Organs Without Bodies
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2003-11-06 · 1:31:37 · 13,913 words
cinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisideologyhegel-dialecticssubjectivityreligion-theologyfascism-populismhistoryphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture centered on Hitchcock's Vertigo, using close analysis of specific shots to develop Lacanian concepts of the gaze, the big Other, and fantasy. He argues Vertigo is a fundamentally anti-Platonic film whose structure illustrates how the 'original' is already a copy, and extends this into discussions of belief, censorship, cultural distance, Stalinism, and the figure of the 'organ without a body' as a metaphor for emancipatory subjectivity. The talk concludes with a reading of the Grimm fairy tale 'The Willful Child' and Descartes as models for a displaced, non-corporeal subjectivity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “suture procedure”
The classical cinematic exchange of subjective point-of-view and objective shots that domesticates excess by tying the gaze to a subject, the very procedure Hitchcock's 'fantasy shots' exceed.
as “subjectless subjective shot”
A cinematic shot that is fully subjectivized (charged with libidinal intensity) yet cannot be attributed to any character's point of view, an excess that undoes the suture procedure.
as “organ without a body”
A partial object, a limb, voice, or fist, that detaches from the whole person and begins to act autonomously; the objective correlative of the modern subject and of emancipatory resistance.
as “belief attributed to another”
Beliefs that belong to no individual but are sustained as if held by the big Other, the mechanism underlying both censorship logic and modern 'cultural' religion.
Žižek's thesis that 'culture' as a life-world category designates precisely a set of practices one respects while maintaining a distancing 'I don't really believe it,' unlike genuine religion which is direct.
The murderous rage of a deceived Platonist who discovers that the 'original' he has been trying to recreate is itself already a copy, the structural shock at the end of Vertigo.
Lacan's correction of Plato: the absolute/supra-sensible idea is not behind appearances but is itself appearance in its purest form, the brief illusory vision that vanishes when approached.
as “sexual possession versus sexual use”
Žižek's distinction: true possession is not exploiting the other as a sexual object but renouncing that use while demanding the other have sex with no one else, a purely masturbatory structure.
A cinematic/existential movement in which fantasy does not collapse into reality but explodes into an autonomous spectral remainder (voice, image), not 'the desert of the real' but a pre-fantasmic partial object.
as “surplus enjoyment (jouissance)”
The libidinal excess with which the master 'pays' the slave, Fight Club's self-beating enacts the violent work of ridding oneself of it as a first act of liberation.
as “the subject as barred / divided subject”
The Lacanian divided subject whose ultimate division is between the subject (void) and fantasy; they cannot be brought together, the subject cannot assume its fundamental fantasy.
For Lacan following Freud, the core fantasy (e.g. 'a child is being beaten') is paradoxically never consciously fantasized by the subject, it is pure construction that sets the coordinates of desire.
as “objet petit a (object cause of desire)”
The elusive partial object that is not the object of desire but its cause, illustrated in Vertigo when Scotty glances back to check if the curl of hair (the a) is still in place even while embracing Judy.
as “preemptive mourning”
Žižek's Lacanian reinterpretation of Freud's melancholy: one mourns not the lost object of desire but the lost cause of desire, and does so even before the actual loss occurs.
Not a hidden divine master who pulls the strings, but the power of pure appearance, the virtual witness whose 'belief' must be maintained even when no actual person holds it.
Fantasy does not merely compensate for unattained desire; it literally tells us what we want, without fantasy we do not know our desire, and its collapse means a loss of reality, not gain.
Hegel's distinction between two modes of memory, invoked to caution against reducing fantasy to 'compulsive memories' without first specifying which concept of memory is at stake.
Stories he reaches for 7
In Fincher's Fight Club, the hero beats himself, his fist acts like an autonomous organ without a body, enacting the Nietzschean-Lacanian first step of liberation: ridding oneself of the surplus enjoyment the master pays with.
“his fist starts to behave like precisely like autonomous organ without a body acting on its own.”
Žižek accepts the closing applause in Stalinist fashion: 'I accept this applause because it's not me who matter, I embody here only what is most noble in you, I'm just a modest element.'
“I accept this applause because it's not me who matter. I embody here only what is most noble in you I'm just a modest element”
Balanchine staged a Webern ballet where after the music stops the dancers continue, the effect is horrific, as if the dancers are deprived of their life substance, death itself dancing, the ultimate autonomized partial object.
“Dancers dance, the music stops and the dancing goes on. And the effect is absolutely horrific.”
A swindler impersonating a resistance hero becomes so absorbed in the role that he chooses death as the General rather than survival as himself, the copy becomes more 'true' than the original, paralleling Vertigo's anti-Platonic reversal.
“the small thief gets so intensely caught up in this role that at the end he fully assumes the identity of General della Rovere and he prefers to be shot as General della Rovere.”
In Leone's film, a phone rings and rings and a hand picks it up but the ringing continues, for a few uncanny seconds something traumatic appears before the narrative explains it away, the absolute as pure spectral appearance.
“the phone ringing ringing ringing then the hand picks up picks it up the ringing goes on... those magic five ten seconds where we think oh my god it's something appears something traumatic.”
Stalin announced only that the 'Kulak problem as a class should be solved' without specifying how; local cadres, terrified of being accused of leniency, escalated to maximum violence, while Stalin's interventions were always ones of moderation.
“The only thing that Stalin said was the problem with Kulaks as class should be solved... Nobody knew how to interpret this.”
A willful child is buried but its little arm keeps rising from the grave until the mother beats it down with a switch, Žižek reads this as the best metaphor for resistance and for the emancipatory subject as detached organ.
“his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in... the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch”
Works invoked 25
Vertigo film
One of Žižek's two candidates for 'the biggest movie of all times'; the main subject of the talk, read as a Lacanian anti-Platonic masterpiece.
Psycho film
Žižek's personal choice for Hitchcock's greatest film over Vertigo; discussed for its censorship battles (toilet bowl scene, underwear) and its mirror-structure.
Fight Club film
Liked 'at least the first one'; the self-beating fist scene is central to Žižek's argument about organ-without-a-body and the Nietzschean logic of emancipation.
Adorno and Horkheimer's project criticized for focusing exclusively on fascism while never producing a real theory of Stalinism, which should have been the harder test case.
North by Northwest film
Mentioned alongside Vertigo and Psycho as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces with a distinctive formal model (diagonal crossing lines) identified by François Regnault.
Logic of Sense book
Deleuze's book cited for the Cheshire Cat figure (smile persisting after cat disappears) as a model for the organ-without-a-body that insists after the whole is gone.
The Age of Innocence book
Wharton's novel (only seen in film form by Žižek) praised for its depiction of how public acknowledgment of known secrets shatters precisely because the big Other now knows.
Mulholland Drive film
Žižek 'relatively' likes it; reads it as a properly Lacanian account of fantasy collapse into spectral partial objects rather than simply a confused narrative.
Žižek's own most recent book at the time of the talk; cited as where he developed the paradoxes of belief attributed to another.
Leone's four-hour version praised; the ringing-phone opening used as prime example of the spectral autonomized object that insists for a few traumatic seconds.
Soviet Marxism book
Marcuse's book on Soviet society dismissed as merely descriptive, not a real theoretical account of Stalinism, symptom of the Frankfurt School's avoidance of the harder problem.
Discourse on Method book
Descartes' opening gesture of recognizing cultural contingency through the other's eyes is read as the original multicultural and Cartesian-subjective moment.
General della Rovere film
Rossellini's late-fifties masterpiece used to parallel Vertigo's anti-Platonic reversal: the copy becomes more real than the original.
The Road to Terror book
Getty-Naumov's history of Stalinist terror called 'the best book on terror'; key source for Žižek's structural analysis of ambiguous injunctions under Stalinism.
Raymond Durgnat's Hitchcock book praised as 'wonderful' but cited for its exemplary error: forty pages on Vertigo that consistently place the film in Los Angeles.
The shortest Grimm Brothers fairy tale, read aloud in its entirety; called 'the best metaphor of resistance' and the organ without a body as emancipatory subject.
Diderot's philosophical novel about the talking vagina analyzed as a literalized fantasy of the object itself speaking, the partial object more uncanny than Ensler's Vagina Monologues.
Point Blank film
John Boorman's film with Lee Marvin cited as another example of the fantasy/reality ambiguity structure, the entire film potentially readable as a dying man's fantasy.
Carrie film
The grave-hand final scene cited as a film instance of the arm-from-the-grave motif (from the Grimm fairy tale) as figure of resistant subjectivity.
A Child Is Being Beaten essay
Freud's essay on the fundamental fantasy ('a child is being beaten') cited to show that the core fantasy is never consciously entertained by the subject, pure construction.
Dr. Strangelove film
Kubrick's film cited for the involuntary arm-raising as a cinematic precursor of the organ-without-a-body motif.
Me, Myself & Irene film
Liked less than Fight Club but cited alongside it for the autonomous double as organ-without-a-body structure.
Mourning and Melancholy essay
Freud's essay cited for the notion of 'preemptive mourning' and for the distinction between loss of the object and loss of the cause of desire.
Ambrose Bierce's short story used as the structural model for the alternate reading of Vertigo in which the film is the dying fantasy of the protagonist.
Eve Ensler's work merely subjectivizes the vagina (witty commenting voice); contrasted unfavorably with Diderot's more uncanny literalized partial object.
People invoked 44
An alternative jazz-saxophone Psycho score he had written is mentioned as one of the counterfactual thought experiments about what the film could have been.
Joe Ashkenazi positive
French CNRS researcher of Hungarian origin who identified the systematic misreadings of the Ernie's restaurant shots; Žižek praises his detailed French-language study of Vertigo.
Laura Mulvey negative
Among those named by Ashkenazi as having committed the systematic misreading of the Ernie's restaurant shots in Vertigo.
Mark (host) positive
Described as a fellow Hitchcockian and friend who prefers Vertigo to Psycho; their disagreement is framed as 'class struggle between Hitchcockians.'
Described as a wonderful British critic whose forty-page analysis of Vertigo in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock mistakenly places the film in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco.
Robin Wood negative
Among the Hitchcock commentators who wrongly describe the Madeleine profile shot as Scotty's subjective point-of-view shot, thus re-enacting the suture operation they supposedly critique.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my Stalinist Lacanian colleague' and friend; her uncanny experience of her boyfriend's phone number calling her while he was sitting beside her is used to illustrate the apparition of the spectral object.
Umberto Eco positive
Praised as a good journalist-commentator but criticised for his novels ('much worse') and theoretical writing ('even worse'); cited on the modern inability to say 'I love you' directly.
François Regnault positive
Lacanian Parisian who attempted to identify each Hitchcock masterpiece by a pure formal model (curved space for Vertigo, mirror-cut for Psycho, diagonals for North by Northwest); Žižek finds it too abstract but 'there is something in it.'
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Associated with the Frankfurt School's theoretical fiasco of focusing on fascism rather than Stalinism; a new biography is mentioned noting that Bundeswehr funded the Frankfurt School in the fifties.
Sergio Leone positive
Once Upon a Time in America (especially the four-hour version) is praised for its ringing-phone opening as a perfect instance of the spectral apparition before narrative explanation.
Jacques Lacan positive
Primary theoretical framework throughout: the gaze as objet petit a, the big Other, fantasy, the barred subject, and 'appearance as appearance' against Plato.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited via the Cheshire Cat / 'smile without a cat' figure from The Logic of Sense as a model for the organ without a body that insists after the whole disappears.
David Fincher positive
Fight Club is used as a key example of the organ-without-a-body (self-beating fist) and the Nietzschean/Lacanian logic of liberation from surplus enjoyment.
Cited as an example of Stalin's technique: letting it be known Bukharin 'looks bad' without specification, then restraining the younger Politburo members who demanded arrest, illustrating the ambiguous injunction mechanism.
Mentioned as the composer whose extremely brief complete works Balanchine used for the uncanny silent-dance experiment.
Ambrose Bierce positive
'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' is cited as the structural model for the reading of Vertigo in which everything after the opening rooftop sequence is a dying man's fantasy.
Donald Spoto negative
Among interpreters who insist that the profile shot of Madeleine is Scotty's point-of-view shot, thereby containing the excess within the logic of suture.
David Lynch positive
Žižek 'relatively likes' Mulholland Drive and reads it as a properly Lacanian structure of fantasy disintegrating into spectral remainder; criticises the common view that Lynch's films are simply confused.
Eve Ensler negative
The Vagina Monologues contrasted unfavorably with Diderot: Ensler merely subjectivizes the vagina (witty voice), whereas Diderot grasps something more uncanny, the object itself starting to speak.
Mentioned as the second-choice star of Vertigo (replacing the pregnant Vera Miles), underscoring the film's contingent origin.
Robert Pfaller positive
Described as 'good friend young Austrian philosopher' whose concept of 'beliefs which are beliefs of no one' and reading of deconstructionism as hyper-belief are central to the section on the big Other.
Judith Butler negative
Used as example of deconstructionist over-hedging ('if we strategically adopt this attitude, may we not risk the hypothesis that this is a can of Coke'), called 'my good enemy friend.'
Edith Wharton positive
The Age of Innocence is praised for its depiction of the shattering effect when the wife's secret knowledge becomes public, illustrating the power of the big Other.
George Balanchine positive
His Webern ballet in which dancers continue moving after the music stops is called 'ingenious' and 'absolutely horrific', a prime example of the autonomized partial object.
J. Arch Getty positive
Getty-Naumov's The Road to Terror is called 'the best book on [Stalinist] terror' and a key source for Žižek's analysis of how collectivization orders actually functioned.
George Orwell negative
Žižek respectfully disagrees: Orwell's description of totalitarianism misses the Kafkaesque structure of Stalinism, the obscure, not the explicit, injunction is the key mechanism.
Author of Carrie, cited for the grave-hand scene as a cinematic instance of the organ-without-a-body motif.
Karl Kraus positive
His aphorism 'Coitus is only an insufficient substitute for masturbation' (cited via Freud) is used to describe the masturbatory structure of Scotty's desire in Vertigo.
Denis Diderot positive
Les Bijoux Indiscrets cited for its literalized fantasy of the talking vagina as a headless autonomous voice, the partial object that starts to speak directly.
Sheila Fitzpatrick positive
Defended against right-wingers who accuse her of rehabilitating Stalinism; her books on Soviet daily life are presented as accurately depicting the Kafkaesque ambiguity of Stalinist commands.
Éric Rohmer negative
Noted for early description of Vertigo as a deeply Platonic film; Žižek argues the link is negative, Vertigo is the ultimate anti-Platonic film.
Roberto Rossellini positive
General della Rovere called 'a wonderful masterpiece' used to illustrate the same anti-Platonic reversal as Vertigo.
Praised as 'superbly' playing the swindler in Rossellini's General della Rovere who ultimately prefers death in the role to survival as himself.
Dziga Vertov positive
The Soviet kino-eye (kino-glaz) is cited as the cinematic embodiment of the autonomous gaze as organ without a body wandering through early Soviet space.
Herbert Marcuse negative
Soviet Marxism cited as the Frankfurt School's best attempt at analyzing Stalinism, dismissed as mere descriptive analysis of how Khrushchev functions, not a real theory.
Mentioned for his proud stance of standing by his mistakes in film commentary, illustrating the general problem of factual errors in Hitchcock studies.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Central subject of the talk; Žižek reads Vertigo and Psycho as philosophical masterpieces illuminating Lacanian concepts of the gaze, the big Other, and fantasy.
Cited as one of Pfaller's sources for the concept of beliefs-of-no-one and pre-modern belief in Greek gods.
Analyzed structurally: his technique was deliberate ambiguity that generated excess violence which he then moderated, a masterful mechanism of control, not the direct-order model of Orwell.
René Descartes positive
The opening of the Discourse on Method is read as the original site of Cartesian subjectivity and multiculturalism, the parallax view of one's own customs as contingent.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited on 'A Child Is Being Beaten' for the fundamental fantasy, on Mourning and Melancholy for preemptive mourning, and as a 'genius' whose theory of melancholy is generally misread.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced for the distinction Erinnerung/Gedächtnis (two modes of memory) and for the Hegelian notion of appearance; the big Other's logic of maintaining appearances is linked to Hegelian cunning of reason (then distinguished from it).
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
A fragment on emancipating oneself from one's chains and then from that emancipation is called the 'best comment on Fight Club' and used to explain the dual stage of liberation.
What it argues
Vertigo as anti-Platonic filmthe gaze as autonomous object (objet petit a)the big Other and the logic of belieffantasy versus reality in cinemaorgan without a body as figure of emancipatory subjectivitycensorship and ideological appearancecultural distance as substitute for genuine belief
Dialectical moves 7
“The copy turns out to be the original — what we took to be a mere imitation (Judy posing as Madeleine) was already the original, so the 'original' Madeleine was itself a fake.”
Vertigo's anti-Platonic reversal: the shock is not that original trumps copy but that the copy was always already the original.
“Far from the big Other being an omnipotent hidden master who controls everything, it is almost the opposite: the big Other is the power of pure appearance — it means appearances have to be maintained.”
