Ontological Incompleteness in Painting, Literature and Quantum Theory
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012 · 1:28:04 · 12,291 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalscience-physicscinema-art-cultureideologyhistoryrevolution-violencereligion-theologysubjectivity
In a wide-ranging seminar discussion, Žižek argues that reality is fundamentally incomplete and ontologically open, drawing on Schelling's pre-ontological chaos, quantum physics (wave-function collapse, the Aspect experiment), modernist painting (David's 'Death of Marat', Van Gogh, Munch), and detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Columbo). He defends the Jacobins and their tragic lucidity, critiques liberal misreadings of Agamben and Adorno-Horkheimer's pessimism, and develops the idea that retroactive causality, the way the future shapes the past, operates in history, art, and politics alike. The talk weaves ontological speculation with political theory, philosophy of science, and close readings of literature and film.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Agamben's category of bare life excluded from political community; Žižek relays Agamben's own correction that the point is not liberal inclusion of the marginalised but rather that we are ALL becoming homo sacer under permanent emergency-state logic.
as “state of exception / emergency-state logic”
Agamben's concept, cited by Žižek, that the exception is becoming the norm, more and more pervading everyday life, rather than being limited to marginal outsiders.
Žižek's satirical label for the Adorno-Horkheimer style argument that Western consumer society is as oppressive as the Gulag, a position he ridicules from his own experience of real socialism.
Marcuse's diagnosis of advanced industrial society's suppression of critical negativity, grouped by Žižek with Adorno-Horkheimer as a paradigm of self-defeating leftist pessimism.
as “incomplete universe”
The thesis that reality is never fully ontologically constituted, there is always a void or unfinished dimension, which Žižek reads through quantum physics, Schelling, and modernist art.
Žižek's semi-ironic rendition of Schelling's Weltalter idea that God created the world as a kind of 'work therapy' to save himself from a pre-ontological madness of chaotic drives.
as “pre-ontological chaos”
Following Schelling, Žižek posits a spectral, not-yet-symbolized stratum that underlies constituted reality and persists as gaps, voids, or unfinished textures visible in painting, quantum fluctuations, and Iceland's landscape.
as “point de capiton (quilting point)”
Lacan's term for a master-signifier that retroactively fixes the meaning of an entire chain; Žižek uses Saint Paul's re-reading of Christ's death as the archetypal example.
Lacan's distinction (noted by Žižek) between a signifier and a sign of love, the moment drive in its brutality is included into the symbolic order, illustrated by music in Shakespeare's Richard II.
A figure or moment that enables a transition but then disappears from the new order it helped to create; Žižek notes it should not simply be identified with après-coup because future dimensions are also at stake.
The Lacanian/Freudian structure of deferred action whereby an earlier event only acquires its full meaning retroactively, distinguished here (with some hesitation) from Fredric Jameson's 'vanishing mediator'.
A structuralist/Lacanian notion invoked to describe the detective-novel clue: something that functions as part of ordinary reality but, read properly, also encodes the hidden truth of the crime.
as “subject supposed to know”
Lacanian figure of an agent presumed to already possess complete knowledge, illustrated here by Columbo who immediately and inexplicably knows the murderer from the start.
Pierre Bayard's concept (adopted by Žižek) that some artworks or thinkers 'plagiarize' a future that is already inscribed as possibility in the present, making them ahead of their time in a non-mystical, materialist sense.
Not explicitly used in the text; excluded.
as “wave-function collapse”
The quantum-mechanical event whereby a superposition resolves into a definite state; Žižek reads the debate (Heisenberg vs Bohr) as showing that incompleteness is ontological, not merely epistemological.
as “retroactive causality”
The logic by which a later event or reading retroactively constitutes the meaning of an earlier one, used here to explain how great writers create their precursors, how quantum observation collapses the past wave function, and how Saint Paul retroactively made Christ's death a triumph.
A neither-inside-nor-outside, in-between layer of materiality, visible in Van Gogh's dense color, Munch's slimy frames, and the florist-mirror scene in Hitchcock's Vertigo, that Žižek links to Schelling's pre-ontological chaos.
Stories he reaches for 3
T. J. Clark's reading of Jacques-Louis David's painting is used: the dark, empty upper half is not mere realistic wall but a pre-ontological void that makes it the first modernist painting, anticipating Malevich's black square.
“You blow into this and you get Malevich, no? ...revolutionary activity is seen as something which has a terrifying anxiety dimension. Against the background of some dark abyss.”
Borges observed that Kafka retroactively constitutes his precursors (Poe, Blake, Dostoevsky): you need Kafka to see the Kafkaesque dimension in them. Žižek uses this as evidence for the ontological openness of the past.
“A truly great writer creates retroactively his forerunners.”
At the Museum of Paris (now removed), a document showed Robespierre beginning to sign an appeal for direct dictatorship to save himself, then stopping, choosing legal order and his own death over overthrowing Parliament. Žižek sees this as tragic heroism.
“He said, no, I am for legal order, democracy, I cannot do it. And he knew this means his death.”
Works invoked 26
Vertigo film
The florist mirror scene, Madeleine reflected while only Scottie's eye appears in a secondary mirror, is read as a masterpiece illustrating how the observer becomes a spectral pure gaze and the reflected image solid reality.
The Book of Job book
The dinner-bet scene between God and the Devil is called 'the greatest, most obscene scene', used to illustrate the non-monotheistic, plural, abyss-riven character of the Jewish God.
Implicitly referenced through the 'Administered World' / pessimism critique; represents the leftist bad-conscience tendency Žižek opposes.
After Finitude book
Briefly referenced as mentioning the fossil-creation theological argument but being 'too dismissive' of its metaphorical potential for a theory of ideology.
The Death of Marat artwork
Central example throughout: the void in the upper half is read as the first modernist gesture, pre-ontological openness built into a propaganda painting that resists its own ideological function.
Persona film
Žižek says he 'hates' it personally but acknowledges the boy-touching-the-screen shot as an instance of the pre-ontological obscene figure persisting across Bergman and Munch.
Cited as systematic demonstration that most perceived 'ancient' traditions (Scottish kilt, etc.) are modern fabrications, supporting the ideology-as-retroactive-past thesis.
Columbo tv
Read as the purest illustration of Lacan's 'subject supposed to know': the detective always already knows the killer; the whole episode is a semiotic game of proof.
Žižek's own early book, cited as containing the concept of the vanishing mediator (in response to an audience question).
Homo Sacer book
Used to introduce the concept of bare life / homo sacer; Žižek defends the book's actual thesis (universal exception) against the liberal misreading (marginal inclusion).
One-Dimensional Man book
Cited as another instance of the Frankfurt School's self-defeating pessimism about consumer society.
Richard II play
The final monologue is described as like 'Lacan put into poetry', perfectly embodying the sign of love and how music can function as a sign rather than a signifier.
The Silence film
Cited (with Persona) as containing the uncanny Munchian boy figure that marks the pre-ontological spectral stratum in Bergman's work.
Gospel of John book
Žižek calls John 'the bad guy', the first anti-Semitic, racist, mystic, gnostic gospel, for beginning with 'In the beginning was the Logos' rather than with what preceded the beginning (the Schellingian question).
Briefly mentioned as Adorno's famous attack on Heidegger, used to contextualise the irony of Adorno-Horkheimer being close to Heidegger's ontology despite the polemic.
Key example of the retroactive re-reading: the narrator is nominally the murderer but Pierre Bayard argues convincingly the real murderer is his sister; illustrates ontological openness of texts.
Used to illustrate structural variations in detective fiction: the solution (all suspects are killers) logically requires the victim be the 'true criminal'.
The Scream artwork
Used alongside Van Gogh to illustrate pre-ontological dense spectral materiality; Žižek mentions owning a blow-up figure and a pillow of the screaming figure.
Described as 'breathtaking' half-mystical cosmological speculation; the source of the pre-ontological chaos / divine madness concept Žižek develops throughout.
Read as a gnostic (materialist sense) work that deliberately deploys visual textures of unfinished/corroded-fresco walls to produce the phenomenological effect of an ontologically incomplete world.
Another Bayard re-reading: the 'real' murderer is not the identified one; cited as further evidence for the detective-novel's structural openness.
Madonna (Edvard Munch) artwork
The embedded sub-frame within the painting, a slimy sphere containing a monster-foetus floating in sperm, is read as the pre-ontological obscene remainder framed within ideal feminine representation.
Praised for reading Bohr materialistically and rigorously, without New Age watering-down; one of the few philosophy-of-physics works Žižek endorses.
The publication of Darwin's work created a crisis for Christian theologians who then invented the 'God created fossils' solution, the example Žižek uses as the best metaphor for ideology.
Central theoretical reference for the idea that some artworks or thinkers 'plagiarize' a future inscribed as possibility in the present, used to explain David's prescient modernism.
Found by Žižek for two dollars in a Boston secondhand bookstore; read as an extremely convincing demonstration that the narrator of Christie's novel did not commit the murder.
People invoked 46
André Monglond positive
French historian quoted via Benjamin on works as film shots whose developer lies in the future, used to support the retroactive-causality thesis.
Franz Kafka positive
Used as the canonical example (via Borges) of a writer who retroactively constitutes his own predecessors by virtue of his existence.
Ingmar Bergman positive
Mentioned as sharing the Munchian figure of a screaming boy in crucial films (Persona's boy touching the screen, The Silence), used to track the persistence of the pre-ontological obscene figure across media.
Dismissed as 'a drunken idiot' personally; appears as the model for the corrupt painter in the time-travel science-fiction story Žižek narrates.
The subject of David's painting and a Jacobin figure; Žižek reads the void in the painting as expressing Marat's own lucid uncertainty about the revolutionary future.
Nicholas Fearn positive
Described as a 'very aggressive analytical philosopher' who hates continental tradition, but whose computer-game metaphor for quantum incompleteness Žižek endorses as wonderful and illuminating.
Vincent van Gogh positive
Praised as an absolute genius for producing 'spectral in-between materiality', a heaviness that belongs neither to the depicted object nor to the paint surface but to a ghostly stratum in-between.
Pierre Bayard positive
French essayist whose Sherlock Holmes / Roger Ackroyd re-readings and 'Plagiarizing from the Future' concept are endorsed by Žižek as genuinely demonstrating ontological openness of texts and retroactive causality.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Two anecdotes (the assassination attempt and the stolen car) are used to illustrate the informal, open character of the early Soviet period before the Stalinist state consolidated; Žižek also refers to his Lenin introduction.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Grouped with Horkheimer as exemplars of leftist bad conscience, the 'Administered World' thesis that equates consumer prosperity with hidden totalitarianism, which Žižek ridicules from his own experience of real socialism.
Briefly mentioned as Žižek's personal favourite painter, contrasted favourably with Pollock.
Jacques Lacan positive
Pervasive reference throughout: subject supposed to know, point de capiton, après-coup, sign of love, the early vs later Lacan on love vs desire, Real/Symbolic/Imaginary framing of Talmudic ontology.
Appears in a personal anecdote about Žižek making provocative jokes about lesbianism to her; she is described as laughing and being 'used to' his style.
Appears in the Lenin assassination anecdote, sending a guard to buy lemons to help the wounded Lenin, used to illustrate the informal, improvised character of the early Soviet period.
Judith Butler negative
Singled out as having misread Agamben in a liberal way, treating homo sacer as a call for inclusionary politics rather than a diagnosis of universal bare life.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Cited alongside Robespierre in the exchange of 'tragic political letters' during the Thermidor, exemplifying heroic lucidity about inevitable defeat.
Galileo Galilei positive
Cited as the first to introduce the counter-intuitive principle of inertia (objects in motion stay in motion), marking the beginning of the gap between scientific description and ordinary phenomenological experience.
David Bohm negative
Bohm's hidden-variables interpretation of quantum mechanics attempts to save objective reality, but Žižek agrees with critics that the price is too high, requiring waves that travel backwards in time.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly on multiple points: his concept of multiplicity vs the One, agreement on the Jacobins (though Žižek parts ways on whether they should have made a coup d'état), and shared admiration for Saint-Just and Robespierre.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Žižek defends the 'real' Agamben against liberal misreadings, relaying a private conversation in which Agamben expressed his true pessimistic thesis that we are all homo sacer; though Žižek associates Agamben with the Adorno-Horkheimer pessimistic line he partially rejects.
Fredric Jameson positive
Mentioned as having the Munch Scream blow-up figure at home (like Žižek); his concept of the 'vanishing mediator' is discussed (with some reservation) in relation to après-coup.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
His collective volume on invented traditions (The Invention of Tradition) is cited approvingly as systematic demonstration that most 'ancient' traditions are modern fabrications, supporting the ideology-as-retroactive-past argument.
Agatha Christie positive
Praised for 'tremendous narrative imagination' in exhausting all structural variations of detective plot logic; her novels serve Žižek as examples of semiotic epistemology in fiction.
Alain Aspect positive
French physicist whose famous experiment is cited as proving Bohr right against Einstein on non-locality, supporting Žižek's ontological incompleteness thesis.
Richard Feynman positive
Cited for the dictum that nobody really understands quantum physics, interpreted by Žižek not as an admission of bluffing but as pointing to a deep gap between scientific formalism and everyday ontological intuition.
Stephen King positive
Defended against cultural snobbery: his horror fiction captures the idea that evil spirits inhabit the in-between spaces of thick walls, neither inside nor outside, which Žižek reads as illustrating the pre-ontological spectral space.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Criticised for reading the uncertainty principle merely epistemologically (we cannot measure simultaneously) rather than ontologically; eventually accepted Bohr's correction but as a footnote, which Žižek sees as intellectual dishonesty.
Edvard Munch positive
Described as 'that freaky guy' whom Žižek admits to liking; The Scream and Madonna are used to illustrate pre-ontological obscene stains persisting within or around realistic representation.
T. J. Clark positive
Art historian whose New Left Review essay on David's Death of Marat as the first modernist painting Žižek endorses and extends; called 'not a complete idiot', Žižek's highest praise.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Presented as a tragic hero who consciously chose legal order and death over seizing illegal power, the document of his half-signed appeal is one of Žižek's 'most beautiful' political documents.
Karen Barad positive
Žižek expresses relief that she is considered serious by a physicist in the room; praises her Meeting the Universe Halfway for reading Bohr in a rigorously materialist way without New Age watering-down.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Defended against gnostic-mystic readings; Žižek endorses a structuralist-materialist gnostic reading of Decalogue as depicting an ontologically incomplete world through visual texture.
Herbert Marcuse negative
Author of One-Dimensional Man, cited as another instance of the pessimistic Frankfurt School tendency Žižek disputes.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Major philosophical source: the Weltalter concept of pre-ontological chaos, divine madness, and existence emerging from chaos is foundational for Žižek's ontology of incompleteness; he notes Schelling took over (and accidentally killed) Carolina Schlegel.
Brian Greene positive
Popular physics writer whose 'borrow from the future' banking metaphor for quantum vacuum fluctuations Žižek uses to illustrate ontological cheating.
Walter Benjamin positive
Quoted on works of art as 'shots on film' that are only developed/read in the future, supporting the retroactive causality thesis; the André Monglond quote comes via Benjamin.
Quentin Meillassoux negative
Briefly cited as having referenced the fossil-creation theological debate in After Finitude but dismissed as 'too dismissive' of it, missing its metaphorical richness for a theory of ideology.
William Shakespeare positive
Žižek defends Shakespeare as a genius and reads Richard II's final monologue as perfectly embodying Lacan's concept of the sign of love and music; he jokes about writing a piece proving Shakespeare was reading Lacan's seminars.
