachment because Heidegger says very well no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present that is to say for us humans you get my point to acquire this distance of negativity I am not this to in the only way for us to get unstuck from reality to acquire a distance from reality is to get excessively stuck onto a totally particular contingent element so that in a way in this way and this is the Freudian way one can generate negativity out of positivity one just accelerates or rather pushes to excess positivity in the sense of things are here but I got stuck to this one and by this everything else is destabilized I acquire so I like this idea of how the secret of negativity is this being stuck onto something like and Hegel we may say he comes sometimes even close to it for example when he says something very nice when he speaks about abstract freedom of subjectivity he says that the only way for the subject to signal its let's say it its autonomy its detachment from all empirical objects is to pick out one particular thing and stake absolutely everything on it you know this meaningless pride when you say I don't know you can beat me you can burn my house whatever you want but that you know like let's call it the Michael Kohlhaas symptom but that the way you treated my horse up I'm ready to you see Michael Kohlhaas would be a nice example do whatever you want but don't touch my two horses I'm absolutely stuck there and as you know Kohlhaas is ready then to he does practically destroys half Germany in civil war just that but you know here the object doesn't matter as Freud himself says very clearly that the object of Trieb drive even if it's an unconditional fixation it's ultimately indifferent precisely in its indifference in the indifference of the object the message gets through that what matters is not the object but my arbitrary fixation my free will itself so again it's through this fixation I try to reach again and again this excessive moment that negativity and repetition emerge and you were kind enough to announce a little bit of PR propaganda my forthcoming book which is total madness it will be now it looks a little bit over printed pages on Hegel where I precisely try to focus on all these elements of excessive fixation and at the same time excessive negativity like you have in Hegel the way in Anthropology first part of Philosophie des Geistes at the beginning of Philosophie des Geistes when Hegel speak about Verrücktheit madness it's Hegel at his Foucauldian best where he says that the possibility of madness is structural there is no human subjectivity without an ever-permanent shadow of madness so for Hegel again madness is not some as he puts it very clearly some accidental variation but it's he says in beautiful Foucauldian way that although this doesn't mean that we all should be mad but being human presupposes the possibility of madness structural possibility and the fight against it then we have many other moments of this for example the necessity of war the most problematic Hegel for some people but here we can see how wrong are those who think that Hegel brings at the end some kind of reconciliation no Hegelian reconciliation is not everything is reunited in some larger harmonious synthesis reconciliation is for Hegel precisely reconciliation with the irrational madness of the world remember clearly where Hegel introduces in Phänomenologie des Geistes the very term Versöhnung at the end just before religion enters at the end of that chapter where he deals with with with the beautiful with the beautiful soul and so on that is to say with the consciousness or rather form of subjectivity which judges compares pardons and so on and then he says you have in a totally Heideggerian way you have to abandon every position of judging reconciliation is not the subject swallows the object reconciliation is precisely you accept the radical otherness really to conclude my point is that we have here a wonderfully complex structure because what I was saying doesn't mean that simply okay now we have okay fuck off Hegel we got your point the secret formula of Hegel is in Kierkegaard Freud now let's forget Hegel let's deal with these guys ah here I would like to conclude in an idea which came to me a propos of Wall Street protests very strange Freudian association you know when Claude Lévi-Strauss said something beautiful about prohibition of incest he says this prohibition is not a question to which we don't have an answer but it's an answer without question it's obviously the prohibition of incest is a solution an answer to some deadlock we don't know to which one we don't know the problem the question in this sense I claim yes Kierkegaard-Freudian notion of repetition is where we get Hegel's secret at its purest we get the for in this fixation repetition and so on we get as it were the zero level the real core of Hegelian dialectics but we can see this only if the question is Hegelian so to really stop now I think that then we will have a lot of time like two three minutes for debate and so on it's that no I'm really sorry to repeat an old joke but I cannot resist it I love it when people told me but you're a totalitarian you don't like dialogue I told them you must have heard it but I love it I love dialogues late Plato's dialogues you know what happens there one guy speaks all the time and the other says every minutes by Zeus so it is Socrates and so on so we have but sorry quite clear so I think that our task today is simply of course not to simply remain Hegelian in the sense of the fidelity to Hegel's explicit position this is madness but to to to to read post-Hegelians from the standpoint of the Hegelian question the only way to read what is truly great in post-Hegelians is to read them as an answer to the Hegelian question which is why to conclude we all know that the post-Hegelian break has another dimension which is the most famous one the dimension of new positive order no usually it is said Hegel crazy idealist this is just the realm of shadows and the basic post-Hegelian break is to introduce or assert some positivity of the will in in late Schelling Schopenhauer and so on or even Nietzsche or or for example for Marx the actual positive social process of production Kierkegaard the singularity of belief so you have you have some positivity which should be the foundation of the abstract and I claim that this is precisely the original sinner for me here if you ask me is Feuerbach he is the worst this idea that there is some positivity of being missed by Hegel no the much more crucial dimension of the post-Hegelian break is this emergence of radical repetition and I think we are still at this level so the task is you may have guessed my final formula not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense thank you very much for your patience very nice that's life nice you know that cynical part in Hegel in everything is not Hegel in Brecht's Dreigroschenoper where one of the bad guys guys who exploits prostitutes and when he is complained how can you do this why don't you do it in another way no he says Es geht auch anders aber so geht es auch no so that would be my answer my self comment very very helpful so you are das bitch you know no she wanted it's a long joke she wanted to be das Avital like not das Kapital but das Avital and I gave her an argument which I think convinced you I told you that if das Avital it sounds evil but it leaves open the space for this disgusting humanism you know like oh she pretends to be evil das Avital but there is nonetheless a warm human being beneath no das Avital means there is nothing human beneath yeah that turned me off that's a big turn off it turned me off thank you so how many how many minutes of of two no okay do you give a couple of questions okay so this is a world historical moment oh my god don't don't go too far because now it's not even undecidable now it's pure making fun of me you know what I mean no because you are in principle ready to take questions right bye are you leaving I underlined five times the word in principle in principle like Stalin was in principle for democracy no in this sense yeah well we don't want to torture you either or do we okay we do so thinking is torturing I I wrote please I will have a long text on Heidegger torturing and language where I go in detail into this I don't like she's a nasty bitch Elfriede nastier than you Elfriede Jelinek but he said one thing it's wonderful she said language in its fundamental dimension language lies we have to torture language to make it say the truth that's ridiculous are you crazy but all poetry is this what suddenly you regressed off the page to truth and lies and ah wait a minute I'm I'm not about you should be more maybe don't tell me this post okay shut up you did so well and now you're bullshitting us no on on Wall Street I was so mad that I didn't discover this obvious play with words you know what's the symbol of Wall Street no a bull and yes they are bullshitting we are getting the shit of that bull no now that's true very good not impressed by this no but no I loved it I loved it yeah really really so um we have different ways we haven't deconstructed Q and A but what we can do is you can listen to the questions and then decide if you want to answer them it doesn't have to what would be a really Lévi-Straussian way would be for me to talk for five minutes and then you would have to guess what was the question which I'm answering this would be the only Hegelian way you know so who would like to ask Slavoj or make a comment it doesn't have to be a question it can be an answer as Hegel no I'm quite serious I'm not accusing you but do you know that at every conference there are usually guys who pretend to ask a question but really use it for like minutes self-declaration you know people like these are one of the reasons why I still exceptionally advocate death penalty if you put it like that okay with all these provisos who has the balls or guts to um to make a comment a remark a question um expose shamelessly their own reflections because they wrote a book on this very subject or are thinking of it can I just tell you something because you are not only my students here who are there nonetheless let me make a remark which against my nature will sound feminist no I'm so glad to tell you that how there is a kind of a higher necessity in our lives that every two one two three decades a woman writes a really good book on Hegel and and they are almost all women recently it started it's a modest book then she turned towards Kantianism I don't for Beatrice Longuenesse wrote some years ago in France a book Hegel and the critique of metaphysics something like this it sounds very modest but it's a very good book it was later translated I think then it was some years ago Catherine Malabou The Future of Hegel where she in a wonderful way deconstructs or demystifies using the terms very naively this idea Hegel the idiot who thought history is an end no and in a totally new way opened up this problem of Hegel and the opening of the future with a basically a beautifully paradoxical but deeply convincing thesis that Hegel what Hegel calls absolutes Wissen absolute knowing is the formula of the most radical opening towards the future it's precisely a gesture of okay here it is the conclusion