The big Other is not substance but the impersonal demand that surfaces be kept intact, closer to structural void than to divine subject.
“The theorists who decry suture as the basic ideological procedure of cinema themselves enact precisely this operation when they re-translate the excess of Madeleine's profile shot back into the logic of suture.”
The film theorist who attacks ideological mechanisms reproduces the very mechanism in their misreading, critique re-enacts what it critiques.
“If you say directly 'this is a can of Coke,' you mean exactly the same as all those deconstructionist provisos — you don't need them, because what pre-modern people said directly already included all those qualifications.”
The deconstructionist hedge is not a more sophisticated attitude but a symptom of our inability to sustain the distance that was tacitly built into direct pre-modern utterance.
“Totalitarianism does not mean you get clear orders you must unconditionally obey — paradoxically, Stalin's only positive interventions were always ones of moderation, restraining the excess his own ambiguity had produced.”
The totalitarian leader generates obedient excess precisely by being obscure, then appears as merciful moderator, total control through permanent ambiguity.
“When your fantasy disintegrates you do not finally see reality as it is — you lose reality itself. Fantasy is not opposed to reality; it sustains reality.”
The collapse of fantasy is not liberation into truth but the destruction of the very coordinates that made reality cohere.
“The objective correlative of a person is the whole body; the objective correlative of a subject is an organ — you become a subject precisely when a part of you starts to act as organ without a body.”
Subjectivity is not wholeness but the moment a detached partial object acts autonomously, displacing corporate unity.
Claims 16
asserts
The famous 'profile shot' of Madeleine in Vertigo is not Scotty's point-of-view shot but a subjectless subjective shot — a fantasy shot whose libidinal excess most commentators misread as suture.Hitchcock's Vertigo / film theory of suture
asserts
Vertigo is a fundamentally anti-Platonic film: its central shock is not that the copy is mistaken for the original but that the supposed copy (Judy/Madeleine) turns out to have been the original all along.Vertigo / Platonism
asserts
The big Other is not an omnipotent hidden master but the power of pure appearance — it 'exists' only as the virtual addressee of beliefs no individual actually holds.Lacanian big Other
asserts
Hitchcock's censorship battles reveal that censorship was not protecting viewers (who automatically assumed nudity anyway) but the innocence of the big Other — appearance has to be maintained for a non-existing someone.censorship / ideology / big Other
asserts
Modern 'culture' as a category designates exactly those practices maintained through the distancing formula 'I don't really believe it' — the moment you really believe, it becomes religion, and you are called a fundamentalist.cultural belief / religion / fundamentalism
asserts
Today we actually believe more than pre-moderns, not less, because we cannot sustain belief through proxy distance — belief must now be fully personal and first-person.modernity and belief
reframes
Deconstructionist hedging (Butler's 'if we strategically adopt this attitude, may we not risk the hypothesis that…') is the purest form of believing, not the opposite — it cannot sustain the pre-modern distancing that was simply included in direct statement.deconstruction / Judith Butler / belief
asserts
Totalitarianism, especially Stalinism, does not function through clear unconditional orders but through deliberately ambiguous injunctions that generate anxiety and push subordinates to excess, with the leader's interventions always being ones of moderation.Stalinism / totalitarianism
rejects
The Frankfurt School's focus exclusively on fascism rather than Stalinism is their ultimate theoretical fiasco, since Stalinism — with its potentially emancipatory origin — should have been the harder test case for the dialectic of enlightenment.Frankfurt School / Adorno / dialectic of enlightenment
asserts
The proper metaphor for the emancipatory/revolutionary subject is not the whole body but a partial organ that starts to act autonomously — like the arm in the Grimm fairy tale or the fist in Fight Club.subjectivity / political emancipation
rejects
Orwell's description of Stalinism is incorrect because it implies clear, direct orders — missing the Kafkaesque structure of ambiguous injunctions that characterized actual Stalinist functioning.Orwell's model of totalitarianism
asserts
Fantasy does not compensate for unattained reality; it literally constitutes and coordinates our desire, so the collapse of fantasy means the loss of reality itself, not liberation into it.fantasy / reality / desire
reframes
Melancholy in the Lacanian sense is not attachment to a lost object of desire but a preemptive loss of the cause of desire — one still possesses the object but has already lost what made one desire it.melancholy / Freud / Lacan
asserts
Conservative politics always invokes the corporate body metaphor — a harmonious social organism — while emancipatory politics is figured by the horror of a detached organ acting on its own.political metaphors / conservatism / emancipation
asserts
Multiculturalism is strictly a Cartesian affair: Descartes' Discourse on Method opens with exactly the multicultural gesture of recognizing one's own customs as contingent through the eyes of the other.multiculturalism / Descartes / Cartesian subjectivity
reframes
Western outrage at the Taliban's destruction of the Buddha statues was hypocritical — what truly disturbed us was not the loss of cultural heritage but the unbearable fact that they really believed, taking religion seriously in a way we cannot.Taliban / fundamentalism / Western cultural attitude
Quotes 19
“What we encounter in this excess is precisely in the Lacanian jargon the gaze as object. The gaze freed from the strings which attach it to a particular subject.”Slavoj Žižek · gaze as autonomous object (objet petit a)
“It is as if precisely by not looking directly at it, it is as if he, Scotty, is libidinally captivated by it. It's too strong.”Slavoj Žižek · excess of desire that cannot be directly assumed
“It's a shot which is subjectivized without being attributed to a subject. A kind of pure pre-subjective phenomenon.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectless subjective shot
“The big other means appearance have to be maintained.”Slavoj Žižek · big Other as power of pure appearance
“What is the really existing culture? It's a set of beliefs practices which we assume through this distance of this belief I claim. If you really believe it's religion.”Slavoj Žižek · culture as belief-through-distance
“How do we call those poor guys who really believe in their culture? We call them barbaric fundamentalists. This is the definition of them.”Slavoj Žižek · fundamentalism as genuine belief vs. cultural distance
“Maybe we with this cultural studies attitude we undermine religion much more effectively than all the Taliban guns.”Slavoj Žižek · cultural relativism as more effective secularization than violence
“The shock is not that the original turns out to be a mere copy. The shock is that what we took to be the copy turns out to be the original.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-Platonic reversal in Vertigo
“Coitus ist nur ein ungenügendes Surrogat für die Onanie. Coitus is only an insufficient substitute for masturbation.”Slavoj Žižek · masturbatory structure of male desire / Karl Kraus via Freud
“The ultimate formula of sexual possession is not the exploitation of the partner as a sexual object, but the renunciation of such use… on condition that you do not have any sex with others.”Slavoj Žižek · sexual possession vs. sexual use
“We didn't learn anything new. So the big other learned it.”Slavoj Žižek · the big Other as the virtual witness of shared secrets
“Fascism is a relatively simple phenomenon. Fascists were to put it very simply bad guys who planned to do some bad things and look what a miracle they really did some bad things.”Slavoj Žižek · fascism as simple compared to Stalinism — Frankfurt School's error
“First one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chain and ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too.”Slavoj Žižek · Nietzsche on double emancipation / chain sickness
“The objective correlative of a person is the whole body. Subjects are organs.”Slavoj Žižek · subject vs. person / organ without a body as subjectivity
“Fantasy is not opposed to reality. When your fantasy disintegrates you lose reality.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy sustains reality
“Fantasy literally sets the coordinates of desire. Fantasy tells us what we desire.”Slavoj Žižek · fantasy as constitutive of desire
“Multiculturalism is strictly a Cartesian affair.”Slavoj Žižek · Cartesian parallax view as root of multiculturalism
“What Lacan repeated against Plato: the supra-sensible absolute idea is appearance as appearance. The absolute is that brief vision — the woman, but when it gets too close it is dispelled.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's correction of Plato: absolute as pure appearance
“People who in this radical sense are not ready to subordinate themselves to compulsion in this more elementary sense… We have a nice name for them. They are called psychotics.”Slavoj Žižek · psychosis as refusal of elementary compulsion / symbolic order
Transcript 32 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. Thanks very much, and especially Mark for this kind introduction, because I have a especially fond memories of this place for a very specific reason. I don't know if you remember, but there was a journalist here, a lady that time, eight years ago, from some architectural journal, and then she wrote a report on the talk which caused me, but I loved it, an immense amount of trouble in my country Slovenia. I was attacked as non-patriotic and so on. You know why? Because I spoke as you said, it was uncanny home, about radical evil. And you know this lady, and I loved it, because it was typical how this politically correct sympathy with victims was revealed as patronizing racism. She wrote, and this was then reproduced in the main Slovene daily newspaper on the front page, a small item but on the front page, she wrote to cut a long story short. She confused the names of my hometown Ljubljana and Lubyanka, you know, the KGB torture prison in Moscow. And she said no wonder for him the home is radical evil when he was living there in the very torture house of KGB and so on. So that my first memory of this place for which I am grateful. The second memory is this will be a kind of an ongoing dialogue, or I would have put it, as I would have put it in much more innocent terms, class struggle between me and Mark, because we are both Hitchcockians. We both think that one of the two Hitchcock masterpieces is, I mean to cut the crap, the biggest movie of all times. There is only a small difference, but as you know among Stalinists the smaller the difference the more violent, he thinks it's Vertigo, I think it's Psycho, no? But so, but today to annoy him, because I know that he published a wonderful essay on Psycho, sorry, on Vertigo, I cannot even do it. Okay. I will, I will mostly speak about Vertigo. And not to be too boring, I hope that I can presuppose, presume that most of you have seen the movie so that I don't have to go into all these details. Okay. So let me then begin. Whenever I read about a Hitchcock film or see it, something always strikes me. One of the most instructive things to do about especially these two masterpieces, Vertigo, Psycho, by Hitchcock, is to play the game of mental experiments. What if things were to take just a slightly different path as they almost did? For example, in Psycho, what if, did you know, of course you all know Psycho, did you know that there was already a score written, a totally different score by Bernard Herrmann, more in his jazz style as he did it later for Taxi Driver, with saxophone jazz. I mean it's strange to imagine what kind of a movie this would be because now we identify so much Psycho with this strings only score. Or what would have happened if in Vertigo, if instead of Kim Novak we would get Vera Miles, who as maybe you know, she was already, she was supposed to get the role and it was a simple accident she got pregnant. And then Kim Novak was the second choice. An even more ultimate obscenity to insult you Mark, that would be for you. Do you know that there already was written by this bestseller couple Livingston Evans a song, Vertigo, which the studio wanted to impose on Hitchcock during the titles? With these kind of idiotic words like, oh I will draw you in vertigo of my love and so on and so on. So just let's just try to imagine what would have happened. A more, more crucial, serious question is that I don't know if you know, but in the original scenario on Vertigo, there is another half a minute scene at the end which Hitchcock shot, but basically he was cheating. He shot it just to dupe the censorship and then he dropped it out, but from the beginning probably he planned to drop it out. Because if you know Vertigo you probably know that it violates Hays Code in the sense that the criminal, Gavin Elster, the the bad guy, the murderer, sorry, the the husband of Madeleine, he isn't caught, he just disappears. So the last there was in the original version, not not released but for the studio bosses, a thirty second sequence where you see Scotty back at home with Midge and you know these magic moments in cinemas when whenever you open a radio it's just the news that concerns you. They open a radio and then the voice says the criminal Gavin Elster was caught in Switzerland or somewhere else for and then they look at each other, blah blah. So just how many are these possibilities? These mental experiments or alternate stories are often realized in what is, and this will be my starting point, one of the most revealing although apparently trivial aspects of Hitchcock studies. The extraordinary amount of simple factual mistakes. It's already well known that in cinema studies there is an extraordinary amount of factual mistakes. Like even there is a famous saying, maybe you know it by Stanley Cavell, who proudly says no I stand by all my mistakes and so on, no? He meant that apropos of these melodramas, melodramas of the unknown woman, but especially with Hitchcock it this reaches dimensions of madness sometimes. Like the recently he died unfortunately recently Raymond Durgnat, the British guy who just before his death, his last book was I think something like a really close look at Psycho, a wonderful literally shot-by-shot study of Psycho. But okay, in his standard Hitchcock book, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, there is a forty pages analysis of Vertigo, detailed analysis, forty pages. But the premise of it is, it all the time describes it as if the movie takes place in Los Angeles. I mean it's you know if there ever was a movie identified with a place it's of course Vertigo and San Francisco. So what I'm trying to say is that there are so many of these mistakes that I'm almost tempted to see something redemptive in them. That because the first surprise is the nature of these mistakes. They are often, this the case of Durgnat and Vertigo is not typical, typically they are detailed mistakes and typically they are crucial for the line of argumentation. It's usually when you are in for a mistake you should always be careful when you read an analysis of Hitchcock and when the author said but here we should pay very careful attention to the exchange of point of view and objective shots or he recall that cut and so on and so on, and then surprise you, I don't know, buy a video or a DVD, check it up, it simply isn't there. It's different. So this and again the interesting point is that it's at its most engaged, precisely it's not indifferent interpreters who commit this kind of mistakes, misreading, it's precisely the most engaged readers. And I think that often again these mistakes are in a way productive. They point towards a repressed dimension or whatever. So now I would like to start with such a mistake. Pointed out by a guy who was previously unknown to me, Joe Ashkenazi, I hope I pronounce it right, of Hungarian origins who works in France at CNRS. Nothing to do with my private gang of theories, psychoanalysis, just a good cognitivist, but he wrote a wonderful in French only a wonderful detailed study of Vertigo recently. And it's incredible you would have thought my god everything is was possible was already written about Vertigo. No, it wasn't. His starting point it's a wonderful simple observation about two of such systematic mistakes. They occur one minute from up one after the other and practically everybody, he gives, it's almost like McCarthy naming names, he gives the list there. Laura Hicklens, I didn't double check it, Laura Mulvey, Robin Wood, just three, four even, everybody committed a mistake here. So please the first clip. It's the scene in Ernie’s, the restaurant where Scotty sees for the first time Madeleine. You see he is, could you make it a little bit louder maybe the sound? You see so now she is there on the side, so this what we see now cannot be his point of view shot. Everybody describes this, I will try to explain why, as the first mistake, as his point of view shot. Of course it's tracking shot, you have there the fascinum and then you see that's her. After this shot you have now the classical suture procedure, subjective, objective shot. We go on. Now comes one of the most famous shots, profile of Madeleine. Look how artificially enlightened is even the background, more yellow. Again, again, practically every and now after this strange shot, the profile, now only you have this is subjective shot. This is the classical suture procedure, subjective, objective. Stop. You can go on. Now again what is so mysterious here is that practically everybody describes these two shots to which I draw your attention, especially the second one, this profile, as as Scotty’s, James Stewart’s point of view subjective shot. But if you look at it closely it's not. He is precisely too afraid to confront it. He just, he he he is afraid of. So what we have here is what? It's a shot of Madeleine, this profile, which is not Scotty’s point of view. The shot of her profile is, while not his point of view shot, it is totally subjectivized. It does depict in a way not what Scotty effectively sees but what he imagines, his hallucinatory inner vision. It's really a fantasy shot. You remember Hitchcock even played with this how the red background on the wall even gets yellow like burning fire and so on. So the point is that this profile which almost threatens to explode, red heat turning into a yellow blaze. As if Scotty’s passion is directly inscribed into the background. It is as if precisely by not looking directly at it, it is as if he, Scotty, is libidinally captivated by it. It's too strong. It's, you got my point, it's a phenomenon, it is subjective, but it's how to put it, a subjective phenomenon but too intense to be directly assumed by a gaze. It would be too much. And what then happens in a very nice way is how after only after she, Madeleine, moves back towards the door, it is as if only when the object of desire is not too close to burn you, only at that point he can afford to look at her and you get what was described by hundreds of persons as suture procedure takes place, that is to say this classical exchange of subjective and objective shot. So again what we get in these two shots, especially in that profile shot, is a shot which is subjectivized without being attributed to a subject. A kind of pure pre-subjective phenomenon. It's a pure appearance, too subjective, too intense to be assumed by the subject. And we get again the same movement from the excess of subjectivity without subject to the standard suture procedure, the exchange of objective and subjective point of view shots. This excess is thus domesticated with the suture procedure. Rendered, transformed into part of the of the standard subject-object exchange. And it is in order to erase the intensity of this subjectless subjective shot that I think the large majority of interpreters, from Donald Spoto to Robin Wood and so on, strangely insist in their detailed description of this scene that the shot is Scotty’s point of view shot. In this way the excess is contained within the logic of suture. So this I find a nice irony here how the very theorists who decry, who you know twenty years ago it was still fashionable to refer to suture as the basic ideological matrix procedure of a of cinema, how they themselves enact precisely this operation here. They kind of re-translate the excess back into the logic of suture. What we encounter in this excesses is precisely in the Lacanian jargon the gaze as object. The gaze free from the the gaze freed from the strings which attach it to a particular subject. No wonder that so-called kino-eye, kino-glaz, Dziga Vertov’s Soviet silent classic from takes as its emblem precisely the eye of the camera as an autonomous organ which wanders around in Soviet Union of the early twenties. Recall here the common expression, but it works better in French, I think also in English you can say to cast an eye over something, but the French have the expression jeter l’oeil which means literally to throw an eye. And I cannot but recall here there is a wonderful French fairy tale, comic one, about Martine, Martin, the legendary idiot, who being an ugly boy cannot find a girlfriend, so his mother tells him why don't you go to a church on Sunday and jeter l’oeil and throw your eye around. So he goes first to a butcher, buys some pig's eyes and goes to a church and throws them around, and then comes to mother and say look mother it didn't get me, no girl loved me for doing that and so on and so on. But that's what we should do, I claim. A quote from Vertov, the film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the hands to the feet, from the feet to the eyes and so on in the most profitable order, and it organizes the details into a regular montage exercise and so on and so on. So what would be this gaze which is stolen from us, turned into an organ without a body? We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I myself remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror. You know like you can sometimes see yourself from the side. And when all of a sudden I caught a glimpse of my face from profile through this double mirroring. And the image