Niels Bohr positive
Championed against Heisenberg: Bohr correctly read the uncertainty principle as an ontological claim (reality itself is incomplete), not merely an epistemological limitation; Aspect's experiment is read as vindicating Bohr against Einstein.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
The florist mirror scene from Vertigo is read as a masterpiece of spectral proto-reality, Hitchcock's visual technique perfectly illustrates the subject as 'pure gaze' in a world of spectral in-between materiality.
Max Horkheimer negative
Co-author of the 'Verwaltete Welt' / Administered World thesis that Žižek criticises as self-defeating leftist pessimism.
Jacques-Louis David positive
Painter of The Death of Marat, which Žižek (following T. J. Clark) identifies as the first modernist painting; also the subject of a chapter in Žižek's 'big fat book'.
Aristotle negative
Cited as a pre-modern physicist whose 'physics' simply described everyday experience (heavy objects fall, things at rest stay at rest), contrasted with Galileo's counter-intuitive inertia principle.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
His famous observation that great writers retroactively create their precursors (illustrated via Kafka) is central to Žižek's argument about ontological openness and retroactive causality.
Paul the Apostle positive
Praised as a genius for retroactively re-reading Christ's traumatic death as the ultimate triumph, the paradigm of the Lacanian quilting point and retroactive causality in history.
Albert Einstein negative
Invoked as the defender of the locality principle, which Aspect's experiment disproved, Einstein's insistence on a fully constituted local reality is on the losing side of Žižek's ontological argument.
What it argues
ontological incompleteness of realityretroactive causality and après-coupSchelling's pre-ontological chaostragic heroism of the Jacobinsdetective fiction as epistemological formquantum physics and the collapse of the wave functionmodernist painting as inscription of the pre-ontological
Dialectical moves 8
“The true point of Agamben's homo sacer is not that marginals should be included but that we are ALL already homo sacer — the exception is becoming the universal rule.”
What liberals read as a call for greater inclusion, Agamben intends as a pessimistic diagnosis of universal bare life under the permanent state of exception.
“Far from being a simple propaganda painting, David's Death of Marat is the first modernist painting precisely because the void resists any revolutionary optimism.”
What appears to be a limitation (an unfinished upper half) is actually the painting's most radical gesture, it incorporates the abyss of the unknown into heroic depiction.
“A truly great writer does not simply have predecessors — he retroactively CREATES his predecessors; Blake and Poe become Kafka's predecessors only after Kafka exists.”
Literary influence runs backwards as much as forwards: the later work constitutes what counts as anticipation in earlier work, revealing that the past is not fixed.
“The so-called uncertainty principle is not an epistemological limitation — reality itself is incomplete; it is not that we cannot measure it, it is that there is nothing fully determinate there to measure.”
What Heisenberg read as a limit on knowledge, Bohr (and Žižek) read as an ontological claim: incompleteness belongs to reality, not to our access to it.
“The only real materialism is to think incompleteness WITHOUT God — to affirm an open, unfinished universe without invoking any transcendent observer to close it.”
Removing God does not restore a complete objective reality; it forces us to accept irreducible ontological openness as a positive materialist thesis.
“In the florist mirror scene in Vertigo, 'the only real part' — Scottie's reflection — is experienced as spectral, while the mirror image of Madeleine appears as the solid reality.”
Hitchcock inverts the distinction between reality and its image, making the observer a ghostly 'pure gaze' and the reflected image the anchor of reality.
“The Jacobins lost not because they were outgunned but because they refused to seize power illegally — they were voted out, which proves they were never true totalitarians.”
The standard condemnation of Jacobin terror is inverted: the fact that they could be removed by a parliamentary vote shows they maintained democratic legality, the very opposite of totalitarianism.
“The quantum wave function's collapse RETROACTIVELY depends on observation even after the particle has already passed through the slit — the past itself is not fixed until registered.”
Observation does not merely affect what we know about the past but constitutively determines what the past was, making retroactive causality a physical fact.
Claims 18
asserts
Reality is fundamentally ontologically incomplete — there is always a pre-ontological remainder or void that is not simply an epistemological limitation but belongs to reality itself.ontology / philosophy of reality
rejects
The liberal reading of Agamben — that homo sacer are marginalised individuals who need to be made visible and included — entirely misses his point, which is that we are all becoming homo sacer under the spreading logic of the state of exception.Agamben / liberal political theory
rejects
Adorno-Horkheimer's pessimistic insistence that consumer prosperity is secretly as bad as totalitarian oppression is a form of leftist bad conscience that collapses the distinction between genuine and imagined oppression.Frankfurt School pessimism / critical theory
asserts
David's 'Death of Marat' is the first modernist painting because the dark void in the upper half functions as a pre-ontological opening that resists revolutionary kitsch and anticipates modernist abstraction.modernism / art history / Death of Marat
asserts
The Jacobins — Robespierre and Saint-Just — displayed genuine tragic heroism by consciously choosing to lose their heads rather than seize power illegally, against the inner logic of the Revolution.Jacobins / Robespierre / revolutionary ethics
asserts
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is an ontological, not merely epistemological, claim: it is not that we cannot measure position and velocity simultaneously, but that reality itself is indeterminate at that level.quantum physics / Bohr vs Heisenberg
asserts
A proper materialist history resists simple contextualizing: no historical constellation is complete, which means retroactive readings are genuinely constitutive of the past rather than distortions.historiography / materialism / retroactivity
asserts
Great writers retroactively create their own precursors: it takes Kafka's existence for us to read Poe or Blake as 'Kafkaesque', and this is not just a change of perspective but an ontological fact about incomplete pasts.literary history / retroactive causality / Borges on Kafka
asserts
Saint Paul's genius was to retroactively reread Christ's catastrophic death as the ultimate triumph — a paradigm case of the quilting point (point de capiton) that reorganizes the entire field.Christianity / Saint Paul / retroactivity
reframes
The vanishing mediator and après-coup should not simply be identified; the temporal paradox in question involves the future as well as the past.après-coup vs vanishing mediator
asserts
In detective fiction the real pleasure is not knowing 'who did it' but following the logical-semiotic deduction from clues to conclusion — which is why being told the killer in advance does not ruin the novel.detective fiction / Agatha Christie / pleasure of reading
asserts
Columbo is the purest fictional illustration of Lacan's 'subject supposed to know': he always already knows the murderer by an inexplicable immediate certainty, and the entire episode is simply the semiotic game of proving it.Columbo / subject supposed to know / Lacan
asserts
God created the world — pronounced the Word — as a kind of psychiatric work therapy to save himself from his own pre-ontological madness, in Schelling's Weltalter.Schelling / divine creation / pre-ontological chaos
asserts
The God-created-fossils solution to the Darwin problem is the best metaphor for ideology: retroactive fabrication of a past that never existed.ideology / retroactivity / creationism
asserts
Materialist ontological incompleteness does not require God: one must think incompleteness without a divine observer — this is the terrifying lesson of quantum physics.quantum physics / materialism / ontology
asserts
Karen Barad's agential realism is a serious, non-New-Age materialist reading of Bohr, and her work is one of the few that really grapples with the ontological paradoxes of quantum physics.Karen Barad / quantum physics / materialism
asserts
Kieślowski's Decalogue works with the same structure of ontological incompleteness: shots that are 'real' within the film but appear as unfinished, corroded frescoes, making the world look not-yet-fully-constituted.Kieślowski / cinematic ontology / incompleteness
asserts
Van Gogh's genius lies in producing a 'spectral in-between materiality' — a heaviness felt neither in the depicted object nor in the bare paint surface but in a ghostly layer in-between.Van Gogh / painting / spectral materiality
Quotes 17
“His point is simply that with this new postmodern geopolitics, we are all homo sacer. The emergency state logic is more and more pervading our daily life.”Slavoj Žižek · Agamben's real thesis vs liberal misreading
“You complain about Gulag, but at least it's Gulag there just some people. You know that San Francisco, the entire city is one big consumerist Gulag.”Slavoj Žižek · leftist bad conscience / absurdity of equating consumer society with the Gulag
“There are two kinds of people: people who are complete idiots and people who are not complete idiots, there is no other choice my friend.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's binary taxonomy of interlocutors
“The painting resists this pseudo-revolutionary bullshit. He is dying but he knows that his death will be a small contribution to French people finally enjoying freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · Death of Marat as anti-kitsch revolutionary art
“The point is not to see how the world was at the beginning. The point is to see what happened before the beginning.”Slavoj Žižek · Schelling's pre-ontological inquiry
“God created the world — this was what we call in psychiatry work therapy — literally to save himself from his own madness.”Slavoj Žižek · Schelling's divine madness / creation as therapy
“A truly great writer creates retroactively his forerunners.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive causality in literary history (Borges on Kafka)
“The genius of Paul was to re-read failure as the ultimate triumph. This is what Lacan means by point de capiton — you add a signifier and everything retroactively changes.”Slavoj Žižek · Saint Paul / quilting point / retroactive causality
“Isn't this the best metaphor you can imagine for ideology? This simply how do you call it, retroactive inventing the past. We are doing it all the time.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as retroactive fabrication of the past
“No context is full. Every historical constellation is incomplete, open. A proper materialist history is not this simple historicizing contextualization.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological openness of every historical context
“This is the clearest case of what Lacan meant by subject supposed to know. It's totally non-explained how, but Columbo knows. Absolutely knows.”Slavoj Žižek · Columbo as illustration of subject supposed to know
“We caught God with pants down. Fuck you God, you were lazy there, you didn't do velocity and position at the same time.”Slavoj Žižek · quantum incompleteness as God's negligence / theological humour
“The terrifying lesson of quantum physics: we are wrong to think that if you want to be a materialist, reality should be fully ontologically constituted. The difficult thing is to think incompleteness without God.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist ontological incompleteness without theology
“If you observe it afterwards — when the particle already passed through the slit — it still retroactively depends on the act of observation.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive causality in quantum physics (double slit)
“He becomes a kind of spectral entity, pure gaze looking at her. It's a wonderful shot.”Slavoj Žižek · Vertigo florist scene / pure gaze / spectral observer
“There is nothing heavy there — there is some spectral in-between materiality you feel. And I claim that this is the absolute genius of Van Gogh.”Slavoj Žižek · spectral proto-reality in Van Gogh's painting
“He said, no, I am for legal order, democracy, I cannot do it. And he knew this means his death.”Slavoj Žižek · Robespierre's tragic commitment to legality over survival
Transcript 24 turns
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Okay, so what I propose is that, no, don't look at me, I'm afraid you terrorize. That's what you want, no? Sorry? Yeah, thank you. But because I thought, I thought it's full. It looks as if it were
Okay, so what I propose is that, no, don't look at me, I'm afraid you terrorize. That's what you want, no? Sorry? Yeah, thank you. But because I thought, I thought it's full. It looks as if it were
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full. But I
full. But I
Slavoj Žižek
feel bad, my god. Why do you have to do this? Slaves! This is slavery! Why? I'm sorry, I needed a slave. Sorry? No, but you know, I am for slavery, but for honest, I'm like a fascist, you know. Slaves should be treated nicely, you should beat them, but only when it's really necessary. And you should beat slaves in such a way that you don't leave traces and so on, you know. Like and war on. Look, like once I had a wonderful conversation with Giorgio Agamben. And I did hit something, it was wonderful. Because you know, liberals totally misunderstand him. No, I'm serious. They think that the point of Agamben's Homo Sacer and so on is Judith Butler here misunderstands him in a liberal way, that the point is homo sacer, whatever sacer, are those who are, you know, not fully integrated, outsiders living in this gray area, not in and that the point is to render them visible, you know, to speak for them. But Agamben, of course, he's a polite guy, he doesn't want to talk about this publicly to create enemies. But privately once he exploded with this. He said, he told me, no, this is liberal topic, this you know, there are some marginals whose word is not heard enough and we should open the space that everyone is integrated.
feel bad, my god. Why do you have to do this? Slaves! This is slavery! Why? I'm sorry, I needed a slave. Sorry? No, but you know, I am for slavery, but for honest, I'm like a fascist, you know. Slaves should be treated nicely, you should beat them, but only when it's really necessary. And you should beat slaves in such a way that you don't leave traces and so on, you know. Like and war on. Look, like once I had a wonderful conversation with Giorgio Agamben. And I did hit something, it was wonderful. Because you know, liberals totally misunderstand him. No, I'm serious. They think that the point of Agamben's Homo Sacer and so on is Judith Butler here misunderstands him in a liberal way, that the point is homo sacer, whatever sacer, are those who are, you know, not fully integrated, outsiders living in this gray area, not in and that the point is to render them visible, you know, to speak for them. But Agamben, of course, he's a polite guy, he doesn't want to talk about this publicly to create enemies. But privately once he exploded with this. He said, he told me, no, this is liberal topic, this you know, there are some marginals whose word is not heard enough and we should open the space that everyone is integrated.