so now attack me you know what I mean this concluding gesture which through very self-limitation opens up exposes itself it's much more honest than this self-relativizing historicism where I really hate people where you always when you say something you always add that you don't really agree with yourself you know maybe it's not like this I know blah blah and the third book recent one Rebecca Comay morning sickness not morning as the sun is rising but mourning like Trauer no it's an excellent reading of Hegel and the French Revolution much more radical than Richter and Joachim Ritter sorry not Richter all the classical stuff that we know in a wonderful immanent analysis it shows first how much more radical Hegel was than Kant and others you know the traditional reception of Hegel of the French Revolution of people around Hegel was this kind of a liberal spiritualism in principle it was good but then like is good is bad and then okay you can play all the games that the passage was necessary or not but nonetheless Hegel is the only one in Kant you even have a wonderfully ridiculous open split into two on the one hand in what everyone from Lyotard quotes is those passages I think is it in Streit der Fakultäten or Was ist Aufklärung I always forgot which passages what a vulgar empirical question no sorry those passages on how you know the sublime event going on for all the public observers in Europe signum prognosticum and all that that celebration at the same time if you look at Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten you find such a trauma at the trial against the king which Kant denounces as the ultimate indelible crime diabolical evil something which from within undermines the very form of the law because you know you violate the law in the form of the law so for Kant this is if you kill the king out of fear rebellion it's not a problem if you make a legal trial against the king it's like from within self-destruction of the rule of law so again the the paradox is that it's at the same time the most sublime event and an unthinkable evil Hegel's greatness is that he was ready to think both at the same time together and Rebecca Comay wonderfully shows how all that comes
One point that she, Avital, made towards the end really hits on what I want to develop, namely how, with all the people referring to negativity and so on and so on, I, up to a point, up to a point only, agree with Heidegger who somewhere noted that Hegel himself, the philosopher of negativity, really fails to, to explicate, to bring out the, let’s call it naively, fundamental operation of negativity. And I claim—this will be the thesis—that in a way without being aware of it, when Freud talks about death drive, that is to say this post-Hegelian topic of blind repetition, that it is only in this line of post-Hegelian thought that, as it were retroactively, we can get the zero-level operation of Hegel. So okay, let me jump in medias res and confront the question in all its brutal naivety: Can Hegel think the Freudian field? Here is my first improvised list of what, so it seems, Hegel cannot think: a series of concepts mostly elaborated by psychoanalysis and Marxism. Repetition, unconscious, overdetermination, modern mathematical science; then the dimension of language which Lacan calls la langue, language in its ridiculous aspect of, of, of playing with words, ambiguities, and so on; then the notion of antagonism, class struggle, sexual difference. Now, upon a closer look however, it becomes clear that one should be very precise about what Hegel cannot think or do. It is never a question of simple inability. There is, in all these cases, a tiny imperceptible line of separation which compels us to supplement the assertion of impossibility or inability with a qualifying "yes, but." Hegel cannot do it; yes, but he almost comes there to be able to do it. First, repetition. Of course, I'm aware that Hegel does think repetition. But—and here the let me call in this brutal throwing together of two totally disparate thinkers—in the field of Kierkegaard and Freud, as opposite as they are, they both, of course at a totally different level, propose a notion of repetition which is a non-productive repetition, a pure repetition which just strives for more of the same. Hegel's notion of repetition on the other hand always involves an Aufhebung—I don't know, sublation is the usual term. Through repetition, something is idealized, transformed from an immediate contingent reality into a notional universality, or at least through repetition the necessity of an event is, becomes, passes from an sich to für sich, from in itself to for itself. Hegel's two great examples: Caesar. First we have Caesar as the name of a person, singular name. Caesar has to die so that he repeats himself as in Augustus Octavian as Caesar the title. This is Hegel's perfect example, no? With Octavian, Caesar is no longer a single name of a contingent individual, it becomes a general title. Octavian was the first Caesar. Or, through repetition, the assertion of necessity. Hegel's example is Napoleon, of course. Napoleon had to lose two times to get the point that his time is over. The first defeat, it was possible to perceive it as a simple contingency, bad luck or whatever. You had to do it twice to get the point. The fact that Hegel misses this excess of purely mechanic repetition in no way implies that he is too much focused on the new. Now, a truly intelligent critique of Hegel—and we find it sometimes in Deleuze, sometimes not even when he talks directly about Hegel—would claim that it is precisely because Hegel cannot think the pure repetition, repetition without the movement of Aufhebung or Idealisierung, that Hegel cannot think the radically new. One would have said that it's exactly the opposite, that repetition is simply the repetition of the same, nothing new. But the idea is that in this Hegelian repetition, which is repetition sustained by Aufhebung, Idealisierung, precisely the new is not radically new but is just the explication of what was already there. And here Deleuze, although I think he is here much more Hegelian than he himself thinks, Deleuze makes here a wonderful remark that something really new can emerge only through repetition. No, he means something very precise: that when we really have a radical change—let's say we talk about something, let's say I don't know, a state—then not yet radically new is if you try to undermine the state in different ways and so on and so on, but something radically new would have emerged when you don't even have to change the terms; positively, you say state, state, but, you know, the whole horizon changes so radically that state is no longer the same state. The point being that to feel the truly radical emergence of the new, which means the change of the entire field, you must pass through this test of repetition. It’s not that true change is not to say something different; true change is to say the same, but which all of a sudden functions or whatever has a meaning at a totally different level. Here again I claim—but again you know, now what comes is the but, but nonetheless—but nonetheless in a way, my God, Hegel maybe knew it. Because isn't this his entire notion of tautological repetition, that repetition is a radical contradiction? He doesn't mean it in any stupid abstract logical way, but in a very concrete way. Here we have Hegel at his Wittgensteinian best. By Wittgensteinian I mean that he just draws attention to how tautology functions in our everyday use of language. For example when you say—Hegel's example—"a rose is a rose." Why is this a contradiction? Because after you begin "a rose is," the formal structure is that of a subject and a predicate: "a rose is..." and you expect something, and it's a total surprise that because of determinate something—a rose is blue, a plant, green, whatever you want—you get just the same. And then if we develop this further, you can see how, for example in our everyday language, when do we use repetition? For example if you say, "but man is a man." Don't you use this tautology precisely when you want to signal that someone is not at the level of the concept of a man? Like something is expected of me, I fail miserably, and then Avital das bitch will maybe come and say, "Slavoj is Slavoj, what can we do?" You know, you see the point, no? That pure repetition means exactly, exactly this: that, how to put it, pure repetition of the same tautological is a way, as Hegel would have put it, to signal that a thing doesn't fit its own concept. Let’s go further: Hegel and the unconscious. Here again things are more complex. Hegel does think the unconscious. He has his own, even very precise notion of the unconscious, but the Hegelian unconscious is totally opposed to the Freudian unconscious. It is the transcendental universal form of what I am doing as opposed to the immediate particular content which is the focus of my conscious attention. To take the most elementary, it's so ridiculously simple example, you know, from the very beginning of Phenomenology—not Vorrede, not Einleitung, but Sinnliche Gewissheit. When I say "now," of course I mean consciously this particular moment. But the big Hegelian point: what I say is a universal "now," every now. Like the very form of language undermines my literal intention. So Hegel here, in a very almost Lacanian way, explicitly claims that when you have a gap between what somebody literally says and what he wants to say—he uses usually the verb meinen, means to say, Meinung—that the truth is in what you say, not in what you want to say or you mean to say. So again, yeah, the most radical beautiful development of this Hegelian unconscious is, of course, you find it towards the end of the Einleitung, not the long one Vorrede, to Phänomenologie des Geistes where Hegel introduces when he speaks about die Erfahrung des Bewusstseins, experience of consciousness, and passage from one to another figure of consciousness, Gestalt des Bewusstseins, he introduces the category of das Formelle, the formal aspect. He says we have one figure and then the other. For example, I don't know, very naively again from phenomenology, we have stoicism, skepticism, and then we have, we have Unglückliche Bewusstsein—how is this translated? the un, not unhappy consciousness. Now he says for the, the agent of experience him or herself, it's just that one thing disappears another one emerges. What the, the agent itself, the subject, doesn't perceive is the formal aspect, the inner necessity of this passage. But again, this Hegelian unconscious is formal universal; it's more universal in the sense that you are, as it were, bewitched, trapped by the particular content, you don't see the transcendental form. The Freudian unconscious is on the contrary the unconscious of particular contingent associations to and links, and this one can claim, maybe it's not sure, Hegel cannot think. To take a classic Freudian example, he reports on a dream of a feminine patient of him where her dream was about a funeral she effectively attended the previous day. And in the dream she appeared—I mean the dream made her very sad and so on and so on. Freud also uses this dream to exemplify his idea that except anxiety all affects cheat. So Freud provides a wonderful interpretation of this dream, and what I