replicated all my gestures but in a weird uncoordinated way. It's in such a situation my specular image was stolen from me. My look was no longer looking back at me. It is in such weird experiences that you catch what Lacan called gaze as the object small a at its purest. The part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship. So when we see ourselves from outside, from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I'm objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but rather that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, which observes me from outside. Someone close to me had a couple of years ago an operation and it must have been a traumatic thing. The operation was I don't know some smaller operation so it was only local anesthesia. But as parts of it, and I still don't know was this justified or was just a specific doctor's sadism, it was that while under anesthesia, the eye was taken out. Only under anesthesia. And the person told me that it was nightmarish not pain, there was no pain. But because the eye was taken out and turned around a little bit. So it was possible, you know it was like divine position, you can look at yourself objectively. This is the horror. Okay, so let's now go on. So what exactly is the status of this gaze? Where do we find it? There is a another wonderful detail in Vertigo which often passes unnoticed, a detail which tells us a lot about how censorship works. At whom censorship is targeted. There is a scene in Vertigo, you remember after Scotty saves Madeleine from the bay, he brings her to his apartment and then puts her into bed, blah blah, and then okay the idea is of course underlying idea that he undressed her because you see the movement of the camera across his apartment and then above a sink you see her underwear. But do you really see that? Everybody thinks that you do see that, but and that's what I read in this book on Vertigo that this was the biggest fight of Hitchcock with censorship. They didn't censorship insisted, the Hays Code guys, Hays Office, sorry, that it should not be real underwear, really underwear, because then people may really think that he saw her naked. So please show it. Because everybody automatically assumes that it is underwear. You will see it is not. But you see the irrationality of it. Just look carefully now, it will be very short. Look, it's not. Look, it's not. Even this we stop it across there. You see and if you ask anyone they will tell you it's underwear. And even stop that's all, sorry. And that's her yes, that's the logical conclusion. After ten minutes later when she leaves the room, that this pieces of cloth disappears so automatically you think it is. Now why am I showing you this? Not just to make fun of but to ask a simple question. About whom was the censorship worried? Because it wasn't to protect us viewers. We all automatically assume that we see underwear. Isn't this a very weird operation of censorship? It is as if it's not that they wanted to protect us but they wanted precisely what Lacan called the big other. They wanted to protect some all knowing view, they didn't want to protect us. We all again automatically assume that it is underwear. The the history of censorship in Hitchcock it's very instructive also for because in Psycho, you know which was the only big problem with censorship in Psycho? Not all the killings, not the shower murder, but towards the end when boyfriend and sister, Lila and Sam, when they in the cabin occupied previously by Marion, you remember when they look into the closet bowl for a brief split of a second. That was the big fight. And if you look at the shot you will see it because censorship insisted that A, it should last just split of a second that you really see the inside and B, that it should be, this was the crazy insistence, absolutely clean. No traces of shit or whatever. Now again why I find this interesting is that you can see how when Lacan talks about big other and so on, the other’s gaze, this is not this not some fantasy, this is something which is my god Hays Code knew it. I mean American censorship knows it. They were worried about that. So what this shows is the logic of belief. The point is not in the case of Vertigo that we should believe that there was no that he didn't see her naked. But the innocence to be protected is the innocence as it were of the big other. The belief to be protected is the belief of the big other. So again my old thesis when Lacan speaks about the big other, the big other is not so much this Hegelian cunning of reason, substance, a divine-like entity which pulls all the strings secretly. It's almost rather the opposite, it's the power of pure appearance. The big other means appearance have to be maintained. And this maybe touches the topic of the book on account of which I am here, my last book, The Puppet and the Dwarf, where I precisely developed this paradoxes of belief, belief as attributed to another. I rely here to the work of my good friend young Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, who developed relying on people like Paul Veyne but at the same time with a critical distance, how today's notion of belief, this first person belief, I fully assume belief is something modern, is something which emerged with early modernity probably. That for example when old Greeks spoke about Zeus and so on and so on, about the gods living on the top of the Mount Olympus, the point was not if you climb the mountain you will see there gods. But nonetheless in a way they did believe. So Robert Pfaller, this friend of mine introduces here the notion of beliefs which are beliefs of no one. It's like that no one who is to be spared the horrible idea that James Stewart may have seen Kim Novak naked and so on. It's just somebody, but a non-existing somebody. And the idea is again that this is how our beliefs function. When in a so-called precisely but it's not primitive we are more primitive, primitive society when people say we believe that our origin is that stupid totem bird or whatever fish. It's not that they believe in it. It's the big other which believes. Which is why here I follow again my friend Robert Pfaller, he claims that if anything today we believe more than ever. Because what we are not able today, it's precisely to sustain this belief through a distance, through a proxy. It must be personal belief. And here I think he pulls a stroke of genius Robert Pfaller where he uses as the ultimate proof of a totally believing attitude so-called Derridean deconstructionism. Why? Ah he gives some wonderful examples like he says what's the first thing that strikes the eye when you read, now they are already a little bit in decay they no longer do it the way they did it some ten years ago, this hardline deconstructionist jargon. The first feature is as you may remember this fear to state a thing directly. For example a true hardline deconstructionist like okay, okay, like I had a recently a friendly fight with her so I will use my good enemy friend Judith Butler. She would never say this is a can of Coke. She would say if we accept the phallogocentric referential functioning of language, so the if we strategically that's the word he likes, if we strategically adopt this attitude, may we not perhaps, she likes she loves rhetorical question, risk the hypothesis that this can be designated strategically blah blah as a can of Coke and so on. But you see you see what is wrong here. What is wrong here is the idea is this fear to say directly this is a can of Coke. I claim what deconstructionists don't see is that if you say it if I say it directly this is a can of Coke, I mean exactly the same as all those provisos. You don't need them. Because this is precisely what pre-modern people meant. All this was included. Or it's the same with love. Umberto Eco made somewhere a wonderful ironic in one of his early good journalistic, you know who is Umberto Eco, this good journalistic commentator who unfortunately engage in novels which are much worse and even more unfortunately in engage sometimes in theoretical writings which are even worse. Okay. But okay the good Eco the journalist once wrote an essay on love today and claim how today we find it too obscene to say I love you. You must include you must say as a poet would have put it I love you or you know like or maybe we could call this love or whatever. But again the point is that before as if in traditional guys really meant it. The problem is no, I mean it this distance that you have to mark as such today was simply included before. The mystery is why do we have to do it today? And I think that perhaps this strange attitude towards beliefs is why today the term culture emerged as the central life-world category. Practically everything that we deal with is an object of cultural studies. Science is a cultural phenomenon, art is a cultural phenomenon, philosophy is just another cultural, even if you read radical structuralist or deconstructionist, production critique of political economy capitalism another cultural signifying phenomenon and so on and so on. I have here a strange thesis, why everything is culture, what does it ultimately mean culture actually, like in the sense of really existing socialism. What is the really existing culture? It's a set of beliefs practices which we assume through this distance of this belief I claim. If you really believe it's religion. It's culture the moment you say as for example many of my Jewish friends but not only Jewish are saying, you know I do respect kosher I don't eat meat blah blah I mean pork but you know it's just culture I don't really believe in it. It's just out of respect. Culture is something that as we put it you don't take it seriously but you respect it. Of course you like in this scene the big other believes you don't want to hurt the big other. Now comes the ultimate paradox. So how do we call those poor guys who really believe in their culture? We call them barbaric fundamentalists. This is the definition of them. And this I think is what bothered us so much about my beloved Taliban when you remember two years ago when they were bombing those Buddha statues. Why were we I think it was absolutely hypocritical our Western reaction. Why were we so so so outraged? The the superficial reason was my god it's part of our of the of the cultural inherited cultural treasures of humanity. How can they do this? No I think this is not what bothered us. What bothered us is that they took religion so seriously. We found we found it incredible that they really believed that those stupid we really thought that these are just some stupid stone statues. We found it unbearable that they really saw in them some threat that religion really meant it for them. So again I think that okay I cannot refrain from drawing the obvious pessimistic conclusion which is that maybe we with this culture cultural studies attitude we undermine religion much more effectively than all the Taliban guns. I mean this is for example the lesson today my friend told me, maybe they told me only one side of the story, in Tibet. Now it's now that Tibetans are losing. When the Chinese communists finally got it, forget about all the repression of the monks. No, we even give millions of dollars to to renovate the old Tibetan monasteries. But you just change the context. You have now already Tibetan karaoke bars there, Lama experiences and so on and so on and the job is done much more efficiently. Okay. Back to Vertigo. At this point the probable reaction of you will be of course this opposition, the opposition between the big other and the ordinary gaze. The all-seeing gaze of the big other and the ordinary gaze is simply the Platonic one. That between the limited view of us mortals and the view of the big other which sees everything. And effectively already in the late fifties, immediately after Vertigo's release, Eric Rohmer noted that the film is deeply Platonic. However I think the link is a negative one. Vertigo is the ultimate anti-Platonic film, a kind of systematic undermining of the Platonic project. In what sense? Let's be here very precise. The murderous fury that seizes Scotty when he finally discovers, you know ten minutes before the end, that Judy, whom he tried to make into Madeleine, is the woman he knew as Madeleine. Is precisely the fury of a deceived Platonist who perceives that the original he wants to imitate, to remake in a perfect copy is already in itself a copy. This is pure Platonic fury. The shock here is not again that the original turns out to be a mere copy. This is standard deception and Plato all the time warns us against it. Don't mistake copy for the original. The shock is that what we took to be the copy turns out to be the original. That is to say that the Madeleine which was supposed to be a copy was already the original. Perhaps one should read here Vertigo together with General della Rovere, a wonderful Rossellini, Roberto Rossellini masterpiece from the same time, late fifties. The story of a small thief and swindler, superbly played by Vittorio De Sica, who is arrested by the Germans in Genoa in the winter of forty-four, forty-five. The Germans occupying force in Italy, no, propose a deal to him. In the prison he will pass for the legendary General della Rovere, a resistance hero, so that other political prisoners will tell him their secrets, especially the true identity of other key resistance leaders. However the small thief, De Sica played by De Sica, gets so intensely caught up in this role that at the end he fully assumes the identity of General della Rovere and he prefers to be shot as General della Rovere. You know he simply takes the game seriously. The Platonic reversal to be accomplished here is the same as that of Vertigo. What if the true della Rovere was already a fake? I think this would be a more intelligent twist of what what if at the end the true Rovere would emerge and we would discover that De Sica as the copy, the fake, is more true to it than than as it were the original the original itself. So back to Vertigo. Crucial for the film's anti-Platonic thrust are the deceptively dead, because they are simply often perceived by idiots who don't know how to read a movie as kind of dead ten minutes of the film, after Scotty meets Judy, let's say the poor girl who turns to be Madeleine, in the second half of the film and before he fully engages in her violent transformation into Madeleine. What happens here? There are three I will only show them not to lose too much time two of them, there are three key scenes here. First the scene of their initial evening date at Ernie’s again with the couple seated at a table opposite each other, obviously failing to engage in a minimum conversation. All of a sudden Scotty’s gaze gets fixed on some point behind Judy, the vulgar common girl sitting opposite him, and we see that it is a woman vaguely familiar to Madeleine, dressed in the same grey gown. When Judy notices what attracted Scotty’s gaze she is of course deeply hurt. The crucial moment here is when we see from Scotty’s point of view the two of them in the same shot. Judy on the right side, close to him, and the grey woman back in the background. Could we have please now the next one if you succeeded? And then please don't turn it back just let it run. Because you see now this is the same Ernie’s, this is the vulgar girl Judy. You see there. I think this is the pure Platonic split, that is to say the vulgar model but then when it comes too close he sees and of course she notices what she notices what happened. What is crucial here is that you see at that brief moment of illusion when Scotty thinks that my god what if that woman back there is Madeleine, just let it run, let it on please. At that brief split of a second we get the absolute appearance. And this is in what sense Lacan repeated against Plato that what Plato didn't see is that the supra-sensible absolute idea is appearance as appearance. The absolute is that brief vision is that the woman, but when it gets too close it is dispelled. So again here we have the Platonic split in a way. The real woman who is vulgar copy and the brief illusory appearance of the absolute idea. Then he takes her home and this is I think the ultimate feminist anti-Platonic scene. This in itself is an absolute masterpiece. You will see what will happen now. You will literally see the negative of the profile that we saw in the first shot that I showed you at Ernie’s. You remember when you see Madeleine against the background. Here you will see the background is green, you will see her, Judy's profile but only as dark. It's literally that's why she uses her, just as a kind of a dark screen to project. This is literally the negative. This you should read again together with that one. And now comes something absolutely unthinkable, tremendous. This is the moment of subjectivization. Subject is not all this shot that you will see now, her face literally split. How? It is as if it's ontologically incomplete. You can read this even as Platonic horror, the black space, just the stuff of course and this the stuff for men's dreams. It is as if you remember when you saw this profile in the first scene. It is as if you see here what was on the other side of the profile. Here was Scotty's projection, that's feminist thing. This is if I were to write a book on feminist subjectivity I would use this one. But I pay too because Hitchcock estate asks five thousand for a simple shot. Okay that's another story. Okay so I think again okay stop please it's okay? I I think that here you see that Hitchcock was a genius how to put it how precisely it works. Profile you see then, profile filling in this black and this tragic position if you want of feminine subjectivity. Something else happens then in the scene that I will not show you, it would take too much time, when there is a scene soon after this one when the two of them go dancing and you can see in almost tragic way for her when they dance how she would want to be closer to him physically but he he is really disgusted at her. He doesn't want her physically. He wants her just as that dark stuff to put together his fantasy. Okay. So I think that it is okay but you will say but then at the end we do have coitus. Yes, but when? Only when he Scotty fills in that black half with again with fantasy of Madeleine. You remember when he redre- when he remakes her as Madeleine then they make love implicitly. But that love is again definitely masturbatory in its structure. It is like you know what Karl Kraus quoted by Freud said. Coitus ist nur ein ungenügendes Surrogat für die Onanie. Coitus is only an insufficient substitute for masturbation, no? That's basically the structure which is there. And okay I then don't have time to go now into this more in detail I would just like to emphasize that this phallic dimension masturbatory dimension of male enjoyment, jouissance, enables us to define in a precise way sexual possession. The ultimate formula of sexual possession is not the exploitation of the partner as a sexual object, but the renunciation of such use, the attitude of I do not want anything from you, no sexual favors on condition on condition that you do not have any sex with others. I think that this pure this is the true possession opposed to use. And I think that this is my solution to the standard Kantian problem but don't you when you make love don't you use the other as object for your pleasure? Yeah but that's the risk you have to take. I think that the attitude of possession is precisely to reject this and then to again maintain the other just as an object of possession. So again we have this tension that we noticed here between two sides tension embodied in the two sides of of a woman, this woman Judy Madeleine. Half of the woman subjectivity, feminine subjectivity, the real, the other half the screen for projecting fantasies. This is is this not also the overall structure of Vertigo? That is to say it's a well known theory and I think it works according to which Vertigo as a film plays upon two registers. On the one hand it can be read as simply a realistic narrative, a story about taking place in real world about a guy who blah blah blah if you take everything that happens in the film as simply taking place in reality. But you know all these mental experiments which I think are justified in this case that you can namely the alternate reading which is you remember how at the very beginning there is the famous scene of Scotty running from one roof to the other and then we see him hanging down and it's never explained how he got down. So the reading is that the entire film which follows is then just his is that just his fantasy what happens before he fell down. And that at the end it rejoins his situation when he is again on the top of the of the church tower so that what should have happened at the end is he jumps down and it's his jump in reality. All that really happens are the first three minutes. So if we read the movie this way the structure is the one of Ambrose Bierce's famous short story, An Occurrence at Old Creek Bridge, in which everything that follows the hanging of a man at the story's outset is at the end revealed as the fantasy of the dying man. There are also other films which play on this ambiguity like Point Blank, John Boorman's you remember with Lee Marvin. At the beginning Alcatraz and you can read it as if at the beginning he is shot and all because at the end you return to Alcatraz, as if it's just a kind of fantasy detour. And I think that this idea of two levels is very let's call them in naive way fantasy reality is operative effectively in Hitchcock. Why? This is the way to account for those mysterious moments where things how to put it happen just at a right moment. That is to say something that if we only perceive the movie as taking place in reality would be a slightly ridiculous coincidence. But nonetheless we take it seriously. Why? Because this is the point where as it were fantasy directly intervenes into reality. There are two such scenes. One is the very last scene. Do you remember how when they practically already reconcile with each other at the very end on the tower Scotty and Judy, the girl, they embrace, at that very point mother superior appears from below. And but you know the problem is here the perfect timing. If mother superior were to appear two minutes earlier nothing would have happened. If she were to appear twenty seconds earlier nothing would have happened. And in a way this works because as I put in one of my books I forgot which one, this is a serious option in the sense that I remember when I was young when I was thirteen, fourteen I saw for the first time Vertigo in my country Yugoslavia. It was in Cinematheque, it was a bad old copy so bad that