unknown
That's not his point
That's not his point
Slavoj Žižek
at all. His point is a much more pessimistic one. His point is simply that with this new postmodern geopolitics, we are all homo sacer. That this emergency state logic is more and more pervading our daily life and is in a way, let me put it like this, here Agamben belongs to that pessimistic Marxist line, I don't even agree with him, of for example Adorno and Horkheimer, who I really think this is a kind of a leftist bad conscience. You know, a leftist had to be a pessimist short term in the sense of we are living in horrible times. Okay, but till five, ten years ago, we had relative prosperity. So the big sport of the leftist was to prove how apparently it may appear that we live in prosperity, but really we are so manipulated that it's worse than ever. You know, to convince you how if you think you are leading a nice life, it's just you are totally brainwashed. And I'm you know, coming from real socialism, from communist countries where fuck it, you know what's oppression, you know. I find like the high point of stupidity, I remember when I was very young, early 70s, in Europe, in Imperial Safe, I debated with some American leftists, political situation, and then somebody mentioned Gulag. And a guy from, of course, Berkeley at that point, San Francisco, told us seriously something like you complain about Gulag, but at least it's Gulag there, just some people. You know that San Francisco, the entire city is one big consumerist Gulag or Horkheimer, you know? I mean, it sounds deep but it doesn't work. It's not as simple as that. So what I'm saying is that back to Agamben that you know, it's the same with Adorno-Horkheimer, their idea is precisely our, as long as they were relatively successful consumerist societies, are approaching a certain, here they were, that's the irony, very close to Heidegger, even if they rejected Heidegger. You know, one of the famous attacks from Heidegger is Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, jargon of authenticity. But you know, this idea that even if it appears welfare blah blah blah, at the deeper sense, okay, Marcuse called this One-Dimensional Man world, Adorno and Horkheimer called this Verwaltete Welt, usually it's translated as Administered World. So the idea is that we are approaching a kind of even Badiou up to a point agrees with it. In Badiou's terms, this would have been the reduction of subjectivity to hedonist human-animal consumer. That the idea is that even if we are doing relatively well materially, we are approaching a certain zero level where we are basically gradually deprived of our humanity. We don't even notice it and so on and so on, no? We can talk maybe afternoon or later after we go through theory about this political aspect, or maybe before I will, but I'm just afraid I need some time to from the courage to confront you. Because let me mention to you one text, maybe you get it on on the on the web already for free, I think you do, in New Left Review about two, three months ago, I think it's no longer the last issue. The guy called T. J. Clark. Maybe you know him, he's the art historian and also some kind of a leftist, but he is well, as I like to put it, not a complete idiot. And this doesn't mean that I'm, I mean, there are two kinds of people: people who are complete idiots and people who are not complete idiots, there is no other choice my friend. So okay, you know where he began? Let me move on. Do you know he did a wonderful reading and I refer to it in my big fat book on on Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat. You know that painting? As the first modernist painting. And this is what I like. He makes a simple observation and as far as I know, you can correct me if I am wrong, but I am asking around did anyone already, of art historians and so on, not only noticed it, but noticed the meaning of it, namely how weird this image is. You know how does it look? It's a painting like this. The lower half, even a little bit less, you know it's the famous one, Marat in the bath dying, his hand with pen and then the beginning of some stupid declaration or whatever. You know what is all here? Nothing. Dark. It's wonderful, no? And my idea, the way I did it do it in my fat book, is that this is the first of the black squares and so on, no? You blow into this and you get Kandinsky and you get not Kandinsky, sorry, Malevich, no? And so on. No, because you know why I think it's so wonderful? Because in a way even for ordinary people, revolutionary activity is seen as something which is not just happy dreaming but has a terrifying anxiety dimension. Like who knows what will come? You cannot but read this as some kind of you know, we can do heroic deeds but against the background of some dark abyss, who knows what will be. And I even in my book try to imagine, I try to imagine a kind of a really totalitarian version of this painting. And it's easy to imagine. It would have been exactly the same painting, just as in a cartoon, that balloon with words. Here instead of a void, the painter would have painted something like what was Marat thinking, his vision and something like, you know, the revolutionary kitsch. Happy French people dancing in freedom and so on, like the vision, you know. And I really think that this is the space of his thoughts, of I mean of of Marat, which is precisely the void. You know, the painting resists this pseudo-revolutionary bullshit. He is dying but he knows that his death will be a small contribution to French people finally enjoying freedom and so on and so on. Even I even I didn't do this in that text, or maybe I did, I forgot whatever, but I'm even and here we come to theory, I'm even tempted to go a little bit further. And now we are going into theory. And claim that this part functions how, this dark part. Of course, you can read it in a naive way. And the history of this painting is well known. First I must tell you this is why I still like Jacobins. What are you saying? I am so vulgar, you know. Hey you slave, slave sorry, what were you saying? You know that's my dream, I'm so dirty, you did something like this. You know that's why I'm saying that I, I am saying such stupid things that we are already big friends. Okay, this is you know slave's rebellion. Now now I'm no longer human slave-owner, no? Sorry. But what I want to say is that if there is the the crucial point of modern ontology, it's the idea of as I repeat all the time, of incomplete universe. You know, this idea that reality is not fully ontologically constructed, that the world is not fully out there. So again, what do I mean by this? I'll explain it. Although of course as we know from history because and again sorry this is what I admire with Jacobins, it's obviously a very dark painting. And still it became an official painting, you know. It was carried around Paris streets, meeting but isn't it this a nice sign of revolutionaries that you know, when in their this is a propaganda painting but without any cheap optimism that we associate with propaganda. It's darkness, the message is we are walking on the edge of abyss. And which is why although they are even too easy for too soft for Alain Badiou, I am also like him for Jacobins. They were, there are some letters very mysterious, exchanged between Saint-Just and Robespierre, which are for me maybe the the most tragic political letters but of such an ethical namely, you know the standard Marxist theory which is up to a point true that in the course of French Revolution because of its inner logic, it's similar to Roman Empire. It wasn't just that Julius Caesar was a bad guy but there was a historical tendency towards empire and the same in France. And what is so immensely, I almost cried, otherwise I cry only at big Melodrama Super. This is my private secret. I may appear to say everything, one question I don't answer is with which movies I was crying, you know. It's that it's so tragic, they both were clearly aware of this. People's reign is over, a new empire whatever authoritarian rule will come. And their heroic and they had a choice. Some of the people around them said, okay fuck it, let's as them grab a chance, you know. And no, they said they decided consciously, we prefer to lose our heads than to do this step. It's very tragic, you know. They consciously they knew basically that they will lose. Because remember how remember the Thermidor how Jacobins lost. It was my god, you don't you know how they lost? They were voted out of office in Assemblée Nationale. I am sorry to tell you but true totalitarian leader, you don't get rid of him like that, no. You don't get rid of Stalin by proposing in Soviet People's Congress to vote against, no? So this is and even you know which is another of these tragic documents, here I differ a little bit from Badiou, for Badiou thinks they should have made a coup d'état or whatever Jacobins. You know how it went? They were voted out and then they took refugee, the hardline revolutionaries, that is to say Robespierre, Saint-Just in Hôtel de Ville in the city hall in Paris and there some radical supporters of Jacobins tried to push Robespierre to sign an appeal to the people directly, overthrow Parliament, let the people introduce a direct dictatorship, take power. And it's one of the most beautiful documents. Although the right-wingers, but it's proven that it's wrong, the right-wingers had their own reading, it's beautiful. Maybe because it's so beautiful you no longer can see it in that in Catherine, in that Jewish part, Le Marais, you have the Museum of Paris, and I was so sad, it was there till recently, two, three years ago they removed it. That very document and you have Robes and then stop. Badiou started to sign it and then he said, no, I am for legal order, democracy, I cannot do it. And he knew this means his death, you know. The right-wing myth is that is that something simply interrupted him whatever. Right-wingers are really evil here, you know. They they don't want to because Robespierre was such a tragic figure. You know what he was doing in days before that Thermidor meeting where they ousted him? No police arrests and so on. He was this was the great naivety. He thought one big speech by me and we will win. And he was seen for hours walking around Paris alone. And everyone was just think oh what is he thinking, what will be the next speech and so on. No, there was some tragic greatness in these guys, no? Even in early Lenin, you can find this some data in my Lenin introduction. You know there was an attentat on Lenin in How did it happen? It's unimaginable. You know how it happened? Lenin alone with his private chauffeur, alone in an open car approached Kremlin. There he saw some women debating, and the women started to shout at him. Hey, you, you promised us freedom, now we don't even have enough to eat blah blah. Lenin stepped out and started to debate with them. And then one woman shot him. And then it was total chaos. A guard shouted at Kremlin, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya came and said my god, what to do? Then this is demonstrated. Then she said to the guard, listen, there is a store around the corner there where I heard they got some lemons from the south. Go there and buy some lemons, maybe this will... You know, it's incredible. Or you know what happened once? This is demonstrated too. Lenin in he went again with his chauffeur to in the evening to give a speech at some high school, the end of the year. And on the road in suburbs empty, some three small-gang bandits stopped the car and threw them out. They didn't know who he is, chauffeur and Lenin, and stole the car. So the two of them then had to walk for half an hour to a police station claiming can you phone to Kremlin. And the point is that those policemen didn't know them and said, what you are Lenin, fuck off and so on. It was still possible for this to happen. And it's only in '22, '23 that the Soviet state that we all like and love, you know, where things like this can no any longer happen, emerged. So again, but let's not okay, let's not get lost here. Let's go back to that painting. This was just a small celebration of authentic revolutions and so on. You know although you can say that the picture the painting David the Death of Marat is realistic because it's well known what he meant within realist logic, that upper dark part to be. It's the wall. It's simply he wanted to emphasize the loneliness of Marat and how he lived in a modest apartment where the wall and he even and here things become mysterious because at the same time we know that the wall behind on that wall was not as ascetic just dark with scratches that it was kind of a how do you call that stuff with flower motifs that you see wallpaper. Sorry? Wallpaper. Yeah, that there was wallpaper more kitschy wallpaper there. But what I want to say is this. I think modernism begins when as if you look at the world as an unfinished world. You know like you have realist painting here, here, but it is as if parts of the painting are unfinished. You know the way you phenomenologically experience the painting. It's as if these are simply just how do you call when the painter before doing it just makes some checks. It's just the chaotic background as it were. And the idea is that although maybe he wasn't fully aware, but it's clear that he was playing with this. So again, the idea being that you have a certain structure of reality but this is not all. There is some the way I call it in my books chaotic pre-ontological not even reality. You know like you have to have, you know where I had a very naive this is total naivety but I had a wonderful experience. I hate this warm countries and so on where you dance and so on. Like I think that in in Brazil, I think that Bahia should be bombed. People are lazy there, dance. I like São Paulo, dirty city, work and so on no. But what there are two dream countrysides for me. The very south of Tierra del Fuego, no, Land of Fire. The very south of Argentina. Or if you go to the opposite end, Iceland. Were you in Iceland? Not just Reykjavik but you should go around. And when I went there, my idea I almost had a kind of a metaphysical epiphany. It's as if and then I was so glad to learn from my Iceland friends that they in their mythology already play with this, that God didn't fully finish the job of creation in Iceland. You know because if you go to some of the countryside there is something growing green but it's this kind of chaotic moss. It looks from our naive experience that it's not yet it's as the northern part you know as if God was just playing with some with some plant life but didn't yet fully finish creation, no. That's why again I cannot resist it. If I were to choose a place to live independently of France and so on, it would have been somewhere to the north-east of of Reykjavik out there in the wilderness. Okay, now let's go on. Why is this important? Because now I will make a crazy jump. First let's go on with paintings. Can I just ask you something quickly? Of course. So why don't you why don't you include the lack or the not all as part of reality itself? I do. You do? Although I do in my big book. When you say that reality is not fully ontologically constructed, why is it? You know what I mean. Why is it that why isn't it included? Because you seem to be making a distinction between the pre-ontological and the fully constituted reality, right? I am but you see Alain. Who is the Schelling guy? It's you. It's you, the Schelling guy. Schelling guy. Oh, the Schelling, yeah yeah yeah. The guy will be evil not that you at me. The guy between Fichte and Hegel who thought he is a good doctor also and you know he took over from Schlegel Carolina Schlegel, this revolutionary beauty, the femme fatale of German Romanticism, and she was ill and he Schelling cured her. Tried to cure her, so she died, I mean. That's our Schelling, you know. But she was good, she was to the end for Jacobins. As long as she was there Schelling was a leftist, then he turned. No no no, this is I have a book on her, this is truth. Okay, but let's go on. I'm saying this because you know that I took this from Schelling. I did a book on Schelling. In Schelling you have this idea that you have existence which means established world of reality and then you have this pre-ontological literally pre-logos chaos. I mean if you want poetically, I hope we agree, the most
at all. His point is a much more pessimistic one. His point is simply that with this new postmodern geopolitics, we are all homo sacer. That this emergency state logic is more and more pervading our daily life and is in a way, let me put it like this, here Agamben belongs to that pessimistic Marxist line, I don't even agree with him, of for example Adorno and Horkheimer, who I really think this is a kind of a leftist bad conscience. You know, a leftist had to be a pessimist short term in the sense of we are living in horrible times. Okay, but till five, ten years ago, we had relative prosperity. So the big sport of the leftist was to prove how apparently it may appear that we live in prosperity, but really we are so manipulated that it's worse than ever. You know, to convince you how if you think you are leading a nice life, it's just you are totally brainwashed. And I'm you know, coming from real socialism, from communist countries where fuck it, you know what's oppression, you know. I find like the high point of stupidity, I remember when I was very young, early 70s, in Europe, in Imperial Safe, I debated with some American leftists, political situation, and then somebody mentioned Gulag. And a guy from, of course, Berkeley at that point, San Francisco, told us seriously something like you complain about Gulag, but at least it's Gulag there, just some people. You know that San Francisco, the entire city is one big consumerist Gulag or Horkheimer, you know? I mean, it sounds deep but it doesn't work. It's not as simple as that. So what I'm saying is that back to Agamben that you know, it's the same with Adorno-Horkheimer, their idea is precisely our, as long as they were relatively successful consumerist societies, are approaching a certain, here they were, that's the irony, very close to Heidegger, even if they rejected Heidegger. You know, one of the famous attacks from Heidegger is Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, jargon of authenticity. But you know, this idea that even if it appears welfare blah blah blah, at the deeper sense, okay, Marcuse called this One-Dimensional Man world, Adorno and Horkheimer called this Verwaltete Welt, usually it's translated as Administered World. So the idea is that we are approaching a kind of even Badiou up to a point agrees with it. In Badiou's terms, this would have been the reduction of subjectivity to hedonist human-animal consumer. That the idea is that even if we are doing relatively well materially, we are approaching a certain zero level where we are basically gradually deprived of our humanity. We don't even notice it and so on and so on, no? We can talk maybe afternoon or later after we go through theory about this political aspect, or maybe before I will, but I'm just afraid I need some time to from the courage to confront you. Because let me mention to you one text, maybe you get it on on the on the web already for free, I think you do, in New Left Review about two, three months ago, I think it's no longer the last issue. The guy called T. J. Clark. Maybe you know him, he's the art historian and also some kind of a leftist, but he is well, as I like to put it, not a complete idiot. And this doesn't mean that I'm, I mean, there are two kinds of people: people who are complete idiots and people who are not complete idiots, there is no other choice my friend. So okay, you know where he began? Let me move on. Do you know he did a wonderful reading and I refer to it in my big fat book on on Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat. You know that painting? As the first modernist painting. And this is