want to focus on is this total lateral contingency, accidentality of his reading. Freud totally suspends any hermeneutic immersion into the scene of the dream, like "oh funeral, somebody is dying, what does death mean to this woman?" or maybe it's ritual funeral, "who died there?" and discovers a totally lateral connection that as usual the woman brings up as totally unimportant at the end of the session: that she was surprised to meet at this funeral her great ex-love and the secret hope was that maybe I will meet him again. So it was basically a totally happy dream. This whole bullshit of horror, death and so on was: I meet a guy and okay let's not go on, maybe he will screw me next day or whatever. But you see—but no, you see the point. The point is that this totally contingent link is radically non-immanent. No matter how you analyze the scene of the dream, the emotional horizon and so on, you don't get it. It's just this totally contingent partial link. Link connected to this is the impossibility for Hegel to think overdetermination. Now let me be very precise here. Hegel can think overdetermination but only in the purely abstract sense of a universality, universal species which comprises itself as its own subspecies and thus encounters among its species itself in—the term he uses taken over by Marx—in its gegensätzliche Bestimmung, oppositional determination. This is basically the most elementary structure of overdetermination, and it's exactly in this sense that for example Marx in his introduction to Grundrisse where he develops this fourfold structure of production, distribution, exchange, consummation, he says that production is doubly inscribed: it's at the same time the species or rather okay the genus encompassing and one of its species, that it's doubly inscribed. This is in the strict Hegelian and even Freudian sense overdetermination. It's not simply that "yes everything is complicated, overdetermined"—no no, it means this precise paradox that, that overdetermination means that one of the elements of a set overdetermines the set itself. This incidentally—if I may be a little bit brutal—is what already people like Engels, Lenin even, don't get. Even Lenin at his philosophical best in so-called Philosophical Notebooks. Clearly there his limit is the notion of Wechselwirkung, that is to say, you know, like "no it's not just simple causality but everything is connected with everything else, if A influences B there is always a counterwirkung, counterefficiency, blah blah." That's not enough. Overdetermination means precisely this reflexively redoubled efficiency where you not only influence B, but you over-influence the very way B influences you back and so on. So Hegel can think this. But what he cannot think is again the complex network of particular links organized along the lines of condensation, displacement, Verdichtung, Verschiebung, and so on. In more general terms the Hegelian process always deals with a radical clear cuts, resolutions. What is totally foreign to Hegel—not so much foreign as he would have dismissed it as meaningless, stupid—is the Freudian logic of pragmatic opportunistic compromises, not in theory but in the logic of dreams. For example, what, you know, this is why it is so difficult and non-convincing when some authors, Jean Hyppolite among others, tried to conceptualize the Freudian dialectic of re or repression, Verdrängung, and Wiederkehr, return of the repressed, in the terms of negation of negation. First something is negated, let's say in the sense of Verdrängung, and then it returns in the guise of a symptom as return of the repressed. Yeah but the point that doesn't fit Hegel's notion of negation of negation is that, you know, a strange thing happened with Freud: it's nothing gets resolved to the end. You try to do something, you fail, you make a compromise, you blur even this one. It's all a kind of a patchwork of compromises. Recall the legendary case of forgetting the name Signorelli from Freud's Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. I have to boast here that I know German a little to be more impressive. Freud, Freud couldn't recall the name Signorelli of the painter of the Orvieto frescoes, and so he produced as substitutes the names of two other painters, Botticelli and Boltraffio. And his analysis brings to light the processes of signifying associations which linked Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The Italian village Trafoi was where he received the message of the suicide of one of his patients struggling with sexual problems. Herr, the German word for master, signor, is linked to a trip in Herzegovina where an old Muslim told Freud that after one can no longer engage in sex there is no reason to go on living and so on and so on. So we have a complex rhizomatic texture of associations and displacement which display no clear triadic structure with any final resolution. The result of the tension between let's call it thesis, the name Signorelli, and anti-thesis, its forgetting, is the compromise formation of falsely remembering two other names in which the dimension on account of which Freud was unable to remember Signorelli, the link between death and sex, returns in an even more conspicuous way. This, in a way, you don't find in Hegel. With Hegel somehow the conclusion of a dialectical process is always it explodes, radical resolution. Like first, like exemplarily for example the whole dialectic of modern society which, you know, begins in the chapter on Bildung, formation, education, in Phänomenologie des Geistes. It starts with all this: first corruption of authentic medieval master, feudal master and his servant's relationship into this flattery of Louis Quatorze, of, of Ludwig the 14th, and then it goes on through utilitarianism, French revolutionary terror, and there it achieves its radical pure form. You get the absolute as it were contradiction of self-negating negativity, of reign of terror where every subjectivity is potentially negated, of this mad dance of pure self-destruction. The problem is that precisely nothing like that happens in the Freudian space of the formations of the unconscious. There we have all the time compromise formations, you know, something is asserted but simultaneously denied, displaced, reduced, or encrypted in an often ridiculously patched up way. Now, the next point I want to make is that what complicates this figure, this reproach, is that you know what is so mysterious is that whenever people want to point out how Hegel was not able to see something, quite often when you look closely at it you see that the dimension that he was not able to see is not some modern post-Hegelian dimension but it's the very Hegelian aspect, dimension of a phenomenon he wasn't able to see in things, precisely what he should have seen if he were to be able to approach these phenomena through his own let’s call it—it’s a wrong term—methodology. Let’s take—and Fredric Jameson did here in his short recent book on Phänomenologie des Geistes some, made some nice point—let’s take the topic Hegel and economy. We know Hegel was reading Adam Smith and so on. But what is so surprising is that since Hegel's notion of modern society, as Jameson points out, nonetheless remains basically at a pre-capitalist level. It's basically artisans, people producing, exchanging. This idea that the moment we pass into Hegel's model was still a manufacturing and so on, the idea of big large factories with mechanized machinery and with clear class division, those who own, is simply not present in Hegel. But again, what is so beautiful is that Marx in order to describe this dynamics, as we all know, had to read Hegel. You know, after, after the fiasco of the relative fiasco of the '48 revolution, Marx started to read again Hegel's logic, and it's absolutely crucial for genesis of capital. I mean, just look at Capital and you will see here and there or rather all around Hegelian references. For example the passage from money to capital is formulated in purely Hegelian terms as the passage from abstract universal substance, money as the common measure, the universality but passive abstract universality of all particular commodities, to money as active subject. Capital is money which is no longer a substance but active subject which reproduces itself in its circulation and so on and so on. So the dimension, very nice one I think I want to emphasize here, is that for example what Hegel was not able to see in modern economy is not some totally un-Hegelian dimension, but his own shadow in it. What and—okay. Then another thing: here Gérard Lebrun, a very good French philosopher who wrote a lot of Kant and Hegel, who unfortunately died recently, pointed out that maybe what made for Hegel, what made Hegel unable to think capital is that, you know, namely this—and we are back at the problem of repetition here—you know Hegel's big opposition between, usually it's translated spurious infinity, schlechte, is it schlechte or what? no, what is the bad infinity? I think it's schlechte Unendlichkeit, yes, and the good one, the true infinity. But the true infinity is precisely the subjective infinity of self-relating. And as Lebrun pointed out, Marx characterizes capital as automatic subject, automatisches Subjekt. Why, why is this paradoxical? Because what is so perverse for a Hegelian in capitalism is that it undermines this simple duality of on the one hand just the mechanical repetition, on the other hand truly speculative self-relating and so on. The movement of capital is both at the same time. At the same time A, it has this aspect of endless repetition, just endless circulation more and more and more, but at the same point—so it's automatic, almost mechanical—but at the same point it is strictly subjective, speculative, self-relating. This was probably as Lebrun puts it a monstrous mixture that Hegel was unable to think of. And maybe I claim Hegel, this is also why Hegel was not able to think mathematics. Hegel brutally reduced mathematics to the very model of pre-dialectical Verstand, abstract understanding, just formal thinking, unable to engage in a proper conceptual dynamics. But my God, it would be really worthy to reread Hegel here. For example, it’s wonderful what Hegel writes—obviously the problem obsessed him—about how do you call it? infinitesimal calculus, no? He—this is maybe one of the great symptomatic points of Hegel. Because what he there encounters is a case of mathematics which clearly functions in purely speculative way in Hegelian terms. Why? What happens there? You know, in let us say how does a circle and a line where do they touch? Like that you can have the paradox of—we have a circle where a straight line touches it. It’s just a point but this point nonetheless has a direction. So as Hegel puts it, it is as if in mathematics itself we no longer have the relation between two, two quantities but it is as if—or rather we have it but without the X, what they relate to. Both sides, the line and the circle are, as it were, reduced to zero. What infinitesimal calculus presents us is just the formula of a pure relationship where the relata, the related terms, are in itself disappear. Are—so again this is pure speculative reversal. And it’s incredible reading, I mean it’s like if one, sign check it up. This comes of course towards the end of