the last half minute was missing. And for ten years I thought that Vertigo is a movie with a happy end. That they embrace pardoned and so on. And no, the shock is that it worked quite well. I mean it is so it's a serious question why does the mother superior have to appear? It's clear why. Because it's Scotty’s superego. Scotty wants her death. It's almost the Orpheus like, you know it's the version of you know we all know what really happens in Orpheus myth, no? Orpheus is terrified by the idea this woman with me up there, where is my noble poet profession? So it's clear that he turns back so that she goes back to hell and he can write poetry and so on. Okay the then another even nicer example of this magic coincidence in what is I think if you ask me and I wonder Mark if you were to agree like this gunpoint question one scene from Vertigo which is the top. If you ask me it's that short scene after he saves her just after that that display of underwear which is not underwear when they have that gentle soft conversation at the table when he then joins sorry she joins him from the bedroom and they have that conversation short conversation it's their first conversation. This is the supreme scene. But again you have this magic moment of intervention at precisely the right point. Now I will show you okay please the last clip. It's a miracle that it worked. I mean I was pessimistic. Let's hope that it will work here also. Just if you can put some voice on now please. Ah you saw it. That's it stop ha ha just this. You know what's the magic. They talk blah blah. Then at the precise moment when there is erotic tension contact the phone rings to interrupt it and who it is her husband of course. I think that again the only way to account for it is to read it as a to read it as a fantasy. So okay we have this tension between fantasy reality of course reality sustained by fantasy. But now to approach slowly not quite yet but slowly the end, I would like to make a step further here. What characterizes so-called modern cinema in contrast to Hitchcock is I think precisely the step into the disintegration of fantasy. What do I mean by this? I don't mean a disintegration of fantasy in the simple sense of oh fantasy falls apart and finally we are welcome to the desert of the real, confronted with the way reality really is. No, it's that interspace where by losing fantasy by being deprived of fantasy we lose also reality and we have some kind of how to call it pre-fantasmic imaginary partial objects floating around not yet a consistent fantasy. This is how I read and the reason I relatively like, relatively not absolutely, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Basically the movie is as it is the problem with Lynch I claim quite the opposite of what is usually said oh it's just a confused story no meaning no it's even too linear it's too simple a movie. It's clearly the first two thirds is the fantasy universe and then return to fall back into reality. But I think that the structure is properly Lacanian more complex. It's not direct fall from fantasy what the girl is dreaming about played by Naomi Watts to reality. It's that fantasy when it gets too intense precisely after her wonderfully shot I claim lesbian lovemaking encounter gets too intense and starts to fall apart at that point she escapes into reality. This takes this falling apart of fantasy takes place it's done in a wonderfully precise way if you saw the movie Mulholland Drive in two steps. First it's that that test shooting scene which is you can understand there why Lacan says that repeats after Freud that the real appears as dream within a dream. We are in a movie but we get a dimension of her real character of the girl precisely when she makes a test when she acts within acting movie. You remember how up to that point she is perceived as rather restrained and so on and all of a sudden you have this explosive of almost obscene erotic energy. Then but this is still within narrative reality just too much intensity. Then it explodes in the famous wonderful scene in the night club Silencio. You remember where the two girls Betty the heroine and her mistress lesbian mistress Rita go after successfully making love. There is a singer singing Roy Orbison's Crying in Spanish then the singer collapses but the voice remains, the song goes on. This is again the autonomized spectral object. And I think this moment is crucial where fantasy collapses not into reality but explodes gets autonomized a pure spectral apparition for example of a bodiless undead voice. And I cannot think here about two other examples which point in the same direction. One is but you must see the long version four hours, in the short version it's precisely this scene is cut short horribly, at the very beginning of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. You remember the phone ringing ringing ringing then the hand picks up picks it up the ringing goes on. Now what's crucial here is that it's the same as with that scene in a restaurant when Scotty sees lady in grey. Of course immediately afterwards it is explained in the terms of simple reality what really happened. It is explained that is to say the ringing we were hearing all the time was not that phone ringing but another ring. But what interests me those magic five ten seconds where we think oh my god it's something appears something traumatic. It happened to a good friend of mine I can even tell you who she would love it, my Stalinist Lacanian colleague Alenka Zupančič, the magic experience like that. She was oh this is nice dirty private story but respectable. She was with her boyfriend in a car then she was talking to her and then all of a sudden her mobile phone started ringing she saw her boyfriend was calling her from the number. And she had this momentary loss of like how can he be calling me when he is there? Okay after thinking about it it was explained away. It was simply that she had her mobile phone in such a position here that you know her boyfriend's number was of course number one the first. So you know she without knowing it pressed the buttons and and and it called him yes sorry and so on and so on. It was possible to explain it but she told me nonetheless for five ten seconds it was this uncanny anxiety. What is going on? You can explain you can explain it away afterwards. But here the other scene the as it were the absolute appears. So in the it's the same with Sergio Leone. Again of course it's immediately explained then narratively but nonetheless those minutes when the phone goes on ringing where we have precisely what? And here I combine Lacan and Deleuze. It's like the Cheshire Cat in Alice big reference of Deleuze in The Logic of Sense you know when the cat disappears the smile remains. Organ without a body insists. There is of course here we have the voice which insists. Maybe it's even more horrible what George Balanchine did with a piece by Webern. He staged a ballet based on the music of Webern. If you know anything about Anton Webern you know that his complete works are less than three CDs, that is to say his pieces if they are very long are more than five minutes, no? So what Balanchine did is something ingenious. Dancers dance, the music stops and the dancing goes on. And the effect is absolutely horrific. All of a sudden it becomes some kind of a dance like you know as if dancers as if the dancers were deprived of their life substance. It's as if death itself is dancing. So what interests me again is this moment of of autonomization. This notion of a partial object which starts to talk is also the site of forceful ideological investments especially with regard to the way the male gaze endeavors to counter the fundamental hystericity of the feminine speech. For example in his extraordinary philosophical novel Les Bijoux Indiscrets, The Indiscreet Jewels, from Diderot renders the ultimate fantasmatic answer. His idea here is that a woman speaks with two voices. The first one that of her soul, mind and heart is constitutively lying, deceiving, covering up her promiscuity. It is only the second voice that of her bijou, the pearl, which of course is he makes it clear vagina, which by definition always speaks the truth. A boring repetitive automatic mechanical truth, the truth of her unconstrained voluptuousness. This notion of the talking vagina is not meant that's the madness of it it's interesting to read the sexual fantasies of so-called French mechanical materialists. He does not mean it as a metaphor but quite literally. Diderot provides the anatomic description of his words vagina as instrument a corde et a vent, wind instrument and string instrument able to sing and so on and so on. So it's as if again counteracting what Lacan calls woman doesn't exist it's that there you have the guarantee when vagina talks woman does exist positively not just as the elusive hysterical subject. Does however this mean that the talking vagina is just a the ultimate male chauvinist sexual ideological fantasy? I think that there is more in it. I think that we should be here very precise. What we have here is not is not the same as what you have in like the recent big theatrical hit Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Because now the difference here is very refined one. There I think vagina is simply subjectivized. You have a witty cynical acerbic voice commenting on and so on and so on. But what Diderot is trying to grasp is something much more uncanny and mysterious. It's a kind of a headless headless voice of it's not the subject who speaks it's the object itself which starts to talk in a way. It's a much more uncanny move this autonomization or the becoming subject directly of the object itself. Along the same lines I think we should also read films like the ones that I like at least the first one I like, David Fincher's Fight Club, or the one that I like less but it has a nice detail the one with with Jim Carrey, my god Me, Myself Irene, where in both of them you know it's a double but the double is basically fist autonomized object. You remember this crucial very depressive traumatic but I think very effective scene in David Fincher's Fight Club when when he the hero Ed Norton confronts his boss he starts to beat himself. But how? It's his fist starts to behave like precisely like autonomous organ without a body acting on its own. You remember there is of course something comical about it because you remember this is one of the standard numbers of the circus clowns you know like you behave as if your limbs that you cannot control them that they that they act on their own. And of course we can go on here. For example up to the Deleuzian ideal which you find in some hardcore porn where you have a group orgy where basically instead of objects sorry instead of bodies you basically have just an assemblage composition bricolage of partial objects. Like you know when you have a good orgy scene and they are difficult to find, it's no longer persons it's just an opening here an organ there vagina and a mouth here penis and another hole there and so on. All the unity is lost. This would be I think something very Deleuzian. Okay then what is so good so progressive whatever about this self-beating in Fight Club? I think that Nietzsche was right when in one of his fragments he wrote and this is for me the best comment on Fight Club. First one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chain and ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too. Each of us has to suffer though in greatly different ways from the chain sickness even after he has broken the chains. So in other words liberation is first you have to beat yourself to get rid of that as Lacan would have put it the surplus enjoyment with which master your master pays you. That's the difficult part of of liberating yourself. And my final point here would have been now I'm really concluding the political one. It's that against all this old rhetoric which is now in some circles at least fashionable again of alienation and against it asserting the wholeness of a person realizing yourself and so on and so on. The best metaphor for resisting to use the old fashioned term revolutionary subject is precisely subject whose objective correlative whose who as object is not the whole body the whole person but just an organ. Let me now really finish with I will read you an entire fairy tale. But don't be afraid it's less than ten lines. It's the shortest fairy tale of Grimm Brothers called The Willful Child, or The Obstinate Child, or different translations, Eigensinnige Kind is the German title. Here it is. Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch and as soon as she had done that it withdrew and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth. I think this is a very sad story, because I think that this is the best metaphor of resistance. Like you all know probably all the cinematic connotations of it. From the bad ironic one for example Stanley Kubrick is it Kubrick yes Dr. Strangelove you remember the Kissinger guy with the you know who's like in this slightly different raising of the hand repeating. And then of course it's Carrie the first big hit Stephen King cinema version you remember when that very last scene which is already the dream of the other girl her friend Carrie remembers how out of the grave the hand comes up. And this is true. I think that the moment of the proper moment of subjectivization not only in this pathetic sense revolutionary but subversive is precisely when how should I put it the object what we perceived as something non-subjectivizable the object as it were starts becomes a strange non-subjectivized subject how should I put it. So my point would have been that whenever we have the reference to the whole body a person this would be the Lacanian point this is how I read Lacan’s the barred subject confronted with the object small a that the objective correlative of a person is the whole body. Persons have bodies corporate bodies and so on. Subjects are organs. That is to say how do you become a subject when precisely as in the Fight Club some part of your body an organ starts to act as organ without a body. And we should far from criticizing this as alienation or whatever of forever we should precisely endorse this opposition. As you know maybe better than me always the reference of conservative politics is always the corporate one. It's always society as a harmonious body. Then bad things happen when an organ of the body no longer functions in a proper way doing what it should with regard to its function. As they put it the head should be a head king should be a wise king the hand should be a hand worker should work not complain and so on and so on. But I think again the metaphor of emancipation is simply this horror when an object starts to act at its of its own. And this is the subject in the modern sense. This object out of joint as it were displaced object is the correlat of Cartesian subjectivity. You don't believe me? Just to finish, really to finish, recently I was rereading Descartes' Discourse on Method and I'm more than ever confirmed in the fact that multiculturalism is strictly a Cartesian affair. My god you know how it begins just read it. What is the opening gesture of Descartes? He says he was traveling around European countries and he says he was first shocked by the difference of customs opinions and so on. And then his second move he says is that he all of a sudden perceived that wait a minute they they customs of other people they may appear strange eccentric to us but if you look through their eyes at us we are no better than you know this fundamental insight into how our own background is ultimately contingent stupid and so on. That the same the same surprise with which you look at others at other customs how is it that they eat like that and so on that you should be able to in a kind of a parallax view shift to adopt the same attitude back towards yourself. And I think this is the original site of Cartesian subjectivity. All that comes afterwards all this self-identical rational subject that comes afterwards. The original insight is this radical out of place. I am nowhere, I have no place, which means precisely I have no body, just an organ. I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life that's why my friends call me Fidel. Thank you very much. Let us all thank to the to the guys there because you know they did a wonderful job. I was absolutely sure that something will go wrong with projections and it didn't. That was a wonder because you know it already happened to me that everything was clear but then the guy this happened in in Austria once the guy screwed it up and it was very embarrassing because I was talking about suffering and death and then there was a scene from Chaplin kicking a dog and so on so this time it worked. Thank you I mean okay. I just thought that would go down rather well in Austria. Okay the question. Sorry why? Yeah but I think no no no I I I know but I think their answer would have been that the woman is like kind of a last fetishist step that is to say even in the Hollywood of the fifties in film noir if you know the woman taking down her stockings was the most you can see. That was still like you can see a woman taking down her stockings you cannot see a woman taking down her bra or pants or whatever no? So I think that he simply went as far as possible because it's interesting for the same problem in next film Psycho as you probably know. The other big censorship point where Hitchcock had to fight was you remember in the very first scene in the hotel room you see her that is to say Marion Janet Leigh on the bed and the American ambassador to Mexico acts that is to say that is to say John Gavin Sam you see him standing. And if I remember correctly he has he has some underwear on no? Hitchcock wanted him naked above the waist at least, they didn't want it and they also insisted Hitchcock wanted both of them lying down. They no she had to stand up and it's again it's absolutely crazy how they reasoned. Their reason was you know that's the mystery of censorship whom they were trying to convince? I mean we all knew this was this kind of a how do you call it lunch quickie or whatever would be the vulgar term. But they the arguing of the the argument of the censorship was that there should be a possibility to explain it away that it didn't happen the sex act. So the the idea was it's madness I read it in a book on Hitchcock what if what happened is just that Janet Leigh Marion was tired and laid down and he just came to visit her and it was hot and put the shirt down. But you see the madness. Nobody thinks this but they just wanted a purely possible narrative to account for what you see without without actually and some and obviously there is something in Americans although I don't want to be engaged in America bashing which pushes them into this madness. You know where I myself experience this total madness quite recently. I visited US and I noticed when I visit US usually as you gently reminded me I travel like crazy so I often have that crucial one-way tickets you know. So then I noticed that I am often twice checked up you know once you are when you pass those blah blah blah and then selectively some passengers are checked up again for bombs whatever all the luggage immediately before boarding the plane. Then once I exploded and I said what's going on it's all the time me do I look as a okay I do maybe I don't know as a terrorist or what no? And then it was explained to me no it's because you have a one-way ticket. Then maybe you can help me here. I tried to account for it like what is the reasoning behind? And maybe I'm stupid but the only line of reasoning that I was able to reconstruct is the following one. They imagined a terror- let's say to be friendly I am a terrorist you are Bin Laden no. I tell you okay you tell me you go there bomb kill yourself. Okay I tell you okay and I make how do you call it this proposal of expenses no? Return ticket to New York Bin Laden says no you will die there you don't need a return ticket we can economize there. I don't know any other reason why why one-way ticket would would make me suspicious no? And again it's repeatedly whenever I know now in two days I'm going to the States I know where well will happen in Boston where I will board the flight to again could you please sir step aside and so on no? But again so you see that's my point how how strange the functioning of ideology especially censorship is. You know that it's not our real beliefs to convince us and so on and so on. It's different world. Sorry the? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Mhm. Yeah. We are not we are not... Yeah yeah. Yeah. Yeah I agree with it because I see in this again a kind of an even distant echo of that first profile of Madeleine because it's again we will not see her directly but it's all the more present I mean. Yeah yeah. But precisely I think this is crucial for a as a Lacanian you also know this as well as I that precisely fantasy as its most at its most radical for Lacan is not subjectivized. Fantasy is subjective. Fantasy is not what you fantasize about. It's precisely paradoxically what Freud calls fundamental fantasies for Lacan what you are precisely