what I like. He makes a simple observation and as far as I know, you can correct me if I am wrong, but I am asking around did anyone already, of art historians and so on, not only noticed it, but noticed the meaning of it, namely how weird this image is. You know how does it look? It's a painting like this. The lower half, even a little bit less, you know it's the famous one, Marat in the bath dying, his hand with pen and then the beginning of some stupid declaration or whatever. You know what is all here? Nothing. Dark. It's wonderful, no? And my idea, the way I did it do it in my fat book, is that this is the first of the black squares and so on, no? You blow into this and you get Kandinsky and you get not Kandinsky, sorry, Malevich, no? And so on. No, because you know why I think it's so wonderful? Because in a way even for ordinary people, revolutionary activity is seen as something which is not just happy dreaming but has a terrifying anxiety dimension. Like who knows what will come? You cannot but read this as some kind of you know, we can do heroic deeds but against the background of some dark abyss, who knows what will be. And I even in my book try to imagine, I try to imagine a kind of a really totalitarian version of this painting. And it's easy to imagine. It would have been exactly the same painting, just as in a cartoon, that balloon with words. Here instead of a void, the painter would have painted something like what was Marat thinking, his vision and something like, you know, the revolutionary kitsch. Happy French people dancing in freedom and so on, like the vision, you know. And I really think that this is the space of his thoughts, of I mean of of Marat, which is precisely the void. You know, the painting resists this pseudo-revolutionary bullshit. He is dying but he knows that his death will be a small contribution to French people finally enjoying freedom and so on and so on. Even I even I didn't do this in that text, or maybe I did, I forgot whatever, but I'm even and here we come to theory, I'm even tempted to go a little bit further. And now we are going into theory. And claim that this part functions how, this dark part. Of course, you can read it in a naive way. And the history of this painting is well known. First I must tell you this is why I still like Jacobins. What are you saying? I am so vulgar, you know. Hey you slave, slave sorry, what were you saying? You know that's my dream, I'm so dirty, you did something like this. You know that's why I'm saying that I, I am saying such stupid things that we are already big friends. Okay, this is you know slave's rebellion. Now now I'm no longer human slave-owner, no? Sorry. But what I want to say is that if there is the the crucial point of modern ontology, it's the idea of as I repeat all the time, of incomplete universe. You know, this idea that reality is not fully ontologically constructed, that the world is not fully out there. So again, what do I mean by this? I'll explain it. Although of course as we know from history because and again sorry this is what I admire with Jacobins, it's obviously a very dark painting. And still it became an official painting, you know. It was carried around Paris streets, meeting but isn't it this a nice sign of revolutionaries that you know, when in their this is a propaganda painting but without any cheap optimism that we associate with propaganda. It's darkness, the message is we are walking on the edge of abyss. And which is why although they are even too easy for too soft for Alain Badiou, I am also like him for Jacobins. They were, there are some letters very mysterious, exchanged between Saint-Just and Robespierre, which are for me maybe the the most tragic political letters but of such an ethical namely, you know the standard Marxist theory which is up to a point true that in the course of French Revolution because of its inner logic, it's similar to Roman Empire. It wasn't just that Julius Caesar was a bad guy but there was a historical tendency towards empire and the same in France. And what is so immensely, I almost cried, otherwise I cry only at big Melodrama Super. This is my private secret. I may appear to say everything, one question I don't answer is with which movies I was crying, you know. It's that it's so tragic, they both were clearly aware of this. People's reign is over, a new empire whatever authoritarian rule will come. And their heroic and they had a choice. Some of the people around them said, okay fuck it, let's as them grab a chance, you know. And no, they said they decided consciously, we prefer to lose our heads than to do this step. It's very tragic, you know. They consciously they knew basically that they will lose. Because remember how remember the Thermidor how Jacobins lost. It was my god, you don't you know how they lost? They were voted out of office in Assemblée Nationale. I am sorry to tell you but true totalitarian leader, you don't get rid of him like that, no. You don't get rid of Stalin by proposing in Soviet People's Congress to vote against, no? So this is and even you know which is another of these tragic documents, here I differ a little bit from Badiou, for Badiou thinks they should have made a coup d'état or whatever Jacobins. You know how it went? They were voted out and then they took refugee, the hardline revolutionaries, that is to say Robespierre, Saint-Just in Hôtel de Ville in the city hall in Paris and there some radical supporters of Jacobins tried to push Robespierre to sign an appeal to the people directly, overthrow Parliament, let the people introduce a direct dictatorship, take power. And it's one of the most beautiful documents. Although the right-wingers, but it's proven that it's wrong, the right-wingers had their own reading, it's beautiful. Maybe because it's so beautiful you no longer can see it in that in Catherine, in that Jewish part, Le Marais, you have the Museum of Paris, and I was so sad, it was there till recently, two, three years ago they removed it. That very document and you have Robes and then stop. Badiou started to sign it and then he said, no, I am for legal order, democracy, I cannot do it. And he knew this means his death, you know. The right-wing myth is that is that something simply interrupted him whatever. Right-wingers are really evil here, you know. They they don't want to because Robespierre was such a tragic figure. You know what he was doing in days before that Thermidor meeting where they ousted him? No police arrests and so on. He was this was the great naivety. He thought one big speech by me and we will win. And he was seen for hours walking around Paris alone. And everyone was just think oh what is he thinking, what will be the next speech and so on. No, there was some tragic greatness in these guys, no? Even in early Lenin, you can find this some data in my Lenin introduction. You know there was an attentat on Lenin in How did it happen? It's unimaginable. You know how it happened? Lenin alone with his private chauffeur, alone in an open car approached Kremlin. There he saw some women debating, and the women started to shout at him. Hey, you, you promised us freedom, now we don't even have enough to eat blah blah. Lenin stepped out and started to debate with them. And then one woman shot him. And then it was total chaos. A guard shouted at Kremlin, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya came and said my god, what to do? Then this is demonstrated. Then she said to the guard, listen, there is a store around the corner there where I heard they got some lemons from the south. Go there and buy some lemons, maybe this will... You know, it's incredible. Or you know what happened once? This is demonstrated too. Lenin in he went again with his chauffeur to in the evening to give a speech at some high school, the end of the year. And on the road in suburbs empty, some three small-gang bandits stopped the car and threw them out. They didn't know who he is, chauffeur and Lenin, and stole the car. So the two of them then had to walk for half an hour to a police station claiming can you phone to Kremlin. And the point is that those policemen didn't know them and said, what you are Lenin, fuck off and so on. It was still possible for this to happen. And it's only in '22, '23 that the Soviet state that we all like and love, you know, where things like this can no any longer happen, emerged. So again, but let's not okay, let's not get lost here. Let's go back to that painting. This was just a small celebration of authentic revolutions and so on. You know although you can say that the picture the painting David the Death of Marat is realistic because it's well known what he meant within realist logic, that upper dark part to be. It's the wall. It's simply he wanted to emphasize the loneliness of Marat and how he lived in a modest apartment where the wall and he even and here things become mysterious because at the same time we know that the wall behind on that wall was not as ascetic just dark with scratches that it was kind of a how do you call that stuff with flower motifs that you see wallpaper. Sorry? Wallpaper. Yeah, that there was wallpaper more kitschy wallpaper there. But what I want to say is this. I think modernism begins when as if you look at the world as an unfinished world. You know like you have realist painting here, here, but it is as if parts of the painting are unfinished. You know the way you phenomenologically experience the painting. It's as if these are simply just how do you call when the painter before doing it just makes some checks. It's just the chaotic background as it were. And the idea is that although maybe he wasn't fully aware, but it's clear that he was playing with this. So again, the idea being that you have a certain structure of reality but this is not all. There is some the way I call it in my books chaotic pre-ontological not even reality. You know like you have to have, you know where I had a very naive this is total naivety but I had a wonderful experience. I hate this warm countries and so on where you dance and so on. Like I think that in in Brazil, I think that Bahia should be bombed. People are lazy there, dance. I like São Paulo, dirty city, work and so on no. But what there are two dream countrysides for me. The very south of Tierra del Fuego, no, Land of Fire. The very south of Argentina. Or if you go to the opposite end, Iceland. Were you in Iceland? Not just Reykjavik but you should go around. And when I went there, my idea I almost had a kind of a metaphysical epiphany. It's as if and then I was so glad to learn from my Iceland friends that they in their mythology already play with this, that God didn't fully finish the job of creation in Iceland. You know because if you go to some of the countryside there is something growing green but it's this kind of chaotic moss. It looks from our naive experience that it's not yet it's as the northern part you know as if God was just playing with some with some plant life but didn't yet fully finish creation, no. That's why again I cannot resist it. If I were to choose a place to live independently of France and so on, it would have been somewhere to the north-east of of Reykjavik out there in the wilderness. Okay, now let's go on. Why is this important? Because now I will make a crazy jump. First let's go on with paintings. Can I just ask you something quickly? Of course. So why don't you why don't you include the lack or the not all as part of reality itself? I do. You do? Although I do in my big book. When you say that reality is not fully ontologically constructed, why is it? You know what I mean. Why is it that why isn't it included? Because you seem to be making a distinction between the pre-ontological and the fully constituted reality, right? I am but you see Alain. Who is the Schelling guy? It's you. It's you, the Schelling guy. Schelling guy. Oh, the Schelling, yeah yeah yeah. The guy will be evil not that you at me. The guy between Fichte and Hegel who thought he is a good doctor also and you know he took over from Schlegel Carolina Schlegel, this revolutionary beauty, the femme fatale of German Romanticism, and she was ill and he Schelling cured her. Tried to cure her, so she died, I mean. That's our Schelling, you know. But she was good, she was to the end for Jacobins. As long as she was there Schelling was a leftist, then he turned. No no no, this is I have a book on her, this is truth. Okay, but let's go on. I'm saying this because you know that I took this from Schelling. I did a book on Schelling. In Schelling you have this idea that you have existence which means established world of reality and then you have this pre-ontological literally pre-logos chaos. I mean if you want poetically, I hope we agree, the most
unknown
beautiful,
beautiful,
Slavoj Žižek
shattering, this half-mystical cosmological speculation I think is Schelling's Weltalter, Ages of the World. I mean this is breathtaking. Already at the beginning Schelling says, I don't the point is not to see how the world was at the beginning. The point is to see what happened before the beginning. This is really an ingenious point. Schelling quotes the Bible you know that the bad guy, if you ask me the bad guy is John, of the four gospels. John is the first anti-Semitic, the first racist, the first mystic, the first gnostic. He screwed it up. And he begins with at the beginning was
shattering, this half-mystical cosmological speculation I think is Schelling's Weltalter, Ages of the World. I mean this is breathtaking. Already at the beginning Schelling says, I don't the point is not to see how the world was at the beginning. The point is to see what happened before the beginning. This is really an ingenious point. Schelling quotes the Bible you know that the bad guy, if you ask me the bad guy is John, of the four gospels. John is the first anti-Semitic, the first racist, the first mystic, the first gnostic. He screwed it up. And he begins with at the beginning was
unknown
Logos, the Word.
Logos, the Word.
Slavoj Žižek
Schelling referring to this said, no, what interests me is what was there before the beginning. By beginning he means this divine and so why did God create the world? And he goes into this. This reminds me, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, but I forgot the title. I think it's something like The Word. A wonderful, very short, I love them these science fiction stories which part of paradoxical, short one page and a half science fiction story. Oh, Solo Solution. Sorry? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Where all of it is just a rambling of a confused guy. Should I do it? I'm too tired. Fuck it. I don't want. I don't want what to do blah blah blah. And then at the end he says, okay, let's do it. Let it be light or what. Like the point is you get it that it was God's confusion. This is a very Schellingian idea, you know. Schelling goes then into this wonderful concept of divine madness, abyss of divine drives. Basically, I put it of course with a certain irony but literally it's true. As you must know, Schelling's idea is that I'm very evil here. God created the world this was what we call in psychiatry this labor/work therapy, you know, when they tell
Schelling referring to this said, no, what interests me is what was there before the beginning. By beginning he means this divine and so why did God create the world? And he goes into this. This reminds me, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, but I forgot the title. I think it's something like The Word. A wonderful, very short, I love them these science fiction stories which part of paradoxical, short one page and a half science fiction story. Oh, Solo Solution. Sorry? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Where all of it is just a rambling of a confused guy. Should I do it? I'm too tired. Fuck it. I don't want. I don't want what to do blah blah blah. And then at the end he says, okay, let's do it. Let it be light or what. Like the point is you get it that it was God's confusion. This is a very Schellingian idea, you know. Schelling goes then into this wonderful concept of divine madness, abyss of divine drives. Basically, I put it of course with a certain irony but literally it's true. As you must know, Schelling's idea is that I'm very evil here. God created the world this was what we call in psychiatry this labor/work therapy, you know, when they tell
unknown
you do some work and it will help you, you know that literally God created the world pronounced the word to to save himself from
you do some work and it will help you, you know that literally God created the world pronounced the word to to save himself from
Slavoj Žižek
his own madness. And what I want to say here
his own madness. And what I want to say here
unknown
is that Schelling then this is his typical genius evokes a typical to he says he asks Schelling how does we understand this God pronounced a word. And he said this is Schelling at his strongest, when he's dealing with a highest speculative point, you
is that Schelling then this is his typical genius evokes a typical to he says he asks Schelling how does we understand this God pronounced a word. And he said this is Schelling at his strongest, when he's dealing with a highest speculative point, you
Slavoj Žižek
