On Melancholy
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012 · 1:28:18 · 12,220 words
psychoanalysisideologyreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticscapitalismgeopolitics-warcinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalrace-antisemitismeveryday-life
In this wide-ranging seminar session, Žižek moves from Italian sex comedy as ideological critique to the Lacanian distinction between 'the Big Other doesn't exist' and 'there is no Big Other,' using the latter to reread Marx's commodity fetishism, Freudian fantasy, and the Book of Job. He argues that true atheism requires not merely the subject's disbelief but the collapse of the Big Other itself, drawing on jokes about psychiatry, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, and Chesterton's reading of Job to illustrate the structure of objective belief. The talk weaves in discussions of suicide bombers, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ambedkar's critique of the Hindu caste system, and Deleuze's unexpected use by the IDF, all organized around the structural logic of suture, differentiality, and the paradox of enjoyment as obligation.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “jouissance as obligation”
The contemporary reversal of Freud's repression model: patients now feel guilty not for illicit desires but for failing to enjoy; psychoanalytic work today is to convince the patient that enjoyment is not obligatory.
German phrase ('Enjoy immediately') on chocolate packaging, cited as a symptomatic emblem of the contemporary super-ego injunction to enjoy.
as “Asiatic Mode of Production (structural paradox)”
Žižek uses this as a formal model: within any genus divided into species, one element functions not as a member but as a stand-in for the constitutive exclusion, the element that is 'outside' the set but inscribed within it.
Ambedkar's formula, cited approvingly: every classificatory system structurally requires a constitutive exclusion, so the outcast is not an empirical oversight but the formal condition of the caste system itself.
as “absence in the mode of presence”
Structuralist concept invoked to explain how what is not there, the missing cream vs. the missing milk, is constitutive of identity; Žižek ties this to Saussurean differentiality.
Saussure's principle that identity is purely differential, you are not what you are positively, you are what you are not, applied by Žižek to show how ideology works at the level of implication rather than explicit content.
Late Lacan's more radical formula, 'there is no Big Other', which goes beyond mere non-existence to assert that the symbolic order itself is inconsistent and non-functional.
For Žižek (via Chesterton/Job), not the death of the old divine patriarch but the death of the guarantee, the collapse of any higher order (personal God, Reason, History) that ensures that suffering and evil serve a purpose.
as “objective responsibility”
The Stalinist category whereby a person is held responsible for historical outcomes regardless of personal intention, evidence that Stalinism maintains a God-like Big Other (history) that guarantees objective meaning.
as “Holy Spirit as Big Other”
Lacan's early identification of the Holy Spirit with the Big Other (the immanent symbolic community); Žižek contests this, arguing that genuine Christianity requires a more radical death of God beyond this Hegelian-idealist survival.
Late Lacan's formula of atheism: God is not simply non-existent but unconscious, meaning we continue to act as if God exists even when we consciously deny it, so the belief is structural rather than subjective.
For Marx (as Žižek reads him), not a subjective illusion but an objective structure: things themselves don't know that money is just a social relation, so the fetishist belief is inscribed in the activity of buying and selling, not in subjects' conscious minds.
In contrast to desire's goal-oriented structure, drive's aim is the circular movement itself, illustrated by the joke of the man who cannot decide 'in or out' because the circulation is the point.
Fantasy is not subjective distortion of reality but the way things 'really appear' at the social-structural level, too intense and crazy to be consciously assumed by any subject.
as “objective appearance”
The Marxian-Lacanian notion that fantasy is not how things appear to the subject but how things really appear at the level of social reality itself, a level inaccessible to the subject's reflective self-knowledge.
as “pro-Zionist antisemitism”
The emergent ideological configuration (exemplified by Breivik and Glenn Beck) that fully supports Israel as a Western outpost against Arabs while simultaneously maintaining antisemitic views toward Jews in the West.
The element within a classificatory system that appears to fix it into a harmonious whole by inscribing within the system its constitutive exclusion, that which stands for what is without.
as “objectified belief”
Belief that is located not in the subject's mind but in social practice and the symbolic order itself, 'we know it but it (the commodity, the chicken) doesn't know it.'
Hysterical plunge into action to escape doubt; Žižek applies it to the suicide bomber who blows himself up not from conviction but as a desperate wager to resolve his own unbelief.
The Hegelian-theodicy figure that evil events serve a higher rational purpose; Žižek presents it as a 'disgusting strategy' that the Book of Job dismantles, what dies on the cross is precisely this guarantee of higher meaning.
as “Big Other”
The purely virtual symbolic order that exists only insofar as subjects believe it exists; Žižek distinguishes 'the Big Other doesn't exist' (it still insists symbolically) from 'there is no Big Other' (it is thwarted and non-functional even as symbolic order).
Stories he reaches for 5
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka a customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they've run out of cream and offers coffee without milk instead. The Hegelian point: what you are not is constitutive of your identity, absence is present in a determinate way.
“Sorry, we ran out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk?”
A patient is cured of his delusion that he is a grain of corn and is released; he immediately returns terrified that a chicken will eat him. The psychiatrist reminds him he is a man. He replies: 'I know that, but does the chicken know?' The belief is in the Other, not in the subject.
“I know this, but does the chicken know that I am now a man?”
G.K. Chesterton argues that when God responds to Job by listing the freaks of nature, the logic is: 'You think you're in deep shit? I screwed everything', God himself engages in blasphemy, admitting the world is not harmonious.
“God's answer is: 'I didn't just screw your life, I screwed everything.'”
Holmes asks about the 'curious incident' of the dog in the night; the inspector says the dog did nothing, Holmes replies that this is precisely the curious incident. The absence of an expected action is the clue.
“The dog did nothing. But this is the curious incident.”
Ambedkar argued that the defeat of Buddhism in India was a tragedy, called for abolishing the entire Hindu caste tradition, and formulated 'no castes without outcasts' to show that the outcast is the structural condition of the caste system, not an empirical exception.
“No castes without outcasts.”
Works invoked 14
Capital book
Marx's Capital, specifically the appendix on commodity fetishism in the first chapter (second edition); Žižek calls it 'Marx at his best' and recommends it as a 'beautiful text.'
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 film; Žižek uses the 'coffee without cream' scene as a demonstration of Hegelian dialectics and the constitutive role of negation in identity.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, where he quotes Alenka Zupančič's atheism version of the grain-of-corn joke.
The Book of Job other
Called 'one of the greatest texts of world culture'; Žižek argues it is the first ideological critique, that it would be the first text removed from the Bible if authorities could revise it, and that it anticipates the death of the God-of-guarantee.
Casablanca film
Referenced obliquely in relation to the God-as-innocent-gaze motif, God is the gaze for which 'what happened, nothing' must be maintained, like the discretion at the end of Casablanca.
Life is Beautiful film
Roberto Benigni's film; Žižek mentions an imagined alternate version in which the child knew the truth all along, used to illustrate the catastrophic effect of discovering that the protecting Other knew.
Žižek's dialogue with John Milbank (radical orthodoxy); cited as where he struggles to prove that Christianity requires a more radical death of God than the Hegelian survival as Holy Spirit.
The Age of Innocence film
Scorsese's film (from Edith Wharton's novel); the revelation that the wife always knew her husband's affair illustrates the devastating effect of the Big Other losing its innocence.
Daniel Dennett's book; described as a 'nice intelligent book' that nonetheless fails to explain consciousness because it cannot account for the distinction between reality, objective appearance, and wrong appearance.
Silver Blaze other
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story; the 'dog that did nothing' clue is cited as the best-known illustration of Saussurean differentiality, the absence of an action as the most significant event.
Rare mid-1970s Italian sex comedy given to Žižek by an Italian friend as an illegal copy; he describes it as 'incredible' and 'at the level of Monty Python' for its satirical treatment of the obligation to enjoy.
Mille Plateaux book
Deleuze (and Guattari)'s A Thousand Plateaus; Žižek is startled and troubled to learn it is used as a tactical manual by the Israeli Defense Forces to devise strategies for fighting Palestinians.
Paradise Now film
Palestinian film about a suicide bomber; Žižek 'relatively liked it' and notes it illustrates his thesis that bombers act from doubt rather than firm belief.
Deleuze's essay in the volume 'What is Structuralism?'; recommended by Žižek as maybe the best introduction to the structuralist notion of suture, difference, and differentiality.
People invoked 31
Ferdinand de Saussure positive
Identified as the father of structural linguistics whose principle of differentiality, identity as a bundle of differences, underlies Žižek's account of how ideology works.
Cited as another example of pro-Zionist antisemitism: pro-Israel abroad, openly blamed Jewish bankers for the financial meltdown at home; fired from Fox News.
Mentioned in relation to an alternate version of Life is Beautiful in which the child knew the truth all along, used to illustrate the devastating effect of the chicken knowing.
Salam Fayyad positive
Palestinian Prime Minister praised for quietly building efficient state apparatus rather than engaging in armed resistance, Žižek argues this is more threatening to Israeli settlement ambitions.
Friend who organized visits by Jenin Freedom Theatre to New York; cited in the context of Palestinian-Jewish humor exchanges.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Cited as Ambedkar's target; Gandhi's 'soft' defense of the caste system is presented as less radical and less structurally honest than Ambedkar's total rejection.
Alenka Zupančič positive
One of Žižek's two closest intellectual comrades (with Mladen Dolar); she adapted the grain-of-corn joke into an atheism joke that Žižek cites from Parallax View; she and Dolar argue Hegel and Christianity are not yet truly materialist.
Cited as an Axis of Evil member who was once an American ally; his attack on Iran was tacitly supported by the US including silence on use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces.
Cited as an example of Western blowback: directly supported by CIA fighting Soviets, later became the enemy, illustrating the West's fatal Cold War misjudgment about religious fundamentalism.
Mentioned appreciatively as representative of the excess quality of Italian cinema that Žižek admires.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; Žižek tracks the development from early Lacan ('the Big Other doesn't exist') to late Lacan ('there is no Big Other' / 'God is unconscious') and defends the radicality of the late position.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my beloved theologian'; Žižek cites his reading of God's speech to Job (God admits the whole universe is a mess) and his reading of the crucifixion as the death of the God-of-guarantee.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek praises Deleuze's structuralism essay and his dignified death; Deleuze's concept of suture/difference is recommended as the best introduction; Žižek is troubled but not personally opposed when noting IDF's use of Mille Plateaux.
Cited, unusually, as 'right' on one point: that Arab hatred of Jews is a relatively recent phenomenon and pre-20th-century Arab-Jewish relations were often characterized by solidarity.
Mentioned as Hanan Ashrawi's intellectual mentor.
Daniel Dennett negative
Consciousness Explained is described as a 'nice intelligent book' that nonetheless fails to do what it promises because it cannot account for the tripartite distinction of how things are, how they really appear, and how they wrongly appear.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Gandhi's radical democratic opponent; Žižek praises his formula 'no castes without outcasts' as a structurally precise account of constitutive exclusion and calls for broader recognition of his work.
Hanan Ashrawi positive
Pupil of Edward Said, public face of Al-Fatah; Žižek notes she was squeezed out by a convergent plot of Palestinian hardliners and Zionists who both preferred a less articulate Palestinian voice.
Described as a 'weird fellow-traveller' of radical orthodoxy; co-author of The Monstrosity of Christ with Žižek, mentioned as context for Žižek's struggle to prove a more radical death of God in Christianity.
Described as a 'mumbling guy who doesn't speak English', preferred by Zionists as the Palestinian face because he presented a worse image than Ashrawi.
Mentioned in the context of the 1958 Nobel Prize controversy and the Soviet campaign against him; used to illustrate that refusing to sign a petition, doing nothing, can be the most significant political act.
Mladen Dolar positive
The other member of Žižek's 'Communist Troika'; together with Zupančič he argues that Hegel's reading of Christianity is not yet fully materialist.
Used as the prime example of pro-Zionist antisemitism: his manifesto supports Israel against Arabs while maintaining antisemitic views toward European Jews.
Žižek calls Foucault his 'bad guy' in contrast to Deleuze, noting that despite their celebrated intellectual friendship, Deleuze later distanced himself from Foucault.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
The director of Ninotchka; Žižek uses the coffee scene as a vehicle for Hegelian dialectics and credits Lubitsch as the natural author of such philosophical comedy.
Vladimir Putin negative
Žižek wrote a 'rough' text against Putin and 'the gang' in support of Pussy Riot; notes the Stalinist atmosphere of the arrest.
The Italian sex comedy features a 'pupil of Wilhelm Reich' who discovers sexual energy can power Western Europe, cited as the scientific conceit underpinning the plot.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek defends Marx's commodity fetishism analysis as genuinely sophisticated, not naive moralism but a structural theory of objective belief inscribed in practice rather than consciousness.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The Ninotchka joke is presented as a lesson in Hegel; Hegel's reading of Christianity (God survives as Holy Spirit / immanent order) is also invoked as a stepping stone Žižek partially contests.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Cited for recognizing that humanist 'death of God' is the most disgusting mode of surviving God, a dead God still functioning as ideal symbolic order.
Peter Wessel Zapffe positive
Norwegian theologian whose reading of Job is that God is omnipotent but has the mind of a petty evil child, a primitive caveman with absolute power and no moral standard.
What it argues
the Big Other and the structure of beliefobjective belief vs. subjective knowledge (fetishism)enjoyment as ethical obligationsuture and the constitutive exclusion in classificationthe death of God as the death of the guaranteepro-Zionist antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflictthe Book of Job as proto-materialist theology
Dialectical moves 10
“The true task of the analyst today is not to free you from obstacles to enjoyment but to convince you that you don't have to enjoy.”
The super-ego injunction to enjoy has replaced repression as the primary pathology, inverting the classical model of analysis.
“Coffee without cream and coffee without milk are not the same coffee—what you are not is part of your identity.”
The Lubitsch joke demonstrates Hegelian differentiality: absence is constitutive of identity in symbolic space.
“Things themselves don't know—the theological dimension of commodity fetishism is unconscious not in us but in things.”
Marx's formula is not that subjects are deluded but that the fetishist illusion is structurally inscribed in commodity relations themselves.
“We know that there is no commodity fetishism but commodities themselves don't know it.”
Žižek extends the grain-of-corn joke to Marx: the belief is in the structure, not in the believing subject.
“God is not dead in the sense of 'doesn't exist but still screws your life'—the truly radical formula is 'there is no Big Other,' meaning the symbolic order is thwarted.”
The distinction between non-existence (still functional as ideal) and non-being (structurally defunct) is the hinge between Hegelian and truly materialist atheism.
“In Christianity it is not just God's messenger who dies on the cross—the very God of beyond dies, but the trick is he survives as Holy Spirit.”
Hegel's reading of the Passion preserves God as immanent symbolic community, which Žižek argues is still not radical enough.
“What dies on the cross is precisely the Big Other—any higher order guaranteeing that suffering has meaning—leaving us alone with our freedom.”
True Christianity, for Žižek, is not the Hegelian survival of Spirit but the unconditional abandonment of metaphysical guarantee.
“Job's greatness is not claiming innocence but simply refusing the consolation that his suffering has a deeper meaning.”
Job is the first ideological critic: he rejects the friends' theodicy not by asserting his virtue but by denying the framework of meaningful suffering.
“Far from being a simple act of belief, suicide bombing is a hysterical passage à l'acte to escape precisely a lack of belief.”
The bomber does not explode because he believes; he explodes to generate the proof of belief he lacks.
“Stalinism is atheist (no transcendent God) yet theological: history functions as the Lacanian Big Other guaranteeing objective meaning.”
Stalinism's category of 'objective responsibility' reveals that atheism of the explicit kind leaves the God-function intact as History.