the chapter on quantity where Hegel deals with mathematics in the first book on Sein, on logic, on the logic of being in Hegel's Great Logic. What is so obvious there—I mean what makes it so obvious that we are dealing with a trauma—is Hegel's where are we okay is Hegel's idea of is the very length sorry of this part you know it's so weird I think it's around pages he is totally traumatized check it up you know endlessly goes into it obviously he struggles terribly with but again you see it's not he found something that was totally unthinkable for him no he found himself where according to his own theory he shouldn't have found himself he found speculative movement in what should have been for him just stupid mathematical uninteresting repetition and so on and so on okay another thing another way oh my God time is running this is so evil but whatever to see Hegel is even when you speak about what I called la langue you know playing with words ambiguities all this crazy aspect of language where as it were language in the in its material texture starts to function on its own independently of content so that you have for example crazy lateral connections which have nothing to do with inner logic of meaning now you would have said oh here Hegel should be totally against a a a first here we encounter the genius of Hegel it's very interesting how Hegel always resisted this common sense temptation of saying since language is imperfect our common language we should construct a purely either formal mathematical or conceptual language where terms will be very precisely defined you know in the sense of avoiding all ambiguities and so on and so on that's how Hegel usually is perceived as pure thinking where you just need language as an imperfect tool in a way this is true Hegel does say that thinking means using language against itself that you we have to think in language but against language now if you know a little bit about Hegel you know his paradoxical answer to how do we do it not to strive as far as possible to to to introduce ambiguity clear structure in language but on the contrary to by way of mobilizing precisely the dimension that Lacan calls la langue all these stupid abstract associations and so on and so on you know I think I even I'm sorry I don't forget remember where it was but there was one German author who presented a nice German this bureaucratic work the list of all of these Hegelian playing with words for example not only the big one everybody knows this the notorious Aufhebung three meanings annihilation preservation and elevation at a higher level this is even too teleological but then for example when Hegel speaks about contradiction radical difference he says that in a contradiction the things destroys itself zugrunde gehen and this is how he arrives at the category of Grund no or even it's not even purely at this conceptual level where Hegel clearly mobilizes all the contingent ambiguities language sometimes he even is very evil I love him as a at a personal level for example you know Hegel's some people even don't get it for example Pierre Macherey in his book Hegel ou Spinoza Hegel or Spinoza claims that that Hegel how do you call that lung disease that people were dying Schwindsucht in German sorry yes yeah yeah yeah that that Spinoza died according to his philosophy from TB the guy doesn't have a point he just takes this as Hegel's cruelty no Hegel know the German term for tuberculosis is Schwindsucht Schwindsucht means suchen to search to disappear and then Hegel makes just a wonderful evil remark he says the basic lesson of Spinoza's philosophy is that every particular identity searches for its disappearance annihilation in substance so Spinoza was consequent and died accordingly for Schwindsucht and so on and not only this another wonderful detail Hegel who was no German nationalist you know when he has chosen Berlin is not the seat of the German Reich read his letters it is money money how much for some at some point it looked that he will be more paid in Amsterdam he got an invitation and it's interesting how immediately he wrote his Dutch friends can you bring me as much many as possible he was started already to learn Dutch the play words ambiguities of Dutch language and so on you know why this is beautiful because he didn't play Heidegger game Hegel here of oh there is a deeper wisdom of German language no this is what I like that you can fight the contingency of language but how you fight it by mobilizing the contingency itself at its most stupid at contingent you know it's almost the same thing as Freud when Freud says in a crucial remark that when you that the the way you can be sure that you encounter something real in a dream is when in a dream you dream about a dream a dream within a dream that's the form of the appearance of of the real so and this is one aspect we find this in Hegel on the another aspect also interesting I claim is that from the opposite side also the Freudian unconscious has often a wonderfully Hegelian reference to form in Freud also unconscious can be formal in the sense of simply the form the medium of expression I will give you now again there are much more complex examples but a wonderfully simple example when Freud reports again of a woman who told her that she was dreaming that she is pregnant but she cannot say the dream became unclear it's not clear it's a mess what and then Freud discovered a very simple one but just focus on the form the idea what did this insistence oh oh it's not clear and so on all of a sudden the woman started to refer to the form of her dream or Tagtraum day dreaming that it and his solution is that the woman wasn't able to confess to herself that well she was sleeping around with many men and didn't know what was unclear was who the the father is and this unclarity unable this was too much for her to admit it even in the content of a dream it appeared as the uncertainty in the form of the dream so you know this wonderful logic where content is censored but what is censored in content returns in the very form it's a very Hegelian move so again oh my God how the time is running okay this is life let me go on so we have them nonetheless we should return to it ah another point about Hegel cannot think repetition maybe even there I am not so sure it is absolutely crucial to read Hegel's Anthropologie anthropology the beginning of his Philosophie des Geistes third part of Enzyklopädie where Hegel makes it very clear that A there is no freedom of thought outside language but that in order to learn a language you must internalize the rules in a totally non-thinking mechanic way which is why and I totally agree with it although with Hegel here although some people would have dismissed him as proto-fascist or whatever which is why I think Hegel is right to insist that why when I think it's in some of his notes on pedagogy or whatever I forgot where Hegel confronts this problem why should people read a dead learn in universities a dead language Latin is this a purely dead mechanical living thought is only in living languages and then Hegel even as it were takes into account in advance Heidegger's point which is that yes Latin is dead language the only authentic living thinking was Greek and so on and Hegel there makes a wonderful turn he says no the foundation of our thinking has to be a purely dead mechanical custom that precisely you need like you know we can be free think creatively whatever you want only if we in a totally mechanic way obey follow the rules okay so then the next point one can demonstrate that Hegel that even where Hegel appears to be at his most idealist Selbstbewusstsein self-consciousness he is talking about the unconscious that is to say that now this is a crazy thesis but Lacan developed it very convincingly I think I'm not sure it was in his L'envers de la psychanalyse the other side of psychoanalysis seminar on four discourses of psychoanalysis I think it's from where Lacan proposes a crazy statement self-consciousness is an object what does it mean by this I think something very simple which provides a crucial key of what Hegel of how the Hegelian notion of Selbstbewusstsein is to be understood Selbstbewusstsein does not mean that some kind of a meta-subject or a thinker or whoever is really aware of what is going on but something else Hegel himself provides an example when he writes about the functioning of the state and when he develops in what sense the state is the Selbstbewusstsein self-awareness of a society so that a society doesn't exist as a true subject without state but then Hegel uses some wonderful examples for example he says that this doesn't mean that the guy this is now crucial this doesn't mean that the state consciously knows what it is doing even less does it mean that the head of the state the monarch knows no Hegel says it openly the head of the monarch the sorry the head of the state the monarch is an idiot his only duty is to know to sign his name and so on what Hegel says is that state is self-consciousness of society in the sense of that all acts of state but especially let's call it celebrations parades nominations whatever are not simply functional events like but are also to use the modern language performative self-declarations so then Hegel uses a wonderful example he says for example a parade or a ceremonial meeting is where state is a state is conscious of itself but this only means that it reflexively to use the Derridean in precise the Derridean term of mark remarks itself without anyone having to be aware of it Hegel even uses the example let's say we have a ceremonial parade the king thinks how to escape his wife after the ceremony this is my specification not Hegel's to to screw that beautiful lady daughter of his servant queen thinks about her lover bureaucrats minister think about no nobody has to think about it but the very in the very form this performative dimension is is at work something similar Lacan fuck am I dreaming it sounded almost as my name and I thought I was thinking about that horrible story dimension yesterday on Italo Calvino and so on you know we are here alienated but then an original innocent feminine voice calls me out and then I go out and okay yeah yeah okay let me go on no Lacan says let us say something very stupid you know this is how one should read Hegel's notion of Selbstbewusstsein it's not a psychological notion it's a purely notion of a reflexive registration you not only do something you symbolically inscribe it register it let's say I were to and I'm even consciously convinced that I have a good time no it's much more honest the opposite example let's say consciously I'm tired of you like screw you this stupid talk here blah blah but let's say then that I were to produce a gesture a symptom which would nonetheless signal the opposite that maybe I'm narcissistic maybe I like you whatever but that I really enjoy to be here it's just a gesture a symptom isn't it that that symptom is my true self-consciousness only there I remark where I truly stand that I become aware in a purely formal way or symbolic registration that in that the whole idea that I hate you I want to be over is false and Hegel even mentions somewhere when he criticizes divorce of in marriage I don't agree with him but he makes a nice point which is that often people privately