know, but then all of a sudden he clarifies it with an everyday situation. He says isn't it often that again, we are confused, we try to understand then all of a sudden you find the right word. And he said that creation should be conceived like that. It's not out of nothing. And here even my Jewish friends are telling me that Schelling was right. Do you know that the first thing every good every guy who really knows Talmud and all that bullshit will tell you that the first mystery is that Elohim or what the word in the Bible which is used for God is plural. It's singular-plural whatever. And this also explains this strange things you know when God says let's create Adam on our image. He speaks in plural. He says let's create someone like us. Like it's this also explains that obscene, but for me it's the greatest, obscene scene in the beginning of the book of Job, you know. When God basically God had a nice dinner with Devil and then in that conversation cognac after dinner they debate, are people faithful to me blah blah blah, and they made a bet, no. This is all part of this idea and this is what I say then to annoy my Jewish friends or tell them to tell is to tell them of course you are not truly a monotheist. My Lacanian paradox would have been Jewish God is still one which is many to get real one unique three or as Alain would have said, one has to be marked repeated. You know this is what Alain has it very nicely that one is not the beginning. You don't begin with one. What you have at the beginning is zero and multiplicity, multiplicité, which shouldn't be translated as Hardt-Negri multitude, no. So again, let's go on. Again you find already in Schelling this idea of that our reality is not simply things are like that. It's a kind of a fragile construction based on or emerging out of some kind of a pre-ontological chaos. You know it's as if here and there, and this is also the best theory of evil. It's very deep. In Talmud somebody told me that the origin of evil, isn't it a beautiful dream. Now you will tell me this is bullshit. Of course I don't believe in it. I'm totally an atheist. But I think that we can translate all this in very materialist term of the real, symbolic, structuring of the real. You know what's the most radical Talmud ontology? Two features. The one is that before our world, God made other universes, but they were a failure, so God destroyed them, erased them. But he was not careful enough, not completely. And that evil are the remainders of the previous destroyed world worlds. I love this how what is obviously crazy theology maybe even nonsense, how useful it can be for example, maybe you know it I'm sorry I repeat it another example which is my favorite one. Because Meillassoux and terms Meillassoux, you know after finitude, after Meillassoux he refers to it but I think he is too dismissive. Do you know this debate I don't know maybe some of you know who he is, namely after Darwin already in immediately after the publication of Origins of Species, you know that there were some problems for Christians because they had this problem. Some honest theologians, A, it's clear we totally believe Bible has to be true. They were right, they didn't buy this bullshit. Oh, Bible is just a mythic condensation of early stages of humanity. No they said my god, it's God Word, don't mess, it's true. Okay, and then I like this, this is British sense like this is Monty Python of humor. They even the charm is that this is not a joke. One theologian even proposed that God created the world minus at in the morning. and I like this idea God takes breakfast, okay, now. Okay. So the problem was how to combine this with obvious fact they admitted it that you cannot play with Darwin. He really demonstrated and all the proofs, fossils and so on, no, that the universe even on earth is at least millions of years. I hope you know the solution, it's an ingenious one. How to bring these two together. Ah, a theological friend of Darwin found the mega solution. Of course God cannot lie so it's true our world was created blah blah blah. But to give us an illusion of openness, God directly created fossils. You know it's kind of a it's like on movie sets you know where you really do it in a studio set but you paint on the background, you know, the valley or whatever. That God did the same thing at a temporal level. And I find this an ingenious idea. Why? Don't be afraid. I'm not a fundamentalist nut. I don't believe in this. What I think is that isn't this the best metaphor you can imagine for ideology? This simply you know retroactive how do you how do you call it, inventing the past or whatever. We are doing it all the time. Do you know that big old now, he's still alive because he forgot to die, he's so old, Eric Hobsbawm. He published some years ago with Cambridge University Press I think a wonderful volume, collective work. Is it Inventing the Past or something like that? Where they go systematically through all of it. For example, the nice example. You know how we identified Scottish dresses today with that kilt, the skirt for men and so on. Well, late 19th-century purely. Scottish revival. There was something similar to it earlier but absolutely not the same. Like most of what we perceive as ancient history it was reinvented and so on and so on. So again, I think and I even think that this is not ideology in bad sense. I there is a whole chapter on this in my book you can read there how what fascinated me this is the idea that I want to give to you of this ontological openness of reality. I always quote this Borges line which is famous about Kafka. You must know it that all with every writer has a how do you call it, the ones he plagiarized, predecessors, forerunners. But a a truly great writer creates retroactively his forerunners. And he gives the example of Kafka, no? The idea is that of course we know who were the predecessors of Kafka. Name them: Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky, William Blake blah blah. But he says at the same time Kafka has already to be here to see that dimension in them. Now you will say, okay what's the big deal. This simply means from today's perspective we read them in a different way. It's not as simple as that. Why not? Because this would still have implied that they were fully what they were and now from our totality we read them non-authentically in a different way. Like okay the greatest master here of course is Saint Paul, which is why I like him like Alain Badiou, you know. It's clear that Jesus Christ in himself was just a stupid confused loser. And it's absolutely clear that it was a typical situation of what Lacan means by but this nonetheless authentic, I'm not making fun, as point de capiton, you know in the sense of quilting point where you add a signifier and everything retroactively changes. The although there are some hints redemption blah blah blah, but as we all know the death of Christ was experienced as a mega trauma, failure. And the genius of Paul was to as it were re-read, re-interpret failure as the ultimate triumph. Okay, so but what does this mean again? I also quote here often you must know it the idea I'm referring to here is this idea from some French historian André Monglond who knows him. The point is that he was quoted by Walter Benjamin. You know where he says these are famous lines that often we have historical phenomena like works of art whatever, which are like it's a nice technological metaphor shots on a film you take in the old fashioned camera where you take shots but only in the future the developers how do you call them for that film will be so only in the future we will be able to read it. And okay Benjamin says many works of art, work like that and so on and so on. And I agree it's literally true. For example no, I didn't use this in this book of mine but or did I, I forgot. For example in Shakespeare. I mean I'm sorry that I'm very traditional here but Shakespeare was a genius I claim, you know. You find so many passages in him which are as if once I was even tempted to say as a kind of a theoretical irony joke, I wanted to write a text proving in detail which of Lacan's seminars Shakespeare was reading. You know like the idea is that he was reading Ethics of Psychoanalysis was my favorite at that point. Richard not the III, the guy who the evil king you know, Kingdom for a Horse who I totally buy historical revisionists, he was really a good guy. It's all Tudor plot. You know Tudors took over after and because Tudors were the true bandits. And to legitimate their rule, they killed everyone around and invented histories or okay but Richard II, the guy who got more and more hysterical and at the end he is liquidated, it's breathtaking how you know when Lacan says that signifier he uses this mysterious expression which is a very precise one. Signifier can become a sign of love, not signifier. And he means something very precise. We don't have time to go into it because this is one of nice thing for me with Lacan. The early yes immediately, just let me finish. The early Lacan was to put it bluntly against love for desire. The idea is desire paradox abyss of desire is authentic and love is basically an imaginary narcissistic gentrification, control down playing of desire. In love in other words love is constitutively narcissistic. You like your mirror image whatever your own and so on and so on. But then all of a sudden and precisely beginning with seminar and later when the topic of the real, the drive enters love becomes more authentic than desire. As he puts it love is the way drive in its brutality can be included into the symbolic order so there is the sign of love. Okay listen at the final monologue before he is killed, at the very end of Shakespeare's Richard II. It's like Lacan put into poetry, you know with precisely this expression music as a sign of love. It's okay. We don't have time to go into it but let's go back. So what I want to say is that okay you and then just really briefly. I was just curious I don't remember seeing the part where you were talking about Kafka that comes out of the discussion you have on the vanishing mediator correct? Already the no no vanishing mediator is in my early early book for they know not what they do, no. Right but just out of curiosity I was wondering if you're going to continue on that line if you could explain the difference between the vanishing mediator and après-coup in Lacan. If there is if there is if there is a gap. Oh my god, that's a tough question and okay maybe it would have been meant totally yeah. I would like at some point in the future because I'm agree with your question if its implication is that we shouldn't simply identify the two because the obvious solution would have been the identify the that is to say that the mediator vanishes precisely because après-coup it is in other words to put it ironically we are all Stalinists if we want it or no. We are all retro you know like all history is like Stalin's images where Trotsky disappears or whatever, you know we are but it's more it's I think it's more complex because first the problem is not only the past it's it's the future also. Okay but I don't go into it now sorry let me go on with this one. You know again it's not enough to say simply let's talk about William Blake as influence on Kafka. Of course there was William Blake the way he really was, a different historical constellation meaning and then Kafka reappropriated I mean did something to Blake. No no no the point is that Blake should be read as that film, you know. We are not talking about mythology, about mystic. It's not that Blake was from the future, it's Blake was like that painting by David. It was open, it was not fully contextualized. This is why I claim that a proper materialist history is not is never this simple historicizing contextualization like if you look at the thing fully in its context you can really understand it. Our answer should be no, because precisely no context is full. Every historical constellation is incomplete, open. Okay let me go on here now. In literature okay we find this openness and so on. I quote a lot in my book I have a whole chapter on it if you read French a little bit but some of the his books are translated. There is a wonderful French guy I love him. Pierre Bayard, B-A-Y-A-R-D, Pierre Bayard, who is this kind of the best of European intellectuals. He's not a specialist but just a wonderful essayist make okay. He started with a couple of incredibly brilliant books although just exercises in practical jokes but it's more. He took a couple of detailed analysis and it's not done as a joke, a couple of so convincing I think it's simply right, a couple of big classical detective novels claiming that the wrong guy is identified as culprit. And for example his most famous case is you know one of don't underestimate I did it a lot of time Agatha Christie. She did have a tremendous narrative imagination of playing out all variations. For example what are the variations? For example you know the story of Murder on the Orient Express? You know what's the solution there? You have a group of suspects. Who is the killer? All of them. But the price you pay because by definition the whole community cannot be wrong this would be too Marxist, no. The only solution quite logically is then the true criminal must be the murdered one and that the murder was justified. That's the version there. Then you find in Murder on the News, N-E-W-S, you know for these city side streets whatever you must I think this round streets in England no. But it's you know it's really an ingenious story because the standard topic is murder masked as suicide, you know. You kill someone then you plant a suicide letter whatever to be very primitive you wipe your fingerprints from the gun you press his hand or blah blah blah. Here it's the opposite. It's a murder but the solution of Poirot is that it really was a suicide. It's a very simple solution, a guy was desperate killed himself his wife or who hated another woman who was the mistress of this guy and she just found the body and manipulated it the suicide so that it looked like murder. Or I mean she really was a genius at this level of again. Or one Murder is Getting Ready whatever. It's a wonderful future analysis you know Poirot comes to this typical big party in English countryside and deduces that a guy is planning to kill someone so that this final confrontation is not you know this theatrical moment at the end of Agatha Christie novels all the group of suspects are gathered and then no, he confronts alone the future murderer and convinced him not to do it, you know. So again you must know it, the other legend here is The Murder of Roger
know, but then all of a sudden he clarifies it with an everyday situation. He says isn't it often that again, we are confused, we try to understand then all of a sudden you find the right word. And he said that creation should be conceived like that. It's not out of nothing. And here even my Jewish friends are telling me that Schelling was right. Do you know that the first thing every good every guy who really knows Talmud and all that bullshit will tell you that the first mystery is that Elohim or what the word in the Bible which is used for God is plural. It's singular-plural whatever. And this also explains this strange things you know when God says let's create Adam on our image. He speaks in plural. He says let's create someone like us. Like it's this also explains that obscene, but for me it's the greatest, obscene scene in the beginning of the book of Job, you know. When God basically God had a nice dinner with Devil and then in that conversation cognac after dinner they debate, are people faithful to me blah blah blah, and they made a bet, no. This is all part of this idea and this is what I say then to annoy my Jewish friends or tell them to tell is to tell them of course you are not truly a monotheist. My Lacanian paradox would have been Jewish God is still one which is many to get real one unique three or as Alain would have said, one has to be marked repeated. You know this is what Alain has it very nicely that one is not the beginning. You don't begin with one. What you have at the beginning is zero and multiplicity, multiplicité, which shouldn't be translated as Hardt-Negri multitude, no. So again, let's go on. Again you find already in Schelling this idea of that our reality is not simply things are like that. It's a kind of a fragile construction based on or emerging out of some kind of a pre-ontological chaos. You know it's as if here and there, and this is also the best theory of evil. It's very deep. In Talmud somebody told me that the origin of evil, isn't it a beautiful dream. Now you will tell me this is bullshit. Of course I don't believe in it. I'm totally an atheist. But I think that we can translate all this in very materialist term of the real, symbolic, structuring of the real. You know what's the most radical Talmud ontology? Two features. The one is that before our world, God made other universes, but they were a failure, so God destroyed them, erased them. But he was not careful enough, not completely. And that evil are the remainders of the previous destroyed world worlds. I love this how what is obviously crazy theology maybe even nonsense, how useful it can be for example, maybe you know it I'm sorry I repeat it another example which is my favorite one. Because Meillassoux and terms Meillassoux, you know after finitude, after Meillassoux he refers to it but I think he is too dismissive. Do you know this debate I don't know maybe some of you know who he is, namely after Darwin already in immediately after the publication of Origins of Species, you know that there were some problems for Christians because they had this problem. Some honest theologians, A, it's clear we totally believe Bible has to be true. They were right, they didn't buy this bullshit. Oh, Bible is just a mythic condensation of early stages of humanity. No they said my god, it's God Word, don't mess, it's true. Okay, and then I like this, this is British sense like this is Monty Python of humor. They even the charm is that this is not a joke. One theologian even proposed that God created the world minus at in the morning. and I like this idea God takes breakfast, okay, now. Okay. So the problem was how to combine this with obvious fact they admitted it that you cannot play with Darwin. He really demonstrated and all the proofs, fossils and so on, no, that the universe even on earth is at least millions of years. I hope you know the solution, it's an ingenious one. How to bring these two together. Ah, a theological friend of Darwin found the mega solution. Of course God cannot lie so it's true our world was created blah blah blah. But to give us an illusion of openness, God directly created fossils. You know it's kind of a it's like on movie sets you know where you really do it in a studio set but you paint on the background, you know, the valley or whatever. That God did the same thing at a temporal level. And I find this an ingenious idea. Why? Don't be afraid. I'm not a fundamentalist nut. I don't believe in this. What I think is that isn't this the best metaphor you can imagine for ideology? This simply you know retroactive how do you how do you call it, inventing the past or whatever. We are doing it all the time. Do you know that big old now, he's still alive because he forgot to die, he's so old, Eric Hobsbawm. He published some years ago with Cambridge University Press I think a wonderful volume, collective work. Is it Inventing the Past or something like that? Where they go systematically through all of it. For example, the nice example. You know how we identified Scottish dresses today with that kilt, the skirt for men and so on. Well, late 19th-century purely. Scottish revival. There was something similar to it earlier but absolutely not the same. Like most of what we perceive as ancient history it was reinvented and so on and so on. So again, I think and I even think that this is not ideology in bad sense. I there is a whole chapter on this in my book you can read there how what fascinated me this is the idea that I want to give to you of this ontological openness of reality. I always quote this Borges line which is famous about Kafka. You must know it that all with every writer has a how do you call it, the ones he plagiarized, predecessors, forerunners. But a a truly great writer creates retroactively his forerunners. And he gives the example of Kafka, no? The idea is that of course we know who were the predecessors of Kafka. Name them: Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky, William Blake blah blah. But he says at the same time Kafka has already to be here to see that dimension in them. Now you will say, okay what's the big deal. This simply means from today's perspective we read them in a different way. It's not as simple as that. Why not? Because this would still have implied that they were fully what they were and now from our totality we read them non-authentically in a different way. Like okay the greatest master here of course is Saint Paul, which is why I like him like Alain Badiou, you know. It's clear that Jesus Christ in himself was just a stupid confused loser. And it's absolutely clear that it was a typical situation of what Lacan means by but this nonetheless authentic, I'm not making fun, as point de capiton, you know in the sense of quilting point where you add a signifier and everything retroactively changes. The although there are some hints redemption blah blah blah, but as we all know the death of Christ was experienced as a mega trauma, failure. And the genius of Paul was to as it were re-read, re-interpret failure as the ultimate triumph. Okay, so but what does this mean again? I also quote here often you must know it the idea I'm referring to here is this idea from some French historian André Monglond who knows him. The point is that he was quoted by Walter Benjamin. You know where he says these are famous lines that often we have historical phenomena like works of art whatever, which are like it's a nice technological metaphor shots on a film you take in the old fashioned camera where you take shots but only in the future the developers how do you call them for that film will be so only in the future we will be able to read it. And okay Benjamin says many works of art, work like that and so on and so on. And I agree it's literally true. For example no, I didn't use this in this book of mine but or did I, I forgot. For example in Shakespeare. I mean I'm sorry that I'm very traditional here but Shakespeare was a genius I claim, you know. You find so many passages in him which are as if once I was even tempted to say as a kind of a theoretical irony