Claims 17
asserts
The contemporary psychoanalytic task has reversed: no longer to free subjects from prohibitions so they can enjoy, but to convince them that enjoyment is not obligatory.psychoanalysis and the super-ego injunction to enjoy
asserts
Marx's commodity fetishism is not a subjective illusion but an objective structure: the fetishist belief is in the activity itself, not in what subjects consciously think.commodity fetishism and ideology
asserts
Stalinism is a form of religion in the Lacanian sense because it preserves the Big Other as History—an ideal symbolic order that guarantees the objective meaning of acts.Stalinism and the Big Other
asserts
Humanist atheism ('God doesn't exist but is our ideal') is the most disgusting mode of surviving God, as Nietzsche recognized, because a dead God still screws your life as a virtual symbolic order.secular humanism and atheism
asserts
Late Lacan's formula 'there is no Big Other' is more radical than 'the Big Other doesn't exist' because it asserts the symbolic order is thwarted and non-functional even as non-existent.Lacan's late teaching on the Big Other
rejects
The Hegelian reading of Christianity—God dies but survives as the Holy Spirit / immanent symbolic community—is not truly materialist because it preserves the Big Other in idealized form.Hegelian Christianity and the survival of the Big Other
asserts
What dies on the cross is not just God as transcendent patriarch but the Big Other itself—any higher order guaranteeing that suffering has meaning—leaving humanity alone with its freedom.the crucifixion and the death of metaphysical guarantee
asserts
The Book of Job is a proto-materialist text: Job's greatness is not claiming innocence but refusing the ideological consolation that his suffering has a deeper meaning.the Book of Job and ideology critique
rejects
Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained fails to deliver on its promise because it cannot account for the distinction between how things really are, how they really appear, and how they wrongly appear.Dennett's eliminativist philosophy of mind
asserts
In certain political situations, doing nothing is itself the most consequential act—as when refusing to sign anti-Pasternak petitions under Stalinism.political action and symbolic inaction
asserts
Suicide bombers typically act not from firm belief but from hysterical doubt—the act is a desperate wager to prove to themselves that they believe.religious terrorism and belief structure
asserts
The American fundamentalist right's recent pro-Zionism is ideologically consistent with a new form of antisemitism that supports Israel externally while scapegoating Jews internally.pro-Zionist antisemitism in the American right
asserts
The West's Cold War support for religious fundamentalism over the secular left is a root cause of the current Middle East crisis.Western foreign policy and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
asserts
Israel historically supported Hamas as a divide-and-rule tactic against Al-Fatah, making Hamas in part an Israeli strategic creation.Israel's relationship to Hamas
asserts
Salam Fayyad's quiet state-building strategy is more threatening to Israeli settlement expansion than armed resistance because it makes Palestinian statehood an undeniable fact on the ground.Palestinian political strategy
asserts
Fantasy is not subjective distortion but objective appearance: it is how things really appear at the level of social reality, too intense to be consciously assumed by any subject.Freudian fantasy and social reality
reframes
The distinction between Lacanian psychoanalysis and brain science is that brain science presents an objective process inaccessible to the subject, whereas the Freudian unconscious is still a subjective state but desubjectivized.psychoanalysis vs. neuroscience
Quotes 15
“Today literally the majority of patients—it's not that they have illicit desires and feel sinful; you feel guilty if you are not able to enjoy.”Slavoj Žižek · super-ego injunction to enjoy
“The main task of the analyst today paradoxically is to convince you you don't have to enjoy. You can if you want but you don't have to. Enjoyment is not obligatory.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of psychoanalytic task
“What you are not is part of your identity. You are not just what you are, you are what you are not. And this is how symbolic space works.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian differentiality
“Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es. They don't know what they are doing but they are doing it.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's formula of ideology
“Things themselves don't see. The belief, the erroneous fetishist belief, is in your acting.”Slavoj Žižek · objective belief / commodity fetishism
“A God who doesn't exist but who still screws your life totally—this is the humanist position, the most disgusting mode of surviving God.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of humanist atheism
“God is unconscious—meaning we believe in God; even if you are officially atheist, the structure of objective belief is there.”Slavoj Žižek · late Lacan's formula of atheism
“Job is not saying 'I'm innocent.' He just claims 'I don't accept the bullshit that this suffering has any deeper meaning.'”Slavoj Žižek · Job as proto-materialist ideological critique
“Fantasy is not how things appear to you. Fantasy is how things really appear—too intense, too crazy to be subjectively assumed.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy as objective appearance
“What dies on the cross is precisely the Big Other—any higher order guaranteeing that suffering has meaning. We are alone with our freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · the crucifixion as death of metaphysical guarantee
“The typical structure: for a suicide bomber, you don't explode yourself because you believe. It's a kind of an ultra-hysterical passage à l'acte—you doubt if you really believe.”Slavoj Žižek · suicide bombing as act of unbelief
“There are situations where to do nothing is almost the most you can do.”Slavoj Žižek · inaction as political act
“The next stage will be pro-Zionist antisemitism—'We should support them there, but here they are a danger.'”Slavoj Žižek · pro-Zionist antisemitism
“The whole point of drive is that the circulation of drive, the movement itself, is the goal.”Slavoj Žižek · drive vs. desire
“No castes without outcasts—every classificatory system is based on an exclusion.”Slavoj Žižek · structural exclusion / suture
Transcript 26 turns
unknown
Transcribe an audio recording verbatim. Slavoj Žižek (philosopher). Heavy Slovenian accent, code-switches into German/French, mentions real people, companies, TV shows, films, and books. Continuous text only. No commentary, no speaker labels, no timestamps. Proper
Transcribe an audio recording verbatim. Slavoj Žižek (philosopher). Heavy Slovenian accent, code-switches into German/French, mentions real people, companies, TV shows, films, and books. Continuous text only. No commentary, no speaker labels, no timestamps. Proper
Slavoj Žižek
nouns (names, organizations, titles) must be maximally precise and spelled correctly. Transcribe every sentence, do not summarize or skip. Use [unintelligible] for unclear words. Okay, ah, okay, speaker, ah, okay. I got from the working class, from the people, a demand, request, whatever, to do a little bit of where we are spiritually today: Buddhism and brain sciences and so on. Like, are you... if I keep it elementary of course... is this okay with you if I mix it also with city poetry and so on? Like, haiku and so on. Like, science, brain sciences, Buddhism, haiku. That. Is this good enough for you? Yeah. No, where is...? I don't feel... I don't like comrade Stalin... Yes, long live comrade... Okay, thanks. Let me go on. Okay, let's see now, I will go... It's nice that you mention the Dario Argento, you know, this as if excess, you know, because this is what I appreciate in Italian cinema in general. Once I gave an interview for Italian TV, you know, they asked me these disgusting narcissistic questions like 'What is our great achievement?' They wanted to be praised. But they got fuck them an answer they didn't expect. I said, 'I don't care, just don't mention me in all that you know, Visconti and Antonioni or what.' I said Italy contributed three things, Italian cinema to world culture, which are the real thing: Spaghetti Western, the sex comedies (I don't know if you remember them from the sixties), and my favorite, they're so incredible, what they called Peplum, you know, those bombastic but slightly ridiculous historical drama like 'Hercules against Sphinx' or what. You know this history... and what I want to say is that especially with these sex comedies, some of them were excellent because although they were cheap commercial movies, this miracle often happened that sometimes a serious author or or more or less, probably for commercial reasons or whatever, got involved in it. For example, I write somewhere about it, do you know there is a rare movie, it's difficult to get it, by a miracle an Italian friend gave me an illegal copy, from mid-seventies, the golden era of these movies, sex comedies, *Conviene far bene l'amore*, 'It should be, we should make love well.' It's quite an incredible sex comedy at the level of like Monty Python, but it really works, it's pretty terrifying. I don't know if you know about it. It's... and again, there was an intellectual behind it, it's serious because it's a ridiculous situation but you can feel how it rings a bell with our situation. It takes place in near future and the imagined situation is the following one: Western Europe or Italy, doesn't matter, runs out of energy and then some scientist, pupil, descendant of Wilhelm Reich, discovers that during the sexual act, a tremendous amount of energy is released on condition (now comes the joke of course) on condition that you are not in love when you do it, that love sabotages this. So then you can imagine how it goes on. They had a problem, but they convinced the Church to turn around its position, so now it is sinful to love your wife of course. Then of course you have these wonderful scenes of confession where the guy goes there and says, 'Oh father, what can I do? I'm not attracted promiscuously by other women, I just love my wife.' 'Horrible, my son, go around, don't waste time, horrible, you must... ' and then comes my favorite like Stalinist moment: all married couples, now it's the energy part, are obliged, I think twice a week, to meet like imagine here some some I don't know twenty thirty sofas, they are obliged there and of course to make love but it's done you know in this serial industrial way. There is a controller there, a kind of a Stalinist you know who says, shouts, 'You, second table to the left there, move, what expression did you use for Hollywood, that hoops or what? Humps. Sorry? Humps. Yeah, you, humps faster!' you know and so on, it's kind of a... and I think that there is there is a truth in it, you know, almost in the sense that this is how... now you will say this is crazy, yes or no? Do you know that again, fuck you now some of you will tell me this is not true but I really got informations from quite many French psychoanalysts, not madmen like me but like real psychoanalysts who deal with real people who told me something pretty interesting that you know in the old days, the simplistic idea, sometimes but not always, he was not stupid, you find it even in Freud, the simplistic idea that like you come to a psychoanalyst because you want to, as I already mentioned this I think on the first day, you want to have sex but you have internalized prohibitions, I don't know, so you go there to get rid of prohibitions so that you can finally do it. The job of the psychoanalyst is to free you from oppressive prohibitions so that you can fully enjoy. They told me that today it's much more complicated. Today literally, so I was told, the majority of patients, it's not that they have illicit desires and they feel sinful for them, no, you feel guilty if you are not able to enjoy. Literally, sexual enjoyment, performance, blah blah, has in a bad sense ethical status, like you are guilty if you cannot enjoy. And which is why again, the task, it makes very strange the task of the analyst. It's no longer to set you free or whatever from obstacles to enjoy, no, the obstacle, the injunction which you have to overcome is precisely the injunction to enjoy. The main task of the analyst today paradoxically is to convince you you don't have to enjoy. You can if you want but you don't have to. Enjoyment is not obligatory. And it would be again very nice to detect in what ways enjoyment is presented as an obligation today. Like once a friend here in Switzerland gave me, I don't know why, he probably wanted to kill me with my diabetes, a box with some chocolate cakes whatever, and I liked something because they were so freshly made the idea is the moment you open them and you expose them to the air they get ruined, so you have... and it's so nice, you open it and you get this special instruction: *Sofort genießen*, like 'You have to enjoy immediately,' you know. It's something like this. So again, the movie does does does react does react to this. Although... okay, we could go on in this direction but let's go on nonetheless where we stop more seriously. Okay, you remember, I just want to bring things together, you remember I mentioned that paradox of the Asiatic Mode of Production, that is to say, let's say you have a universal field, a genus subdivided in species or elements (we don't have to be precise here), whatever, and then there is one element which although it appears to be an ordinary element, it is effectively a stand-in for what is excluded. It really is, I told you, imagine the set of dogs, you have this dog, that dog, and then you have an element 'all dogs which are not part of this classification' or whatever, no? You know who developed this in a wonderful way for social analysis? I think I mentioned him here, maybe not, the guy who was in conflict with Gandhi in India called Dr., I don't know what the other names are, he's known simply as Ambedkar in India. And he is even now not well-known presence there because he was the big opponent of Gandhi. But he was an opponent from precisely a more radical democratic position. His claim was that the greatest tragedy of India was already in around year zero, a little bit earlier, the defeat of Buddhism. You know that the Buddhist movement was overwhelmed basically, old Veda Hinduism made a made a triumphant return you know and recaptured the field by totally restructuring itself and so on and so on. So this guy Ambedkar openly called for Indians to get rid of the entire Hindu tradition, castes and so on and so on. And then he used a wonderful play of words in polemics with Gandhi who nonetheless defended a soft system of castes, he said like 'No castes without outcasts,' you know. That was his formula. The point is not the empirical one, you know, that's the point. It's not okay, no classification is perfect, you always lose some minority. It's a much stronger structural one, that every classificatory system is based on an exclusion. And you have to have, this is the meaning of, you mentioned the chapter in my book, the term suture, you know, suture. It's suture, suture is precisely that element which apparently fixes it all into a harmonious whole by inscribing within the system its constitutive exclusion. You know, you must an element have an element within which stands for what is without. This... as it were, this this empty element, now we are coming to Lacan, this empty element in the sense that it doesn't mean anything, it's just it's just a negation positivized. And here we are at the zero level of dialectics. What do I mean by this? Another old story to tell, I hope it's not known to you, remind me, I'm getting old, senile, blah blah. Did I already use here the joke from Ernst Lubitsch's *Ninotchka*? I think I did. Be honest. No. No. Are you sure? Yes. No. Yes, no, or yes... okay, I will not go into... No, the one the one about the one about coffee with coffee with cream. No. Okay. No, because this is dialectics at its minimal, I claim. It's a wonderful simple joke so that we learn through cinema a little bit of Hegel. This is I think... ah, you know I'm proud of something, if you want, I will give it to you. You know I did write a text supporting those... I'm really proud of this, maybe I did a small thing which is not just bad taste. Yesterday evening I wrote a page and a half in support of those poor girls, Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot, you know now, and it's... I have friends there who informed me, it's really horrible. Okay, they made, even if you are conservative, a small joke there in a church, you know. My God, they are already for months in prison, now they prolonged it to to half a year, they are keeping them... it's a kind of a Stalinist nightmare, you know. And okay, I wrote a text, short, and they even smuggled the text through a lawyer to them. Oh, I'm so glad. They are grateful to me. But the text is pretty rough on Putin and the gang. So since next week I'm going to Russia... they are now afraid, no? My God, you see this is order, political, no. They told me that they proposed me to have it published once I am in Russia. Because they told me since I'm a foreigner, relatively known, the worst that can happen is that they throw me out. They will not arrest me. But they told me it might well happen, it already did, that if it's published tomorrow, before, on the net and so on, that they will not allow me to enter. My God, I didn't know things are so serious there, no. My association was because there I use also this joke, namely the joke is the following one: it's from *Ninotchka*, Ernst Lubitsch of course, who but him, no. In *Ninotchka* there is... I'm not talking about the whole story, you know the story, Greta Garbo, her last big role, age... but it's a just a small scene about coffee where she, no, sorry, the hero, just nothing even with the story, enters a cafeteria and asks, 'Can I get coffee without cream, please? Just coffee without cream.' And again, the Hegelian waiter provides a wonderful answer. He says, 'Sorry, we ran out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk?' you know. And he's totally correct. This is dialectics, in the sense that what is not there, this in... when I was young, in the great era of structuralism, we called this 'absence in the mode of presence,' or in Hegelian terms, but it's this wonderful idea that what you are not is is part of your identity. You are not just what you are, you are what you are not. And this is how symbolic space works. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an easy everyday example. You are silent, you do nothing. But you know if you are silent just like that, it's totally different than being silent in a situation where, imagine a totalitarian regime like Stalinism... I remember when they had some dissident, but this was already not a true Stalinism, no. Like I remember when Pasternak... no, I don't exactly remember, I was too young for that, but I remember reading about it. When in '58 or when Pasternak got Nobel Prize and he was there was of course a public a public campaign against him by Soviet authorities and they put pressure on all other, especially writers, artists, to sign a petition condemning Pasternak as becoming slave of imperialism, blah blah blah. And at that point, to do nothing was 'the' act, you know. There are situations where to do nothing is almost the most you can do it. So again, going back to here, going back to my point, what can we learn from this about how ideology works? Again, it's the basic structural rule. You know what I mean by structural rule, differentiality? Where you are, as Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, identified the differential order where what you are is just a bundle of differences, no? Your identity is only you are not this, you are not that, and so on and so on. You must know which is the best-known line from all Sherlock Holmes which is the beautiful, you must know it, it's from his story Arthur Conan Doyle's *Silver Blaze* where Sherlock Holmes asks the stupid Lestrade or who, police detective, no, or it's no it's the other way round, like the question is, 'Did you notice any any yes, sorry, no,' Sherlock Holmes says, 'Did you notice the curious incident by the dog the last night?' And the other guy says, 'The dog did nothing.' And Sherlock Holmes says, 'But this is the curious incident,' and so on, no. Why? So again, what do I mean by this differentiality? What I mean is that this mechanism where you do something or you have something, but this something even if it is materially the same, it matters what is it not. Like in this case, okay, from a common sense view, you can say 'What does it... ' I know that's why this was a joke, what I quoted to you, you know. Like you can say 'Fuck you,' I mean, 'Coffee is coffee, it's obvious that the customer wants a plain coffee, it doesn't matter if it's defined as without milk or without cream.' But in semiotic space it does matter. It's absolutely crucial. This is I think more and more how ideology works today. It works more at the level of these, let's call them implications, you know. Already there was in communism, again it's from Poland I think, a wonderful joke which has exactly the same structure, I remember from my youth. The presupposition of this joke is that often under communism in stores elementary consumerist items were missing, you know, like butter, like I don't know, electric cables, no. So the point is a guy goes to a store and says, 'Did you already get butter or is it still that you don't have butter?' And the the seller there answers him, 'No, sorry, you are in wrong store, we are the store which doesn't have electric cables, across the street is the store which doesn't have butter,' you know. Like totally correct logic. Immediately I go on, yeah yeah. My God, you're going on like this. Do you plan to change your name to Spartacus or what? Like slave revolt... it looks like in, you know, the slave speaks a lot and the master stays quiet. And then? Ah, but in, for example today, the whole... you get, yeah, you play the slave speaks and the master just... yeah, but the slave should speak with with deeper respect. Oh dear master, can I say something? I know it's insulting for you but can you master show the infinite mercy? Sorry, let me cut this bullshit, please. So yeah, I was just wondering if using this coffee without cream structure, doesn't it also elucidate something about the idea of organs without bodies, in so far as Lacan at first defines the Big Other thinking... yeah, in one of his later seminars says precisely something that doesn't exist but has a body, in opposition to the lamella which is something... yeah yeah yeah, he says that, it's crucial. Lamella doesn't exist. Exactly, but and the the Big Other is has doesn't exist but has a body. I think he says it in Seminar XX. If it has a body, okay... in that sense, I'm sorry, it should be a decaffeinated coffee, that's what he means, that would be... No, no, let us be more precise, you know, in order... You asked a very good question because you know the problem here, let me go quickly through it, is the following one, and Lacan was struggling for a long time with it. What do we mean by 'the Big Other doesn't exist'? From the very beginning, Lacan in a way knew that the Big Other doesn't exist, in the sense that it's a purely virtual symbolic structure. The Big Other is a purely virtual order, it only exists insofar as paradoxically we believe that it exists, no? Like, although it's an ideal order of meaning, but if you kill all real people, it wouldn't exist as this virtuality, no? So uh, but later, Lacan when he radicalizes into *Il n'y a pas de Grand Autre* because you know... ah, I will get you, ah, you poor slave, learn a little bit more, you know. I'm sorry, it's my... that's my nature, you know that story about Scorpio who picks a frog although he knows that he will also drown, that's me. Be very careful. As far as I know mostly, at least the late Lacan, he doesn't say just 'the Big Other doesn't exist,' he says *Il n'y a pas*, 'there is no Big Other.' And as every as we know the theological Lacanians, no, it's not the same. 'Doesn't exist' means but it still insists in its symbolic, you know. But *Il n'y a pas*, 'there is no Big Other,' it means something much more radical: that it is thwarted, non-functional even as non-existent, even as the sym... even as the symbolic order. Because why is this important? Because as Lacan makes it clearer and clearer, and this should be of some interest to you also without maybe this theological interest, because this is also where Lacan shifts his position with regard to atheism. You know, maybe I already improvised about this, I'm not sure. Early Lacan made the standard formula, the formula of stick did stick to standard formula of atheism:
nouns (names, organizations, titles) must be maximally precise and spelled correctly. Transcribe every sentence, do not summarize or skip. Use [unintelligible] for unclear words. Okay, ah, okay, speaker, ah, okay. I got from the working class, from the people, a demand, request, whatever, to do a little bit of where we are spiritually today: Buddhism and brain sciences and so on. Like, are you... if I keep it elementary of course... is this okay with you if I mix it also with city poetry and so on? Like, haiku and so on. Like, science, brain sciences, Buddhism, haiku. That. Is this good enough for you? Yeah. No, where is...? I don't feel... I don't like comrade Stalin... Yes, long live comrade... Okay, thanks. Let me go on. Okay, let's see now, I will go... It's nice that you mention the Dario Argento, you know, this as if excess, you know, because this is what I appreciate in Italian cinema in general. Once I gave an interview for Italian TV, you know, they asked me these disgusting narcissistic questions like 'What is our great achievement?' They wanted to be praised. But they got fuck them an answer they didn't expect. I said, 'I don't care, just don't mention me in all that you know, Visconti and Antonioni or what.' I said Italy contributed three things, Italian cinema to world culture, which are the real thing: Spaghetti Western, the sex comedies (I don't know if you remember them from the sixties), and my favorite, they're so incredible, what they called Peplum, you know, those bombastic but slightly ridiculous historical drama like 'Hercules against Sphinx' or what. You know this history... and what I want to say is that especially with these sex comedies, some of them were excellent because although they were cheap commercial movies, this miracle often happened that sometimes a serious author or or more or less, probably for commercial reasons or whatever, got involved in it. For example, I write somewhere about it, do you know there is a rare movie, it's difficult to get it, by a miracle an Italian friend gave me an illegal copy, from mid-seventies, the golden era of these movies, sex comedies, *Conviene far bene l'amore*, 'It should be, we should make love well.' It's quite an incredible sex comedy at the level of like Monty Python, but it really works, it's pretty terrifying. I don't know if you know about it. It's... and again, there was an intellectual behind it, it's serious because it's a ridiculous situation but you can feel how it rings a bell with our situation. It takes place in near future and the imagined situation is the following one: Western Europe or Italy, doesn't matter, runs out of energy and then some scientist, pupil, descendant of Wilhelm Reich, discovers that during the sexual act, a tremendous amount of energy is released on condition (now comes the joke of course) on condition that you are not in love when you do it, that love sabotages this. So then you can imagine how it goes on. They had a problem, but they convinced the Church to turn around its position, so now it is sinful to love your wife of course. Then of course you have these wonderful scenes of confession where the guy goes there and says, 'Oh father, what can I do? I'm not attracted promiscuously by other women, I just love my wife.' 'Horrible, my son, go around, don't waste time, horrible, you must... ' and then comes my favorite like Stalinist moment: all married couples, now it's the energy part, are obliged, I think twice a week, to meet like imagine here some some I don't know twenty thirty sofas, they are obliged there and of course to make love but it's done you know in this serial industrial way. There is a controller there, a kind of a Stalinist you know who says, shouts, 'You, second table to the left there, move, what expression did you use for Hollywood, that hoops or what? Humps. Sorry? Humps. Yeah, you, humps faster!' you know and so on, it's kind of a... and I think that there is there is a truth in it, you know, almost in the sense that this is how... now you will say this is crazy, yes or no? Do you know that again, fuck you now some of you will tell me this is not true but I really got informations from quite many French psychoanalysts, not madmen like me but like real psychoanalysts who deal with real people who told me something pretty interesting that you know in the old days, the simplistic idea, sometimes but not always, he was not stupid, you find it even in Freud, the simplistic idea that like you come to a psychoanalyst because you want to, as I already mentioned this I think on the first day, you want to have sex but you have internalized prohibitions, I don't know, so you go there to get rid of prohibitions so that you can finally do it. The job of the psychoanalyst is to free you from oppressive prohibitions so that you can fully enjoy. They told me that today it's much more complicated. Today literally, so I was told, the majority of patients, it's not that they have illicit desires and they feel sinful for them, no, you feel guilty if you are not able to enjoy. Literally, sexual enjoyment, performance, blah blah, has in a bad sense ethical status, like you are guilty if you cannot enjoy. And which is why again, the task, it makes very strange the task of the analyst. It's no longer to set you free or whatever from obstacles to enjoy, no, the obstacle, the injunction which you have to overcome is precisely the injunction to enjoy. The main task of the analyst today paradoxically is to convince you you don't have to enjoy. You can if you want but you don't have to. Enjoyment is not obligatory. And it would be again very nice to detect in what ways enjoyment is presented as an obligation today. Like once a friend here in Switzerland gave me, I don't know why, he probably wanted to kill me with my diabetes, a box with some chocolate cakes whatever, and I liked something because they were so freshly made the idea is the moment you open them and you expose them to the air they get ruined, so you have... and it's so nice, you open it and you get this special instruction: *Sofort genießen*, like 'You have to enjoy immediately,' you know. It's something like this. So again, the movie does does does react does react to this. Although... okay, we could go on in this direction but let's go on nonetheless where we stop more seriously. Okay, you remember, I just want to bring things together, you remember I mentioned that paradox of the Asiatic Mode of Production, that is to say, let's say you have a universal field, a genus subdivided in species or elements (we don't have to be precise here), whatever, and then there is one element which although it appears to be an ordinary element, it is effectively a stand-in for what is excluded. It really is, I told you, imagine the set of dogs, you have this dog, that dog, and then you have an element 'all dogs which are not part of this classification' or whatever, no? You know who developed this in a wonderful way for social analysis? I think I mentioned him here, maybe not, the guy who was in conflict with Gandhi in India called Dr., I don't know what the other names are, he's known simply as Ambedkar in India. And he is even now not well-known presence there because he was the big opponent of Gandhi. But he was an opponent from precisely a more radical democratic position. His claim was that the greatest tragedy of India was already in around year zero, a little bit earlier, the defeat of Buddhism. You know that the Buddhist movement was overwhelmed basically, old Veda Hinduism made a made a triumphant return you know and recaptured the field by totally restructuring itself and so on and so on. So this guy Ambedkar openly called for Indians to get rid of the entire Hindu tradition, castes and so on and so on. And then he used a wonderful play of words in polemics with Gandhi who nonetheless defended a soft system of castes, he said like 'No castes without outcasts,' you know. That was his formula. The point is not the empirical one, you know, that's the point. It's not okay, no classification is perfect, you always lose some minority. It's a much stronger structural one, that every classificatory system is based on an exclusion. And you have to have, this is the meaning of, you mentioned the chapter in my book, the term suture, you know, suture. It's suture, suture is precisely that element which apparently fixes it all into a harmonious whole by inscribing within the system its constitutive exclusion. You know, you must an element have an element within which stands for what is without. This... as it were, this this empty element, now we are coming to Lacan, this empty element in the sense that it doesn't mean anything, it's just it's just a negation positivized. And here we are at the zero level of dialectics. What do I mean by this? Another old story to tell, I hope it's not known to you, remind me, I'm getting old, senile, blah blah. Did I already use here the joke from Ernst Lubitsch's *Ninotchka*? I think I did. Be honest. No. No. Are you sure? Yes. No. Yes, no, or yes... okay, I will not go into... No, the one the one about the one about coffee with coffee with cream. No. Okay. No, because this is dialectics at its minimal, I claim. It's a wonderful simple joke so that we learn through cinema a little bit of Hegel. This is I think... ah, you know I'm proud of something, if you want, I will give it to you. You know I did write a text supporting those... I'm really proud of this, maybe I did a small thing which is not just bad taste. Yesterday evening I wrote a page and a half in support of those poor girls, Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot, you know now, and it's... I have friends there who informed me, it's really horrible. Okay, they made, even if you are conservative, a small joke there in a church, you know. My God, they are already for months in prison, now they prolonged it to to half a year, they are keeping them... it's a kind of a Stalinist nightmare, you know. And okay, I wrote a text, short, and they even smuggled the text through a lawyer to them. Oh, I'm so glad. They are grateful to me. But the text is pretty rough on Putin and the gang. So since next week I'm going to Russia... they are now afraid, no? My God, you see this is order, political, no. They told me that they proposed me to have it published once I am in Russia. Because they told me since I'm a foreigner, relatively known, the worst that can happen is that they throw me out. They will not arrest me. But they told me it might well happen, it already did, that if it's published tomorrow, before, on the net and so on, that they will not allow me to enter. My God, I didn't know things are so serious there, no. My association was because there I use also this joke, namely the joke is the following one: it's from *Ninotchka*, Ernst Lubitsch of course, who but him, no. In *Ninotchka* there is... I'm not talking about the whole story, you know the story, Greta Garbo, her last big role, age... but it's a just a small scene about coffee where she, no, sorry, the hero, just nothing even with the story, enters a cafeteria and asks, 'Can I get coffee without cream, please? Just coffee without cream.' And again, the Hegelian waiter provides a wonderful answer. He says, 'Sorry, we ran out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk?' you know. And he's totally correct. This is dialectics, in the sense that what is not there, this in... when I was young, in the great era of structuralism, we called this 'absence in the mode of presence,' or in Hegelian terms, but it's this wonderful idea that what you are not is is part of your identity. You are not just what you are, you are what you are not. And this is how symbolic space works. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an easy everyday example. You are silent, you do nothing. But you know if you are silent just like that, it's totally different than being silent in a situation where, imagine a totalitarian regime like Stalinism... I remember when they had some dissident, but this was already not a true Stalinism, no. Like I remember when Pasternak... no, I don't exactly remember, I was too young for that, but I remember reading about it. When in '58 or when Pasternak got Nobel Prize and he was there was of course a public a public campaign against him by Soviet authorities and they put pressure on all other, especially writers, artists, to sign a petition condemning Pasternak as becoming slave of imperialism, blah blah blah. And at that point, to do nothing was 'the' act, you know. There are situations where to do nothing is almost the most you can do it. So again, going back to here, going back to my point, what can we learn from this about how ideology works? Again, it's the basic structural rule. You know what I mean by structural rule, differentiality? Where you are, as Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structural linguistics, identified the differential order where what you are is just a bundle of differences, no? Your identity is only you are not this, you are not that, and so on and so on. You must know which is the best-known line from all Sherlock Holmes which is the beautiful, you must know it, it's from his story Arthur Conan Doyle's *Silver Blaze* where Sherlock Holmes asks the stupid Lestrade or who, police detective, no, or it's no it's the other way round, like the question is, 'Did you notice any any yes, sorry, no,' Sherlock Holmes says, 'Did you notice the curious incident by the dog the last night?' And the other guy says, 'The dog did nothing.' And Sherlock Holmes says, 'But this is the curious incident,' and so on, no. Why? So again, what do I mean by this differentiality? What I mean is that this mechanism where you do something or you have something, but this something even if it is materially the same, it matters what is it not. Like in this case, okay, from a common sense view, you can say 'What does it... ' I know that's why this was a joke, what I quoted to you, you know. Like you can say 'Fuck you,' I mean, 'Coffee is coffee, it's obvious that the customer wants a plain coffee, it doesn't matter if it's defined as without milk or without cream.' But in semiotic space it does matter. It's absolutely crucial. This is I think more and more how ideology works today. It works more at the level of these, let's call them implications, you know. Already there was in communism, again it's from Poland I think, a wonderful joke which has exactly the same structure, I remember from my youth. The presupposition of this joke is that often under communism in stores elementary consumerist items were missing, you know, like butter, like I don't know, electric cables, no. So the point is a guy goes to a store and says, 'Did you already get butter or is it still that you don't have butter?' And the the seller there answers him, 'No, sorry, you are in wrong store, we are the store which doesn't have electric cables, across the street is the store which doesn't have butter,' you know. Like totally correct logic. Immediately I go on, yeah yeah. My God, you're going on like this. Do you plan to change your name to Spartacus or what? Like slave revolt... it looks like in, you know, the slave speaks a lot and the master stays quiet. And then? Ah, but in, for example today, the whole... you get, yeah, you play the slave speaks and the master just... yeah, but the slave should speak with with deeper respect. Oh dear master, can I say something? I know it's insulting for you but can you master show the infinite mercy? Sorry, let me cut this bullshit, please. So yeah, I was just wondering if using this coffee without cream structure, doesn't it also elucidate something about the idea of organs without bodies, in so far as Lacan at first defines the Big Other thinking... yeah, in one of his later seminars says precisely something that doesn't exist but has a body, in opposition to the lamella which is something... yeah yeah yeah, he says that, it's crucial. Lamella doesn't exist. Exactly, but and the the Big Other is has doesn't exist but has a body. I think he says it in Seminar XX. If it has a body, okay... in that sense, I'm sorry, it should be a decaffeinated coffee, that's what he means, that would be... No, no, let us be more precise, you know, in order... You asked a very good question because you know the problem here, let me go quickly through it, is the following one, and Lacan was struggling for a long time with it. What do we mean by 'the Big Other doesn't exist'? From the very beginning, Lacan in a way knew that the Big Other doesn't exist, in the sense that it's a purely virtual symbolic structure. The Big Other is a purely virtual order, it only exists insofar as paradoxically we believe that it exists, no? Like, although it's an ideal order of meaning, but if you kill all real people, it wouldn't exist as this virtuality, no? So uh, but later, Lacan when he radicalizes into *Il n'y a pas de Grand Autre* because you know... ah, I will get you, ah, you poor slave, learn a little bit more, you know. I'm sorry, it's my... that's my nature, you know that story about Scorpio who picks a frog although he knows that he will also drown, that's me. Be very careful. As far as I know mostly, at least the late Lacan, he doesn't say just 'the Big Other doesn't exist,' he says *Il n'y a pas*, 'there is no Big Other.' And as every as we know the theological Lacanians, no, it's not the same. 'Doesn't exist' means but it still insists in its symbolic, you know. But *Il n'y a pas*, 'there is no Big Other,' it means something much more radical: that it is thwarted, non-functional even as non-existent, even as the sym... even as the symbolic order. Because why is this important? Because as Lacan makes it clearer and clearer, and this should be of some interest to you also without maybe this theological interest, because this is also where Lacan shifts his position with regard to atheism. You know, maybe I already improvised about this, I'm not sure. Early Lacan made the standard formula, the formula of stick did stick to standard formula of atheism:
unknown
'God doesn't exist,' no. But then, maybe here it's an influence of Nietzsche, you know, because Nietzsche was here I think he was very wise in being aware how this
'God doesn't exist,' no. But then, maybe here it's an influence of Nietzsche, you know, because Nietzsche was here I think he was very wise in being aware how this
Slavoj Žižek
standard idealist humanist 'death of God' is the worst in a way, the most disgusting mode of surviving God. You know this humanist version, God doesn't exist, God is just the best of what is in us, the ideal humanity. Okay, you
standard idealist humanist 'death of God' is the worst in a way, the most disgusting mode of surviving God. You know this humanist version, God doesn't exist, God is just the best of what is in us, the ideal humanity. Okay, you
unknown
have a God who doesn't exist but who still screws screws your life totally. He is still here as this inexistent ideal order, no? And Nietzsche was well aware that in this sense it's not enough to make this move from that a God who is a dead God still exists precisely as a virtual symbolic order. This is the humanist position: we don't need God as a real God, the old
have a God who doesn't exist but who still screws screws your life totally. He is still here as this inexistent ideal order, no? And Nietzsche was well aware that in this sense it's not enough to make this move from that a God who is a dead God still exists precisely as a virtual symbolic order. This is the humanist position: we don't need God as a real God, the old
Slavoj Žižek
guy city come there, but God as an ideal order is still here. Where is this important? For example, sorry for bothering you with this old bullshit, but the whole Stalinism is based on this. Of course Stalinism is atheist in the sense of 'there is no transcendent God.' But if you understand God as Lacanian non-existing Big Other, that is to say as an ideal symbolic network which guarantees the meaning of your acts, then God does exist. This is the only way to account for, for example, the most mysterious Stalinist category, the one of objective responsibility. The idea is even if you are personally a good guy and you meant it well, objectively in the eyes of history you are responsible. That is to say you act as if history is not just a chaotic collective process, but there is some kind of ideal order to which you can refer and which as it were determines the meaning of the acts. And the idea is that we communists have direct access to that Big Other. Isn't then history without God? Isn't that the Stalinism? Like... yeah, but a dead God who is still there as... yeah, but 'without God' and that's precisely... only as a dead God, yes. Yeah, but this is not enough. And again, this is I will not bore you with this but this is my eternal problem with Christianity. The standard reading of Christianity is that it's precisely this. Okay, God dies, the old idiot, they my friends who don't follow me here, and now I will make to you an intimate confession: my two best friends, the other two members of our Communist Troika, the three Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič, no, they, and why do you smile in such an evil way? You agree with them, you traitor? I'm sorry. No, what I'm saying is that they also think that Hegel and Christianity here the same are not yet truly materialist, that they are at this level. For Hegel, for example, Hegel even proposed this wonderful formula, you know, that what dies on the cross is not just in Christianity is not just a messenger of God, it's not just you know God sent his son, things went wrong, okay the son dies, God says 'Okay, my boy, come back, we will try again maybe thus... ' No, that what dies on the cross is the very God of beyond. But the trick is this one: God as real living God dies, but he survives as the precisely Hegelian ideal order, as the very immanent symbolic structure, or to put it in Christian terms, God dies but Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit is here. And Holy Spirit is just what? It's no longer God up there. Here my friends accept my Christian, my materialist reading of Christianity where I claim that the whole topic of second coming and so on, no, reincarnation, it's if you are a radical Christian it's wrong. Remember when followers ask Christ 'How will you know that you will come back blah blah,' Christ gives a beautiful answer, he says 'When there are love between two of you I am there.' So it means let's not fall into vulgar reading of Christianity: it's not that something special will happen, Christ... no, Christ is already here when we love each other. So but okay, they my friends, no, they claim that precisely this is not enough. That holy... and even Lacan seems to support them because at least in his early seminars, I think already in seminar II and then in VII, maybe even more, he says explicitly that the Holy Spirit is the Christian name for the Big Other. For this you know like... and what I try to prove, what I'm struggling with in my book, *The Monstrosity of Christ*, the dialogue with that weird fellow-traveller John Milbank, no, the the so-called radical orthodoxy guy, is that precisely it's not just this in Christianity. It's a more radical death. What do I mean by this? We should... let's return to Lacan. Lacan doesn't later Lacan doesn't only... okay, for Lacan the formula of atheism is God is dead, this is the Lacan who still believes in the Big Other as it were. But then the moment Lacan got it that the Big Other is inconsistent, barred and so on, he changed his formula of atheism, no? His formula of atheism is then not 'God doesn't exist' but as maybe some of you know 'God is unconscious.' That's his late... and what does he mean by this? Well, I will not be long here, don't be afraid, because I already mentioned this. God is unconscious means simply that we believe in God, that even if you are officially atheist, you know all the examples I was giving you about how even if you don't believe, you get a naive guy who believes for you or the structure of objective belief is there. Which is why I will not bore you but this is I think one of the things that are not totally stupid which I develop, one of the few things I'm relatively proud of, to reread in this way... I'm sorry if you know already this line, I hope I didn't already talk too much about it here... that Marxist notion of commodity fetishism. You should be very careful there what Marx is saying. Which is why I think it's fully worth rereading. This is the best of Marx. Marx is not the stupid humanist who says, his fetishism is not 'we are stupid, we treat... we should have known that money is just an embodiment of social relations but we treat money as a fetish, as something magical and so on and so on.' It's much more complex. The point of Marx again is not that fetishism is not we subjects caught in bourgeois order don't see how things really are. No, to be brutal, things themselves don't see. Or to put it in a different way. You remember the big Marxist formula of fetishism? Sorry, of ideology, which is from *Capital*: *Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es*. They don't know what they are doing but they are doing it. Ah! What does this mean? Read it closely. It's not just the common stupidity of 'they don't know what they are doing' in the sense of, you know, they are doing something but they have a wrong idea about what they are doing. No no no. Marx is saying something much more ingenious, which is: in reality, in their social activity, in their doing, they are following illusions. But they don't know what illusions they are following. They don't know what in their activity they believe. And this is, for example, when Marx mentions this commodity fetishism and he even talks... this is Marx at his best. Look at that, if you want to read a beautiful text, that appendix to the first... to... it's in the second edition Marx put it together to the first chapter of *Capital* on commodity fetishism. The first phrase there at the beginning, no, which says: 'Commodity appears something like this, at the first sight a very simple thing, a commodity, just an object. But analysis, closer analysis brings out a whole I don't know dimension of theological niceties.' Are you aware what Marx is saying here? Exactly the opposite of the usual materialist criticism. Because the usual critique like the critique of religion would have been: commodity appears something mystical, obscure, or religion, but we as materialists should demonstrate how this mystical effect is the result of alienation of our real life process, you know that, blah blah blah. Marx is saying almost the exact opposite. Marx is not saying, again, you are stupid guy who believes in a fetish but in reality there is no fetish, just actual social activity of no... Marx says: in your everyday life, you believe these are just simple objects. The theological dimension is Marx-similar is a Lacanian there. The theological dimension of commodity fetishism is unconscious. The point of Marx is this one: when you say 'But there is nothing mystical about money. Money is just a sign which gives you a right to the part of the social product. Money is about people working together, blah blah.' Marx is fully aware that this is the everyday view of a normal bourgeois subject. What Marx claims is that when the moment you are active on market, buying selling and so on, you are not following this. You are acting as if you believe. The belief, the erroneous fetishist belief is in your acting. And if I may now I will do something horrible now for which I apologize in advance. I will repeat a joke which I used in my writings, not in talks, in my writings I would say about to times, you know. But I'll do it because again I will reread it through Alenka Zupančič who reused it, you know, I'm now I'm ashamed. But you know that eternal joke, maybe I mentioned it here even of you know, I love these stupid jokes about psychiatrists, you know. They can be extremely materialist beautiful ones. Like for example, this is not the one which I want to use. Do you know that joke about a crocodile? A patient goes to an analyst and complains 'I have this obsession, vision, that there is a crocodile beneath my bed, no?' And the analyst said 'Oh this must be some unconscious complex traumas haunting you, let's talk about your father, mother and so on, horrible no?' So okay, he is in analysis for months and at the end he is convinced okay there is no crocodile, it was my traumatic hallucination. The guy goes home. It's over. And then a month later the same psychiatrist meets the a friend of this guy and says, 'What happened with that guy? You know the one who was in... ' and you know what the friend answers? 