dream about cheating on their wives husbands and so on but once and you do it discreetly but once you are pushed towards let's divorce they all of a sudden discover that what they misperceived as just an external form is much more binding you know never dismiss when you say oh I don't care about my wife my husband it's just formal commitment this is never innocent forms usually matter much more than they appear to matter so I want now to give you nonetheless to elaborate to conclude a little bit more this final point on repetition what dimension of repetition this Kierkegaard Freud dimension of Todestrieb or religious repetition that Hegel cannot maybe cannot think let me quote a passage and I here I must confess I took this from Frauke Berndt whom I met in Chicago she gave a from Frankfurt am Main University she gave this example which I take from her it's a nice example since we are here in Deutsches Haus maybe I should bluff and pretend that I know something about great German classics it's a really nice passage from Goethe's letter to Schiller from August 16th or 17th when Goethe reports to Schiller on an experience his experience which made him perceive a piece of ruined destroyed reality in the city of Frankfurt as a symbol listen to this wonderful quote it's from Briefe an Friedrich Schiller in Sämtliche Werke volume four and so on you can find it whatever no okay here is the quote my grandfather's house its courtyard and its gardens had been transformed from the parochial patrician home of an old Frankfurt elder into the most useful trading and marketplace by wisely enterprising people curious coincidence during the bombardment bombardment in Napoleonic Wars conspired to see the structure perish but even today reduced for the most part to a pile of rubble it is still worth twice as much as the current owners paid my family for it years ago conceivably the whole thing may in the future be bought and restored by yet another entrepreneur and you can easily see that it would in more than one sense stand as a symbol of thousands of other instances in this industrious city and in particular in my own eyes end of quote I think it's crucially here to note the contrast between allegory and symbol allegory is melancholic as Freud pointed out a melancholic treats an object which is still here as already lost melancholy is a preemptive mourning let's say you are in love your partner is still beautiful but you already look at him or her oh my God I already see what will be become out of you years from now and so on and so on and wonderfully dirty things can be say about this procedure do you know I read somewhere that I even have quotes that some medieval theologians warning men against sinful seductive character of women practiced the same thing they told them okay you are now fascinated beautiful woman naked in front of you but just focus your mind on this same figure naked and imagine what will these breasts look years from now and so on and so on and then that's the truth do you want death and so on so that you see the shadow of the future death already in already in its present still Goethe however that's my point does the exact opposite he sees the potential for the future prosperity in the present pile of rubble in a somewhat pathetic way one could say the same about the ruins of September 11th a melancholic would see in them the truth of the arrogant dreams of the United States grandeur that is to say he would see already in the Twin Towers themselves the ruins that lie ahead you know like oh you may boast now but ha ha everything will fall down while a Goethe type optimist would see in the ruins of September 11th a symbol of the enterprising spirit of that other industrious city New York which was probably what Frankfurt was at least for Goethe which will soon replace the ruins with new buildings again crucially here is the rise of the symbol from ruin and repetition it is precisely through the ruin that a symbol appears when you have simply a nice big building it's not a symbol it is simply a stupid nice big building only through ruin can you get the dimension of the of the of the symbol and my point would have been that here we can maybe oppose Hegel and Kierkegaard while in Goethe like in Hegel repetition generates meaning for the post-Hegelian Kierkegaard there is just repetition no rise of new meaning repetition is asserted as such in its mechanic quality so now let's go a step further and just really if you allow me to conclude to propose my final formula because till now I'm well aware I just tried to confuse you like nothing in you you think you as it were caught Hegel by his balls and are squeezing them but no Hegel finds a way out and so on no no no I nonetheless propose this formula on the one hand at its most elementary no it is that Hegel has this radical notion of negativity contradiction brought to its extreme self-destruction which again then turns into its opposite and so on and so on while Freud remains at a level of kind of a endless compromises you mentioned this Avital and I have even a system of them all these my friend Mladen Dolar calls them this the Freudian Ver Ver as in Verwerfung rejection foreclosure is not a good term repression Verdrängung then disavowal Verleugnung denial Verneinung Verdichtung Verschiebung which are all not clear negations but this compromise negation Verdrängung you repress it but not quite as Freud hints at somewhere and Lacan proposes a beautiful formula there is no repression without the return of the repressed because if there is repression without the return of the repressed then it's Verwerfung it's just thrown out or Verschiebung it's not negated it's just instead of here it's there or Verdichtung you know all these complex modes of how acceptance itself can function as a mode of denial for example my preferred example here is what so-called Isolierung what Freud calls Isolierung is that you take something into account formally but you totally isolate it so that the fact is torn out of context and loses its symbolic efficiency for example you know that I always admire communist this Kremlinological extremely thick system of symbols and there in China on my recent visit I found a wonderful case of Isolierung the case the way Chinese official ideology relates to their past to the enormous horrors of the past for example the Great Leap Forward formally they admit it Mao committed mistakes it was horrible millions died but at the same time although they formally admit it but then I asked one of my friends there he told me but we admit it Mao was terribly wrong and so on Great Leap Forward was a great catastrophe then with my evil European spirit attitude I asked the friend okay so can I then write a book on Mao's limitations and will it be published he told me no no no we admit it why to dwell more on it we you know like you say it but the whole point of saying it is saying it as that don't saying it functions exactly as as as the way to to to block any further mention of it saying it explicitly is basically the way to in a way to repress it absolutely I admit it so fuck off stop don't like when somebody tries to dwell on it to elaborate it a party functionary tells him what are you doing whom do you really serve we admitted it so what's the point now you know so but back to Freud so it may appear that Hegel is more simple radical contradiction negativity to the end while in Freud we find this mixed confusion no but at the same time I claim it's also the opposite that only through Freud can we isolate the very core of Hegelian negativity here I come to the point which is what what would have been and this is a great debate also in Freud you know it's a very interesting crucial metapsychological debate we have all these Freudian forms of Verneinung Verwerfung Isolierung they are all forms of in a formal sense negativity but is there a zero level negativity some people claim and I don't buy that but it's a convincing theory it's so-called Ausstossung you know this idea that ego at the most elementary level in order to emerge as opposed to non-ego it's not simply I say here am I ego out there is non-ego it's also Ausstossung I have to throw out part of myself it's a very nice dialectical thought that it's not just again a question of drawing drawing the line of separation to be able to draw this line this external line line between me and not me has also I have to lose part of myself so to put it in very Hegelian speculative terms the external limitation between what is me and not me must at the same at the same time be an internal limitation it's not this I think and here comes the beauty that the zero level of negativity which is exactly the fundamental form of repetition is its opposite it's not that you negate something but that you get excessively stuck onto something like this is for Freud for example the fundamental paradox of Trieb drive and compulsion to repeat Wiederholungszwang this is even I'm tempted to claim Freud's elementary form even if not theory of metaphysics we have a human animal and animals in so far as they are animal okay now I enter very problematic waters I'm well aware of maybe exposing myself to Derridean criticism of but what the hell why not no of referring to over-simplified opposition between animal and man but it has certain pedagogic profit from it so why not so my point is simply this one that it's not that as we usually say animals are stupid stuck onto their object while we men are creatively dynamic you jump from here to there no even I spoke with some cognitivists who were doing very simple experiments with apes and so on and told me no the the immediate behavioral distinction is that man get much more stuck like my good friend Güzen Güzeldere sorry from Duke now he moved elsewhere he's incidentally a Turk and you know we associate Turkey with Muslim fundamentalism and he told me he had a wonderful experience he came from backward Turkey to United States then he put there his children to school no and he's a normal secular Turk no and his children a week later came home and said Father Jesus loves me and so on what is this learn to school then then the child told me why didn't you baptize me the teacher told me I will burn in hell blah blah okay at the end he decided that he prefers somehow the primitive Muslim fundamentalist Turkey when you can survive without all this at least compared to you know Duke is an island all around is Jesse Helms country you know okay let me go on so he told me that he made a very stupid experiment with monkey and love object you present to a monkey a preferable love object a beautiful feminine ape no and the monkey and then another inferior not so attractive the monkey tries with the first one if it doesn't go okay fuck it life is life move to the second one while with humans it's much more complex we have this fixation to an as it were to an impossible object and this is where repetition originates when it's precisely this immobilization you know things flow and then all of a sudden it is as if you get stuck onto something you are not ready to give it away and then you get caught in this circle so here I think that we should reread Heidegger there is a an extremely interesting passage in Holzwege Heidegger der Spruch von is it das Spruch or der Spruch that's my limit of German der Spruch okay I was