Thanks very much. Thanks very much, and especially Mark for this kind introduction, because I have a especially fond memories of this place for a very specific reason. I don't know if you remember, but there was a journalist here, a lady that time, eight years ago, from some architectural journal, and then she wrote a report on the talk which caused me, but I loved it, an immense amount of trouble in my country Slovenia. I was attacked as non-patriotic and so on. You know why? Because I spoke as you said, it was uncanny home, about radical evil. And you know this lady, and I loved it, because it was typical how this politically correct sympathy with victims was revealed as patronizing racism. She wrote, and this was then reproduced in the main Slovene daily newspaper on the front page, a small item but on the front page, she wrote to cut a long story short. She confused the names of my hometown Ljubljana and Lubyanka, you know, the KGB torture prison in Moscow. And she said no wonder for him the home is radical evil when he was living there in the very torture house of KGB and so on. So that my first memory of this place for which I am grateful. The second memory is this will be a kind of an ongoing dialogue, or I would have put it, as I would have put it in much more innocent terms, class struggle between me and Mark, because we are both Hitchcockians. We both think that one of the two Hitchcock masterpieces is, I mean to cut the crap, the biggest movie of all times. There is only a small difference, but as you know among Stalinists the smaller the difference the more violent, he thinks it's Vertigo, I think it's Psycho, no? But so, but today to annoy him, because I know that he published a wonderful essay on Psycho, sorry, on Vertigo, I cannot even do it. Okay. I will, I will mostly speak about Vertigo. And not to be too boring, I hope that I can presuppose, presume that most of you have seen the movie so that I don't have to go into all these details. Okay. So let me then begin. Whenever I read about a Hitchcock film or see it, something always strikes me. One of the most instructive things to do about especially these two masterpieces, Vertigo, Psycho, by Hitchcock, is to play the game of mental experiments. What if things were to take just a slightly different path as they almost did? For example, in Psycho, what if, did you know, of course you all know Psycho, did you know that there was already a score written, a totally different score by Bernard Herrmann, more in his jazz style as he did it later for Taxi Driver, with saxophone jazz. I mean it's strange to imagine what kind of a movie this would be because now we identify so much Psycho with this strings only score. Or what would have happened if in Vertigo, if instead of Kim Novak we would get Vera Miles, who as maybe you know, she was already, she was supposed to get the role and it was a simple accident she got pregnant. And then Kim Novak was the second choice. An even more ultimate obscenity to insult you Mark, that would be for you. Do you know that there already was written by this bestseller couple Livingston Evans a song, Vertigo, which the studio wanted to impose on Hitchcock during the titles? With these kind of idiotic words like, oh I will draw you in vertigo of my love and so on and so on. So just let's just try to imagine what would have happened. A more, more crucial, serious question is that I don't know if you know, but in the original scenario on Vertigo, there is another half a minute scene at the end which Hitchcock shot, but basically he was cheating. He shot it just to dupe the censorship and then he dropped it out, but from the beginning probably he planned to drop it out. Because if you know Vertigo you probably know that it violates Hays Code in the sense that the criminal, Gavin Elster, the the bad guy, the murderer, sorry, the the husband of Madeleine, he isn't caught, he just disappears. So the last there was in the original version, not not released but for the studio bosses, a thirty second sequence where you see Scotty back at home with Midge and you know these magic moments in cinemas when whenever you open a radio it's just the news that concerns you. They open a radio and then the voice says the criminal Gavin Elster was caught in Switzerland or somewhere else for and then they look at each other, blah blah. So just how many are these possibilities? These mental experiments or alternate stories are often realized in what is, and this will be my starting point, one of the most revealing although apparently trivial aspects of Hitchcock studies. The extraordinary amount of simple factual mistakes. It's already well known that in cinema studies there is an extraordinary amount of factual mistakes. Like even there is a famous saying, maybe you know it by Stanley Cavell, who proudly says no I stand by all my mistakes and so on, no? He meant that apropos of these melodramas, melodramas of the unknown woman, but especially with Hitchcock it this reaches dimensions of madness sometimes. Like the recently he died unfortunately recently Raymond Durgnat, the British guy who just before his death, his last book was I think something like a really close look at Psycho, a wonderful literally shot-by-shot study of Psycho. But okay, in his standard Hitchcock book, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, there is a forty pages analysis of Vertigo, detailed analysis, forty pages. But the premise of it is, it all the time describes it as if the movie takes place in Los Angeles. I mean it's you know if there ever was a movie identified with a place it's of course Vertigo and San Francisco. So what I'm trying to say is that there are so many of these mistakes that I'm almost tempted to see something redemptive in them. That because the first surprise is the nature of these mistakes. They are often, this the case of Durgnat and Vertigo is not typical, typically they are detailed mistakes and typically they are crucial for the line of argumentation. It's usually when you are in for a mistake you should always be careful when you read an analysis of Hitchcock and when the author said but here we should pay very careful attention to the exchange of point of view and objective shots or he recall that cut and so on and so on, and then surprise you, I don't know, buy a video or a DVD, check it up, it simply isn't there. It's different. So this and again the interesting point is that it's at its most engaged, precisely it's not indifferent interpreters who commit this kind of mistakes, misreading, it's precisely the most engaged readers. And I think that often again these mistakes are in a way productive. They point towards a repressed dimension or whatever. So now I would like to start with such a mistake. Pointed out by a guy who was previously unknown to me, Joe Ashkenazi, I hope I pronounce it right, of Hungarian origins who works in France at CNRS. Nothing to do with my private gang of theories, psychoanalysis, just a good cognitivist, but he wrote a wonderful in French only a wonderful detailed study of Vertigo recently. And it's incredible you would have thought my god everything is was possible was already written about Vertigo. No, it wasn't. His starting point it's a wonderful simple observation about two of such systematic mistakes. They occur one minute from up one after the other and practically everybody, he gives, it's almost like McCarthy naming names, he gives the list there. Laura Hicklens, I didn't double check it, Laura Mulvey, Robin Wood, just three, four even, everybody committed a mistake here. So please the first clip. It's the scene in Ernie’s, the restaurant where Scotty sees for the first time Madeleine. You see he is, could you make it a little bit louder maybe the sound? You see so now she is there on the side, so this what we see now cannot be his point of view shot. Everybody describes this, I will try to explain why, as the first mistake, as his point of view shot. Of course it's tracking shot, you have there the fascinum and then you see that's her. After this shot you have now the classical suture procedure, subjective, objective shot. We go on. Now comes one of the most famous shots, profile of Madeleine. Look how artificially enlightened is even the background, more yellow. Again, again, practically every and now after this strange shot, the profile, now only you have this is subjective shot. This is the classical suture procedure, subjective, objective. Stop. You can go on. Now again what is so mysterious here is that practically everybody describes these two shots to which I draw your attention, especially the second one, this profile, as as Scotty’s, James Stewart’s point of view subjective shot. But if you look at it closely it's not. He is precisely too afraid to confront it. He just, he he he is afraid of. So what we have here is what? It's a shot of Madeleine, this profile, which is not Scotty’s point of view. The shot of her profile is, while not his point of view shot, it is totally subjectivized. It does depict in a way not what Scotty effectively sees but what he imagines, his hallucinatory inner vision. It's really a fantasy shot. You remember Hitchcock even played with this how the red background on the wall even gets yellow like burning fire and so on. So the point is that this profile which almost threatens to explode, red heat turning into a yellow blaze. As if Scotty’s passion is directly inscribed into the background. It is as if precisely by not looking directly at it, it is as if he, Scotty, is libidinally captivated by it. It's too strong. It's, you got my point, it's a phenomenon, it is subjective, but it's how to put it, a subjective phenomenon but too intense to be directly assumed by a gaze. It would be too much. And what then happens in a very nice way is how after only after she, Madeleine, moves back towards the door, it is as if only when the object of desire is not too close to burn you, only at that point he can afford to look at her and you get what was described by hundreds of persons as suture procedure takes place, that is to say this classical exchange of subjective and objective shot. So again what we get in these two shots, especially in that profile shot, is a shot which is subjectivized without being attributed to a subject. A kind of pure pre-subjective phenomenon. It's a pure appearance, too subjective, too intense to be assumed by the subject. And we get again the same movement from the excess of subjectivity without subject to the standard suture procedure, the exchange of objective and subjective point of view shots. This excess is thus domesticated with the suture procedure. Rendered, transformed into part of the of the standard subject-object exchange. And it is in order to erase the intensity of this subjectless subjective shot that I think the large majority of interpreters, from Donald Spoto to Robin Wood and so on, strangely insist in their detailed description of this scene that the shot is Scotty’s point of view shot. In this way the excess is contained within the logic of suture. So this I find a nice irony here how the very theorists who decry, who you know twenty years ago it was still fashionable to refer to suture as the basic ideological matrix procedure of a of cinema, how they themselves enact precisely this operation here. They kind of re-translate the excess back into the logic of suture. What we encounter in this excesses is precisely in the Lacanian jargon the gaze as object. The gaze free from the the gaze freed from the strings which attach it to a particular subject. No wonder that so-called kino-eye, kino-glaz, Dziga Vertov’s Soviet silent classic from takes as its emblem precisely the eye of the camera as an autonomous organ which wanders around in Soviet Union of the early twenties. Recall here the common expression, but it works better in French, I think also in English you can say to cast an eye over something, but the French have the expression jeter l’oeil which means literally to throw an eye. And I cannot but recall here there is a wonderful French fairy tale, comic one, about Martine, Martin, the legendary idiot, who being an ugly boy cannot find a girlfriend, so his mother tells him why don't you go to a church on Sunday and jeter l’oeil and throw your eye around. So he goes first to a butcher, buys some pig's eyes and goes to a church and throws them around, and then comes to mother and say look mother it didn't get me, no girl loved me for doing that and so on and so on. But that's what we should do, I claim. A quote from Vertov, the film camera drags the eyes of the audience from the hands to the feet, from the feet to the eyes and so on in the most profitable order, and it organizes the details into a regular montage exercise and so on and so on. So what would be this gaze which is stolen from us, turned into an organ without a body? We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I myself remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror. You know like you can sometimes see yourself from the side. And when all of a sudden I caught a glimpse of my face from profile through this double mirroring. And the image replicated all my gestures but in a weird uncoordinated way. It's in such a situation my specular image was stolen from me. My look was no longer looking back at me. It is in such weird experiences that you catch what Lacan called gaze as the object small a at its purest. The part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship. So when we see ourselves from outside, from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I'm objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but rather that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, which observes me from outside. Someone close to me had a couple of years ago an operation and it must have been a traumatic thing. The operation was I don't know some smaller operation so it was only local anesthesia. But as parts of it, and I still don't know was this justified or was just a specific doctor's sadism, it was that while under anesthesia, the eye was taken out. Only under anesthesia. And the person told me that it was nightmarish not pain, there was no pain. But because the eye was taken out and turned around a little bit. So it was possible, you know it was like divine position, you can look at yourself objectively. This is the horror. Okay, so let's now go on. So what exactly is the status of this gaze? Where do we find it? There is a another wonderful detail in Vertigo which often passes unnoticed, a detail which tells us a lot about how censorship works. At whom censorship is targeted. There is a scene in Vertigo, you remember after Scotty saves Madeleine from the bay, he brings her to his apartment and then puts her into bed, blah blah, and then okay the idea is of course underlying idea that he undressed her because you see the movement of the camera across his apartment and then above a sink you see her underwear. But do you really see that? Everybody thinks that you do see that, but and that's what I read in this book on Vertigo that this was the biggest fight of Hitchcock with censorship. They didn't censorship insisted, the Hays Code guys, Hays Office, sorry, that it should not be real underwear, really underwear, because then people may really think that he saw her naked. So please show it. Because everybody automatically assumes that it is underwear. You will see it is not. But you see the irrationality of it. Just look carefully now, it will be very short. Look, it's not. Look, it's not. Even this we stop it across there. You see and if you ask anyone they will tell you it's underwear. And even stop that's all, sorry. And that's her yes, that's the logical conclusion. After ten minutes later when she leaves the room, that this pieces of cloth disappears so automatically you think it is. Now why am I showing you this? Not just to make fun of but to ask a simple question. About whom was the censorship worried? Because it wasn't to protect us viewers. We all automatically assume that we see underwear. Isn't this a very weird operation of censorship? It is as if it's not that they wanted to protect us but they wanted precisely what Lacan called the big other. They wanted to protect some all knowing view, they didn't want to protect us. We all again automatically assume that it is underwear. The the history of censorship in Hitchcock it's very instructive also for because in Psycho, you know which was the only big problem with censorship in Psycho? Not all the killings, not the shower murder, but towards the end when boyfriend and sister, Lila and Sam, when they in the cabin occupied previously by Marion, you remember when they look into the closet bowl for a brief split of a second. That was the big fight. And if you look at the shot you will see it because censorship insisted that A, it should last just split of a second that you really see the inside and B, that it should be, this was the crazy insistence, absolutely clean. No traces of shit or whatever. Now again why I find this interesting is that you can see how when Lacan talks about big other and so on, the other’s gaze, this is not this not some fantasy, this is something which is my god Hays Code knew it. I mean American censorship knows it. They were worried about that. So what this shows is the logic of belief. The point is not in the case of Vertigo that we should believe that there was no that he didn't see her naked. But the innocence to be protected is the innocence as it were of the big other. The belief to be protected is the belief of the big other. So again my old thesis when Lacan speaks about the big other, the big other is not so much this Hegelian cunning of reason, substance, a divine-like entity which pulls all the strings secretly. It's almost rather the opposite, it's the power of pure appearance. The big other means appearance have to be maintained. And this maybe touches the topic of the book on account of which I am here, my last book, The Puppet and the Dwarf, where I precisely developed this paradoxes of belief, belief as attributed to another. I rely here to the work of my good friend young Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, who developed relying on people like Paul Veyne but at the same time with a critical distance, how today's notion of belief, this first person belief, I fully assume belief is something modern, is something which emerged with early modernity probably. That for example when old Greeks spoke about Zeus and so on and so on, about the gods living on the top of the Mount Olympus, the point was not if you climb the mountain you will see there gods. But nonetheless in a way they did believe. So Robert Pfaller, this friend of mine introduces here the notion of beliefs which are beliefs of no one. It's like that no one who is to be spared the horrible idea that James Stewart may have seen Kim Novak naked and so on. It's just somebody, but a non-existing somebody. And the idea is again that this is how our beliefs function. When in a so-called precisely but it's not primitive we are more primitive, primitive society when people say we believe that our origin is that stupid totem bird or whatever fish. It's not that they believe in it. It's the big other which believes. Which is why here I follow again my friend Robert Pfaller, he claims that if anything today we believe more than ever. Because what we are not able today, it's precisely to sustain this belief through a distance, through a proxy. It must be personal belief. And here I think he pulls a stroke of genius Robert Pfaller where he uses as the ultimate proof of a totally believing attitude so-called Derridean deconstructionism. Why? Ah he gives some wonderful examples like he says what's the first thing that strikes the eye when you read, now they are already a little bit in decay they no longer do it the way they did it some ten years ago, this hardline deconstructionist jargon. The first feature is as you may remember this fear to state a thing directly. For example a true hardline deconstructionist like okay, okay, like I had a recently a friendly fight with her so I will use my good enemy friend Judith Butler. She would never say this is a can of Coke. She would say if we accept the phallogocentric referential functioning of language, so the if we strategically that's the word he likes, if we strategically adopt this attitude, may we not perhaps, she likes she loves rhetorical question, risk the hypothesis that this can be designated strategically blah blah as a can of Coke and so on. But you see you see what is wrong here. What is wrong here is the idea is this fear to say directly this is a can of Coke. I claim what deconstructionists don't see is that if you say it if I say it directly this is a can of Coke, I mean exactly the same as all those provisos. You don't need them. Because this is precisely what pre-modern people meant. All this was included. Or it's the same with love. Umberto Eco made somewhere a wonderful ironic in one of his early good journalistic, you know who is Umberto Eco, this good journalistic commentator who unfortunately engage in novels which are much worse and even more unfortunately in engage sometimes in theoretical writings which are even worse. Okay. But okay the good Eco the journalist once wrote an essay on love today and claim how today we find it too obscene to say I love you. You must include you must say as a poet would have put it I love you or you know like or maybe we could call this love or whatever. But again the point is that before as if in traditional guys really meant it. The problem is no, I mean it this distance that you have to mark as such today was simply included before. The mystery is why do we have to do it today? And I think that perhaps this strange attitude towards beliefs is why today the term culture emerged as the central life-world category. Practically everything that we deal with is an object of cultural studies. Science is a cultural phenomenon, art is a cultural phenomenon, philosophy is just another cultural, even if you read radical structuralist or deconstructionist, production critique of political economy capitalism another cultural signifying phenomenon and so on and so on. I have here a strange thesis, why everything is culture, what does it ultimately mean culture actually, like in the sense of really existing socialism. What is the really existing culture? It's a set of beliefs practices which we assume through this distance of this belief I claim. If you really believe it's religion. It's culture the moment you say as for example many of my Jewish friends but not only Jewish are saying, you know I do respect kosher I don't eat meat blah blah I mean pork but you know it's just culture I don't really believe in it. It's just out of respect. Culture is something that as we put it you don't take it seriously but you respect it. Of course you like in this scene the big other believes you don't want to hurt the big other. Now comes the ultimate paradox. So how do we call those poor guys who really believe in their culture? We call them barbaric fundamentalists. This is the definition of them. And this I think is what bothered us so much about my beloved Taliban when you remember two years ago when they were bombing those Buddha statues. Why were we I think it was absolutely hypocritical our Western reaction. Why were we so so so outraged? The the superficial reason was my god it's part of our of the of the cultural inherited cultural treasures of humanity. How can they do this? No I think this is not what bothered us. What bothered us is that they took religion so seriously. We found we found it incredible that they really believed that those stupid we really thought that these are just some stupid stone statues. We found it unbearable that they really saw in them some threat that religion really meant it for them. So again I think that okay I cannot refrain from drawing the obvious pessimistic conclusion which is that maybe we with this culture cultural studies attitude we undermine religion much more effectively than all the Taliban guns. I mean this is for example the lesson today my friend told me, maybe they told me only one side of the story, in Tibet. Now it's now that Tibetans are losing. When the