'Didn't you hear about the tragedy? You mean the guy who was eaten by a crocodile beneath...' But this is materialism. A very correct joke. But okay, the one unfortunately is even better, it's even better known, is the one... ah, you know which is my favorite joke here? If you were... this is... should be the ultimate humps joke or whatever. You must know it. It's just an obscenity. It has to do something with theory, with drive. If you want to understand the notion of drive you should follow this one. Maybe you know it. You know another great contribution of United States apart from, to world culture, apart from how it should be called? Apart from canned laughter and and jokes about doctors, good good news, bad news, are jokes about idiots. You know the scene is an an experienced woman introduces an idiot for the first time to sex. And how things go wrong, and this is for me the absolutely ideal one. Okay, a guy is introduced to sex by a woman. They undress, she shows him her organs, masturbates him, she tells him 'This is now erection,' no? And then teaches him how he enter her and then she said, 'Okay, now you move your humps no, in out, in out.' And you can guess what happens. After half a minute the idiot says, 'Can't you finally make up your mind, is it in or out?' you know. Again, why do I say drive? Because the whole point of drive is that precisely the circulation of drive, the movement itself is the goal, you know. The guy didn't get it, you know. So okay, but now let's take I'm postponing the moment of the real joke because it's so well known that I'm embarrassed but it has better versions. Namely is that joke you know about a guy who thought he is a a grain of corn and you know the story no and he is finally cured left out of psychiatric asylum then he returns and psychiatrist asks him 'What's the point? What went wrong?' He said 'Wait, I met a chicken who threatened to eat me, no?' And then the guy psychiatrist says 'But you know now that you are a man not a piece of grain and' you know, okay, he says 'I know this but does the chicken know that I am now a man, no?' This joke, naive as it may appear, is how fetishism is structured. It doesn't matter if we know it. It matters if as it were the Big Other knows it. Of course the Big Other doesn't exist which means if we believe that the Big Other is still here to know it or not. Alenka Zupančič, I quote her in my *Parallax View* book here I think, did a wonderful version propos atheism. She paraphrased the same joke in this sense: imagine a kind of a (my ideal country) a kind of a brutal Jacobin atheist dictatorship, republic, where if you believe you are treated as deviationist you have to be cured. And then it's the same thing, a guy is is subjected, a believer, to this treatment and finally he is cured okay God doesn't exist and so on and so on. So he's left out but comes running back fast no and the there that ideologist whatever asks him 'What's the problem?' He said 'I feel I feel haunted threatened by God, no?' And then again you can imagine what happens. 'No, doctor,' says 'but you know that God doesn't exist.' And he says 'Yes, but does God know that he now doesn't exist?' and so on. It's a totally it's a totally correct structure. And I will give you a couple of further examples to see the... indeed in the same sense for Marx we know that there is no commodity fetishism but commodities themselves don't know it. And which is why, read that chapter on commodity fetishism, in order to explain commodity fetishism, Marx literally says: imagine one commodity talking to another commodity. And then you get the fetishist formula of fetishist reversal. So Marx literally got this. That... why is this so interesting, this structure? Because when I read I think Daniel Dennett, I think in his *Consciousness Explained*, which is a nice intelligent book but nonetheless I claim it doesn't do precisely what it promises to do. It does not. It's not good enough. But nonetheless, he criticizing naivety or whatever, he he that is to say Dennett accuses the opponents of his position that they distinguish in a nonsensical way two positions: how things appear to us and how things really appear. You know, an apparent nonsense of redoubling appearance. Think that we do not have simply the distinction between how things really are and how they appear to us, but how things really are, how they really appear, and how they wrongly appear to us. But this this is precisely Marx's formula. Commodity fetishism is how things really objectively appear. And why is this so important? Because and we should here go to the end in drawing this paradox, we can imagine the situation where things are in a certain way really and you know how they are but you are still wrong because you don't know how they really appear. You know which is why for example and that's the whole point of Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism. If you are a rational subject who says 'What's the mystery? We live in a social world there is nothing magic in money, money is just a a object which according to our common agreement gives the one who owns it the right to a part of social product, money is about people working together blah blah.' Of course we all know this and it is like this but we don't know that in our social life they don't appear like this. You know this wonderful notion of objective appearance. And this is I think the best definition maybe of the best definition maybe of the Freudian notion of fantasy. Fantasy is not subjective. Fantasy is not how things appear to you. No, fantasy is as a rule even too intense, too crazy to be subjectively assumed. Fantasy is how things is fantasy is how things really appear. Which is why this maybe would have been one of the intelligent psychoanalytic answers to to the primitive, they are not all primitive, brain sciences, namely uh... let's put it like this. I had a debate with brain scientist at Duke University and it was very nice to debate with them. Namely, the they told me, you know, the usual story, like this usual brain science reductionist pessimism to shock you, they told me, 'Oh, you may think that when you are in love something sublime is happening but we can show you easily how it's all just about some neuronal excitations etc etc, like it's no big deal it's just a stupid biochemical process, no?' But to this, if you are a believer in love, to this you can still answer convincingly by simply saying 'Fuck you, I don't care. You can have your objective truth but I still, you cannot take from me like I am, sorry, I will not not to be prosecuted for harassment, I will not look at anyone, I will just say like... okay like okay, I passionately fanatically desire you and you can tell me 'okay, I don't care, you can't take the intensity of the feeling from me,' no?' A psychoanalyst, yes, can take precisely this from I claim. Because he does not claim that it's how... the unconscious is not an objective process. The Freudian unconscious is not this which is not even unconscious, it's not this how should I call it simply objective natural process, in the stupid sense in which neurons are unconscious because they are not aware... no, unconscious is precisely it's still a subjective state, a fantasy whatever, but desubjectivized. You know, this wonderful idea of not of reality inaccessible to me, that's standard stupid ontology which is 'we can we perceive only phenomena there is some transcendent reality.' No, reality is easily acceptable accessible to us through sciences and so on. Phenomena then there are radical phenomena which are not accessible to us. And this is Lacan's... so again, ah, I didn't lose the the the the thread. My point would have been my point would have been that the truly radical act is not for you or me not to believe, that's easy, but to kill the chicken or I mean, to to to convince the chicken not to believe. And this can be an extremely depressive thing. You remember I told you about Benigni, no, the you remember this I remember the theater he said, the alternate version of *Life is Beautiful* where he learns that the child never believed in it, knew it. This would be kind of the the chicken itself stopped stopped to believe. Or you know which is another story which has a nice moment like this. I must confess I haven't read the novel. I I don't know I don't like Scorsese so much, I it's Scorsese's movie that I've seen. Do you remember, uh, what's that Edith Wharton that he did? *The Age of Innocence*. Sorry? *The Age of Innocence*. Yes. Do you remember vaguely the story? Okay, Daniel Day-Lewis I think, guy married with young bride Winona Ryder I think, and then falls passionately in love with with Michelle Pfeiffer (incidentally strange choice for me, I would much prefer Winona Ryder, that's another my personal madness, you know). But then what happens is that you remember he thinks this is a secret passionate affair. And then you remember the scene at the end of the film when Winona Ryder dies and he thinks 'Now okay I'm free finally to legally openly go to my mistress Michelle Pfeiffer, marry her.' But then he meets in front of her house his son who tells him, 'Don't you know, mother knew it all the time. She just pretended innocence.' So you know this innocence is not direct innocence, it's what we call politeness: you act as if you don't know, no? And this ruins everything. The moment he knows that she knew, for him all is ruined. You know, again, it's the same: he learned that the chicken knew it, no? That's the death of God. So for Lacan, you see the nice point, I like the implicit theology, which is ultimately what I was telling about Big Other, Big Other as God. God is not only you know the old guy who knows everything, God is also the ultimate innocence, the one who shouldn't know. You know, what if God (and I'm not talking about real God, I'm talking about how the idea of God functions in our symbolic enemy) is also or at least at the same time the one, this innocent gaze for which or for whom we should maintain innocence, you know like you remember yesterday when I talked about *Casablanca*, no? God is the gaze for which we should pretend what happened, nothing, it was just two seconds and a half. And I think that this exactly is what happens in Christianity. How? Okay, allow me a little bit to go on. Another old story, maybe you know it already but I like to repeat it. I think it all started with the Book of Job. How do you call it? He-Yob, Job, you know the guy who got screwed up in all his holes, my God, you know, by Old Testament. Okay, I claim that this is one of the greatest texts of world culture. No wonder it's such an embarrassment that there is, okay now Church decided and the Jewish establishment, 'This is part of the Bible, so you cannot change it.' But I know from different theologians, that's their big temptation: to... I can guarantee you if some religious authority were to decide 'We were wrong, God gave us another chance to restructure Holy Bible,' you know, to say, 'No, this text should go out, we made a mistake, this text should go in,' I can guarantee you that the first one to be excluded would have been the Book of Job. You know, and again there are even tendencies, you know how among Jewish and among Christian theologians like privately they admit to you maybe... when they established the Bible, I think third, fourth century somewhere there, you know we all know that the Bible is one big falsification in a totally contingent way through strategic considerations and so on. When was it? Do you know when was it established what is in and what... around I think, no? That they made a mistake there. Why? It's not so much what you think. It's not so much this cynical idea, you know as I already mentioned it, you know God sitting at a table with with Devil and 'Oh, let's test that sucker Job, does he really believe in me or not?' What so wonderful there is what happens then, that's the subversiveness. You know what happens then, God Job's life is screwed up, you know, he loses in this order (I like how it says in the Bible) his goats, his wives, his horses and so on etc. I like this. But nonetheless, okay, he is in deep shit. Then what happens? This is really the first great piece of ideology, critique of ideology. You remember what happens then, three stupid theological friends come, one after the other, precisely three ideologists. Each of them tries to console Job, but how? By trying to convince him (a very precise point) that his suffering has a deeper meaning. You know, the first one says (I simplify very much), 'God is just, so if you suffered, it means even if you don't know what, you must have done something wrong.' The second one says (I simplify), something like 'This is just the divine plan to test you whatever blah blah blah.' But the point is... and here we see Job's greatness. Job is not saying 'I'm innocent.' He just claims 'I don't accept the bullshit that this suffering has any deeper meaning.' That's Job's point, no? And you know how important this is, even today. For example, when I was in Israel, I had a weird meeting, I was... I met a couple of weird guys there. Now my attack against you, the the Deleuzian revisionist. Do you know, I don't know the guy, but I met him, fuck you, I met him. Do you know that (you must know the story, they now even translated the book into French), you know that in IDF, Israel Defense Forces military academy, I'm not kidding, one of the basic reference books is Deleuze's *Mille Plateaux*. And the guy, it's not a joke, they published it in France and in German, the guy uses this idea of triage, restructuring, no, of these different space strategies. Out of Deleuze, he elaborated the strategy how to fight Palestinians, you know, with direct application from Deleuze. They established this strategy of not entering through the door but you know, multi-space, to break through the wall or whatever. So sorry, I cannot resist bad joke, sorry. Aren't you ashamed? You are solidary with Israeli military... you traitor! No, sorry, it's bad joke. I am not saying that... you know what only made me bitter a little bit? First, I'm totally for Deleuze and so on, and incidentally I met him once and I knew people who knew him. He was subjectively a little bit like you, he was one of the most dignified, generous persons privately. You know how he died? He had some bullshit with lungs and he had to enter, he attached to a machine, and he didn't want to arouse sympathy, you know. He simply when he couldn't move around without all that machine, he stopped seeing people. Just three four closest friends. He said 'It's too humiliating, I don't want to be that sentimental guy who...' Oh, isn't this a beautiful ethics, no? And then when this became too much, he jumped down from... I mean, he was an incredible ethical person. My bad guy here is Michel Foucault, if you ask me. I think this is the opposition. Because people think only about their big pact, you know, they as it were fell in love, not sexually, and celebrate each other. But I what people don't know, and Deleuze did write about it, is how later they nonetheless split, moved away from each other again. Okay, but that's another story. What I want to say is that... sorry, you? Can I ask...? Yeah, of course. In what you are saying and in relation to desire that you have explained before... can you sort of make the parallel with in a way how Hezbollah functions in relation to the Israelis, in the sense that it sort of embodies their desire to have somebody that I don't know threatens them, scares them, and so on? Up to a point, you know in what sense? When I was in Ramallah, I did... how is it called, I forget his name, who is the Palestinian Prime Minister now, that Harvard trained, not Abbas? Sorry? Abbas. No no no, Abbas is the boss, president. But the Prime Minister, Salam something. Salam Fayyad. Yeah yeah. It doesn't matter, he's a very good technocrat and so on. But I support him. You know why? Because his... and I learned from my friends there, Israelis are really afraid of him because instead of playing with stupid bombs and so on, you know what he is doing like crazy? He is silently building an efficient state apparatus. Like my Palestinian friends were shocked when they told me 'Now you park a car in Ramallah, police is more strict than in across the street in Jerusalem, you pay or you have to pay tax.' You know, and he is doing a wonderful job and Israelis have this kind of an envy and fear towards... because they know that what he is doing is, instead of bombs and so on, he is simply he is doing precisely the opposite of what the Israelis are doing. The Israelis claim we want peace but really they don't want peace, they want to de facto change things on the terrain as much as possible so that at a certain point, the all the talk about two states would become meaningless. Already now it's very tragic, you know. Look at, and it's difficult to find it, here we have the Zionist lobby, sorry to use this term, but are do you know like we speak about West Bank and some Israeli settlements there. Fuck it, look at the exact plan. It's not that there is West Bank and some Israeli settlement. Palestinians fully control around I think, a little bit more. Then you have one zone fully for settlements and another zone... so what I'm saying is that it's absolutely clear that Israelis are slowly, slowly trying to bring about the state where de facto they will control it. Now now what this guy Salam Fayyad is doing: he is doing the opposite without big fuss (I know he is just a good bourgeois capitalist economist) but he is doing a nice job here. He is silently building the entire state apparatus so that his wager is exactly the opposite one: at a certain point, the world and Israel will simply notice, 'No, sorry, West Bank is no longer a couple of crazy Arafat-like terrorists, it's a modest but efficient modern state apparatus,' you know. He is doing the right thing. And here I agree with you, if your point was how of course they hate Hezbollah or Hamas, but this is much more the enemy they really want. And I will give you a proof, I learned this when I was in Israel. Do you know, do you remember, how is that woman? I forgot her name, you must also have it, you most of you know it, that pupil of of Edward Said who was sometime years ago a public face of Al-Fatah? Hanan Ashrawi. Yeah yeah. Did you notice how in the last years she more or less disappeared? years ago you saw her all the time on CNN. Okay, what my Palestinian and Jewish friends told me, it's incredible. Is how, you know how this happened? With the weird plot from fundamentalist Palestinian hardliners and Zionists. They both didn't like her. Hardliners of course not: 'Who is this Western educated woman blah blah blah.' But Zionists also because for them she gave a totally wrong impression, like they liked some mumbling guy like Arafat who doesn't speak English. They say, 'Yeah, these are the real Palestinians.' And all of a sudden you have there an extremely articulated, you know, and so she was the... this is why precisely there was a kind of a shared plot to squeeze her out. And she is now still around and so on, no, but no longer... No, I'm very much involved in this, I just... No, I had a problem when I was there with this BDS or whatever, boycott, no? Yes. I told them that in principle I support it, but I told them that unfortunately I come from Europe. And even if you put all these qualifications, you know, 'It's not Jews, it's just the state of Israel,' you know, it brings too close in Europe the association of 'Boycott the Jews,' antisemitism and so on. And I told them unfortunately today in Europe (let's be frank, in Hungary, many other places) the old classic antisemitism is rising again. It's implicit...