really just testing you I knew it von Anaximander which is very mysterious because Heidegger there in a way has something quite surprising which as it were problematizes his entire notion of historicity not historicism Geschichtlichkeit Heidegger considers there the possibility that an entity ein Seiendes I quote may even insist bestehen upon its while solely to remain more present in the sense of perduring beständigen that which lingers persists beharrt in its presence in this way it extricates itself from its transitory while while as a substantive I didn't translate this don't ask me why it strikes the willful pose of persistence no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present it stiffens as if this were the only way to linger and aims solely for continuance and subsistence so things flow now I interpret Heidegger there they follow their usual course of incessant change and then all of a sudden something get stuck interrupts the flow and we this what to use the term introduced by Judith Butler this excessive attachment to a particular Seiendes here I disagree with Heidegger because Heidegger thinks as if you know like I'm consciously evil here like you know that old creep Yoda says in Star Wars you know I really Yoda is worse than ET when I see Yoda in Star Wars I became a Nazi where are my big boots to squash that stupid guy because he has this you know oh don't get attached to particular beings but I claim our own metaphysical freedom is grounded in such an excessive attachment because Heidegger says very well no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present that is to say for us humans you get my point to acquire this distance of negativity I am not this to in the only way for us to get unstuck from reality to acquire a distance from reality is to get excessively stuck onto a totally particular contingent element so that in a way in this way and this is the Freudian way one can generate negativity out of positivity one just accelerates or rather pushes to excess positivity in the sense of things are here but I got stuck to this one and by this everything else is destabilized I acquire so I like this idea of how the secret of negativity is this being stuck onto something like and Hegel we may say he comes sometimes even close to it for example when he says something very nice when he speaks about abstract freedom of subjectivity he says that the only way for the subject to signal its let's say it its autonomy its detachment from all empirical objects is to pick out one particular thing and stake absolutely everything on it you know this meaningless pride when you say I don't know you can beat me you can burn my house whatever you want but that you know like let's call it the Michael Kohlhaas symptom but that the way you treated my horse up I'm ready to you see Michael Kohlhaas would be a nice example do whatever you want but don't touch my two horses I'm absolutely stuck there and as you know Kohlhaas is ready then to he does practically destroys half Germany in civil war just that but you know here the object doesn't matter as Freud himself says very clearly that the object of Trieb drive even if it's an unconditional fixation it's ultimately indifferent precisely in its indifference in the indifference of the object the message gets through that what matters is not the object but my arbitrary fixation my free will itself so again it's through this fixation I try to reach again and again this excessive moment that negativity and repetition emerge and you were kind enough to announce a little bit of PR propaganda my forthcoming book which is total madness it will be now it looks a little bit over printed pages on Hegel where I precisely try to focus on all these elements of excessive fixation and at the same time excessive negativity like you have in Hegel the way in Anthropology first part of Philosophie des Geistes at the beginning of Philosophie des Geistes when Hegel speak about Verrücktheit madness it's Hegel at his Foucauldian best where he says that the possibility of madness is structural there is no human subjectivity without an ever-permanent shadow of madness so for Hegel again madness is not some as he puts it very clearly some accidental variation but it's he says in beautiful Foucauldian way that although this doesn't mean that we all should be mad but being human presupposes the possibility of madness structural possibility and the fight against it then we have many other moments of this for example the necessity of war the most problematic Hegel for some people but here we can see how wrong are those who think that Hegel brings at the end some kind of reconciliation no Hegelian reconciliation is not everything is reunited in some larger harmonious synthesis reconciliation is for Hegel precisely reconciliation with the irrational madness of the world remember clearly where Hegel introduces in Phänomenologie des Geistes the very term Versöhnung at the end just before religion enters at the end of that chapter where he deals with with with the beautiful with the beautiful soul and so on that is to say with the consciousness or rather form of subjectivity which judges compares pardons and so on and then he says you have in a totally Heideggerian way you have to abandon every position of judging reconciliation is not the subject swallows the object reconciliation is precisely you accept the radical otherness really to conclude my point is that we have here a wonderfully complex structure because what I was saying doesn't mean that simply okay now we have okay fuck off Hegel we got your point the secret formula of Hegel is in Kierkegaard Freud now let's forget Hegel let's deal with these guys ah here I would like to conclude in an idea which came to me a propos of Wall Street protests very strange Freudian association you know when Claude Lévi-Strauss said something beautiful about prohibition of incest he says this prohibition is not a question to which we don't have an answer but it's an answer without question it's obviously the prohibition of incest is a solution an answer to some deadlock we don't know to which one we don't know the problem the question in this sense I claim yes Kierkegaard-Freudian notion of repetition is where we get Hegel's secret at its purest we get the for in this fixation repetition and so on we get as it were the zero level the real core of Hegelian dialectics but we can see this only if the question is Hegelian so to really stop now I think that then we will have a lot of time like two three minutes for debate and so on it's that no I'm really sorry to repeat an old joke but I cannot resist it I love it when people told me but you're a totalitarian you don't like dialogue I told them you must have heard it but I love it I love dialogues late Plato's dialogues you know what happens there one guy speaks all the time and the other says every minutes by Zeus so it is Socrates and so on so we have but sorry quite clear so I think that our task today is simply of course not to simply remain Hegelian in the sense of the fidelity to Hegel's explicit position this is madness but to to to to read post-Hegelians from the standpoint of the Hegelian question the only way to read what is truly great in post-Hegelians is to read them as an answer to the Hegelian question which is why to conclude we all know that the post-Hegelian break has another dimension which is the most famous one the dimension of new positive order no usually it is said Hegel crazy idealist this is just the realm of shadows and the basic post-Hegelian break is to introduce or assert some positivity of the will in in late Schelling Schopenhauer and so on or even Nietzsche or or for example for Marx the actual positive social process of production Kierkegaard the singularity of belief so you have you have some positivity which should be the foundation of the abstract and I claim that this is precisely the original sinner for me here if you ask me is Feuerbach he is the worst this idea that there is some positivity of being missed by Hegel no the much more crucial dimension of the post-Hegelian break is this emergence of radical repetition and I think we are still at this level so the task is you may have guessed my final formula not to go beyond Hegel but to repeat Hegel in the Kierkegaardian sense thank you very much for your patience very nice that's life nice you know that cynical part in Hegel in everything is not Hegel in Brecht's Dreigroschenoper where one of the bad guys guys who exploits prostitutes and when he is complained how can you do this why don't you do it in another way no he says Es geht auch anders aber so geht es auch no so that would be my answer my self comment very very helpful so you are das bitch you know no she wanted it's a long joke she wanted to be das Avital like not das Kapital but das Avital and I gave her an argument which I think convinced you I told you that if das Avital it sounds evil but it leaves open the space for this disgusting humanism you know like oh she pretends to be evil das Avital but there is nonetheless a warm human being beneath no das Avital means there is nothing human beneath yeah that turned me off that's a big turn off it turned me off thank you so how many how many minutes of of two no okay do you give a couple of questions okay so this is a world historical moment oh my god don't don't go too far because now it's not even undecidable now it's pure making fun of me you know what I mean no because you are in principle ready to take questions right bye are you leaving I underlined five times the word in principle in principle like Stalin was in principle for democracy no in this sense yeah well we don't want to torture you either or do we okay we do so thinking is torturing I I wrote please I will have a long text on Heidegger torturing and language where I go in detail into this I don't like she's a nasty bitch Elfriede nastier than you Elfriede Jelinek but he said one thing it's wonderful she said language in its fundamental dimension language lies we have to torture language to make it say the truth that's ridiculous are you crazy but all poetry is this what suddenly you regressed off the page to truth and lies and ah wait a minute I'm I'm not about you should be more maybe don't tell me this post okay shut up you did so well and now you're bullshitting us no on on Wall Street I was so mad that I didn't discover this obvious play with words you know what's the symbol of Wall Street no a bull and yes they are bullshitting we are getting the shit of that bull no now that's true very good not impressed by this no but no I loved it I loved it yeah really really so um we have different ways we haven't deconstructed Q and A but what we can do is you can listen to the questions and then decide if you want to answer them it doesn't have to what would be a really Lévi-Straussian way would be for me to talk for five minutes and then you would have to guess what was the question which I'm answering this would be the only Hegelian way you know so who would like to ask Slavoj or make a comment it doesn't have to be a question it can be an answer as Hegel no I'm quite serious I'm not accusing you but do you know that at every conference there are usually guys who pretend to ask a question but really use it for like minutes self-declaration you know