Chinese communists finally got it, forget about all the repression of the monks. No, we even give millions of dollars to to renovate the old Tibetan monasteries. But you just change the context. You have now already Tibetan karaoke bars there, Lama experiences and so on and so on and the job is done much more efficiently. Okay. Back to Vertigo. At this point the probable reaction of you will be of course this opposition, the opposition between the big other and the ordinary gaze. The all-seeing gaze of the big other and the ordinary gaze is simply the Platonic one. That between the limited view of us mortals and the view of the big other which sees everything. And effectively already in the late fifties, immediately after Vertigo's release, Eric Rohmer noted that the film is deeply Platonic. However I think the link is a negative one. Vertigo is the ultimate anti-Platonic film, a kind of systematic undermining of the Platonic project. In what sense? Let's be here very precise. The murderous fury that seizes Scotty when he finally discovers, you know ten minutes before the end, that Judy, whom he tried to make into Madeleine, is the woman he knew as Madeleine. Is precisely the fury of a deceived Platonist who perceives that the original he wants to imitate, to remake in a perfect copy is already in itself a copy. This is pure Platonic fury. The shock here is not again that the original turns out to be a mere copy. This is standard deception and Plato all the time warns us against it. Don't mistake copy for the original. The shock is that what we took to be the copy turns out to be the original. That is to say that the Madeleine which was supposed to be a copy was already the original. Perhaps one should read here Vertigo together with General della Rovere, a wonderful Rossellini, Roberto Rossellini masterpiece from the same time, late fifties. The story of a small thief and swindler, superbly played by Vittorio De Sica, who is arrested by the Germans in Genoa in the winter of forty-four, forty-five. The Germans occupying force in Italy, no, propose a deal to him. In the prison he will pass for the legendary General della Rovere, a resistance hero, so that other political prisoners will tell him their secrets, especially the true identity of other key resistance leaders. However the small thief, De Sica played by De Sica, gets so intensely caught up in this role that at the end he fully assumes the identity of General della Rovere and he prefers to be shot as General della Rovere. You know he simply takes the game seriously. The Platonic reversal to be accomplished here is the same as that of Vertigo. What if the true della Rovere was already a fake? I think this would be a more intelligent twist of what what if at the end the true Rovere would emerge and we would discover that De Sica as the copy, the fake, is more true to it than than as it were the original the original itself. So back to Vertigo. Crucial for the film's anti-Platonic thrust are the deceptively dead, because they are simply often perceived by idiots who don't know how to read a movie as kind of dead ten minutes of the film, after Scotty meets Judy, let's say the poor girl who turns to be Madeleine, in the second half of the film and before he fully engages in her violent transformation into Madeleine. What happens here? There are three I will only show them not to lose too much time two of them, there are three key scenes here. First the scene of their initial evening date at Ernie’s again with the couple seated at a table opposite each other, obviously failing to engage in a minimum conversation. All of a sudden Scotty’s gaze gets fixed on some point behind Judy, the vulgar common girl sitting opposite him, and we see that it is a woman vaguely familiar to Madeleine, dressed in the same grey gown. When Judy notices what attracted Scotty’s gaze she is of course deeply hurt. The crucial moment here is when we see from Scotty’s point of view the two of them in the same shot. Judy on the right side, close to him, and the grey woman back in the background. Could we have please now the next one if you succeeded? And then please don't turn it back just let it run. Because you see now this is the same Ernie’s, this is the vulgar girl Judy. You see there. I think this is the pure Platonic split, that is to say the vulgar model but then when it comes too close he sees and of course she notices what she notices what happened. What is crucial here is that you see at that brief moment of illusion when Scotty thinks that my god what if that woman back there is Madeleine, just let it run, let it on please. At that brief split of a second we get the absolute appearance. And this is in what sense Lacan repeated against Plato that what Plato didn't see is that the supra-sensible absolute idea is appearance as appearance. The absolute is that brief vision is that the woman, but when it gets too close it is dispelled. So again here we have the Platonic split in a way. The real woman who is vulgar copy and the brief illusory appearance of the absolute idea. Then he takes her home and this is I think the ultimate feminist anti-Platonic scene. This in itself is an absolute masterpiece. You will see what will happen now. You will literally see the negative of the profile that we saw in the first shot that I showed you at Ernie’s. You remember when you see Madeleine against the background. Here you will see the background is green, you will see her, Judy's profile but only as dark. It's literally that's why she uses her, just as a kind of a dark screen to project. This is literally the negative. This you should read again together with that one. And now comes something absolutely unthinkable, tremendous. This is the moment of subjectivization. Subject is not all this shot that you will see now, her face literally split. How? It is as if it's ontologically incomplete. You can read this even as Platonic horror, the black space, just the stuff of course and this the stuff for men's dreams. It is as if you remember when you saw this profile in the first scene. It is as if you see here what was on the other side of the profile. Here was Scotty's projection, that's feminist thing. This is if I were to write a book on feminist subjectivity I would use this one. But I pay too because Hitchcock estate asks five thousand for a simple shot. Okay that's another story. Okay so I think again okay stop please it's okay? I I think that here you see that Hitchcock was a genius how to put it how precisely it works. Profile you see then, profile filling in this black and this tragic position if you want of feminine subjectivity. Something else happens then in the scene that I will not show you, it would take too much time, when there is a scene soon after this one when the two of them go dancing and you can see in almost tragic way for her when they dance how she would want to be closer to him physically but he he is really disgusted at her. He doesn't want her physically. He wants her just as that dark stuff to put together his fantasy. Okay. So I think that it is okay but you will say but then at the end we do have coitus. Yes, but when? Only when he Scotty fills in that black half with again with fantasy of Madeleine. You remember when he redre- when he remakes her as Madeleine then they make love implicitly. But that love is again definitely masturbatory in its structure. It is like you know what Karl Kraus quoted by Freud said. Coitus ist nur ein ungenügendes Surrogat für die Onanie. Coitus is only an insufficient substitute for masturbation, no? That's basically the structure which is there. And okay I then don't have time to go now into this more in detail I would just like to emphasize that this phallic dimension masturbatory dimension of male enjoyment, jouissance, enables us to define in a precise way sexual possession. The ultimate formula of sexual possession is not the exploitation of the partner as a sexual object, but the renunciation of such use, the attitude of I do not want anything from you, no sexual favors on condition on condition that you do not have any sex with others. I think that this pure this is the true possession opposed to use. And I think that this is my solution to the standard Kantian problem but don't you when you make love don't you use the other as object for your pleasure? Yeah but that's the risk you have to take. I think that the attitude of possession is precisely to reject this and then to again maintain the other just as an object of possession. So again we have this tension that we noticed here between two sides tension embodied in the two sides of of a woman, this woman Judy Madeleine. Half of the woman subjectivity, feminine subjectivity, the real, the other half the screen for projecting fantasies. This is is this not also the overall structure of Vertigo? That is to say it's a well known theory and I think it works according to which Vertigo as a film plays upon two registers. On the one hand it can be read as simply a realistic narrative, a story about taking place in real world about a guy who blah blah blah if you take everything that happens in the film as simply taking place in reality. But you know all these mental experiments which I think are justified in this case that you can namely the alternate reading which is you remember how at the very beginning there is the famous scene of Scotty running from one roof to the other and then we see him hanging down and it's never explained how he got down. So the reading is that the entire film which follows is then just his is that just his fantasy what happens before he fell down. And that at the end it rejoins his situation when he is again on the top of the of the church tower so that what should have happened at the end is he jumps down and it's his jump in reality. All that really happens are the first three minutes. So if we read the movie this way the structure is the one of Ambrose Bierce's famous short story, An Occurrence at Old Creek Bridge, in which everything that follows the hanging of a man at the story's outset is at the end revealed as the fantasy of the dying man. There are also other films which play on this ambiguity like Point Blank, John Boorman's you remember with Lee Marvin. At the beginning Alcatraz and you can read it as if at the beginning he is shot and all because at the end you return to Alcatraz, as if it's just a kind of fantasy detour. And I think that this idea of two levels is very let's call them in naive way fantasy reality is operative effectively in Hitchcock. Why? This is the way to account for those mysterious moments where things how to put it happen just at a right moment. That is to say something that if we only perceive the movie as taking place in reality would be a slightly ridiculous coincidence. But nonetheless we take it seriously. Why? Because this is the point where as it were fantasy directly intervenes into reality. There are two such scenes. One is the very last scene. Do you remember how when they practically already reconcile with each other at the very end on the tower Scotty and Judy, the girl, they embrace, at that very point mother superior appears from below. And but you know the problem is here the perfect timing. If mother superior were to appear two minutes earlier nothing would have happened. If she were to appear twenty seconds earlier nothing would have happened. And in a way this works because as I put in one of my books I forgot which one, this is a serious option in the sense that I remember when I was young when I was thirteen, fourteen I saw for the first time Vertigo in my country Yugoslavia. It was in Cinematheque, it was a bad old copy so bad that the last half minute was missing. And for ten years I thought that Vertigo is a movie with a happy end. That they embrace pardoned and so on. And no, the shock is that it worked quite well. I mean it is so it's a serious question why does the mother superior have to appear? It's clear why. Because it's Scotty’s superego. Scotty wants her death. It's almost the Orpheus like, you know it's the version of you know we all know what really happens in Orpheus myth, no? Orpheus is terrified by the idea this woman with me up there, where is my noble poet profession? So it's clear that he turns back so that she goes back to hell and he can write poetry and so on. Okay the then another even nicer example of this magic coincidence in what is I think if you ask me and I wonder Mark if you were to agree like this gunpoint question one scene from Vertigo which is the top. If you ask me it's that short scene after he saves her just after that that display of underwear which is not underwear when they have that gentle soft conversation at the table when he then joins sorry she joins him from the bedroom and they have that conversation short conversation it's their first conversation. This is the supreme scene. But again you have this magic moment of intervention at precisely the right point. Now I will show you okay please the last clip. It's a miracle that it worked. I mean I was pessimistic. Let's hope that it will work here also. Just if you can put some voice on now please. Ah you saw it. That's it stop ha ha just this. You know what's the magic. They talk blah blah. Then at the precise moment when there is erotic tension contact the phone rings to interrupt it and who it is her husband of course. I think that again the only way to account for it is to read it as a to read it as a fantasy. So okay we have this tension between fantasy reality of course reality sustained by fantasy. But now to approach slowly not quite yet but slowly the end, I would like to make a step further here. What characterizes so-called modern cinema in contrast to Hitchcock is I think precisely the step into the disintegration of fantasy. What do I mean by this? I don't mean a disintegration of fantasy in the simple sense of oh fantasy falls apart and finally we are welcome to the desert of the real, confronted with the way reality really is. No, it's that interspace where by losing fantasy by being deprived of fantasy we lose also reality and we have some kind of how to call it pre-fantasmic imaginary partial objects floating around not yet a consistent fantasy. This is how I read and the reason I relatively like, relatively not absolutely, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Basically the movie is as it is the problem with Lynch I claim quite the opposite of what is usually said oh it's just a confused story no meaning no it's even too linear it's too simple a movie. It's clearly the first two thirds is the fantasy universe and then return to fall back into reality. But I think that the structure is properly Lacanian more complex. It's not direct fall from fantasy what the girl is dreaming about played by Naomi Watts to reality. It's that fantasy when it gets too intense precisely after her wonderfully shot I claim lesbian lovemaking encounter gets too intense and starts to fall apart at that point she escapes into reality. This takes this falling apart of fantasy takes place it's done in a wonderfully precise way if you saw the movie Mulholland Drive in two steps. First it's that that test shooting scene which is you can understand there why Lacan says that repeats after Freud that the real appears as dream within a dream. We are in a movie but we get a dimension of her real character of the girl precisely when she makes a test when she acts within acting movie. You remember how up to that point she is perceived as rather restrained and so on and all of a sudden you have this explosive of almost obscene erotic energy. Then but this is still within narrative reality just too much intensity. Then it explodes in the famous wonderful scene in the night club Silencio. You remember where the two girls Betty the heroine and her mistress lesbian mistress Rita go after successfully making love. There is a singer singing Roy Orbison's Crying in Spanish then the singer collapses but the voice remains, the song goes on. This is again the autonomized spectral object. And I think this moment is crucial where fantasy collapses not into reality but explodes gets autonomized a pure spectral apparition for example of a bodiless undead voice. And I cannot think here about two other examples which point in the same direction. One is but you must see the long version four hours, in the short version it's precisely this scene is cut short horribly, at the very beginning of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. You remember the phone ringing ringing ringing then the hand picks up picks it up the ringing goes on. Now what's crucial here is that it's the same as with that scene in a restaurant when Scotty sees lady in grey. Of course immediately afterwards it is explained in the terms of simple reality what really happened. It is explained that is to say the ringing we were hearing all the time was not that phone ringing but another ring. But what interests me those magic five ten seconds where we think oh my god it's something appears something traumatic. It happened to a good friend of mine I can even tell you who she would love it, my Stalinist Lacanian colleague Alenka Zupančič, the magic experience like that. She was oh this is nice dirty private story but respectable. She was with her boyfriend in a car then she was talking to her and then all of a sudden her mobile phone started ringing she saw her boyfriend was calling her from the number. And she had this momentary loss of like how can he be calling me when he is there? Okay after thinking about it it was explained away. It was simply that she had her mobile phone in such a position here that you know her boyfriend's number was of course number one the first. So you know she without knowing it pressed the buttons and and and it called him yes sorry and so on and so on. It was possible to explain it but she told me nonetheless for five ten seconds it was this uncanny anxiety. What is going on? You can explain you can explain it away afterwards. But here the other scene the as it were the absolute appears. So in the it's the same with Sergio Leone. Again of course it's immediately explained then narratively but nonetheless those minutes when the phone goes on ringing where we have precisely what? And here I combine Lacan and Deleuze. It's like the Cheshire Cat in Alice big reference of Deleuze in The Logic of Sense you know when the cat disappears the smile remains. Organ without a body insists. There is of course here we have the voice which insists. Maybe it's even more horrible what George Balanchine did with a piece by Webern. He staged a ballet based on the music of Webern. If you know anything about Anton Webern you know that his complete works are less than three CDs, that is to say his pieces if they are very long are more than five minutes, no? So what Balanchine did is something ingenious. Dancers dance, the music stops and the dancing goes on. And the effect is absolutely horrific. All of a sudden it becomes some kind of a dance like you know as if dancers as if the dancers were deprived of their life substance. It's as if death itself is dancing. So what interests me again is this moment of of autonomization. This notion of a partial object which starts to talk is also the site of forceful ideological investments especially with regard to the way the male gaze endeavors to counter the fundamental hystericity of the feminine speech. For example in his extraordinary philosophical novel Les Bijoux Indiscrets, The Indiscreet Jewels, from Diderot renders the ultimate fantasmatic answer. His idea here is that a woman speaks with two voices. The first one that of her soul, mind and heart is constitutively lying, deceiving, covering up her promiscuity. It is only the second voice that of her bijou, the pearl, which of course is he makes it clear vagina, which by definition always speaks the truth. A boring repetitive automatic mechanical truth, the truth of her unconstrained voluptuousness. This notion of the talking vagina is not meant that's the madness of it it's interesting to read the sexual fantasies of so-called French mechanical materialists. He does not mean it as a metaphor but quite literally. Diderot provides the anatomic description of his words vagina as instrument a corde et a vent, wind instrument and string instrument able to sing and so on and so on. So it's as if again counteracting what Lacan calls woman doesn't exist it's that there you have the guarantee when vagina talks woman does exist positively not just as the elusive hysterical subject. Does however this mean that the talking vagina is just a the ultimate male chauvinist sexual ideological fantasy? I think that there is more in it. I think that we should be here very precise. What we have here is not is not the same as what you have in like the recent big theatrical hit Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Because now the difference here is very refined one. There I think vagina is simply subjectivized. You have a witty cynical acerbic voice commenting on and so on and so on. But what Diderot is trying to grasp is something much more uncanny and mysterious. It's a kind of a headless headless voice of it's not the subject who speaks it's the object itself which starts to talk in a way. It's a much more uncanny move this autonomization or the becoming subject directly of the object itself. Along the same lines I think we should also read films like the ones that I like at least the first one I like, David Fincher's Fight Club, or the one that I like less but it has a nice detail the one with with Jim Carrey, my god Me, Myself Irene, where in both of them you know it's a double but the double is basically fist autonomized object. You remember this crucial very depressive traumatic but I think very effective scene in David Fincher's Fight Club when when he the hero Ed Norton confronts his boss he starts to beat himself. But how? It's his fist starts to behave like precisely like autonomous organ without a body acting on its own. You remember there is of course something comical about it because you remember this is one of the standard numbers of the circus clowns you know like you behave as if your limbs that you cannot control them that they that they act on their own. And of course we can go on here. For example up to the Deleuzian ideal which you find in some hardcore porn where you have a group orgy where basically instead of objects sorry instead of bodies you basically have just an assemblage composition bricolage of partial objects. Like you know when you have a good orgy scene and they are difficult to find, it's no longer persons it's just an opening here an organ there vagina and a mouth here penis and another hole there and so on. All the unity is lost. This would be I think something very Deleuzian. Okay then what is so good so progressive whatever about this self-beating in Fight Club? I think that Nietzsche was right when in one of his fragments he wrote and this is for me the best comment on Fight Club. First one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chain and ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too. Each of us has to suffer though in greatly different ways from the chain sickness even after he has broken the chains. So in other words liberation is first you have to beat yourself to get rid of that as Lacan would have put it the surplus enjoyment with which master your master pays you. That's the difficult part of of liberating yourself. And my final point here would have been now I'm really concluding the political one. It's that against all this old rhetoric which is now in some circles at least fashionable again of alienation and against it asserting the wholeness of a person realizing yourself and so on and so on. The best metaphor for resisting to use the old fashioned term revolutionary subject is precisely subject whose objective correlative whose who as object is not the whole body the whole person but just an organ. Let me now really finish with I will read you an entire fairy tale. But don't be afraid it's less than ten lines. It's the shortest fairy tale of Grimm Brothers called The Willful Child, or The Obstinate Child, or different translations, Eigensinnige Kind is the German title. Here it is. Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch and as soon as she had done that it withdrew and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth. I think this is a very sad story, because I think that this is the best metaphor of resistance. Like you all know probably all the cinematic connotations of it. From the bad ironic one for example Stanley Kubrick is it Kubrick yes Dr. Strangelove you remember the Kissinger guy with the you know who's like in this slightly different raising of the hand repeating. And then of course it's Carrie the first big hit Stephen King cinema version you remember when that very last scene which is already the dream of the other girl her friend Carrie remembers how out of the grave the hand comes up. And this is true. I think that the moment of the proper moment of subjectivization not only in this pathetic sense revolutionary but subversive is precisely when how should I put it the object what we perceived as something non-subjectivizable the object as it were starts becomes a strange non-subjectivized subject how should I put it. So my point would have been that whenever we have the reference to the whole body a person this would be the Lacanian point this is how I read Lacan’s the barred subject confronted with the object small a that the objective correlative of a person is the whole body. Persons have bodies corporate bodies and so on. Subjects are organs. That is to say how do you become a subject when precisely as in the Fight Club some part of your body an organ starts to act as organ without a body. And we should far from criticizing this as alienation or whatever of forever we should precisely endorse this opposition. As you know maybe better than me always the reference of conservative politics is always the corporate one. It's always society as a harmonious body. Then bad things happen when an organ of the body no longer functions in a proper way doing what it should with regard to its function. As they put it the head should be a head king should be a wise king the hand should be a hand worker should work not complain and so on and so on. But I think again the metaphor of emancipation is simply this horror when an object starts to act at its of its own. And this is the subject in the modern sense. This object out of joint as it were displaced object is the correlat of Cartesian subjectivity. You don't believe me? Just to finish, really to finish, recently I was rereading Descartes' Discourse on Method and I'm more than ever confirmed in the fact that multiculturalism is strictly a Cartesian affair. My god you know how it begins just read it. What is the opening gesture of Descartes? He says he was traveling around European countries and he says he was first shocked by the difference of customs opinions and so on. And then his second move he says is that he all of a sudden perceived that wait a minute they they customs of other people they may appear strange eccentric to us but if you look through their eyes at us we are no better than you know this fundamental insight into how our own background is ultimately contingent stupid and so on. That the same the same surprise with which you look at others at other customs how is it that they eat like that and so on that you should be able to in a kind of a parallax view shift to adopt the same attitude back towards yourself. And I think this is the original site of Cartesian subjectivity. All that comes afterwards all this self-identical rational subject that comes afterwards. The original insight is this radical out of place. I am nowhere, I have no place, which means precisely I have no body, just an organ. I'm sorry if I was too long but that's life that's why my friends call me Fidel. Thank you very much. Let us all thank to the to the guys there because you know they did a wonderful job. I was absolutely sure that something will go wrong with projections and it didn't. That was a wonder because you know it already happened to me that everything was clear but then the guy this happened in in Austria once the guy screwed it up and it was very embarrassing because I was talking about suffering and death and then there was a scene from Chaplin kicking a dog and so on so this time it worked. Thank you I mean okay. I just thought that would go down rather well in Austria. Okay the question. Sorry why? Yeah but I think no no no I I I know but I think their answer would have been that the woman is like kind of a last fetishist step that is to say even in the Hollywood of the fifties in film noir if you know the woman taking down her stockings was the most you can see. That was still like you can see a woman taking down her stockings you cannot see a woman taking down her bra or pants or whatever no? So I think that he simply went as far as possible because it's interesting for the same problem in next film Psycho as you probably know. The other big censorship point where Hitchcock had to fight was you remember in the very first scene in the hotel room you see her that is to say Marion Janet Leigh on the bed and the American ambassador to Mexico acts that is to say that is to say John Gavin Sam you see him standing. And if I remember correctly he has he has some underwear on no? Hitchcock wanted him naked above the waist at least, they didn't want it and they also insisted Hitchcock wanted both of them lying down. They no she had to stand up and it's again it's absolutely crazy how they reasoned. Their reason was you know that's the mystery of censorship whom they were trying to convince? I mean we all knew this was this kind of a how do you call it lunch quickie or whatever would be the vulgar term. But they the arguing of the the argument of the censorship was that there should be a possibility to explain it away that it didn't happen the sex act. So the the idea was it's madness I read it in a book on Hitchcock what if what happened is just that Janet Leigh Marion was tired and laid down and he just came to visit her and it was hot and put the shirt down. But you see the madness. Nobody thinks this but they just wanted a purely possible narrative to account for what you see without without actually and some and obviously there is something in Americans although I don't want to be engaged in America bashing which pushes them into this madness. You know where I myself experience this total madness quite recently. I visited US and I noticed when I visit US usually as you gently reminded me I travel like crazy so I often have that crucial one-way tickets you know. So then I noticed that I am often twice checked up you know once you are when you pass those blah blah blah and then selectively some passengers are checked up again for bombs whatever all the luggage immediately before boarding the plane. Then once I exploded and I said what's going on it's all the time me do I look as a okay I do maybe I don't know as a terrorist or what no? And then it was explained to me no it's because you have a one-way ticket. Then maybe you can help me here. I tried to account for it like what is the reasoning behind? And maybe I'm stupid but the only line of reasoning that I was able to reconstruct is the following one. They imagined a terror- let's say to be friendly I am a terrorist you are Bin Laden no. I tell you okay you tell me you go there bomb kill yourself. Okay I tell you okay and I make how do you call it this proposal of expenses no? Return ticket to New York Bin Laden says no you will die there you don't need a return ticket we can economize there. I don't know any other reason why why one-way ticket would would make me suspicious no? And again it's repeatedly whenever I know now in two days I'm going to the States I know where well will happen in Boston where I will board the flight to again could you please sir step aside and so on no? But again so you see that's my point how how strange the functioning of ideology especially censorship is. You know that it's not our real beliefs to convince us and so on and so on. It's different world. Sorry the? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Mhm. Yeah. We are not we are not... Yeah yeah. Yeah. Yeah I agree with it because I see in this again a kind of an even distant echo of that first profile of Madeleine because it's again we will not see her directly but it's all the more present I mean. Yeah yeah. But precisely I think this is crucial for a as a Lacanian you also know this as well as I that precisely fantasy as its most at its most radical for Lacan is not subjectivized. Fantasy is subjective. Fantasy is not what you fantasize about. It's precisely paradoxically what Freud calls fundamental fantasies for Lacan what you are precisely
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unable to directly
unable to directly
Slavoj Žižek
fantasize about. This is the whole point of you know that wonderful short text by Freud Ein Kind wird geschlagen, a child is being beaten, where the fantasy itself the core fundamental fantasy my father is beating me is precisely something which as Freud fantasized emphasized precisely was never fantasized by the small kid. It's pure construction pure presupposition. So in this sense yes I agree that when Lacan speaks about the divided subject
fantasize about. This is the whole point of you know that wonderful short text by Freud Ein Kind wird geschlagen, a child is being beaten, where the fantasy itself the core fundamental fantasy my father is beating me is precisely something which as Freud fantasized emphasized precisely was never fantasized by the small kid. It's pure construction pure presupposition. So in this sense yes I agree that when Lacan speaks about the divided subject
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I claim the ultimate division is precisely between
I claim the ultimate division is precisely between
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subject and fantasy. It's that the subject is void voided
subject and fantasy. It's that the subject is void voided
Slavoj Žižek
of fantasy. You cannot bring the two of them together. You cannot have the subject assuming the fantasy. But I mean wouldn't the old fashioned interpretation Freudian interpretation simply be yes I'm sorry. Just to make it clear yeah yeah. Be that the kind of prohibition of representing her underwear can't be done without the positive suggestion that she doesn't wear underwear. Yeah but okay I see your point and I agree no no but but but how do you unite this with with that scene there because there the fact that three minutes after when she disappears all those pieces of cloth disappear also. This points towards what can either she is some kind of a strange pervert who puts strange objects who uses strange objects but because I think and I would not make this interpretation but the old fashioned Freudian interpretation would be that what's particularly what's particularly scandalous is because in the first half at some level Madeleine actually functions as his mother in in and that's taken up also so I mean when when you when you see the first shot saying this is not a subjective shot and of course that's kind of textually right but nonetheless it's the identification with another position. Now I think it's very interesting that what that position is is actually very low quite low to the ground. That is to say the subjective shot that's shown comes absolutely from the point of view of a child and that happens several times in the movie. Yeah okay no no I agree you know why because I know that you focus your wonderful text on this namely this formal aspect of how the object a in sorry non Freudian more Lacanian jargon in Vertigo is of course this pure form no? Which is repeated at four five levels. It's first in in during the credits all those strange look like attractors in chaos theory all those strange vertigo forms. Then of course you have a you have on that Carlotta Valdes' hair and you have all that the curl of the hair. Then then you have of course the tower the circular tower and then you have the movement of the camera and even in a way when Scotty follows Madeleine in the first third. You know the way it goes around around on the street so it's as if the same formal pattern persists again and again. And again at this level I like very much although it doesn't quite work it's too abstract but nonetheless there is something in namely François Regnault one of the Lacanian gang guys from Paris did try such a reading trying to identify all Hitchcock's masterpieces by a certain pure formal model. Like Vertigo this kind of a curved space, Psycho of course as mirror-like cut lines, North by Northwest this kind of diagonal just straight lines crossing each other and so on and so on. So so where I agree with you is you know which scene is wonderful for me and I often use it to explain the key Lacanian sorry difference between when I take over you will get two years of Gulag and a little bit of confession to do for not fully. I detect sometimes a trace of irony towards Lacan in you. Am I correct? No. This is not sincere okay sorry but what I mean is that there is a one doesn't it happen I think once when they are embracing I think this final embrace before they make love isn't there one when he Scotty embraces her Judy changed into Madeleine and then again camera itself has this circular movement around them and then isn't it that for a split of a second he looks back and to check up if the hair is you know it is as if I love you but I have to check it up if the object which is the cause of me loving
of fantasy. You cannot bring the two of them together. You cannot have the subject assuming the fantasy. But I mean wouldn't the old fashioned interpretation Freudian interpretation simply be yes I'm sorry. Just to make it clear yeah yeah. Be that the kind of prohibition of representing her underwear can't be done without the positive suggestion that she doesn't wear underwear. Yeah but okay I see your point and I agree no no but but but how do you unite this with with that scene there because there the fact that three minutes after when she disappears all those pieces of cloth disappear also. This points towards what can either she is some kind of a strange pervert who puts strange objects who uses strange objects but because I think and I would not make this interpretation but the old fashioned Freudian interpretation would be that what's particularly what's particularly scandalous is because in the first half at some level Madeleine actually functions as his mother in in and that's taken up also so I mean when when you when you see the first shot saying this is not a subjective shot and of course that's kind of textually right but nonetheless it's the identification with another position. Now I think it's very interesting that what that position is is actually very low quite low to the ground. That is to say the subjective shot that's shown comes absolutely from the point of view of a child and that happens several times in the movie. Yeah okay no no I agree you know why because I know that you focus your wonderful text on this namely this formal aspect of how the object a in sorry non Freudian more Lacanian jargon in Vertigo is of course this pure form no? Which is repeated at four five levels. It's first in in during the credits all those strange look like attractors in chaos theory all those strange vertigo forms. Then of course you have a you have on that Carlotta Valdes' hair and you have all that the curl of the hair. Then then you have of course the tower the circular tower and then you have the movement of the camera and even in a way when Scotty follows Madeleine in the first third. You know the way it goes around around on the street so it's as if the same formal pattern persists again and again. And again at this level I like very much although it doesn't quite work it's too abstract but nonetheless there is something in namely François Regnault one of the Lacanian gang guys from Paris did try such a reading trying to identify all Hitchcock's masterpieces by a certain pure formal model. Like Vertigo this kind of a curved space, Psycho of course as mirror-like cut lines, North by Northwest this kind of diagonal just straight lines crossing each other and so on and so on. So so where I agree with you is you know which scene is wonderful for me and I often use it to explain the key Lacanian sorry difference between when I take over you will get two years of Gulag and a little bit of confession to do for not fully. I detect sometimes a trace of irony towards Lacan in you. Am I correct? No. This is not sincere okay sorry but what I mean is that there is a one doesn't it happen I think once when they are embracing I think this final embrace before they make love isn't there one when he Scotty embraces her Judy changed into Madeleine and then again camera itself has this circular movement around them and then isn't it that for a split of a second he looks back and to check up if the hair is you know it is as if I love you but I have to check it up if the object which is the cause of me loving
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you is
you is
Slavoj Žižek
still there. Here you have wonderful states this idea that like you know love is not direct that object of love is not the same as the the object of
still there. Here you have wonderful states this idea that like you know love is not direct that object of love is not the same as the the object of
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desire is not the
desire is not the
Slavoj Žižek
same as what
same as what
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Lacan what Lacan calls objet petit a
Lacan what Lacan calls objet petit a
Slavoj Žižek
object cause of desire which is that on account of which I love you. And again you can here complicate in a properly Freudian way this time I would say wonderfully well if you read close Freud, Freud was a genius I admit it. His theory of melancholy is not what people usually think which is I cannot get which is to put it in vulgar terms
object cause of desire which is that on account of which I love you. And again you can here complicate in a properly Freudian way this time I would say wonderfully well if you read close Freud, Freud was a genius I admit it. His theory of melancholy is not what people usually think which is I cannot get which is to put it in vulgar terms
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the
the
Slavoj Žižek
stupid doxa is the following one. You lose the object of desire, then mourning means you work through blah blah blah get used to it, melancholy means you remain attached to it you don't you remain attached to the lost object. As Freud has a wonderful hint in his Trauer und Melancholie, Mourning and Melancholy where he says that on the opposite melancholy is he used this term wonderful term is a kind of a advance in advance like the way Bush would say now preemptive strike. Preemptive mourning. Before before you even lose the object in the reality you already mourn it. It's as if I still have you but I already you know that's melancholy and I think this can be perfectly put then in Lacanian terms. What you actually lose in melancholy is not object of desire but it's the cause of desire. That is to say I want a woman then I get her she's there but what should you know like it's no longer the cause of
stupid doxa is the following one. You lose the object of desire, then mourning means you work through blah blah blah get used to it, melancholy means you remain attached to it you don't you remain attached to the lost object. As Freud has a wonderful hint in his Trauer und Melancholie, Mourning and Melancholy where he says that on the opposite melancholy is he used this term wonderful term is a kind of a advance in advance like the way Bush would say now preemptive strike. Preemptive mourning. Before before you even lose the object in the reality you already mourn it. It's as if I still have you but I already you know that's melancholy and I think this can be perfectly put then in Lacanian terms. What you actually lose in melancholy is not object of desire but it's the cause of desire. That is to say I want a woman then I get her she's there but what should you know like it's no longer the cause of
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desire that which made me desire her is no longer there. So I think that it is at this
desire that which made me desire her is no longer there. So I think that it is at this
Slavoj Žižek
level I think that I agree with you
level I think that I agree with you
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that Hitchcock is how to put it it's much more refined than it may than it may appear. I'd like to know what you make of the relationship between the other and
that Hitchcock is how to put it it's much more refined than it may than it may appear. I'd like to know what you make of the relationship between the other and
Slavoj Žižek
Big
Big
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Brother in the
Brother in the
Slavoj Žižek
sense that in the sense of the in the sense of the well in the sense that you seemed to say two different things. What um in some
sense that in the sense of the in the sense of the well in the sense that you seemed to say two different things. What um in some