guy city come there, but God as an ideal order is still here. Where is this important? For example, sorry for bothering you with this old bullshit, but the whole Stalinism is based on this. Of course Stalinism is atheist in the sense of 'there is no transcendent God.' But if you understand God as Lacanian non-existing Big Other, that is to say as an ideal symbolic network which guarantees the meaning of your acts, then God does exist. This is the only way to account for, for example, the most mysterious Stalinist category, the one of objective responsibility. The idea is even if you are personally a good guy and you meant it well, objectively in the eyes of history you are responsible. That is to say you act as if history is not just a chaotic collective process, but there is some kind of ideal order to which you can refer and which as it were determines the meaning of the acts. And the idea is that we communists have direct access to that Big Other. Isn't then history without God? Isn't that the Stalinism? Like... yeah, but a dead God who is still there as... yeah, but 'without God' and that's precisely... only as a dead God, yes. Yeah, but this is not enough. And again, this is I will not bore you with this but this is my eternal problem with Christianity. The standard reading of Christianity is that it's precisely this. Okay, God dies, the old idiot, they my friends who don't follow me here, and now I will make to you an intimate confession: my two best friends, the other two members of our Communist Troika, the three Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič, no, they, and why do you smile in such an evil way? You agree with them, you traitor? I'm sorry. No, what I'm saying is that they also think that Hegel and Christianity here the same are not yet truly materialist, that they are at this level. For Hegel, for example, Hegel even proposed this wonderful formula, you know, that what dies on the cross is not just in Christianity is not just a messenger of God, it's not just you know God sent his son, things went wrong, okay the son dies, God says 'Okay, my boy, come back, we will try again maybe thus... ' No, that what dies on the cross is the very God of beyond. But the trick is this one: God as real living God dies, but he survives as the precisely Hegelian ideal order, as the very immanent symbolic structure, or to put it in Christian terms, God dies but Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit is here. And Holy Spirit is just what? It's no longer God up there. Here my friends accept my Christian, my materialist reading of Christianity where I claim that the whole topic of second coming and so on, no, reincarnation, it's if you are a radical Christian it's wrong. Remember when followers ask Christ 'How will you know that you will come back blah blah,' Christ gives a beautiful answer, he says 'When there are love between two of you I am there.' So it means let's not fall into vulgar reading of Christianity: it's not that something special will happen, Christ... no, Christ is already here when we love each other. So but okay, they my friends, no, they claim that precisely this is not enough. That holy... and even Lacan seems to support them because at least in his early seminars, I think already in seminar II and then in VII, maybe even more, he says explicitly that the Holy Spirit is the Christian name for the Big Other. For this you know like... and what I try to prove, what I'm struggling with in my book, *The Monstrosity of Christ*, the dialogue with that weird fellow-traveller John Milbank, no, the the so-called radical orthodoxy guy, is that precisely it's not just this in Christianity. It's a more radical death. What do I mean by this? We should... let's return to Lacan. Lacan doesn't later Lacan doesn't only... okay, for Lacan the formula of atheism is God is dead, this is the Lacan who still believes in the Big Other as it were. But then the moment Lacan got it that the Big Other is inconsistent, barred and so on, he changed his formula of atheism, no? His formula of atheism is then not 'God doesn't exist' but as maybe some of you know 'God is unconscious.' That's his late... and what does he mean by this? Well, I will not be long here, don't be afraid, because I already mentioned this. God is unconscious means simply that we believe in God, that even if you are officially atheist, you know all the examples I was giving you about how even if you don't believe, you get a naive guy who believes for you or the structure of objective belief is there. Which is why I will not bore you but this is I think one of the things that are not totally stupid which I develop, one of the few things I'm relatively proud of, to reread in this way... I'm sorry if you know already this line, I hope I didn't already talk too much about it here... that Marxist notion of commodity fetishism. You should be very careful there what Marx is saying. Which is why I think it's fully worth rereading. This is the best of Marx. Marx is not the stupid humanist who says, his fetishism is not 'we are stupid, we treat... we should have known that money is just an embodiment of social relations but we treat money as a fetish, as something magical and so on and so on.' It's much more complex. The point of Marx again is not that fetishism is not we subjects caught in bourgeois order don't see how things really are. No, to be brutal, things themselves don't see. Or to put it in a different way. You remember the big Marxist formula of fetishism? Sorry, of ideology, which is from *Capital*: *Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es*. They don't know what they are doing but they are doing it. Ah! What does this mean? Read it closely. It's not just the common stupidity of 'they don't know what they are doing' in the sense of, you know, they are doing something but they have a wrong idea about what they are doing. No no no. Marx is saying something much more ingenious, which is: in reality, in their social activity, in their doing, they are following illusions. But they don't know what illusions they are following. They don't know what in their activity they believe. And this is, for example, when Marx mentions this commodity fetishism and he even talks... this is Marx at his best. Look at that, if you want to read a beautiful text, that appendix to the first... to... it's in the second edition Marx put it together to the first chapter of *Capital* on commodity fetishism. The first phrase there at the beginning, no, which says: 'Commodity appears something like this, at the first sight a very simple thing, a commodity, just an object. But analysis, closer analysis brings out a whole I don't know dimension of theological niceties.' Are you aware what Marx is saying here? Exactly the opposite of the usual materialist criticism. Because the usual critique like the critique of religion would have been: commodity appears something mystical, obscure, or religion, but we as materialists should demonstrate how this mystical effect is the result of alienation of our real life process, you know that, blah blah blah. Marx is saying almost the exact opposite. Marx is not saying, again, you are stupid guy who believes in a fetish but in reality there is no fetish, just actual social activity of no... Marx says: in your everyday life, you believe these are just simple objects. The theological dimension is Marx-similar is a Lacanian there. The theological dimension of commodity fetishism is unconscious. The point of Marx is this one: when you say 'But there is nothing mystical about money. Money is just a sign which gives you a right to the part of the social product. Money is about people working together, blah blah.' Marx is fully aware that this is the everyday view of a normal bourgeois subject. What Marx claims is that when the moment you are active on market, buying selling and so on, you are not following this. You are acting as if you believe. The belief, the erroneous fetishist belief is in your acting. And if I may now I will do something horrible now for which I apologize in advance. I will repeat a joke which I used in my writings, not in talks, in my writings I would say about to times, you know. But I'll do it because again I will reread it through Alenka Zupančič who reused it, you know, I'm now I'm ashamed. But you know that eternal joke, maybe I mentioned it here even of you know, I love these stupid jokes about psychiatrists, you know. They can be extremely materialist beautiful ones. Like for example, this is not the one which I want to use. Do you know that joke about a crocodile? A patient goes to an analyst and complains 'I have this obsession, vision, that there is a crocodile beneath my bed, no?' And the analyst said 'Oh this must be some unconscious complex traumas haunting you, let's talk about your father, mother and so on, horrible no?' So okay, he is in analysis for months and at the end he is convinced okay there is no crocodile, it was my traumatic hallucination. The guy goes home. It's over. And then a month later the same psychiatrist meets the a friend of this guy and says, 'What happened with that guy? You know the one who was in... ' and you know what the friend answers? 'Didn't you hear about the tragedy? You mean the guy who was eaten by a crocodile beneath...' But this is materialism. A very correct joke. But okay, the one unfortunately is even better, it's even better known, is the one... ah, you know which is my favorite joke here? If you were... this is... should be the ultimate humps joke or whatever. You must know it. It's just an obscenity. It has to do something with theory, with drive. If you want to understand the notion of drive you should follow this one. Maybe you know it. You know another great contribution of United States apart from, to world culture, apart from how it should be called? Apart from canned laughter and and jokes about doctors, good good news, bad news, are jokes about idiots. You know the scene is an an experienced woman introduces an idiot for the first time to sex. And how things go wrong, and this is for me the absolutely ideal one. Okay, a guy is introduced to sex by a woman. They undress, she shows him her organs, masturbates him, she tells him 'This is now erection,' no? And then teaches him how he enter her and then she said, 'Okay, now you move your humps no, in out, in out.' And you can guess what happens. After half a minute the idiot says, 'Can't you finally make up your mind, is it in or out?' you know. Again, why do I say drive? Because the whole point of drive is that precisely the circulation of drive, the movement itself is the goal, you know. The guy didn't get it, you know. So okay, but now let's take I'm postponing the moment of the real joke because it's so well known that I'm embarrassed but it has better versions. Namely is that joke you know about a guy who thought he is a a grain of corn and you know the story no and he is finally cured left out of psychiatric asylum then he returns and psychiatrist asks him 'What's the point? What went wrong?' He said 'Wait, I met a chicken who threatened to eat me, no?' And then the guy psychiatrist says 'But you know now that you are a man not a piece of grain and' you know, okay, he says 'I know this but does the chicken know that I am now a man, no?' This joke, naive as it may appear, is how fetishism is structured. It doesn't matter if we know it. It matters if as it were the Big Other knows it. Of course the Big Other doesn't exist which means if we believe that the Big Other is still here to know it or not. Alenka Zupančič, I quote her in my *Parallax View* book here I think, did a wonderful version propos atheism. She paraphrased the same joke in this sense: imagine a kind of a (my ideal country) a kind of a brutal Jacobin atheist dictatorship, republic, where if you believe you are treated as deviationist you have to be cured. And then it's the same thing, a guy is is subjected, a believer, to this treatment and finally he is cured okay God doesn't exist and so on and so on. So he's left out but comes running back fast no and the there that ideologist whatever asks him 'What's the problem?' He said 'I feel I feel haunted threatened by God, no?' And then again you can imagine what happens. 'No, doctor,' says 'but you know that God doesn't exist.' And he says 'Yes, but does God know that he now doesn't exist?' and so on. It's a totally it's a totally correct structure. And I will give you a couple of further examples to see the... indeed in the same sense for Marx we know that there is no commodity fetishism but commodities themselves don't know it. And which is why, read that chapter on commodity fetishism, in order to explain commodity fetishism, Marx literally says: imagine one commodity talking to another commodity. And then you get the fetishist formula of fetishist reversal. So Marx literally got this. That... why is this so interesting, this structure? Because when I read I think Daniel Dennett, I think in his *Consciousness Explained*, which is a nice intelligent book but nonetheless I claim it doesn't do precisely what it promises to do. It does not. It's not good enough. But nonetheless, he criticizing naivety or whatever, he he that is to say Dennett accuses the opponents of his position that they distinguish in a nonsensical way two positions: how things appear to us and how things really appear. You know, an apparent nonsense of redoubling appearance. Think that we do not have simply the distinction between how things really are and how they appear to us, but how things really are, how they really appear, and how they wrongly appear to us. But this this is precisely Marx's formula. Commodity fetishism is how things really objectively appear. And why is this so important? Because and we should here go to the end in drawing this paradox, we can imagine the situation where things are in a certain way really and you know how they are but you are still wrong because you don't know how they really appear. You know which is why for example and that's the whole point of Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism. If you are a rational subject who says 'What's the mystery? We live in a social world there is nothing magic in money, money is just a a object which according to our common agreement gives the one who owns it the right to a part of social product, money is about people working together blah blah.' Of course we all know this and it is like this but we don't know that in our social life they don't appear like this. You know this wonderful notion of objective appearance. And this is I think the best definition maybe of the best definition maybe of the Freudian notion of fantasy. Fantasy is not subjective. Fantasy is not how things appear to you. No, fantasy is as a rule even too intense, too crazy to be subjectively assumed. Fantasy is how things is fantasy is how things really appear. Which is why this maybe would have been one of the intelligent psychoanalytic answers to to the primitive, they are not all primitive, brain sciences, namely uh... let's put it like this. I had a debate with brain scientist at Duke University and it was very nice to debate with them. Namely, the they told me, you know, the usual story, like this usual brain science reductionist pessimism to shock you, they told me, 'Oh, you may think that when you are in love something sublime is happening but we can show you easily how it's all just about some neuronal excitations etc etc, like it's no big deal it's just a stupid biochemical process, no?' But to this, if you are a believer in love, to this you can still answer convincingly by simply saying 'Fuck you, I don't care. You can have your objective truth but I still, you cannot take from me like I am, sorry, I will not not to be prosecuted for harassment, I will not look at anyone, I will just say like... okay like okay, I passionately fanatically desire you and you can tell me 'okay, I don't care, you can't take the intensity of the feeling from me,' no?' A psychoanalyst, yes, can take precisely this from I claim. Because he does not claim that it's how... the unconscious is not an objective process. The Freudian unconscious is not this which is not even unconscious, it's not this how should I call it simply objective natural process, in the stupid sense in which neurons are unconscious because they are not aware... no, unconscious is precisely it's still a subjective state, a fantasy whatever, but desubjectivized. You know, this wonderful idea of not of reality inaccessible to me, that's standard stupid ontology which is 'we can we perceive only phenomena there is some transcendent reality.' No, reality is easily acceptable accessible to us through sciences and so on. Phenomena then there are radical phenomena which are not accessible to us. And this is Lacan's... so again, ah, I didn't lose the the the the thread. My point would have been my point would have been that the truly radical act is not for you or me not to believe, that's easy, but to kill the chicken or I mean, to to to convince the chicken not to believe. And this can be an extremely depressive thing. You remember I told you about Benigni, no, the you remember this I remember the theater he said, the alternate version of *Life is Beautiful* where he learns that the child never believed in it, knew it. This would be kind of the the chicken itself stopped stopped to believe. Or you know which is another story which has a nice moment like this. I must confess I haven't read the novel. I I don't know I don't like Scorsese so much, I it's Scorsese's movie that I've seen. Do you remember, uh, what's that Edith Wharton that he did? *The Age of Innocence*. Sorry? *The Age of Innocence*. Yes. Do you remember vaguely the story? Okay, Daniel Day-Lewis I think, guy married with young bride Winona Ryder I think, and then falls passionately in love with with Michelle Pfeiffer (incidentally strange choice for me, I would much prefer Winona Ryder, that's another my personal madness, you know). But then what happens is that you remember he thinks this is a secret passionate affair. And then you remember the scene at the end of the film when Winona Ryder dies and he thinks 'Now okay I'm free finally to legally openly go to my mistress Michelle Pfeiffer, marry her.' But then he meets in front of her house his son who tells him, 'Don't you know, mother knew it all the time. She just pretended innocence.' So you know this innocence is not direct innocence, it's what we call politeness: you act as if you don't know, no? And this ruins everything. The moment he knows that she knew, for him all is ruined. You know, again, it's the same: he learned that the chicken knew it, no? That's the death of God. So for Lacan, you see the nice point, I like the implicit theology, which is ultimately what I was telling about Big Other, Big Other as God. God is not only you know the old guy who knows everything, God is also the ultimate innocence, the one who shouldn't know. You know, what if God (and I'm not talking about real God, I'm talking about how the idea of God functions in our symbolic enemy) is also or at least at the same time the one, this innocent gaze for which or for whom we should maintain innocence, you know like you remember yesterday when I talked about *Casablanca*, no? God is the gaze for which we should pretend what happened, nothing, it was just two seconds and a half. And I think that this exactly is what happens in Christianity. How? Okay, allow me a little bit to go on. Another old story, maybe you know it already but I like to repeat it. I think it all started with the Book of Job. How do you call it? He-Yob, Job, you know the guy who got screwed up in all his holes, my God, you know, by Old Testament. Okay, I claim that this is one of the greatest texts of world culture. No wonder it's such an embarrassment that there is, okay now Church decided and the Jewish establishment, 'This is part of the Bible, so you cannot change it.' But I know from different theologians, that's their big temptation: to... I can guarantee you if some religious authority were to decide 'We were wrong, God gave us another chance to restructure Holy Bible,' you know, to say, 'No, this text should go out, we made a mistake, this text should go in,' I can guarantee you that the first one to be excluded would have been the Book of Job. You know, and again there are even tendencies, you know how among Jewish and among Christian theologians like privately they admit to you maybe... when they established the Bible, I think third, fourth century somewhere there, you know we all know that the Bible is one big falsification in a totally contingent way through strategic considerations and so on. When was it? Do you know when was it established what is in and what... around I think, no? That they made a mistake there. Why? It's not so much what you think. It's not so much this cynical idea, you know as I already mentioned it, you know God sitting at a table with with Devil and 'Oh, let's test that sucker Job, does he really believe in me or not?' What so wonderful there is what happens then, that's the subversiveness. You know what happens then, God Job's life is screwed up, you know, he loses in this order (I like how it says in the Bible) his goats, his wives, his horses and so on etc. I like this. But nonetheless, okay, he is in deep shit. Then what happens? This is really the first great piece of ideology, critique of ideology. You remember what happens then, three stupid theological friends come, one after the other, precisely three ideologists. Each of them tries to console Job, but how? By trying to convince him (a very precise point) that his suffering has a deeper meaning. You know, the first one says (I simplify very much), 'God is just, so if you suffered, it means even if you don't know what, you must have done something wrong.' The second one says (I simplify), something like 'This is just the divine plan to test you whatever blah blah blah.' But the point is... and here we see Job's greatness. Job is not saying 'I'm innocent.' He just claims 'I don't accept the bullshit that this suffering has any deeper meaning.' That's Job's point, no? And you know how important this is, even today. For example, when I was in Israel, I had a weird meeting, I was... I met a couple of weird guys there. Now my attack against you, the the Deleuzian revisionist. Do you know, I don't know the guy, but I met him, fuck you, I met him. Do you know that (you must know the story, they now even translated the book into French), you know that in IDF, Israel Defense Forces military academy, I'm not kidding, one of the basic reference books is Deleuze's *Mille Plateaux*. And the guy, it's not a joke, they published it in France and in German, the guy uses this idea of triage, restructuring, no, of these different space strategies. Out of Deleuze, he elaborated the strategy how to fight Palestinians, you know, with direct application from Deleuze. They established this strategy of not entering through the door but you know, multi-space, to break through the wall or whatever. So sorry, I cannot resist bad joke, sorry. Aren't you ashamed? You are solidary with Israeli military... you traitor! No, sorry, it's bad joke. I am not saying that... you know what only made me bitter a little bit? First, I'm totally for Deleuze and so on, and incidentally I met him once and I knew people who knew him. He was subjectively a little bit like you, he was one of the most dignified, generous persons privately. You know how he died? He had some bullshit with lungs and he had to enter, he attached to a machine, and he didn't want to arouse sympathy, you know. He simply when he couldn't move around without all that machine, he stopped seeing people. Just three four closest friends. He said 'It's too humiliating, I don't want to be that sentimental guy who...' Oh, isn't this a beautiful ethics, no? And then when this became too much, he jumped down from... I mean, he was an incredible ethical person. My bad guy here is Michel Foucault, if you ask me. I think this is the opposition. Because people think only about their big pact, you know, they as it were fell in love, not sexually, and celebrate each other. But I what people don't know, and Deleuze did write about it, is how later they nonetheless split, moved away from each other again. Okay, but that's another story. What I want to say is that... sorry, you? Can I ask...? Yeah, of course. In what you are saying and in relation to desire that you have explained before... can you sort of make the parallel with in a way how Hezbollah functions in relation to the Israelis, in the sense that it sort of embodies their desire to have somebody that I don't know threatens them, scares them, and so on? Up to a point, you know in what sense? When I was in Ramallah, I did... how is it called, I forget his name, who is the Palestinian Prime Minister now, that Harvard trained, not Abbas? Sorry? Abbas. No no no, Abbas is the boss, president. But the Prime Minister, Salam something. Salam Fayyad. Yeah yeah. It doesn't matter, he's a very good technocrat and so on. But I support him. You know why? Because his... and I learned from my friends there, Israelis are really afraid of him because instead of playing with stupid bombs and so on, you know what he is doing like crazy? He is silently building an efficient state apparatus. Like my Palestinian friends were shocked when they told me 'Now you park a car in Ramallah, police is more strict than in across the street in Jerusalem, you pay or you have to pay tax.' You know, and he is doing a wonderful job and Israelis have this kind of an envy and fear towards... because they know that what he is doing is, instead of bombs and so on, he is simply he is doing precisely the opposite of what the Israelis are doing. The Israelis claim we want peace but really they don't want peace, they want to de facto change things on the terrain as much as possible so that at a certain point, the all the talk about two states would become meaningless. Already now it's very tragic, you know. Look at, and it's difficult to find it, here we have the Zionist lobby, sorry to use this term, but are do you know like we speak about West Bank and some Israeli settlements there. Fuck it, look at the exact plan. It's not that there is West Bank and some Israeli settlement. Palestinians fully control around I think, a little bit more. Then you have one zone fully for settlements and another zone... so what I'm saying is that it's absolutely clear that Israelis are slowly, slowly trying to bring about the state where de facto they will control it. Now now what this guy Salam Fayyad is doing: he is doing the opposite without big fuss (I know he is just a good bourgeois capitalist economist) but he is doing a nice job here. He is silently building the entire state apparatus so that his wager is exactly the opposite one: at a certain point, the world and Israel will simply notice, 'No, sorry, West Bank is no longer a couple of crazy Arafat-like terrorists, it's a modest but efficient modern state apparatus,' you know. He is doing the right thing. And here I agree with you, if your point was how of course they hate Hezbollah or Hamas, but this is much more the enemy they really want. And I will give you a proof, I learned this when I was in Israel. Do you know, do you remember, how is that woman? I forgot her name, you must also have it, you most of you know it, that pupil of of Edward Said who was sometime years ago a public face of Al-Fatah? Hanan Ashrawi. Yeah yeah. Did you notice how in the last years she more or less disappeared? years ago you saw her all the time on CNN. Okay, what my Palestinian and Jewish friends told me, it's incredible. Is how, you know how this happened? With the weird plot from fundamentalist Palestinian hardliners and Zionists. They both didn't like her. Hardliners of course not: 'Who is this Western educated woman blah blah blah.' But Zionists also because for them she gave a totally wrong impression, like they liked some mumbling guy like Arafat who doesn't speak English. They say, 'Yeah, these are the real Palestinians.' And all of a sudden you have there an extremely articulated, you know, and so she was the... this is why precisely there was a kind of a shared plot to squeeze her out. And she is now still around and so on, no, but no longer... No, I'm very much involved in this, I just... No, I had a problem when I was there with this BDS or whatever, boycott, no? Yes. I told them that in principle I support it, but I told them that unfortunately I come from Europe. And even if you put all these qualifications, you know, 'It's not Jews, it's just the state of Israel,' you know, it brings too close in Europe the association of 'Boycott the Jews,' antisemitism and so on. And I told them unfortunately today in Europe (let's be frank, in Hungary, many other places) the old classic antisemitism is rising again. It's implicit...
unknown
ah no no, we have something, I'm not exaggerating. Didn't you notice, I've written about it? My god, very important political development. I think Breivik, you know our good friend from Norway, Breivik. Do you know he is very interesting ideological phenomenon? I hope you didn't, it's boring, but I had Norwegian friend who did
ah no no, we have something, I'm not exaggerating. Didn't you notice, I've written about it? My god, very important political development. I think Breivik, you know our good friend from Norway, Breivik. Do you know he is very interesting ideological phenomenon? I hope you didn't, it's boring, but I had Norwegian friend who did
Slavoj Žižek
read his stupid manifesto, it's worse than Stalin or Hitler, like pages, fuck it. But it's interesting what you learn there. Breivik was at the same time pro-Zionist, absolutely no, he says 'We should fully support the state of Israel, it's our first line of defense against the Arabs' Muslim threat blah blah all that.' He even thinks they should (this is the big point) they should destroy that mosque, how is it called? Al-Aqsa. Yeah yeah and build there some of those stupid Sol Paul temples or whatever no. But now comes the surprise: at the same time with regard to the West, he's antisemitic. We have people, when I proposed this idea years ago that the next stage will be pro-Zionist antisemitism, people told me 'Oh it's some of your bad taste deconstructionist jokes whatever.' No it's not my god, the guy says, 'We should support them there, but here they are a danger.' And he even in his manifesto has one page where he says 'In Europe it's not so bad' (the implication because Hitler did his job and cleaned), but he says 'England is so-so and the United States is a catastrophe and they will have to face this problem and so on and so on.' Now let's go a step further. Now okay, next counter-reproach is: this is a unique guy there, ah ah. Do you know who is my favorite commentary, the best of American TV, bad joke? Do you know who is or rather was, he was thrown out, Glenn Beck of Fox News? This guy... he was the same, don't you know? He was fired by Fox, he had to be, because he is the same: absolutely pro-Zionist, visiting Israel, he he simply immediately advocate this solution of 'Throw the Palestinians out of the way,' but at the same time within the United States, he was openly antisemitic. He was the one who did what no leftist, honest leftist did: he openly linked the meltdown to a Jewish plot. It was a trick by Jewish bankers who... no, and I would generalize it. The thing which really works me, I'm all the time telling my Jewish friends this, how come that the American fundamentalist right (these are people who, if I may put it so, it is in their nature to be antisemitic), if I may put it ironically in this naturalist... it has nothing to do with some Judith Butler cultural construction, it's simply in their genes' nature. If there is one who will always be... how come that (and this is only the last years or so, you know they were always a little bit also against Israel), now for the last years, they're the staunchest supporters of Zionist project. Of course their justification we know what it is, it's the stupid one because it says in that how do you call that the very end of the Bible? Book of Revelation. Yeah, it says that before Messiah or blah blah, before the end of the day, Jews will return. They see this as part of no... yeah. But it's more, it's very obscure. Sorry, but you wanted to... on your point of Hezbollah, I think if I'm correct what you were asking was if you could fit it into a Lacanian conception of the empty signifier, like the Jew filled for the German, yeah? Does Israel have the same function for Hezbollah, is it commensurate on the other side? Is that sort of... Yeah yeah more or less. You know what I mean? But I know it's not as simple, you can't... No, I also, you know why not? Yeah, I agree with you in this sense because you know, I either I nonetheless don't think that in the same way the entire Zionist project is linked to to some antisemitic fundamentalism. First, you know, let's make it clear, you know that here even Gaddafi was right when he claimed that you know that Arab hatred of Jews is relatively recent phenomenon. It's only when after in the early 20th century when before the relations the relations were very very good and this lasted almost till thirties and so on, it was often incredible solidarity. So I think that if you are looking for the Other of Zionist project, it's more I don't know a certain type of Western antisemitism and so on. I don't think Arabs are constitutive of it. But the way where I agree with you is that for strategic opportunistic reasons again, Hezbollah or Hamas are the ideal opponent. That's the opponent they need to pursue their task. And it's even literally true. I was so shocked, you know, you should be evil and read the news. You learn many things in news which you know you just get a small note here there and it doesn't explode into big news if you are just attentive, you read it in a Freudian way, you know as Freud says to interpret things with this floating attention, just and... three four years ago when Hamas already was... I think was it, it wasn't some Arab, but it was precisely one of the big Western media New York Times or what who published this. And when I was in Israel I asked some official guys there they confirmed this to be pragmatically they said we had to do it. Do you know that till years ago Israel was supporting Hamas? Yes, actually there's a myth that that in the eighties Hamas was being created by Mossad. Yeah, you know why? Because the idea was very simple one: divide and rule, no? For them they wanted to divide the enemies and to prevent the hegemony of of Al-Fatah and so on and so on. And there are many other mysterious... maybe now it's really real hatred with Iran. But do you know that two years ago did you notice there was some mysterious item that a ship was caught intercepted in international water carrying Israeli arms to Iran and so on. I mean fuck it, who you know, things are here so obscure that who knows who knows. It's the same my god, but that's the paradox of the entire Axis of Evil, you know like name me one member of the Axis of Evil with the exception of the greatest North Korea, okay that's another point, who was not at some point either American agent or working for CIA or whatever, no? Saddam absolutely. Be serious. When Saddam did this totally opportunistic thing, the greatest crime, attacking Iran. And it was absolutely clear, his calculation was 'there is chaos there, let's grab that part of oil close to the sea.' No one dared directly to condemn him. Not only this, Americans were as we know now they admit it even supplying him with satellite images of Iranian groups and silently agreeing with the use of poisonous gas. Americans only protested seriously more or less when Saddam used the gas against Kurdish rebels. But against Iranian Mujahideen they said 'Oh they are crazy fanatics, the only way to stop them' and so on and so on. We know the story about the great guy himself, Osama bin Laden, you know, my God, he was directly in contact with CIA fighting the Soviets. And that's for me the great tragedy as I always emphasize of the Middle East. It's the disappearance of the secular left, where the West is not innocent. You
read his stupid manifesto, it's worse than Stalin or Hitler, like pages, fuck it. But it's interesting what you learn there. Breivik was at the same time pro-Zionist, absolutely no, he says 'We should fully support the state of Israel, it's our first line of defense against the Arabs' Muslim threat blah blah all that.' He even thinks they should (this is the big point) they should destroy that mosque, how is it called? Al-Aqsa. Yeah yeah and build there some of those stupid Sol Paul temples or whatever no. But now comes the surprise: at the same time with regard to the West, he's antisemitic. We have people, when I proposed this idea years ago that the next stage will be pro-Zionist antisemitism, people told me 'Oh it's some of your bad taste deconstructionist jokes whatever.' No it's not my god, the guy says, 'We should support them there, but here they are a danger.' And he even in his manifesto has one page where he says 'In Europe it's not so bad' (the implication because Hitler did his job and cleaned), but he says 'England is so-so and the United States is a catastrophe and they will have to face this problem and so on and so on.' Now let's go a step further. Now okay, next counter-reproach is: this is a unique guy there, ah ah. Do you know who is my favorite commentary, the best of American TV, bad joke? Do you know who is or rather was, he was thrown out, Glenn Beck of Fox News? This guy... he was the same, don't you know? He was fired by Fox, he had to be, because he is the same: absolutely pro-Zionist, visiting Israel, he he simply immediately advocate this solution of 'Throw the Palestinians out of the way,' but at the same time within the United States, he was openly antisemitic. He was the one who did what no leftist, honest leftist did: he openly linked the meltdown to a Jewish plot. It was a trick by Jewish bankers who... no, and I would generalize it. The thing which really works me, I'm all the time telling my Jewish friends this, how come that the American fundamentalist right (these are people who, if I may put it so, it is in their nature to be antisemitic), if I may put it ironically in this naturalist... it has nothing to do with some Judith Butler cultural construction, it's simply in their genes' nature. If there is one who will always be... how come that (and this is only the last years or so, you know they were always a little bit also against Israel), now for the last years, they're the staunchest supporters of Zionist project. Of course their justification we know what it is, it's the stupid one because it says in that how do you call that the very end of the Bible? Book of Revelation. Yeah, it says that before Messiah or blah blah, before the end of the day, Jews will return. They see this as part of no... yeah. But it's more, it's very obscure. Sorry, but you wanted to... on your point of Hezbollah, I think if I'm correct what you were asking was if you could fit it into a Lacanian conception of the empty signifier, like the Jew filled for the German, yeah? Does Israel have the same function for Hezbollah, is it commensurate on the other side? Is that sort of... Yeah yeah more or less. You know what I mean? But I know it's not as simple, you can't... No, I also, you know why not? Yeah, I agree with you in this sense because you know, I either I nonetheless don't think that in the same way the entire Zionist project is linked to to some antisemitic fundamentalism. First, you know, let's make it clear, you know that here even Gaddafi was right when he claimed that you know that Arab hatred of Jews is relatively recent phenomenon. It's only when after in the early 20th century when before the relations the relations were very very good and this lasted almost till thirties and so on, it was often incredible solidarity. So I think that if you are looking for the Other of Zionist project, it's more I don't know a certain type of Western antisemitism and so on. I don't think Arabs are constitutive of it. But the way where I agree with you is that for strategic opportunistic reasons again, Hezbollah or Hamas are the ideal opponent. That's the opponent they need to pursue their task. And it's even literally true. I was so shocked, you know, you should be evil and read the news. You learn many things in news which you know you just get a small note here there and it doesn't explode into big news if you are just attentive, you read it in a Freudian way, you know as Freud says to interpret things with this floating attention, just and... three four years ago when Hamas already was... I think was it, it wasn't some Arab, but it was precisely one of the big Western media New York Times or what who published this. And when I was in Israel I asked some official guys there they confirmed this to be pragmatically they said we had to do it. Do you know that till years ago Israel was supporting Hamas? Yes, actually there's a myth that that in the eighties Hamas was being created by Mossad. Yeah, you know why? Because the idea was very simple one: divide and rule, no? For them they wanted to divide the enemies and to prevent the hegemony of of Al-Fatah and so on and so on. And there are many other mysterious... maybe now it's really real hatred with Iran. But do you know that two years ago did you notice there was some mysterious item that a ship was caught intercepted in international water carrying Israeli arms to Iran and so on. I mean fuck it, who you know, things are here so obscure that who knows who knows. It's the same my god, but that's the paradox of the entire Axis of Evil, you know like name me one member of the Axis of Evil with the exception of the greatest North Korea, okay that's another point, who was not at some point either American agent or working for CIA or whatever, no? Saddam absolutely. Be serious. When Saddam did this totally opportunistic thing, the greatest crime, attacking Iran. And it was absolutely clear, his calculation was 'there is chaos there, let's grab that part of oil close to the sea.' No one dared directly to condemn him. Not only this, Americans were as we know now they admit it even supplying him with satellite images of Iranian groups and silently agreeing with the use of poisonous gas. Americans only protested seriously more or less when Saddam used the gas against Kurdish rebels. But against Iranian Mujahideen they said 'Oh they are crazy fanatics, the only way to stop them' and so on and so on. We know the story about the great guy himself, Osama bin Laden, you know, my God, he was directly in contact with CIA fighting the Soviets. And that's for me the great tragedy as I always emphasize of the Middle East. It's the disappearance of the secular left, where the West is not innocent. You
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know, the West made this fatal misjudgment in the era of Cold War thinking that religious fundamentalism is negligible, the real threat is Soviet influence, secular left. Ah ah, now we are all paying the price. But sorry, let's nonetheless my god we are getting lost. Let's nonetheless...
know, the West made this fatal misjudgment in the era of Cold War thinking that religious fundamentalism is negligible, the real threat is Soviet influence, secular left. Ah ah, now we are all paying the price. But sorry, let's nonetheless my god we are getting lost. Let's nonetheless...
Slavoj Žižek
Can you...? You were going to say something about Deleuze right before... Yeah no no but Deleuze, I know we started with Deleuze and with that madness of IDF IDF accusing you to be the agent... No no sorry. No what I wanted to say, we were talking how did I come to Deleuze, do you remember? IDF, the IDF that they use... Yeah but but coming to that before... you were in Israel you were talking to friends before... no, suture, suture, suture. Yeah yeah yeah. Incidentally again, if you want the best introduction into suture, you know that Deleuze wrote an excellent text in the mid-late sixties which was part of a volume *Quest-ce que le structuralisme?*, 'What is structuralism?' I know it's translated I don't know where, the title is 'A qui reconnaît-on le structuralisme?', 'Whom does one recognize as a structuralist?' which is for me maybe the best introduction to structuralist notion of suture difference and so on and so on. That's and there are other mis... okay let's not lose time I got into too crazy. What I wanted to say here to be... yes, we were at that level of yes how object a, sorry, I will make a jump now to tell you something. Uh, to tell you, yes, I know where we were. We were at this objectified belief, fetishism, slaves seduce me into their sinful ways, you know. Sorry, what I wanted to say is the following thing: that about this objectified belief and so on that... how
Can you...? You were going to say something about Deleuze right before... Yeah no no but Deleuze, I know we started with Deleuze and with that madness of IDF IDF accusing you to be the agent... No no sorry. No what I wanted to say, we were talking how did I come to Deleuze, do you remember? IDF, the IDF that they use... Yeah but but coming to that before... you were in Israel you were talking to friends before... no, suture, suture, suture. Yeah yeah yeah. Incidentally again, if you want the best introduction into suture, you know that Deleuze wrote an excellent text in the mid-late sixties which was part of a volume *Quest-ce que le structuralisme?*, 'What is structuralism?' I know it's translated I don't know where, the title is 'A qui reconnaît-on le structuralisme?', 'Whom does one recognize as a structuralist?' which is for me maybe the best introduction to structuralist notion of suture difference and so on and so on. That's and there are other mis... okay let's not lose time I got into too crazy. What I wanted to say here to be... yes, we were at that level of yes how object a, sorry, I will make a jump now to tell you something. Uh, to tell you, yes, I know where we were. We were at this objectified belief, fetishism, slaves seduce me into their sinful ways, you know. Sorry, what I wanted to say is the following thing: that about this objectified belief and so on that... how
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difficult to say. Yes, I remember
difficult to say. Yes, I remember
Slavoj Žižek
yesterday or the day before, I didn't finish the story, don't believe don't be afraid it's very short one, when I mentioned to you that I spoke with an Israeli psychiatrist you remember dealing with suicide terrorists and that the image he got I think I didn't finish it, it's very interesting: no, his impression is they do not really believe in it. In the sense of, yes I... ah, you know I remember where I lost track there. When I went into those grapes which is not really virgins but grapes, you know. And I like Palestinians are my god they are so similar to Jews, they have wonderful sense of humor and so on and they told me you know what is one of the big jokes about them that playing on this mistranslation virgins in reality those top quality raisins that there was a young frustrated Palestinian boy who couldn't get girls, so he said 'Fuck it, I believe in Quran, let me become a terrorist, I explode and then at least I will get the virgins up there,' no. So okay, he does it, kills himself gets up and then is shocked to learn he gets raisins. And then he complains to God, 'Sorry, it was a mistake, I thought like can I go back no? I wanted girls not raisins.' No they are quite nice, they know how to make fun. Palestinians are and they gave me a wonderful lesson of racism masked as multicultural respect. There was that wonderful group from Israel and my good friend Udi Aloni organized a visit of them to to New York, Jenin Freedom Theatre, you know that guy Juliano who was killed and so on. But what's so interesting is that I saw the group in New York and we went into this wonderful obscene competition between Palestinians and Jews there, like okay I was none of them, I was the judge above, who will tell a nastier joke, and my Jewish friends told me a wonderful Jewish mythology joke. Do you know why? It's a maybe you heard it but I like it so much. That's Jewish humor at its best. Do you know why after the Jews in
yesterday or the day before, I didn't finish the story, don't believe don't be afraid it's very short one, when I mentioned to you that I spoke with an Israeli psychiatrist you remember dealing with suicide terrorists and that the image he got I think I didn't finish it, it's very interesting: no, his impression is they do not really believe in it. In the sense of, yes I... ah, you know I remember where I lost track there. When I went into those grapes which is not really virgins but grapes, you know. And I like Palestinians are my god they are so similar to Jews, they have wonderful sense of humor and so on and they told me you know what is one of the big jokes about them that playing on this mistranslation virgins in reality those top quality raisins that there was a young frustrated Palestinian boy who couldn't get girls, so he said 'Fuck it, I believe in Quran, let me become a terrorist, I explode and then at least I will get the virgins up there,' no. So okay, he does it, kills himself gets up and then is shocked to learn he gets raisins. And then he complains to God, 'Sorry, it was a mistake, I thought like can I go back no? I wanted girls not raisins.' No they are quite nice, they know how to make fun. Palestinians are and they gave me a wonderful lesson of racism masked as multicultural respect. There was that wonderful group from Israel and my good friend Udi Aloni organized a visit of them to to New York, Jenin Freedom Theatre, you know that guy Juliano who was killed and so on. But what's so interesting is that I saw the group in New York and we went into this wonderful obscene competition between Palestinians and Jews there, like okay I was none of them, I was the judge above, who will tell a nastier joke, and my Jewish friends told me a wonderful Jewish mythology joke. Do you know why? It's a maybe you heard it but I like it so much. That's Jewish humor at its best. Do you know why after the Jews in
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exile
exile
Slavoj Žižek
Exodus crossed the Red Sea, do you know why before settling in whatever it is there Zion Palestine today, they had to wander around for years, I think? Do you know why? What's their answer? Because God hated them and wanted to be sure and
Exodus crossed the Red Sea, do you know why before settling in whatever it is there Zion Palestine today, they had to wander around for years, I think? Do you know why? What's their answer? Because God hated them and wanted to be sure and
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was making
was making
Slavoj Žižek
geological investigations for years, wanted to be sure that there will be no oil there where they would settle! Now there's natural gas in the sea. Sorry? Now there's natural gas in the sea and that's the problem. But this I read somewhere that this gas now and the gas that they will make from some technical... isn't the idea that this will change everything now, no? Okay, but nonetheless let's go back. So yes, that guy told me, terrorist, sorry psychiatrist, that no, the typical structure is that for a suicide bomber, you don't explode yourself because you believe. It's a kind of a ultra-hysterical *passage l'acte*, you doubt if you really believe or not.
geological investigations for years, wanted to be sure that there will be no oil there where they would settle! Now there's natural gas in the sea. Sorry? Now there's natural gas in the sea and that's the problem. But this I read somewhere that this gas now and the gas that they will make from some technical... isn't the idea that this will change everything now, no? Okay, but nonetheless let's go back. So yes, that guy told me, terrorist, sorry psychiatrist, that no, the typical structure is that for a suicide bomber, you don't explode yourself because you believe. It's a kind of a ultra-hysterical *passage l'acte*, you doubt if you really believe or not.
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And it's a
And it's a
Slavoj Žižek
desperate wager, 'If I kill myself, I will prove that I believe,' you know. It's a desperate attempt to escape into a brutal act to to to resolve precisely your doubt, your lack of belief. So again, it's interesting enough, sorry, there's a movie called *Paradise Now* which actually illustrates... I've seen it. Yeah yeah, it's about a religious person and then he has lessons and then... sorry you've seen it... yeah of course, yeah yeah, and I relatively liked because there are many movies like that which are too politically correct authentic, fuck it no. I don't like them. But this one is quite watchable, no. Okay, let's go on. Nonetheless let me come back because fuck it I again talked too much but at least I at least I want to keep my promise of saying something about melancholy and so on, you know, because it is linked with all this. What is melancholy here? Okay, now first to conclude with you. So my idea, yes, we were with Job. Yes, oh my god I'm getting crazy. My what happens but things come get really interesting because then we have the last stage where nonetheless Job insists you know like, okay I'm putting it in my poetic terms like, fuck you but if it has no meaning blah blah why did you do it you know like why did I suffer so much. And then comes the mysterious part. You know God explodes you remember it into that big speech of 'Where were you when I created stars, where were you when this that all the freaks miracles,' the problem is how to read this. No? Like the standard reading is the reading of just that the message is God's mind is out of our reach, God moves at a totally different level, we just have to trust God, it's a blasphemy of trying to understand God, no? That's the standard reading. There are other subdivisions but basically... but again, I'm sorry if I repeat myself I have this in one of my
desperate wager, 'If I kill myself, I will prove that I believe,' you know. It's a desperate attempt to escape into a brutal act to to to resolve precisely your doubt, your lack of belief. So again, it's interesting enough, sorry, there's a movie called *Paradise Now* which actually illustrates... I've seen it. Yeah yeah, it's about a religious person and then he has lessons and then... sorry you've seen it... yeah of course, yeah yeah, and I relatively liked because there are many movies like that which are too politically correct authentic, fuck it no. I don't like them. But this one is quite watchable, no. Okay, let's go on. Nonetheless let me come back because fuck it I again talked too much but at least I at least I want to keep my promise of saying something about melancholy and so on, you know, because it is linked with all this. What is melancholy here? Okay, now first to conclude with you. So my idea, yes, we were with Job. Yes, oh my god I'm getting crazy. My what happens but things come get really interesting because then we have the last stage where nonetheless Job insists you know like, okay I'm putting it in my poetic terms like, fuck you but if it has no meaning blah blah why did you do it you know like why did I suffer so much. And then comes the mysterious part. You know God explodes you remember it into that big speech of 'Where were you when I created stars, where were you when this that all the freaks miracles,' the problem is how to read this. No? Like the standard reading is the reading of just that the message is God's mind is out of our reach, God moves at a totally different level, we just have to trust God, it's a blasphemy of trying to understand God, no? That's the standard reading. There are other subdivisions but basically... but again, I'm sorry if I repeat myself I have this in one of my
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books
books
Slavoj Žižek
I know, my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers an ingenious opposite reading. Which is that God's answer is really when he paints to Job all these freaks of nature no, that basically the logic of his answer is 'You really think you are in deep shit but look at the universe it's deep shit all around,' you know like 'I didn't just screw your life I screwed everything,' you know. In other words that we have here as Chesterton put it the moment where God himself engages in blasphemy. And in very nice terms he says only in Christianity... okay but it's not
I know, my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers an ingenious opposite reading. Which is that God's answer is really when he paints to Job all these freaks of nature no, that basically the logic of his answer is 'You really think you are in deep shit but look at the universe it's deep shit all around,' you know like 'I didn't just screw your life I screwed everything,' you know. In other words that we have here as Chesterton put it the moment where God himself engages in blasphemy. And in very nice terms he says only in Christianity... okay but it's not
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even Christianity it's Old Testament fuck okay. And then I think I already mentioned this to you
even Christianity it's Old Testament fuck okay. And then I think I already mentioned this to you
Slavoj Žižek
but it belongs here even two days ago three to this line, then there is a Norwegian theologian, yes, I mentioned it, Zapffe. Z-A-P-F-F-E. A friend from Norway sent me a who has an even more radical reading, that Job waits for God accepting some sorry expecting some magnificent justice but that what Job experiences is that God, the
but it belongs here even two days ago three to this line, then there is a Norwegian theologian, yes, I mentioned it, Zapffe. Z-A-P-F-F-E. A friend from Norway sent me a who has an even more radical reading, that Job waits for God accepting some sorry expecting some magnificent justice but that what Job experiences is that God, the
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real God, is you know
real God, is you know
Slavoj Žižek
this horrible idea you find it in some fairy tales or science fiction stories of a guy who is omnipotent but his mind is that of an evil child, petty. Omnipotent evil monster, that God is that. He is omnipotent as this theologian Norwegian Zapffe put it, but he is a kind of a primitive caveman, just beating with his stick with not even a minimal moral standard. You know that the trauma of Job with which it finishes... okay but so so what you're saying is that God is ultimately omnipotent but also impotent within the same moment. Yeah yeah and this is not even very original, not only Gnosticism but even in Schelling you find this already, you know this idea of divine limitation and so on. But now let me go a step further to conclude this line nonetheless. I think that we should make even a step further here. The lesson of Book of Job, and I think it's crucial to read Jesus Christ as next step in this line. The message of Book of Job is that God as that our usual idea of God, even if it's not material God, is that to put it very bluntly: our life may appear to be a mess but don't worry there is some higher force, structure, meaning, which nonetheless will guarantee that everything serves a purpose. You know, this is what usually is called 'Cunning of Reason,' or this is for me one of the most disgusting images of sorry strategies to explain how evil can be in the world where we have good omnipotent God: you know this parallel of a painting. The idea is in the same way as when you look at a painting... my god I'm thinking we have this joke is God there. Okay that you know a painting, if you look at a painting too close you see just a blurred stain. But if you step back a little bit you see how what you misperceived as a stain contributes to global harmony. So the idea is that this exactly is the status of evil. It appears evil to us because our perspective is too narrow, but from a divine perspective it contributes to global harmony. And then you can... okay, it doesn't matter how you do it empirically. The point is just that you have this trust that however confused things are from a higher global perspective, even if it's inaccessible to us, things have a meaning. There is some agency, personal God, destiny, reason of the world, which somehow runs the show and gives small pushes to direct it in the good sense. I claim that what Job experiences is precisely the death of this God. And I claim that, and that's also Chesterton's wonderful reading, that what dies on the cross is precisely this God. God who up there guarantees that... and this is a very actual God I think because like you know like are you ready to say Holocaust, Gulag, Congo, 'Oh
this horrible idea you find it in some fairy tales or science fiction stories of a guy who is omnipotent but his mind is that of an evil child, petty. Omnipotent evil monster, that God is that. He is omnipotent as this theologian Norwegian Zapffe put it, but he is a kind of a primitive caveman, just beating with his stick with not even a minimal moral standard. You know that the trauma of Job with which it finishes... okay but so so what you're saying is that God is ultimately omnipotent but also impotent within the same moment. Yeah yeah and this is not even very original, not only Gnosticism but even in Schelling you find this already, you know this idea of divine limitation and so on. But now let me go a step further to conclude this line nonetheless. I think that we should make even a step further here. The lesson of Book of Job, and I think it's crucial to read Jesus Christ as next step in this line. The message of Book of Job is that God as that our usual idea of God, even if it's not material God, is that to put it very bluntly: our life may appear to be a mess but don't worry there is some higher force, structure, meaning, which nonetheless will guarantee that everything serves a purpose. You know, this is what usually is called 'Cunning of Reason,' or this is for me one of the most disgusting images of sorry strategies to explain how evil can be in the world where we have good omnipotent God: you know this parallel of a painting. The idea is in the same way as when you look at a painting... my god I'm thinking we have this joke is God there. Okay that you know a painting, if you look at a painting too close you see just a blurred stain. But if you step back a little bit you see how what you misperceived as a stain contributes to global harmony. So the idea is that this exactly is the status of evil. It appears evil to us because our perspective is too narrow, but from a divine perspective it contributes to global harmony. And then you can... okay, it doesn't matter how you do it empirically. The point is just that you have this trust that however confused things are from a higher global perspective, even if it's inaccessible to us, things have a meaning. There is some agency, personal God, destiny, reason of the world, which somehow runs the show and gives small pushes to direct it in the good sense. I claim that what Job experiences is precisely the death of this God. And I claim that, and that's also Chesterton's wonderful reading, that what dies on the cross is precisely this God. God who up there guarantees that... and this is a very actual God I think because like you know like are you ready to say Holocaust, Gulag, Congo, 'Oh
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these
these
Slavoj Žižek
are just evil events for us because of our narrow perspective but from a higher perspective Holocaust contributed to world harmony' or whatever. Although there are people who claim Holocaust was part of divine plan because, which is true, without Holocaust probably no state of Israel, you know. So there are madmen who go. But nonetheless what I want to say is that what dies on the cross is precisely the Big Other. The death of Christ means there is no higher order, ideal, real, existing, non-existing, which guarantees the outcome. We are alone with our freedom. Which is why I do agree that Christianity is the religion of freedom because, to put it in the terms of the joke, the chicken dies there. Or you know what is for me the elementary syllogism of Christianity: let's say you become a Christian to be free and so on, and then you feel abandoned by God. There is no God to help you, it's alone and so on. You know what is the true Christian answer? No,
are just evil events for us because of our narrow perspective but from a higher perspective Holocaust contributed to world harmony' or whatever. Although there are people who claim Holocaust was part of divine plan because, which is true, without Holocaust probably no state of Israel, you know. So there are madmen who go. But nonetheless what I want to say is that what dies on the cross is precisely the Big Other. The death of Christ means there is no higher order, ideal, real, existing, non-existing, which guarantees the outcome. We are alone with our freedom. Which is why I do agree that Christianity is the religion of freedom because, to put it in the terms of the joke, the chicken dies there. Or you know what is for me the elementary syllogism of Christianity: let's say you become a Christian to be free and so on, and then you feel abandoned by God. There is no God to help you, it's alone and so on. You know what is the true Christian answer? No,