people like these are one of the reasons why I still exceptionally advocate death penalty if you put it like that okay with all these provisos who has the balls or guts to um to make a comment a remark a question um expose shamelessly their own reflections because they wrote a book on this very subject or are thinking of it can I just tell you something because you are not only my students here who are there nonetheless let me make a remark which against my nature will sound feminist no I'm so glad to tell you that how there is a kind of a higher necessity in our lives that every two one two three decades a woman writes a really good book on Hegel and and they are almost all women recently it started it's a modest book then she turned towards Kantianism I don't for Beatrice Longuenesse wrote some years ago in France a book Hegel and the critique of metaphysics something like this it sounds very modest but it's a very good book it was later translated I think then it was some years ago Catherine Malabou The Future of Hegel where she in a wonderful way deconstructs or demystifies using the terms very naively this idea Hegel the idiot who thought history is an end no and in a totally new way opened up this problem of Hegel and the opening of the future with a basically a beautifully paradoxical but deeply convincing thesis that Hegel what Hegel calls absolutes Wissen absolute knowing is the formula of the most radical opening towards the future it's precisely a gesture of okay here it is the conclusion so now attack me you know what I mean this concluding gesture which through very self-limitation opens up exposes itself it's much more honest than this self-relativizing historicism where I really hate people where you always when you say something you always add that you don't really agree with yourself you know maybe it's not like this I know blah blah and the third book recent one Rebecca Comay morning sickness not morning as the sun is rising but mourning like Trauer no it's an excellent reading of Hegel and the French Revolution much more radical than Richter and Joachim Ritter sorry not Richter all the classical stuff that we know in a wonderful immanent analysis it shows first how much more radical Hegel was than Kant and others you know the traditional reception of Hegel of the French Revolution of people around Hegel was this kind of a liberal spiritualism in principle it was good but then like is good is bad and then okay you can play all the games that the passage was necessary or not but nonetheless Hegel is the only one in Kant you even have a wonderfully ridiculous open split into two on the one hand in what everyone from Lyotard quotes is those passages I think is it in Streit der Fakultäten or Was ist Aufklärung I always forgot which passages what a vulgar empirical question no sorry those passages on how you know the sublime event going on for all the public observers in Europe signum prognosticum and all that that celebration at the same time if you look at Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten you find such a trauma at the trial against the king which Kant denounces as the ultimate indelible crime diabolical evil something which from within undermines the very form of the law because you know you violate the law in the form of the law so for Kant this is if you kill the king out of fear rebellion it's not a problem if you make a legal trial against the king it's like from within self-destruction of the rule of law so again the the paradox is that it's at the same time the most sublime event and an unthinkable evil Hegel's greatness is that he was ready to think both at the same time together and Rebecca Comay wonderfully shows how all that comes
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afterwards all that Kantian
afterwards all that Kantian
Slavoj Žižek
morality and so on Schillerian aestheticism in the following chapter a kind of are kind of echoes which really cannot get over this trauma that it's a traumatic Nullpunkt French Revolution for Hegel sorry I I answered by Zeus that was great really really who will be your Khrushchev on Ibiza you know that's so there um we only have time for a few more
morality and so on Schillerian aestheticism in the following chapter a kind of are kind of echoes which really cannot get over this trauma that it's a traumatic Nullpunkt French Revolution for Hegel sorry I I answered by Zeus that was great really really who will be your Khrushchev on Ibiza you know that's so there um we only have time for a few more
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questions um does anyone wish to um jump into
questions um does anyone wish to um jump into
Slavoj Žižek
this abyss and we've already been told it
this abyss and we've already been told it
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would be horrible and torture
would be horrible and torture
Slavoj Žižek
which could stoke your libidos intellectually or um we could just do
which could stoke your libidos intellectually or um we could just do
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you want a question or don't look
you want a question or don't look
Slavoj Žižek
you've paralyzed everyone no I am a hypocrite I don't really want it but to save my consciousness it would be conscious sorry Gewissen not it would
you've paralyzed everyone no I am a hypocrite I don't really want it but to save my consciousness it would be conscious sorry Gewissen not it would
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be good to have just one
be good to have just one
Slavoj Žižek
question so that then we can say you know I want to behave like a wonderful example of what does the big other mean in sexuality I recently I used this in my class spoke to a very nice elder German lady who taught me you know I only have sex with my husband so once a month and then I asked her why and then she told me well so that I can say to my analyst that I still have sex so that my analyst doesn't bother me no so for
question so that then we can say you know I want to behave like a wonderful example of what does the big other mean in sexuality I recently I used this in my class spoke to a very nice elder German lady who taught me you know I only have sex with my husband so once a month and then I asked her why and then she told me well so that I can say to my analyst that I still have sex so that my analyst doesn't bother me no so for
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this reason so
this reason so
Slavoj Žižek
that we can just say to the big other there
that we can just say to the big other there
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was a debate yes it was a raging debate so who wants
was a debate yes it was a raging debate so who wants
Slavoj Žižek
to cap this debate hi um so throughout the lecture um I was having trouble
to cap this debate hi um so throughout the lecture um I was having trouble
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precising exactly what you meant by um
precising exactly what you meant by um
Slavoj Žižek
negativity and um you draw this relationship between negativity and repetition can you then um come across the conclusion that there is not a line
negativity and um you draw this relationship between negativity and repetition can you then um come across the conclusion that there is not a line
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between repetition or or negativity and something that is not repetitious something
between repetition or or negativity and something that is not repetitious something
Slavoj Žižek
that occurs a singular or for perhaps for the first time as as not being repeated but for being seen as an initial
that occurs a singular or for perhaps for the first time as as not being repeated but for being seen as an initial
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like regardless of its absoluteness um just experiencing it yes
like regardless of its absoluteness um just experiencing it yes
Slavoj Žižek
no it again it may sound very paradoxical but here I follow Gilles Deleuze although he would have violently disagreed with me if I say Deleuze at his most Hegelian where he in his maybe best book I think
no it again it may sound very paradoxical but here I follow Gilles Deleuze although he would have violently disagreed with me if I say Deleuze at his most Hegelian where he in his maybe best book I think
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his two best
his two best
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books are I think Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition this is his point there that it's only through
books are I think Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition this is his point there that it's only through
Slavoj Žižek
repetition it's not only that the new can also emerge as a repetition but that it's only through pure repetition that something new can emerge and no it's a very radical thesis you know why because you said what about something new for the first time I claim as a good Hegelian there is no first time there is no one one is not at the beginning which is why in my book on Hegel there are many surprises here nice like I found a wonderful crucial quote it's I will tell you exactly where from Hegel's lectures on History of Philosophy where Hegel speaks about this neo-platonic mysticism Plotinus and Hegel then okay his usual attack on why Plotinus doesn't get the dialectical development but then Hegel says it's absolutely crucial to what is absolutely crucial to see is that one does not divide into two dialectical progress is not we have one which splits into two and then the higher synthesis why because for Hegel one to assert the one is the most radical division you can imagine one means one against one as you know it's not only that in a deconstructive mode one is never really one it's supplemented blah blah no the very form of oneness is a radical division division between what if you listen to me that example a rose is a rose you saw the division is the division in this case you posit rose as one only through through tautology but you have then a gap which cannot ever be repaired because between all the multitude of predicates and the form of the one and so on and so on so to go back to your point new is you know now you will say but let's say something totally new really happens like let me be the most most naive let's say a big asteroid approaches earth and finishes off all life on earth I don't this in a