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things you seem to say that the big other is pure object but on the other hand you say that it's experienced as social
things you seem to say that the big other is pure object but on the other hand you say that it's experienced as social
Slavoj Žižek
authority as well and I
authority as well and I
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can't quite piece those up. It seems to me that Big Brother is some kind of metaphysical construct in life that somehow comes before the other. Yeah but it's a metaphysical construct which is nonetheless operative in our daily lives. I think that big other is here for us. How otherwise let me give you another empirical proof of big other. Not that it really exists but that it exists as presupposed in our actual inter-subjective activity. Off for
can't quite piece those up. It seems to me that Big Brother is some kind of metaphysical construct in life that somehow comes before the other. Yeah but it's a metaphysical construct which is nonetheless operative in our daily lives. I think that big other is here for us. How otherwise let me give you another empirical proof of big other. Not that it really exists but that it exists as presupposed in our actual inter-subjective activity. Off for
Slavoj Žižek
example isn't it that sometimes you find imagine a situation, unfortunately I did find a couple of times myself in such a situation, where some of us engaged there four five of us did something horrible, something unpleasant dirty whatever, and we know we should talk about it but none of us wants to approach this topic. And we all know about it, that's crucial, and at the same time we all know that the others know. But nonetheless when somebody explicitly says it, it's shattering. Why? We didn't learn anything new. So the big other learned it. In other words appearance is the old Hegelian like or even in a much more naive way every every marriage counselor or divorce lawyer knows it. How often you have this fantasy of oh if only my wife were to let me go I would join my mistress and so on, but then you know when your wife really kicks you out it's you know like you dream how should I put it that often people who secretly have love affairs find it that to publicly acknowledge it although it's just appearance can be very traumatic. This is where I see a relative beauty of for example Edith Wharton novel or I only saw the movie of course, The Age of Innocence. What is so shattering at the end for the hero? That who is innocent? It's the young wife and at the end he simply learns that far from being innocent she knew it all the time about his affair. And this precisely prevents him from joining his love after her death. So the second point I want to emphasize is that no I don't think that simply no the big other is kind of a proto-totalitarian master. I think I would almost say that in the opposite that in the totalitarian regimes that the totalitarian regimes are a kind of paranoid replacement for the failure of the under quotation marks normal functioning of the big other. Which is why and here I would respectfully disagree with with with Orwell's description. I think that Orwell missed he doesn't give to put it in very naive terms he does not give a correct description of how Stalinism effectively functioned. Because like my source is the book to which I refer in one of my earlier book a lot for me the best book on terror that J. Naumov, Getty-Naumov, The Road to Terror, and the books by that lady who is despised by right wingers as if she tries to rehabilitate Stalinism which is absolutely not true, Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her books on Soviet you know what what she what they depict there how did it effectively function in Stalinism? The first paradox is that you don't find in Stalinism you would think it was totalitarian like detailed orders you have to obey and do it. No the mystery was that you it was really Kafkaesque, you got some order from above but the order was absolutely not clear. For example even let's take the big examples, collectivization. The only thing that Stalin said was the problem with Kulaks as class should be as a class should be solved. We should get rid of Kulaks. Now nobody knew how to interpret this. Does this simply means we take excessive land from them? Does it mean we take all land from them? Does it mean we exile them? Does it mean we kill them? How do we do it? Do we pay them? No. It's tragic to read how local cadre then found what does it mean? No answer. What was Stalin's way of an ingenious one? It was that precisely this anxiety-provoking situation where you get an order but it's not clear what this order is pushes you to excess. And then paradoxically the only positive Stalin's interventions were always one of moderation. It's the famous essay from thirty-one,
example isn't it that sometimes you find imagine a situation, unfortunately I did find a couple of times myself in such a situation, where some of us engaged there four five of us did something horrible, something unpleasant dirty whatever, and we know we should talk about it but none of us wants to approach this topic. And we all know about it, that's crucial, and at the same time we all know that the others know. But nonetheless when somebody explicitly says it, it's shattering. Why? We didn't learn anything new. So the big other learned it. In other words appearance is the old Hegelian like or even in a much more naive way every every marriage counselor or divorce lawyer knows it. How often you have this fantasy of oh if only my wife were to let me go I would join my mistress and so on, but then you know when your wife really kicks you out it's you know like you dream how should I put it that often people who secretly have love affairs find it that to publicly acknowledge it although it's just appearance can be very traumatic. This is where I see a relative beauty of for example Edith Wharton novel or I only saw the movie of course, The Age of Innocence. What is so shattering at the end for the hero? That who is innocent? It's the young wife and at the end he simply learns that far from being innocent she knew it all the time about his affair. And this precisely prevents him from joining his love after her death. So the second point I want to emphasize is that no I don't think that simply no the big other is kind of a proto-totalitarian master. I think I would almost say that in the opposite that in the totalitarian regimes that the totalitarian regimes are a kind of paranoid replacement for the failure of the under quotation marks normal functioning of the big other. Which is why and here I would respectfully disagree with with with Orwell's description. I think that Orwell missed he doesn't give to put it in very naive terms he does not give a correct description of how Stalinism effectively functioned. Because like my source is the book to which I refer in one of my earlier book a lot for me the best book on terror that J. Naumov, Getty-Naumov, The Road to Terror, and the books by that lady who is despised by right wingers as if she tries to rehabilitate Stalinism which is absolutely not true, Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her books on Soviet you know what what she what they depict there how did it effectively function in Stalinism? The first paradox is that you don't find in Stalinism you would think it was totalitarian like detailed orders you have to obey and do it. No the mystery was that you it was really Kafkaesque, you got some order from above but the order was absolutely not clear. For example even let's take the big examples, collectivization. The only thing that Stalin said was the problem with Kulaks as class should be as a class should be solved. We should get rid of Kulaks. Now nobody knew how to interpret this. Does this simply means we take excessive land from them? Does it mean we take all land from them? Does it mean we exile them? Does it mean we kill them? How do we do it? Do we pay them? No. It's tragic to read how local cadre then found what does it mean? No answer. What was Stalin's way of an ingenious one? It was that precisely this anxiety-provoking situation where you get an order but it's not clear what this order is pushes you to excess. And then paradoxically the only positive Stalin's interventions were always one of moderation. It's the famous essay from thirty-one,
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Dizziness
Dizziness
Slavoj Žižek
with Success, where Stalin says no comrades we we cannot do it just like that and so on and so on. It's the same with Bukharin. Stalin let it be known in the late twenties Bukharin looks bad, traitor. Without specification. Then afraid of being accused of leniency blah blah if you look minutes of Politburo and Central Committee younger guys demanded arrest kill Bukharin blah blah. All Stalin's interventions were one and the same motive repeated. Comrades we live in a legal state, the the guilt of comrade Bukharin is not yet proven, we cannot simply. You know this is the masterful way Stalin played. So the mystery is that and I don't think this dimension is clear in Orwell, that with all the total- totalitarianism does not mean you get clear answers sorry orders that you have unconditionally to obey. You get a kind of an unclear but unconditional injunction and it's up to you then it's the big hermeneutic problem. Which is why then at this level what enters is this famous Kremlinology. All you get from up up this is the true Kafkaesque situation are hints. Like what does it mean if after Stalin says collectivization there is an article in Pravda about some unrest among peasants in Southern Siberia? Does this mean that we should crush it or does it mean that we shouldn't proceed? You know like you must read between the lines this messages and so on and so on. I find this quite extraordinary how how it effectively functioned. So again I know I got lost here sorry so I will conclude now as usual you would have put it yeah. My point is only that how should I put it totalitarianism is not a simple phenomenon especially communist totalitarianism and to add insult to injury now a really aggressive statement. This is for me the ultimate theoretical fiasco of Frankfurt School. I don't part not that they were pro-American and so on of course they were. I mean now in new biographies of Adorno you can read incredible things like you know what was one of the main sources of money for the Frankfurt School in the fifties? Bundeswehr the German army and so on. But okay it's cheap point it doesn't matter. What surprises me is the following. Their point was dialectic of enlightenment. How enlightenment turned into blah blah. But why did they focus so fanatically all only on fascism? I mean fascism is a relatively simple phenomenon. Fascists were to put it very simply bad guys who planned to do some bad things and look what a miracle they really did some bad things. I mean but and they were directly against enlightenment. Now how do the true problem precisely for dialectic of enlightenment should have been Stalinism where at least at the origin maybe let's hope was some kind of emancipatory potential and it got if anything almost even worse. I mean and isn't it like you don't have not even a good outline of a theory in entire Frankfurt School. You have Marcuse’s book Soviet Marxism which is not there just an analysis of how Khrushchev blah blah functions you have a little bit here there but no theory. Isn't this weird? Isn't this very weird? Okay too long sorry. Okay I think we should take kind of maybe one more question. Does one in Maoist way divide itself into two? Probably more actually. Okay. Oh sorry oh my god I was as a left winger I was... I'm sorry. Could you just hang on to the microphone because it... It turns on at the bottom. Okay. Can I ask my question? Can we regard fantasies as compulsive memories rather than any psychological events that are inspired by interaction and inter-correlation between reality and memories? I mean as to their empirical source of course they can be considered as compulsive memories although my first point would have been I don't have time to elaborate it now that you know the term compulsion in psychoanalysis is something more precise. It's not that everything which is simply imposed on you is automatically compulsion. But if we describe fantasy in this way then I think some dimension which for me is the fundamental dimension of fantasies gets lost maybe. Namely two aspects of fantasy, repeated again by Lacan and you find it already in Freud, which is that fantasy is not opposed to reality. If you when your fantasy disintegrates you lose reality. Our sense of reality in the very simple sense of in our daily interaction what we experience as reality has to be sustained by a fantasy. When your fantasy disintegrates you have a loss of reality. So this idea of oh now you get rid of fantasies finally you see reality the way it is. This I don't. And secondly even more important it's that like as we all know from Freud already fantasy is not simply a satisfaction, no? Is not I desire something I cannot get it so I fantasize about it. The problem is how do I know in the first place what I want? Fantasy literally sets the coordinates of desire. Fantasy tells us what we desire. We don't it's not predestined by instincts by nature what we desire. Now if we paraphrase it this way and then if we say what we desire is orchestrated by compulsive memories, I find it problematic also in the sense that we would have to specify here also what do you mean by memory, because you know there is this tension which in German it can be articulated nicely with these two terms Erinnerung and Gedächtnis on which on which on which Hegel Hegel plays. So again
with Success, where Stalin says no comrades we we cannot do it just like that and so on and so on. It's the same with Bukharin. Stalin let it be known in the late twenties Bukharin looks bad, traitor. Without specification. Then afraid of being accused of leniency blah blah if you look minutes of Politburo and Central Committee younger guys demanded arrest kill Bukharin blah blah. All Stalin's interventions were one and the same motive repeated. Comrades we live in a legal state, the the guilt of comrade Bukharin is not yet proven, we cannot simply. You know this is the masterful way Stalin played. So the mystery is that and I don't think this dimension is clear in Orwell, that with all the total- totalitarianism does not mean you get clear answers sorry orders that you have unconditionally to obey. You get a kind of an unclear but unconditional injunction and it's up to you then it's the big hermeneutic problem. Which is why then at this level what enters is this famous Kremlinology. All you get from up up this is the true Kafkaesque situation are hints. Like what does it mean if after Stalin says collectivization there is an article in Pravda about some unrest among peasants in Southern Siberia? Does this mean that we should crush it or does it mean that we shouldn't proceed? You know like you must read between the lines this messages and so on and so on. I find this quite extraordinary how how it effectively functioned. So again I know I got lost here sorry so I will conclude now as usual you would have put it yeah. My point is only that how should I put it totalitarianism is not a simple phenomenon especially communist totalitarianism and to add insult to injury now a really aggressive statement. This is for me the ultimate theoretical fiasco of Frankfurt School. I don't part not that they were pro-American and so on of course they were. I mean now in new biographies of Adorno you can read incredible things like you know what was one of the main sources of money for the Frankfurt School in the fifties? Bundeswehr the German army and so on. But okay it's cheap point it doesn't matter. What surprises me is the following. Their point was dialectic of enlightenment. How enlightenment turned into blah blah. But why did they focus so fanatically all only on fascism? I mean fascism is a relatively simple phenomenon. Fascists were to put it very simply bad guys who planned to do some bad things and look what a miracle they really did some bad things. I mean but and they were directly against enlightenment. Now how do the true problem precisely for dialectic of enlightenment should have been Stalinism where at least at the origin maybe let's hope was some kind of emancipatory potential and it got if anything almost even worse. I mean and isn't it like you don't have not even a good outline of a theory in entire Frankfurt School. You have Marcuse’s book Soviet Marxism which is not there just an analysis of how Khrushchev blah blah functions you have a little bit here there but no theory. Isn't this weird? Isn't this very weird? Okay too long sorry. Okay I think we should take kind of maybe one more question. Does one in Maoist way divide itself into two? Probably more actually. Okay. Oh sorry oh my god I was as a left winger I was... I'm sorry. Could you just hang on to the microphone because it... It turns on at the bottom. Okay. Can I ask my question? Can we regard fantasies as compulsive memories rather than any psychological events that are inspired by interaction and inter-correlation between reality and memories? I mean as to their empirical source of course they can be considered as compulsive memories although my first point would have been I don't have time to elaborate it now that you know the term compulsion in psychoanalysis is something more precise. It's not that everything which is simply imposed on you is automatically compulsion. But if we describe fantasy in this way then I think some dimension which for me is the fundamental dimension of fantasies gets lost maybe. Namely two aspects of fantasy, repeated again by Lacan and you find it already in Freud, which is that fantasy is not opposed to reality. If you when your fantasy disintegrates you lose reality. Our sense of reality in the very simple sense of in our daily interaction what we experience as reality has to be sustained by a fantasy. When your fantasy disintegrates you have a loss of reality. So this idea of oh now you get rid of fantasies finally you see reality the way it is. This I don't. And secondly even more important it's that like as we all know from Freud already fantasy is not simply a satisfaction, no? Is not I desire something I cannot get it so I fantasize about it. The problem is how do I know in the first place what I want? Fantasy literally sets the coordinates of desire. Fantasy tells us what we desire. We don't it's not predestined by instincts by nature what we desire. Now if we paraphrase it this way and then if we say what we desire is orchestrated by compulsive memories, I find it problematic also in the sense that we would have to specify here also what do you mean by memory, because you know there is this tension which in German it can be articulated nicely with these two terms Erinnerung and Gedächtnis on which on which on which Hegel Hegel plays. So again
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again okay my point would have been okay I'm tempted to
again okay my point would have been okay I'm tempted to
Slavoj Žižek
accept
accept
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what you said on two conditions. A, that the term memory is defined in a very much more precise way
what you said on two conditions. A, that the term memory is defined in a very much more precise way
Slavoj Žižek
not just what we simply mean by memories like traces and so on and so on. And second point that the term compulsive is redefined in a way which has nothing to do with what is usually referred to as Zwangsneurose as compulsive neurosis and so on and so on, no? So because of course I see your point. Fantasies in a way are are compulsive. Compulsive in the way that how should I put it, you don't choose them, you are in them. But nonetheless you know the problem is that you don't experience them as compulsive in the same way that obsessional neurotic rituals are perceived as as as compulsive. What I'm trying here to do is to rehabilitate a certain level of compulsion. I mean I don't think that our that compulsion that everything that is simply imposed of us is automatically I don't know compulsive pathological and so on and so on. Because I think that people people who in this radical sense are not ready to subordinate themselves to compulsion in this more elementary sense not only neurotic sense. We have a nice name for them. They are called psychotics, no? You know what I mean so that we just have to maybe really define terms more precise. It may surprise you but I finished. Yes I mean... Okay. Okay. How it is that it's already over? I noticed. Oh may I take this short gap then to... Uh... Just say Slavoj thank you very much for coming and thank you for being... Now you provoked me to repeat the old joke. I take I accept this applause because it's not me who matter. I embody here only what is most noble in you I'm just a modest element and it's you know how
not just what we simply mean by memories like traces and so on and so on. And second point that the term compulsive is redefined in a way which has nothing to do with what is usually referred to as Zwangsneurose as compulsive neurosis and so on and so on, no? So because of course I see your point. Fantasies in a way are are compulsive. Compulsive in the way that how should I put it, you don't choose them, you are in them. But nonetheless you know the problem is that you don't experience them as compulsive in the same way that obsessional neurotic rituals are perceived as as as compulsive. What I'm trying here to do is to rehabilitate a certain level of compulsion. I mean I don't think that our that compulsion that everything that is simply imposed of us is automatically I don't know compulsive pathological and so on and so on. Because I think that people people who in this radical sense are not ready to subordinate themselves to compulsion in this more elementary sense not only neurotic sense. We have a nice name for them. They are called psychotics, no? You know what I mean so that we just have to maybe really define terms more precise. It may surprise you but I finished. Yes I mean... Okay. Okay. How it is that it's already over? I noticed. Oh may I take this short gap then to... Uh... Just say Slavoj thank you very much for coming and thank you for being... Now you provoked me to repeat the old joke. I take I accept this applause because it's not me who matter. I embody here only what is most noble in you I'm just a modest element and it's you know how
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the
the
Slavoj Žižek
Stalinists say. Okay.
Stalinists say. Okay.