joke, I wanted to write a text proving in detail which of Lacan's seminars Shakespeare was reading. You know like the idea is that he was reading Ethics of Psychoanalysis was my favorite at that point. Richard not the III, the guy who the evil king you know, Kingdom for a Horse who I totally buy historical revisionists, he was really a good guy. It's all Tudor plot. You know Tudors took over after and because Tudors were the true bandits. And to legitimate their rule, they killed everyone around and invented histories or okay but Richard II, the guy who got more and more hysterical and at the end he is liquidated, it's breathtaking how you know when Lacan says that signifier he uses this mysterious expression which is a very precise one. Signifier can become a sign of love, not signifier. And he means something very precise. We don't have time to go into it because this is one of nice thing for me with Lacan. The early yes immediately, just let me finish. The early Lacan was to put it bluntly against love for desire. The idea is desire paradox abyss of desire is authentic and love is basically an imaginary narcissistic gentrification, control down playing of desire. In love in other words love is constitutively narcissistic. You like your mirror image whatever your own and so on and so on. But then all of a sudden and precisely beginning with seminar and later when the topic of the real, the drive enters love becomes more authentic than desire. As he puts it love is the way drive in its brutality can be included into the symbolic order so there is the sign of love. Okay listen at the final monologue before he is killed, at the very end of Shakespeare's Richard II. It's like Lacan put into poetry, you know with precisely this expression music as a sign of love. It's okay. We don't have time to go into it but let's go back. So what I want to say is that okay you and then just really briefly. I was just curious I don't remember seeing the part where you were talking about Kafka that comes out of the discussion you have on the vanishing mediator correct? Already the no no vanishing mediator is in my early early book for they know not what they do, no. Right but just out of curiosity I was wondering if you're going to continue on that line if you could explain the difference between the vanishing mediator and après-coup in Lacan. If there is if there is if there is a gap. Oh my god, that's a tough question and okay maybe it would have been meant totally yeah. I would like at some point in the future because I'm agree with your question if its implication is that we shouldn't simply identify the two because the obvious solution would have been the identify the that is to say that the mediator vanishes precisely because après-coup it is in other words to put it ironically we are all Stalinists if we want it or no. We are all retro you know like all history is like Stalin's images where Trotsky disappears or whatever, you know we are but it's more it's I think it's more complex because first the problem is not only the past it's it's the future also. Okay but I don't go into it now sorry let me go on with this one. You know again it's not enough to say simply let's talk about William Blake as influence on Kafka. Of course there was William Blake the way he really was, a different historical constellation meaning and then Kafka reappropriated I mean did something to Blake. No no no the point is that Blake should be read as that film, you know. We are not talking about mythology, about mystic. It's not that Blake was from the future, it's Blake was like that painting by David. It was open, it was not fully contextualized. This is why I claim that a proper materialist history is not is never this simple historicizing contextualization like if you look at the thing fully in its context you can really understand it. Our answer should be no, because precisely no context is full. Every historical constellation is incomplete, open. Okay let me go on here now. In literature okay we find this openness and so on. I quote a lot in my book I have a whole chapter on it if you read French a little bit but some of the his books are translated. There is a wonderful French guy I love him. Pierre Bayard, B-A-Y-A-R-D, Pierre Bayard, who is this kind of the best of European intellectuals. He's not a specialist but just a wonderful essayist make okay. He started with a couple of incredibly brilliant books although just exercises in practical jokes but it's more. He took a couple of detailed analysis and it's not done as a joke, a couple of so convincing I think it's simply right, a couple of big classical detective novels claiming that the wrong guy is identified as culprit. And for example his most famous case is you know one of don't underestimate I did it a lot of time Agatha Christie. She did have a tremendous narrative imagination of playing out all variations. For example what are the variations? For example you know the story of Murder on the Orient Express? You know what's the solution there? You have a group of suspects. Who is the killer? All of them. But the price you pay because by definition the whole community cannot be wrong this would be too Marxist, no. The only solution quite logically is then the true criminal must be the murdered one and that the murder was justified. That's the version there. Then you find in Murder on the News, N-E-W-S, you know for these city side streets whatever you must I think this round streets in England no. But it's you know it's really an ingenious story because the standard topic is murder masked as suicide, you know. You kill someone then you plant a suicide letter whatever to be very primitive you wipe your fingerprints from the gun you press his hand or blah blah blah. Here it's the opposite. It's a murder but the solution of Poirot is that it really was a suicide. It's a very simple solution, a guy was desperate killed himself his wife or who hated another woman who was the mistress of this guy and she just found the body and manipulated it the suicide so that it looked like murder. Or I mean she really was a genius at this level of again. Or one Murder is Getting Ready whatever. It's a wonderful future analysis you know Poirot comes to this typical big party in English countryside and deduces that a guy is planning to kill someone so that this final confrontation is not you know this theatrical moment at the end of Agatha Christie novels all the group of suspects are gathered and then no, he confronts alone the future murderer and convinced him not to do it, you know. So again you must know it, the other legend here is The Murder of Roger
unknown
Ackroyd. And that modernist bullshitter Edmund Wilson wrote a legendary essay "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" claiming fuck it we are no longer in this classical detective novels who cares. Ah ah ah it's more complex. Why? First there is something so mysterious about how detective novels really work namely you know what gave me to think here. I'm not trying to convince you to read them because sorry to watch them because you feel how to put it they are outdated today they didn't survive. But still when I was young when I first watched them I liked there two things. This was a great invention. If you heard about them you must know what they are. What is the specific trick of Columbo series? First that the problem is not who done it. You remember how it's typical Columbo story. You see the situation of murder, you see the murder everything, then Columbo comes and so it's not who done it but it's purely
Ackroyd. And that modernist bullshitter Edmund Wilson wrote a legendary essay "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" claiming fuck it we are no longer in this classical detective novels who cares. Ah ah ah it's more complex. Why? First there is something so mysterious about how detective novels really work namely you know what gave me to think here. I'm not trying to convince you to read them because sorry to watch them because you feel how to put it they are outdated today they didn't survive. But still when I was young when I first watched them I liked there two things. This was a great invention. If you heard about them you must know what they are. What is the specific trick of Columbo series? First that the problem is not who done it. You remember how it's typical Columbo story. You see the situation of murder, you see the murder everything, then Columbo comes and so it's not who done it but it's purely
Slavoj Žižek
semiotic problem. You have two realities: the superficial reality and what really happened. And the whole point is how Columbo will both levels are fully known to you. The point is just how to bring the two. And this is correct which is why I think it's wrong this idea you are reading a detective novel and a friend can ruin your pleasure if he tells you oh I will tell you who did it. No if you really like detective novels this will not in the least ruin your pleasure because the trick is not who did it but purely logical deduction how you what was the symptom what was the you know clue to put it in even Lacanian or structuralist terms the doubly inscribed signifier, you know something which can function as part of ordinary reality but if you read it properly works in okay. So what I'm saying that this was one great element in Columbo. Second one even more mysterious. If you watch any Columbo did you noticed something very mysterious. Totally irrational from the standpoint of ordinary logic. Okay after the murder police comes Columbo comes there to the house where the murder whatever and in a very mysterious way he immediately knows who did it. And then the whole point is this double game how he will prove it. And this is the clearest case I claim of of what Lacan meant by subject supposed to know. You know this is it. It's totally non-explained how but Columbo knows. Absolutely know. Because then the whole point is you know this typical it's already a bad cliché Columbo he comes there old lady can I ask you then he goes out everything oh sorry just one more question or whatever all those games no. So what I'm saying is that they are complex things, they are much more enigmatic these who done it novels. And again in Roger Ackroyd, again something prohibited happened. You know you have in detective novels this figure of it can be Dr. Watson or Colonel Hastings I think with Poirot, this innocent stupid again the big other appearance ordinary guy standing for common sense who reports on it. And this guy stands for social decency common manners so by definition he should be innocent. It can also be not a personal friend but just some some someone who stands for common sense community. Now you know what's the big trick no in Roger Ackroyd. That at the end this guy who is telling all the story turns to be the murderer at the very end. And now there were accusations that she cheated and so on Agatha Christie. But here Pierre Bayard and it's difficult to find it because the book is sold out, not even reprinted but if you can get it in some library or I found it in Boston. I was there once staying at a hotel and there was a secondhand bookstore in the basement and my god this was one of the miracles I bought for two dollars or what this book. It's Not the Murder, It's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. In an extremely convincing way I start to suspect that Agatha Christie even knew what she was doing. This guy Bayard demonstrates that Roger Ackroyd the narrator is not the murderer. That here you have to know the story to get the point that it's his sister and that he loved so much his sister that he sacrificed himself for her. To save her he took the murder on himself and so on and so on. It's but no it's not just psychology, it's through wonderfully precise detailed reading of clues. Then he does the same for Sherlock Holmes The Hound of the Baskervilles. Absolutely convincing. Absolutely convincing. I even forgot who but again the murderer is not the one who is the murderer and so on okay. So this guy Bayard let me get back to the point. He did something wonderful. He wrote a also a book Plagiarizing From, this is where future enter, Plagiarizing From the Future. I have a even a chapter on it I think in my big fat book. Plagiarizing from the future. This would mean something like you know his reading of David, although his examples are mostly not all literary would be that it is as if David in this moment with this chaotic background pre-ontological as it were plagiarized from the modernist future. That it is as if he got a sign from the future. He came years too early which is why again T. J. Clark is right in saying that this was the first modernist painting. The second one comes only at the late 19th century but he was years early. And here to describe this logic to you of course Bayard is not a mystic, he is not a New Ager who claims there is some atemporal eternal order where future is already written and we can read signs from it. No no no his idea is that we are getting signs from the future all the time but this future is not as it were objective future. This future is a possibility inscribed into our presence. Can I tell you a story which is again one of my maybe you know it I repeat it all the time is beautiful one of my favorite this temporal paradox science fiction stories. It takes place in United States in 24th, 25th century a couple of hundred years in future from now. And the idea is that at that point a little bit of time travel was possible. It was possible through a machine to go back for a couple of hundred years and to return. Okay, the hero of the story is an art historian who is fascinated by a great mid-20th-century American painter. Basically the model is Jackson Pollock, whom I hate, he is a drunken idiot. My favorite is Mark Rothko, that's another story. So he travels back, he wants my god to see to meet the guy no like your gene, my god who wouldn't like to travel back to meet I don't know Shakespeare whatever no. So he goes back to follow his career of the Pollock figure when Pollock was still in his a young guy. And it's okay, he ends up in Greenwich Village, mid-40s or whatever and is shocked to discover that this guy is a totally corrupt drunken idiot what Pollock was if I may add that and that not only this he's stupid a drunkard but that he is corrupt, evil. What happens is that the historian art historian from the future befriends becomes friend with him and this evil guy steals his machine and escapes into the future. So now you can guess what happens. The only thing that remains to the art historian is to take over the role of this guy and paint his masterpieces because he knows them from the future. So you know he himself was that's what he didn't know the guy who did it for the future. I mean I think that the time of creativity is precisely this this type of circular time you know. I just okay but let's go on. So again let me now I will do something crazy. I will be who was here, was it you who knows about genetics? And you, you you you are the one who knows about quantum physics and so on. Now please don't kill me after I finish just listen to me with great mercy now as I put in no. But isn't it that now it's I admit it I confess to you, all I know is from these you know popular introductions and so on and so on. But at least what I get from these popular introductions it is this idea that in the quantum reality you can ontologically cheat a little bit. They always use for this elements which emerge out of zero and immediately disappear. This idea that something can appear and disappear before it's registered as it were by the by the. So again I will not go now into they even use one of the was it Brian Greene or who uses this banking metaphor where he says let's say I want to take a flight to New York but I don't have money enough on my card but I discover that in that other city they have a slow, not yet digitalized system where it will take one day, two before if I pay with a credit card the bank will so I can buy the ticket and then cover it with money before before the bank will notice it. You know in this sense I can as it were ontologically cheat. I found again this idea tremendously you you see what I'm aiming at that we have some reality which is constituted, registered but you can as it were through this fluctuations ontologically cheat. Like things can happen which then retroactively are undone. You can as it were Brian Greene uses the term "borrow from the future", you know. Reverse causality. Sorry? Yeah yeah where the future affects the past. Yeah yeah. Now all this again I'm not saying anything like to commit myself there although I know what Richard everybody knows what Richard Feynman says no that nobody understands quantum physics and I know what this means. Not this stupidity of we are all bluffing but something very deep about history of science. The idea is that modern science it begins with Galileo no longer can be translated into our ordinary daily experience. Things happen there it's a radical gap between scientific universe reality as described there and our daily experience. And because if you look at early physics, not even science, Aristotle, what is he doing? He is simply describing our daily experience, heavy objects fall blah blah. With Galileo you have the first complication. Because according to our spontaneous ontology, things move if you push it. If a thing is left alone it is at peace. As you know for Galileo it is not peace it is this how do you call it the same speed moving inertia. Yeah inertia. Yeah with which is the zero. It's already a little bit counter-intuitive. Then with with Einstein then with quantum physics it's simply a world which we cannot translate into our experience of reality. But with all this said let me repeat maybe most of you know it but I find it perfect to explain what I'm aiming at with this incompleteness of reality and so on. I'm sorry if you know this story that I always use from a guy whom I don't like very much but here he did something nice. Nicholas Fearn, very aggressive analytical philosopher wrote a short introduction to philosophy where it's clear that he hates all continental tradition. But he says something wonderful. Trying to explain the ontological consequences of quantum physics and this all uncertainty principle and so on. There he is maybe not precise enough because I did read enough about Nils Bohr and so on to learn that Heisenberg was too stupid, didn't get it. Heisenberg has you know this the uncertainty principle like you cannot measure at the same time I don't know velocity and position. But it's very interesting, I read it now, a polemic between Nils Bohr and Heisenberg. Heisenberg still took it as a simple epistemological limitation. Like we just cannot measure it. While Bohr told him basically you are wrong, it is not just that we cannot measure it, reality in itself is that is as it were incomplete. Okay here comes Heisenberg accepted it and added it as a footnote. So the thing that basically makes the uncertainty principle correct is is not it's simply cheating, you know. But this is how big theoreticians cheat you know. I I know a friend of mine who did a similar thing, he made a point and then I played his Nils Bohr. Okay it wasn't at such a high level. And criticized that point. What he simply did is that he directly incorporated because he showed me the unmy my point and he added a footnote "After finishing this text I learned that my friend Slavoj Žižek got a similar idea" whatever you know. I love my friends this is the way we should be given. Okay but let's go on. So Nicholas Fearn to explain this uses this beautiful metaphor which touches to my reality of a PC computer game you know like you know in a computer game also reality is not fully constructed in the sense that for example you see a house in the background when you have all this Call of Duty whatever modern warfare. But if it's not part of the game and often it's not that you can enter the house then there is no program for the interior of the house because why because it's not part of the game. Or you see stars, you see some fuzzy forest trees in the background. These trees trees, forest, exist only in this fuzzy state because or if you know it's not part of the game that you go there, no. And okay his ingenious the programmer didn't consider it necessary to fill it in fully because you are constrained by the rules of the game how far you can go. Okay now comes the idea you must have guessed it. He claimed that the lesson of quantum physics is a similar one and he puts it in this wonderful ironic theological terms that to cut a long story short God underestimated us humanity. God thought we are more stupid this means that in science we will come just to the level of the atom. God thought we will never come to sub-particles so he said like a computer programmer fuck it why should I bother programming in there. So as it were we caught God with pants down you know. Fuck you God, you were lazy there, you didn't do velocity and that all at the same time you know. It's a wonderful theory. The only thing I have to add here is that the crucial thing to do here is because yes your first approach would have been but this only works for a theological universe. You need a God in itself if you believe that reality exists really it must by definition be ontologically complete. My point is no, and that's the terrifying lesson of quantum physics, you know. That we are wrong to think that if you want to be materialist in this simple stupid sense of reality is out there we are part of objective world that that objective world should be fully ontologically constituted. No, the difficult is to think incompleteness without God, as it were. And here I think this is why you know what amuses me, you the blue guy, the quantum guy, yes you sorry, like am I right or not? My impression is that although for thirty-forty years simply as we all know quantum physicist didn't bother about so-called ontological problem like what are ontological they the the standard party line to put it in Stalinist terms was: the only thing that matters is that mathematics works, the formulas work, fuck off who cares about but now the ontological problem is returning, isn't it? They are again raising this question no which is why you have all these crazy solutions from intelligent New Agers but nonetheless New Agers like David Bohm no who wants to save objective reality but I agree with those who claim that the price he pays is too high. He has to make some waves who go backwards direct retroactive time or
semiotic problem. You have two realities: the superficial reality and what really happened. And the whole point is how Columbo will both levels are fully known to you. The point is just how to bring the two. And this is correct which is why I think it's wrong this idea you are reading a detective novel and a friend can ruin your pleasure if he tells you oh I will tell you who did it. No if you really like detective novels this will not in the least ruin your pleasure because the trick is not who did it but purely logical deduction how you what was the symptom what was the you know clue to put it in even Lacanian or structuralist terms the doubly inscribed signifier, you know something which can function as part of ordinary reality but if you read it properly works in okay. So what I'm saying that this was one great element in Columbo. Second one even more mysterious. If you watch any Columbo did you noticed something very mysterious. Totally irrational from the standpoint of ordinary logic. Okay after the murder police comes Columbo comes there to the house where the murder whatever and in a very mysterious way he immediately knows who did it. And then the whole point is this double game how he will prove it. And this is the clearest case I claim of of what Lacan meant by subject supposed to know. You know this is it. It's totally non-explained how but Columbo knows. Absolutely know. Because then the whole point is you know this typical it's already a bad cliché Columbo he comes there old lady can I ask you then he goes out everything oh sorry just one more question or whatever all those games no. So what I'm saying is that they are complex things, they are much more enigmatic these who done it novels. And again in Roger Ackroyd, again something prohibited happened. You know you have in detective novels this figure of it can be Dr. Watson or Colonel Hastings I think with Poirot, this innocent stupid again the big other appearance ordinary guy standing for common sense who reports on it. And this guy stands for social decency common manners so by definition he should be innocent. It can also be not a personal friend but just some some someone who stands for common sense community. Now you know what's the big trick no in Roger Ackroyd. That at the end this guy who is telling all the story turns to be the murderer at the very end. And now there were accusations that she cheated and so on Agatha Christie. But here Pierre Bayard and it's difficult to find it because the book is sold out, not even reprinted but if you can get it in some library or I found it in Boston. I was there once staying at a hotel and there was a secondhand bookstore in the basement and my god this was one of the miracles I bought for two dollars or what this book. It's Not the Murder, It's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. In an extremely convincing way I start to suspect that Agatha Christie even knew what she was doing. This guy Bayard demonstrates that Roger Ackroyd the narrator is not the murderer. That here you have to know the story to get the point that it's his sister and that he loved so much his sister that he sacrificed himself for her. To save her he took the murder on himself and so on and so on. It's but no it's not just psychology, it's through wonderfully precise detailed reading of clues. Then he does the same for Sherlock Holmes The Hound of the Baskervilles. Absolutely convincing. Absolutely convincing. I even forgot who but again the murderer is not the one who is the murderer and so on okay. So this guy Bayard let me get back to the point. He did something wonderful. He wrote a also a book Plagiarizing From, this is where future enter, Plagiarizing From the Future. I have a even a chapter on it I think in my big fat book. Plagiarizing from the future. This would mean something like you know his reading of David, although his examples are mostly not all literary would be that it is as if David in this moment with this chaotic background pre-ontological as it were plagiarized from the modernist future. That it is as if he got a sign from the future. He came years too early which is why again T. J. Clark is right in saying that this was the first modernist painting. The second one comes only at the late 19th century but he was years early. And here to describe this logic to you of course Bayard is not a mystic, he is not a New Ager who claims there is some atemporal eternal order where future is already written and we can read signs from it. No no no his idea is that we are getting signs from the future all the time but this future is not as it were objective future. This future is a possibility inscribed into our presence. Can I tell you a story which is again one of my maybe you know it I repeat it all the time is beautiful one of my favorite this temporal paradox science fiction stories. It takes place in United States in 24th, 25th century a couple of hundred years in future from now. And the idea is that at that point a little bit of time travel was possible. It was possible through a machine to go back for a couple of hundred years and to return. Okay, the hero of the story is an art historian who is fascinated by a great mid-20th-century American painter. Basically the model is Jackson Pollock, whom I hate, he is a drunken idiot. My favorite is Mark Rothko, that's another story. So he travels back, he wants my god to see to meet the guy no like your gene, my god who wouldn't like to travel back to meet I don't know Shakespeare whatever no. So he goes back to follow his career of the Pollock figure when Pollock was still in his a young guy. And it's okay, he ends up in Greenwich Village, mid-40s or whatever and is shocked to discover that this guy is a totally corrupt drunken idiot what Pollock was if I may add that and that not only this he's stupid a drunkard but that he is corrupt, evil. What happens is that the historian art historian from the future befriends becomes friend with him and this evil guy steals his machine and escapes into the future. So now you can guess what happens. The only thing that remains to the art historian is to take over the role of this guy and paint his masterpieces because he knows them from the future. So you know he himself was that's what he didn't know the guy who did it for the future. I mean I think that the time of creativity is precisely this this type of circular time you know. I just okay but let's go on. So again let me now I will do something crazy. I will be who was here, was it you who knows about genetics? And you, you you you are the one who knows about quantum physics and so on. Now please don't kill me after I finish just listen to me with great mercy now as I put in no. But isn't it that now it's I admit it I confess to you, all I know is from these you know popular introductions and so on and so on. But at least what I get from these popular introductions it is this idea that in the quantum reality you can ontologically cheat a little bit. They always use for this elements which emerge out of zero and immediately disappear. This idea that something can appear and disappear before it's registered as it were by the by the. So again I will not go now into they even use one of the was it Brian Greene or who uses this banking metaphor where he says let's say I want to take a flight to New York but I don't have money enough on my card but I discover that in that other city they have a slow, not yet digitalized system where it will take one day, two before if I pay with a credit card the bank will so I can buy the ticket and then cover it with money before before the bank will notice it. You know in this sense I can as it were ontologically cheat. I found again this idea tremendously you you see what I'm aiming at that we have some reality which is constituted, registered but you can as it were through this fluctuations ontologically cheat. Like things can happen which then retroactively are undone. You can as it were Brian Greene uses the term "borrow from the future", you know. Reverse causality. Sorry? Yeah yeah where the future affects the past. Yeah yeah. Now all this again I'm not saying anything like to commit myself there although I know what Richard everybody knows what Richard Feynman says no that nobody understands quantum physics and I know what this means. Not this stupidity of we are all bluffing but something very deep about history of science. The idea is that modern science it begins with Galileo no longer can be translated into our ordinary daily experience. Things happen there it's a radical gap between scientific universe reality as described there and our daily experience. And because if you look at early physics, not even science, Aristotle, what is he doing? He is simply describing our daily experience, heavy objects fall blah blah. With Galileo you have the first complication. Because according to our spontaneous ontology, things move if you push it. If a thing is left alone it is at peace. As you know for Galileo it is not peace it is this how do you call it the same speed moving inertia. Yeah inertia. Yeah with which is the zero. It's already a little bit counter-intuitive. Then with with Einstein then with quantum physics it's simply a world which we cannot translate into our experience of reality. But with all this said let me repeat maybe most of you know it but I find it perfect to explain what I'm aiming at with this incompleteness of reality and so on. I'm sorry if you know this story that I always use from a guy whom I don't like very much but here he did something nice. Nicholas Fearn, very aggressive analytical philosopher wrote a short introduction to philosophy where it's clear that he hates all continental tradition. But he says something wonderful. Trying to explain the ontological consequences of quantum physics and this all uncertainty principle and so on. There he is maybe not precise enough because I did read enough about Nils Bohr and so on to learn that Heisenberg was too stupid, didn't get it. Heisenberg has you know this the uncertainty principle like you cannot measure at the same time I don't know velocity and position. But it's very interesting, I read it now, a polemic between Nils Bohr and Heisenberg. Heisenberg still took it as a simple epistemological limitation. Like we just cannot measure it. While Bohr told him basically you are wrong, it is not just that we cannot measure it, reality in itself is that is as it were incomplete. Okay here comes Heisenberg accepted it and added it as a footnote. So the thing that basically makes the uncertainty principle correct is is not it's simply cheating, you know. But this is how big theoreticians cheat you know. I I know a friend of mine who did a similar thing, he made a point and then I played his Nils Bohr. Okay it wasn't at such a high level. And criticized that point. What he simply did is that he directly incorporated because he showed me the unmy my point and he added a footnote "After finishing this text I learned that my friend Slavoj Žižek got a similar idea" whatever you know. I love my friends this is the way we should be given. Okay but let's go on. So Nicholas Fearn to explain this uses this beautiful metaphor which touches to my reality of a PC computer game you know like you know in a computer game also reality is not fully constructed in the sense that for example you see a house in the background when you have all this Call of Duty whatever modern warfare. But if it's not part of the game and often it's not that you can enter the house then there is no program for the interior of the house because why because it's not part of the game. Or you see stars, you see some fuzzy forest trees in the background. These trees trees, forest, exist only in this fuzzy state because or if you know it's not part of the game that you go there, no. And okay his ingenious the programmer didn't consider it necessary to fill it in fully because you are constrained by the rules of the game how far you can go. Okay now comes the idea you must have guessed it. He claimed that the lesson of quantum physics is a similar one and he puts it in this wonderful ironic theological terms that to cut a long story short God underestimated us humanity. God thought we are more stupid this means that in science we will come just to the level of the atom. God thought we will never come to sub-particles so he said like a computer programmer fuck it why should I bother programming in there. So as it were we caught God with pants down you know. Fuck you God, you were lazy there, you didn't do velocity and that all at the same time you know. It's a wonderful theory. The only thing I have to add here is that the crucial thing to do here is because yes your first approach would have been but this only works for a theological universe. You need a God in itself if you believe that reality exists really it must by definition be ontologically complete. My point is no, and that's the terrifying lesson of quantum physics, you know. That we are wrong to think that if you want to be materialist in this simple stupid sense of reality is out there we are part of objective world that that objective world should be fully ontologically constituted. No, the difficult is to think incompleteness without God, as it were. And here I think this is why you know what amuses me, you the blue guy, the quantum guy, yes you sorry, like am I right or not? My impression is that although for thirty-forty years simply as we all know quantum physicist didn't bother about so-called ontological problem like what are ontological they the the standard party line to put it in Stalinist terms was: the only thing that matters is that mathematics works, the formulas work, fuck off who cares about but now the ontological problem is returning, isn't it? They are again raising this question no which is why you have all these crazy solutions from intelligent New Agers but nonetheless New Agers like David Bohm no who wants to save objective reality but I agree with those who claim that the price he pays is too high. He has to make some waves who go backwards direct retroactive time or
unknown
what he goes then you
what he goes then you
Slavoj Žižek
have this multiple worlds blah blah blah many worlds and so on like then do you believe in because there is some kind of naturalist example the problem of course is you know the idea is that only observation that you have oscillation only when it's registered by a machine or us it's decided which one reality is. But you know what interests me so much and I've read the texts about it if you ask the very naive question, you know this you must know this generally right, the so-called collapse of the wave function linked to the observer. Of course the whole problem is to avoid brutal stupid theology, you know to say this means there must be some observer and to avoid stupid anthropocentrism, subjectivism ah there must be God who observes the entire universe okay. My isn't are there some attempts what's the term I forgot it to claim that it's almost a matter of quantity with some complexity that there is some kind of immanent collapse. What's the name of this theory? It has a name. They simply try to formulate an immanent mechanism of collapse where you don't need literally an observer but just the environment physical itself serves as observer. I don't know enough about it but what I want to tell you can you tell me if you know how to solve this no no another thing because I tried to raise a simple question okay at what moment precisely does the wave function collapse. And it's interesting how you have multiple theories. Some people claim the moment it is registered
have this multiple worlds blah blah blah many worlds and so on like then do you believe in because there is some kind of naturalist example the problem of course is you know the idea is that only observation that you have oscillation only when it's registered by a machine or us it's decided which one reality is. But you know what interests me so much and I've read the texts about it if you ask the very naive question, you know this you must know this generally right, the so-called collapse of the wave function linked to the observer. Of course the whole problem is to avoid brutal stupid theology, you know to say this means there must be some observer and to avoid stupid anthropocentrism, subjectivism ah there must be God who observes the entire universe okay. My isn't are there some attempts what's the term I forgot it to claim that it's almost a matter of quantity with some complexity that there is some kind of immanent collapse. What's the name of this theory? It has a name. They simply try to formulate an immanent mechanism of collapse where you don't need literally an observer but just the environment physical itself serves as observer. I don't know enough about it but what I want to tell you can you tell me if you know how to solve this no no another thing because I tried to raise a simple question okay at what moment precisely does the wave function collapse. And it's interesting how you have multiple theories. Some people claim the moment it is registered
unknown
by a machine, you know even before the scientist checks up the machine. But then this is problematic
by a machine, you know even before the scientist checks up the machine. But then this is problematic
unknown
because then what about the status of the machine a part of reality.
because then what about the status of the machine a part of reality.
Slavoj Žižek
Then there are more subjectivist ones who claim no there must be a conscious observer. Only at that point yes immediately I gives you one and then the third ones are simply I think the kind of structuralist ones who claims no it's language. It must be registered. Yes. Um, the double slit experiment deals with that. Yeah. I know. Yeah. And then
Then there are more subjectivist ones who claim no there must be a conscious observer. Only at that point yes immediately I gives you one and then the third ones are simply I think the kind of structuralist ones who claims no it's language. It must be registered. Yes. Um, the double slit experiment deals with that. Yeah. I know. Yeah. And then
unknown
they when they expanded on
they when they expanded on
Slavoj Žižek
it to see whether it was the camera or our conscious thought and they from what they had come to the conclusion was that it was our actual thought that it wasn't the cameras themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but do you know that wonderful experiment I half understood it I claim what was it, the French guy Alain Aspect, the famous experiment which basically proved Nils Bohr right against Einstein no. He he he did as it were experimentally prove that you have to and know the problem is this locality principle you know the problem I mean okay I will now do a very primitive description I hope you know it. The mystery is this one you know when you have two two correlated particles positive negative whatever what happens to one it always happens in the opposite direction or whatever to the other. Now what they succeeded is you do this you split an element into this couple of I'm giving you a very common sense couple of particles and you do something to one half in a contingent way from outside and then you observe what happened to the other one. They are always correlated like I push you up the other one goes down. What's the problem? The problem is that you can split these two parts into such a distance from each other that the change in the other one like I push this one something happens to this one but what happens to this one depends on what happens here but it happens faster than light travels so you cannot say that through light which is supposed to be the fastest way anything can move it wasn't light. So how then were the two connected? The so-called Einstein insisted on it locality principle or what is violated. Things can be correlated faster than light no? This is why I was so interested wasn't there recently even in the big news that somehow they tried to prove that that they were wrong what? They tried to prove that speed of light was faster than what it was? Yeah yeah but it was canceled then. It didn't work no? Yeah yeah because this would have explained it but again it didn't work yeah. So again again what what what I wrote already in that Schelling book an addendum to it because what fascinates me so much is that the universe described in quantum physics with all its paradoxes retroactive causality blah blah blah because you know better than me I'm sure what is so charming about this double slit experiment. It's not only that's easy relatively that it depends on observation you know all this joke if you observe it it will behave as a particle if not it will behave as a wave. The point is that if you observe it afterwards when the thing already happened when the particle already passes through the slit it still retroactively depends on the act of observation. It's okay but listen can I ask you something? I refer a lot to that woman Karen Barad. Now give me kick me in my face I'm not kidding okay not literally but is she serious or not? Yes she is. She is? Oh that's good news because you know as you can imagine I'm very modest here I write I speculate about quantum physics but I just try to understand it and I'm never sure am I buying bullshit or not you know what I mean like so I didn't make a mega mistake she's not because you know she sometimes uses this shitty Judith Butler their friends post-modern jargon you know so I was afraid you know although she is a she's a theoretical particle physicist. Ah because I don't okay who she tenured in at Princeton in theoretical particle physics. Ah so she yeah because yeah she has yeah is she lesbian? I think so. This is the worst of myself. I think so. Sorry? I think so. Ah that's what I was afraid of. Once I had a nice conversation with Wendy Brown, the lesbian partner of Judith Butler she laughed so much she's used to my I told her how can you be a beautiful woman a lesbian this is such an egoist act by being a lesbian you render yourself useless you brutally withdraw yourself from half of humanity man how can you be so brutal no. But but again she's not you know what I like about her? Listen this book what's the title Meeting the Universe Halfway. I like even if she is not right her basic effort which is to take Bohr very seriously none of this New Age bullshit you know but and to read him in a materialist way but without but again nonetheless speaking to all the paradoxes without watering it down in down in some common sense reality and so on and so on. It's one of the few I don't
it to see whether it was the camera or our conscious thought and they from what they had come to the conclusion was that it was our actual thought that it wasn't the cameras themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but do you know that wonderful experiment I half understood it I claim what was it, the French guy Alain Aspect, the famous experiment which basically proved Nils Bohr right against Einstein no. He he he did as it were experimentally prove that you have to and know the problem is this locality principle you know the problem I mean okay I will now do a very primitive description I hope you know it. The mystery is this one you know when you have two two correlated particles positive negative whatever what happens to one it always happens in the opposite direction or whatever to the other. Now what they succeeded is you do this you split an element into this couple of I'm giving you a very common sense couple of particles and you do something to one half in a contingent way from outside and then you observe what happened to the other one. They are always correlated like I push you up the other one goes down. What's the problem? The problem is that you can split these two parts into such a distance from each other that the change in the other one like I push this one something happens to this one but what happens to this one depends on what happens here but it happens faster than light travels so you cannot say that through light which is supposed to be the fastest way anything can move it wasn't light. So how then were the two connected? The so-called Einstein insisted on it locality principle or what is violated. Things can be correlated faster than light no? This is why I was so interested wasn't there recently even in the big news that somehow they tried to prove that that they were wrong what? They tried to prove that speed of light was faster than what it was? Yeah yeah but it was canceled then. It didn't work no? Yeah yeah because this would have explained it but again it didn't work yeah. So again again what what what I wrote already in that Schelling book an addendum to it because what fascinates me so much is that the universe described in quantum physics with all its paradoxes retroactive causality blah blah blah because you know better than me I'm sure what is so charming about this double slit experiment. It's not only that's easy relatively that it depends on observation you know all this joke if you observe it it will behave as a particle if not it will behave as a wave. The point is that if you observe it afterwards when the thing already happened when the particle already passes through the slit it still retroactively depends on the act of observation. It's okay but listen can I ask you something? I refer a lot to that woman Karen Barad. Now give me kick me in my face I'm not kidding okay not literally but is she serious or not? Yes she is. She is? Oh that's good news because you know as you can imagine I'm very modest here I write I speculate about quantum physics but I just try to understand it and I'm never sure am I buying bullshit or not you know what I mean like so I didn't make a mega mistake she's not because you know she sometimes uses this shitty Judith Butler their friends post-modern jargon you know so I was afraid you know although she is a she's a theoretical particle physicist. Ah because I don't okay who she tenured in at Princeton in theoretical particle physics. Ah so she yeah because yeah she has yeah is she lesbian? I think so. This is the worst of myself. I think so. Sorry? I think so. Ah that's what I was afraid of. Once I had a nice conversation with Wendy Brown, the lesbian partner of Judith Butler she laughed so much she's used to my I told her how can you be a beautiful woman a lesbian this is such an egoist act by being a lesbian you render yourself useless you brutally withdraw yourself from half of humanity man how can you be so brutal no. But but again she's not you know what I like about her? Listen this book what's the title Meeting the Universe Halfway. I like even if she is not right her basic effort which is to take Bohr very seriously none of this New Age bullshit you know but and to read him in a materialist way but without but again nonetheless speaking to all the paradoxes without watering it down in down in some common sense reality and so on and so on. It's one of the few I don't
unknown
know do you know some better really okay but let's go on I'm crazy I'm sorry I admit it just to to conclude this line so we were at this incompleteness of reality blah blah blah all that. What I would like to add here is that even in art I think that
know do you know some better really okay but let's go on I'm crazy I'm sorry I admit it just to to conclude this line so we were at this incompleteness of reality blah blah blah all that. What I would like to add here is that even in art I think that
Slavoj Žižek
cinematic art at its best count on this effect like one of you told me that who is doing a cinema that it's also interesting Kieślowski who was that the name who is the traitor who is doing Kieślowski sorry sorry you know a nice there is a whole school of criticism in Poland some of them who read Kieślowski as a gnostic author but in a good sense not in this stupid you know mystic New Age but gnostic in the sense precisely because you know what is one of the basic gnostic ideas here I like to cut a long story short that God is a stupid guy who didn't finish his work of creation we live in an incomplete world. And in a very good reading of Decalog, they find traces of this David David like incompleteness for example at the beginning of his bleakest film maybe a short film on killing. Remember how you have some shots like you have the future murderer, the young guy but I like that film you know why because in a way you are forced to sympathize with the murderer the taxi driver who is killed, well maybe I would have killed him he is a nasty guy you know okay let me go on remember there are some shots like I hope this works ah okay like okay is that standard frame you have here a wall and here you see the guy leaving the whatever but this wall is done like that with although you see it's a wall but the way you perceive it it's as if at light unfinished you know in old frescos sometimes part of it still is and the other part is just corroded just just just stains and so on. Although it is reality you know you perceive it as in as it's as if you are looking at the film as an unfinished corroded fresh or a painting you know like here is reality but this is not quite part of reality and again I think this is the mega master master master hood of of Kieślowski this gentle playing with your most elementary sense of reality. Another example that I like to use now okay I'm almost ashamed to mention it but two mega guys Edward Munch and Van Gogh and Van Gogh. Okay I'm sorry but now I'm referring to your most elementary phenomenological experience of let's go to the mega kitsch incidentally you know I cannot resist the temptation of vulgarity you know that where is look in French where Van Gogh cut his ear you know I spoke with some guys friends of my friends in Amsterdam from that Van Gogh Museum I told him can you fake it and find an old ear sorry here and claim this is Van Gogh's original ear and so on more tourism and so on I like this okay let's go on. Remember just try to visualize a late painting that the crazy one you know the not it's not the very late one but when he was in the south of France you remember those typical blue sky sun and some field of corn whatever and this incredible intensity of color which as it were makes you feel some strange heaviness, thickness, density of what shouldn't like clouds even the sky is no longer experience the sky is no longer experience as just vast light emptiness but something dense heavy to and my point is what try to locate this I claim this is a fact okay maybe I'm an idiot who knows but I'm not alone here that you have this effect of as it were it's a kind of a weird material heaviness that you experience as part of objects but at what level do we experience that's what I'm asking you this heaviness? It's not it's not the heaviness of the object depicted in a realistic way. I think and I think this is the absolute genius of Van Gogh how he paints something light fragile but you know the very mode of painting undermines it. So it's not the depicted object but it's also not that's crucial the immediate materiality of the painting. There is nothing heavy there is some spectral in-between materiality you feel and I claim that this is it's the same if you don't believe me look at it some of wonderful I'm very old romantic here I'm sorry to tell you I like I like Edvard Munch no. I like that freaky guy. If you are civilized you should buy it that's the most precious thing in my home. You know that you have some philosophers store or what in the United States which are selling obscenity I met them by. You can buy you know from Scream there no you can buy to blow it up you get the whole figure like that and all my friends Fredric Jameson have it at home. I even have more I have a pillow with that guy on and then when you put your hand on well you get this is American culture I judge. So let me go on back to this if you look at some of his paintings there what I'm trying to retrace is precisely this kind of a grey obscene pre-ontological materiality spectral one my god I would even like I don't have it they don't have it here to bring to to tell you if you now I will speak like a Californian guy to share the experience with you you know like if you feel the same if you look at some of his paintings even in that Scream you know how if you look at how the earth before in front of that bridge or this sky it's the same massive heaviness it's as if the stuff there resists being simply part of transparent realistic depiction and if you have some other paintings like a couple of women at night through a lake you can always get this as if some kind of obscene pre-ontological stains are resisting and I think that you even get direct proofs of this. You know where? Do the okay that the figure of the screaming boy you know you know where you find him also? You know his famous painting is it Madonna or what of Munch torso beautiful woman but you remember what you have then. It's really that's how I think he should be read. Okay you have painting and on within the painting this all is painted it's kind of a double frame here you have the woman torso and here you have a kind of a slimy disgusting sphere and in it a kind of a monster totally similar to the guy who is screaming in the Scream is floating here surrounded by sperm and so on. And you know when you find the last figure of this obscene guy did you notice the same weird figure of a boy in some crucial Ingmar Bergman films? Like there is a boy touching the screen at the beginning of Persona which I hate much better examples Silence and so on. But what I want to say is that and now let me make a jump maybe one of the best scenes from Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's a minor scene sometimes so that the movie fits two hours and you don't have to cut on mercies in United States they even leave it out. About quarter of an hour into Vertigo you remember when Scottie follows Madeleine. They she goes to a florist. That florist also no longer exists let's like it's horrible okay and then you have this is Hitchcock at his best one of the weirdest shots. She she Madeleine enters through the main entrance he enters through a back entrance and she looks you have then you have something like this you have here a big mirror that's the shot you see her it's her point of view shot she looks at herself the beautiful Madeleine in the mirror then you have here a crack here it's just another mirror wall whatever and here you can see just his eye and so on Scottie staring at her. The wonder of this scene is that although although from the naive realist standpoint the only real part is this what you see here is just her image. The way you experience it is that we are here in normal reality and it's as if you know this idea that you find in horror movies which is why I like Stephen King is here very deep don't underestimate him that it's always on the border between inside and outside like in thick walls in between neither inside nor outside of a house trolls evil trolls spirits are there something the idea being that there is another precisely the Schellingian spectral proto-reality and from there he becomes a kind of spectral entity pure gaze looking at her. It's a wonderful it's a wonderful shot. Listen fuck life it's We go on in the afternoon I'm sorry. I just you know what I will do I will try to if maybe slaves will we are in decadent times slaves want freedom I know what's the tragedy. I try to be a master but I will start to serve my slaves and so on you know it's decadent. Seriously because you know I talk about this but this is bullshit like it would be so much more effective just to show this couple of things to you no? Because then I'm not totally confused I may appear because from all of this you can imagine what my point would have been answering you subject that in order to have the effect of subject you need this spectral space and not all of reality and so on and so on. You know that. I will okay a little bit on this in the afternoon life is shit I talk too much. But I already repeated with you the old joke you know you at least know why people call me Fidel no. Like Fidel Castro, you know.
cinematic art at its best count on this effect like one of you told me that who is doing a cinema that it's also interesting Kieślowski who was that the name who is the traitor who is doing Kieślowski sorry sorry you know a nice there is a whole school of criticism in Poland some of them who read Kieślowski as a gnostic author but in a good sense not in this stupid you know mystic New Age but gnostic in the sense precisely because you know what is one of the basic gnostic ideas here I like to cut a long story short that God is a stupid guy who didn't finish his work of creation we live in an incomplete world. And in a very good reading of Decalog, they find traces of this David David like incompleteness for example at the beginning of his bleakest film maybe a short film on killing. Remember how you have some shots like you have the future murderer, the young guy but I like that film you know why because in a way you are forced to sympathize with the murderer the taxi driver who is killed, well maybe I would have killed him he is a nasty guy you know okay let me go on remember there are some shots like I hope this works ah okay like okay is that standard frame you have here a wall and here you see the guy leaving the whatever but this wall is done like that with although you see it's a wall but the way you perceive it it's as if at light unfinished you know in old frescos sometimes part of it still is and the other part is just corroded just just just stains and so on. Although it is reality you know you perceive it as in as it's as if you are looking at the film as an unfinished corroded fresh or a painting you know like here is reality but this is not quite part of reality and again I think this is the mega master master master hood of of Kieślowski this gentle playing with your most elementary sense of reality. Another example that I like to use now okay I'm almost ashamed to mention it but two mega guys Edward Munch and Van Gogh and Van Gogh. Okay I'm sorry but now I'm referring to your most elementary phenomenological experience of let's go to the mega kitsch incidentally you know I cannot resist the temptation of vulgarity you know that where is look in French where Van Gogh cut his ear you know I spoke with some guys friends of my friends in Amsterdam from that Van Gogh Museum I told him can you fake it and find an old ear sorry here and claim this is Van Gogh's original ear and so on more tourism and so on I like this okay let's go on. Remember just try to visualize a late painting that the crazy one you know the not it's not the very late one but when he was in the south of France you remember those typical blue sky sun and some field of corn whatever and this incredible intensity of color which as it were makes you feel some strange heaviness, thickness, density of what shouldn't like clouds even the sky is no longer experience the sky is no longer experience as just vast light emptiness but something dense heavy to and my point is what try to locate this I claim this is a fact okay maybe I'm an idiot who knows but I'm not alone here that you have this effect of as it were it's a kind of a weird material heaviness that you experience as part of objects but at what level do we experience that's what I'm asking you this heaviness? It's not it's not the heaviness of the object depicted in a realistic way. I think and I think this is the absolute genius of Van Gogh how he paints something light fragile but you know the very mode of painting undermines it. So it's not the depicted object but it's also not that's crucial the immediate materiality of the painting. There is nothing heavy there is some spectral in-between materiality you feel and I claim that this is it's the same if you don't believe me look at it some of wonderful I'm very old romantic here I'm sorry to tell you I like I like Edvard Munch no. I like that freaky guy. If you are civilized you should buy it that's the most precious thing in my home. You know that you have some philosophers store or what in the United States which are selling obscenity I met them by. You can buy you know from Scream there no you can buy to blow it up you get the whole figure like that and all my friends Fredric Jameson have it at home. I even have more I have a pillow with that guy on and then when you put your hand on well you get this is American culture I judge. So let me go on back to this if you look at some of his paintings there what I'm trying to retrace is precisely this kind of a grey obscene pre-ontological materiality spectral one my god I would even like I don't have it they don't have it here to bring to to tell you if you now I will speak like a Californian guy to share the experience with you you know like if you feel the same if you look at some of his paintings even in that Scream you know how if you look at how the earth before in front of that bridge or this sky it's the same massive heaviness it's as if the stuff there resists being simply part of transparent realistic depiction and if you have some other paintings like a couple of women at night through a lake you can always get this as if some kind of obscene pre-ontological stains are resisting and I think that you even get direct proofs of this. You know where? Do the okay that the figure of the screaming boy you know you know where you find him also? You know his famous painting is it Madonna or what of Munch torso beautiful woman but you remember what you have then. It's really that's how I think he should be read. Okay you have painting and on within the painting this all is painted it's kind of a double frame here you have the woman torso and here you have a kind of a slimy disgusting sphere and in it a kind of a monster totally similar to the guy who is screaming in the Scream is floating here surrounded by sperm and so on. And you know when you find the last figure of this obscene guy did you notice the same weird figure of a boy in some crucial Ingmar Bergman films? Like there is a boy touching the screen at the beginning of Persona which I hate much better examples Silence and so on. But what I want to say is that and now let me make a jump maybe one of the best scenes from Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's a minor scene sometimes so that the movie fits two hours and you don't have to cut on mercies in United States they even leave it out. About quarter of an hour into Vertigo you remember when Scottie follows Madeleine. They she goes to a florist. That florist also no longer exists let's like it's horrible okay and then you have this is Hitchcock at his best one of the weirdest shots. She she Madeleine enters through the main entrance he enters through a back entrance and she looks you have then you have something like this you have here a big mirror that's the shot you see her it's her point of view shot she looks at herself the beautiful Madeleine in the mirror then you have here a crack here it's just another mirror wall whatever and here you can see just his eye and so on Scottie staring at her. The wonder of this scene is that although although from the naive realist standpoint the only real part is this what you see here is just her image. The way you experience it is that we are here in normal reality and it's as if you know this idea that you find in horror movies which is why I like Stephen King is here very deep don't underestimate him that it's always on the border between inside and outside like in thick walls in between neither inside nor outside of a house trolls evil trolls spirits are there something the idea being that there is another precisely the Schellingian spectral proto-reality and from there he becomes a kind of spectral entity pure gaze looking at her. It's a wonderful it's a wonderful shot. Listen fuck life it's We go on in the afternoon I'm sorry. I just you know what I will do I will try to if maybe slaves will we are in decadent times slaves want freedom I know what's the tragedy. I try to be a master but I will start to serve my slaves and so on you know it's decadent. Seriously because you know I talk about this but this is bullshit like it would be so much more effective just to show this couple of things to you no? Because then I'm not totally confused I may appear because from all of this you can imagine what my point would have been answering you subject that in order to have the effect of subject you need this spectral space and not all of reality and so on and so on. You know that. I will okay a little bit on this in the afternoon life is shit I talk too much. But I already repeated with you the old joke you know you at least know why people call me Fidel no. Like Fidel Castro, you know.