repetition it's not only that the new can also emerge as a repetition but that it's only through pure repetition that something new can emerge and no it's a very radical thesis you know why because you said what about something new for the first time I claim as a good Hegelian there is no first time there is no one one is not at the beginning which is why in my book on Hegel there are many surprises here nice like I found a wonderful crucial quote it's I will tell you exactly where from Hegel's lectures on History of Philosophy where Hegel speaks about this neo-platonic mysticism Plotinus and Hegel then okay his usual attack on why Plotinus doesn't get the dialectical development but then Hegel says it's absolutely crucial to what is absolutely crucial to see is that one does not divide into two dialectical progress is not we have one which splits into two and then the higher synthesis why because for Hegel one to assert the one is the most radical division you can imagine one means one against one as you know it's not only that in a deconstructive mode one is never really one it's supplemented blah blah no the very form of oneness is a radical division division between what if you listen to me that example a rose is a rose you saw the division is the division in this case you posit rose as one only through through tautology but you have then a gap which cannot ever be repaired because between all the multitude of predicates and the form of the one and so on and so on so to go back to your point new is you know now you will say but let's say something totally new really happens like let me be the most most naive let's say a big asteroid approaches earth and finishes off all life on earth I don't this in a
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formal sense it
formal sense it
Slavoj Žižek
will be new but in strict Hegelian sense and I stick to Hegel here it wouldn't be anything new but in reference to your previous comment um I there was one smart person you referenced and um he said that self-consciousness is an object yeah and um the way and correct me if I'm wrong the way I conceptualize self-consciousness is always created out of relation of another object um the individual subjective being put against another object and realizing either the relationship between the two the perceiver and the object or himself just as as another or or as something as another object um so in experiencing the initial self-consciousness or the creation of self-consciousness is that not a subjectively new creation oh I see what you mean but again one has to be here very very precise the first thing to do is again I'm sorry I will give you again a kind of a twisted convoluted answer is I agree with you that this self-consciousness and
will be new but in strict Hegelian sense and I stick to Hegel here it wouldn't be anything new but in reference to your previous comment um I there was one smart person you referenced and um he said that self-consciousness is an object yeah and um the way and correct me if I'm wrong the way I conceptualize self-consciousness is always created out of relation of another object um the individual subjective being put against another object and realizing either the relationship between the two the perceiver and the object or himself just as as another or or as something as another object um so in experiencing the initial self-consciousness or the creation of self-consciousness is that not a subjectively new creation oh I see what you mean but again one has to be here very very precise the first thing to do is again I'm sorry I will give you again a kind of a twisted convoluted answer is I agree with you that this self-consciousness and
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its other it's crucial
its other it's crucial
Slavoj Žižek
but the first thing to note and I if I got
but the first thing to note and I if I got
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correctly the undertone of your question I agree with you here is to absolutely separate this topic from the standard liberal Hegelian topic of recognition as Fred Jameson nicely
correctly the undertone of your question I agree with you here is to absolutely separate this topic from the standard liberal Hegelian topic of recognition as Fred Jameson nicely
Slavoj Žižek
remarked usually we had either a conservative proto-fascist Hegel organic totality against liberal liberalist mechanical multitude or the leftist Hegel. Now in the last decade more and more a new liberal Hegel is emerging and if you look for kind of a sign of recognition it’s the word precisely recognition. You know, Hegel whose goal is this idea in a free society, I recognize you, you recognize me, and so on and so on. What is lost here is what? Let me return to your example: encountering something new. Yes, I agree with you, in what precise
remarked usually we had either a conservative proto-fascist Hegel organic totality against liberal liberalist mechanical multitude or the leftist Hegel. Now in the last decade more and more a new liberal Hegel is emerging and if you look for kind of a sign of recognition it’s the word precisely recognition. You know, Hegel whose goal is this idea in a free society, I recognize you, you recognize me, and so on and so on. What is lost here is what? Let me return to your example: encountering something new. Yes, I agree with you, in what precise
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sense. And who was this—I
sense. And who was this—I
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forgot who noticed this, I'm sorry, I'm confused—that if you look closely at how Hegel describes the so-called Herrschaft-Knechtschaft, this struggle to death blah blah, you will see that it's not simply I encounter another self-consciousness and then first we fight, then blah blah, we recognize each other or whatever, but that
forgot who noticed this, I'm sorry, I'm confused—that if you look closely at how Hegel describes the so-called Herrschaft-Knechtschaft, this struggle to death blah blah, you will see that it's not simply I encounter another self-consciousness and then first we fight, then blah blah, we recognize each other or whatever, but that
Slavoj Žižek
within Hegelian space to encounter another subject is something ontologically impossible and an ultimate scandal. Why? Because for Hegel—and he is right—each of us as subject, Selbstbewusstsein, is absolute. By definition, I as a subject am the totality of subject and object. And it's something absolutely monstrous, traumatic because, again, by form—it’s not a question of psychological arrogance—by formal definition I am the subject, the center of my world. So how can then within the world another jerk appear to say, "ha ha, I am also a subject." That this is—and that in this sense you can say that this is something radically new. But again I would like to make my point here: why? Precisely because it's repetition of me. This is the most radically new thing, not to discover an alien or whatever but to say, "fuck it, another self-consciousness, it cannot be." So you know what I mean? The basic point here—and I cannot go now into Lacanian waters, I hope he was the smart guy you mentioned you were, no—is that, is that because of this radical scandal of another self-consciousness, there is—intersubjectivity shouldn't be our ultimate horizon. There is never this symmetry of me and other subject in the space of mutual recognition. You know, no wonder that in psychoanalysis it's very important, I claim: what is the material disposition, dispositif, of psychoanalytic treatment? It's not me eye-to-eye
within Hegelian space to encounter another subject is something ontologically impossible and an ultimate scandal. Why? Because for Hegel—and he is right—each of us as subject, Selbstbewusstsein, is absolute. By definition, I as a subject am the totality of subject and object. And it's something absolutely monstrous, traumatic because, again, by form—it’s not a question of psychological arrogance—by formal definition I am the subject, the center of my world. So how can then within the world another jerk appear to say, "ha ha, I am also a subject." That this is—and that in this sense you can say that this is something radically new. But again I would like to make my point here: why? Precisely because it's repetition of me. This is the most radically new thing, not to discover an alien or whatever but to say, "fuck it, another self-consciousness, it cannot be." So you know what I mean? The basic point here—and I cannot go now into Lacanian waters, I hope he was the smart guy you mentioned you were, no—is that, is that because of this radical scandal of another self-consciousness, there is—intersubjectivity shouldn't be our ultimate horizon. There is never this symmetry of me and other subject in the space of mutual recognition. You know, no wonder that in psychoanalysis it's very important, I claim: what is the material disposition, dispositif, of psychoanalytic treatment? It's not me eye-to-eye
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with the analyst—I see you, you see me. No, is I look into the void, the guy is behind me. So it's the—for me psychoanalyst is not another subject, it's an object. It has to be behind me. It's basically even in a way a silent object. In other words, the idea is—and this is why I agree with you—that the encounter of the other is something new. But again, it is not intersubjectivity.
with the analyst—I see you, you see me. No, is I look into the void, the guy is behind me. So it's the—for me psychoanalyst is not another subject, it's an object. It has to be behind me. It's basically even in a way a silent object. In other words, the idea is—and this is why I agree with you—that the encounter of the other is something new. But again, it is not intersubjectivity.
Slavoj Žižek
Sorry, I didn't answer the question, I know. Thank you. You know what? I think you would love Levinas. Khrushchev is too beautiful for you. I decided this is Aufhebung time. So I want to thank you for dialectically doing what you just did and for closing the season and for, um, really bringing until the last few remarks outstanding, um, reflections to us and also we’re looking forward to reading every one of those thousand printed pages. Now, you know Kant towards the end to solve the problem of French Revolution—because it was unthinkable, this diabolical evil—Kant tried to show that it wasn’t really that, that the idea of evil in the pure form of good, that is to say killing the monarch, that it’s impossible, it’s so evil that it cannot happen. So he tried to prove how, no, French revolutionaries they were really afraid of the king’s revenge, you know, it was pathological form. So Kant says no, there is only radical evil, like our radical propensity towards evil, but pure diabolical evil, evil done for the sake of it, is not possible. Well, looking at you maybe Kant was wrong. Okay, so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen.
Sorry, I didn't answer the question, I know. Thank you. You know what? I think you would love Levinas. Khrushchev is too beautiful for you. I decided this is Aufhebung time. So I want to thank you for dialectically doing what you just did and for closing the season and for, um, really bringing until the last few remarks outstanding, um, reflections to us and also we’re looking forward to reading every one of those thousand printed pages. Now, you know Kant towards the end to solve the problem of French Revolution—because it was unthinkable, this diabolical evil—Kant tried to show that it wasn’t really that, that the idea of evil in the pure form of good, that is to say killing the monarch, that it’s impossible, it’s so evil that it cannot happen. So he tried to prove how, no, French revolutionaries they were really afraid of the king’s revenge, you know, it was pathological form. So Kant says no, there is only radical evil, like our radical propensity towards evil, but pure diabolical evil, evil done for the sake of it, is not possible. Well, looking at you maybe Kant was wrong. Okay, so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen.