Reopening Hegel-Haus
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2020-08-27 · 1:22:05 · 11,095 words
with Julian Assange
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologytechnology-ai-cyberspacehistoryphilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismcapitalismsubjectivityconsciousness-mind
Žižek gives a wide-ranging interview on whether Hegel remains relevant today, conducted at the Hegel House in Stuttgart. He critiques three dominant readings of Hegel (conservative, radical-left, and liberal/recognition-focused) and defends a pessimistic, distrust-centred Hegel who shows how noble projects necessarily turn catastrophic. The conversation moves through the Hegel–Lacan connection, Kojève's end-of-history thesis, the unconscious as bestimmte Negation, and the book 'Hegel in a Wired Brain', where Žižek argues that wired-brain singularity will not dissolve the pure subject and the Freudian unconscious. The talk ends with jokes, anecdotes about Hegel's personal life, and a self-deprecating finale involving Italian wine proverbs.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's polemical label for the contemporary Hegel centred on recognition and argumentative discourse (Pippin, Brandom, Fukuyama, Butler), which he regards as a domestication that suppresses Hegel's negativity and distrust.
as “Anerkennung (recognition)”
The liberal Hegel's focus on a free society of mutual recognition, which Žižek criticises as a domestication of Hegel that ignores the necessity of terror on the way to any genuine reconciliation.
Žižek's ironic category for thinkers (Lukács, Fukuyama, tech-neognostics) who accept Hegel as great but claim he misunderstood himself, and that some present or future reality (proletariat, liberal democracy, digital singularity) finally realises what Hegel aimed at.
Žižek's formula for reading Hegel through Lacan, not to claim psychoanalysis enacts Hegelian reconciliation, but to use Lacanian concepts (the real, the unconscious as virtual negation) to save Hegel from liberal domestication.
as “Kant avec Sade / Sade is a Kantian”
Žižek presents Lacan's (and Adorno/Horkheimer's) thesis not as 'Kant is really a sadist' but that Sade is a Kantian: unconditional enjoyment-for-the-sake-of-enjoyment mirrors the pure formal pressure of Kantian duty, used to frame the analogous formula Hegel avec Lacan.
For Žižek, Hegelian reconciliation does not mean the subject absorbs its otherness but rather reconciles itself with the gap and alienation as constitutive of its own being.
Žižek's counter-reading of Hegel against Brandom's 'spirit of trust': the zero-level of Hegel's procedure is that any noble historical project or idea can be trusted to go wrong.
Žižek extends Hegel's 'owl of Minerva' insight, philosophy always arrives too late, into a general epistemological principle: we can understand Shakespeare better than Shakespeare understood himself, and distance (temporal or geographical) is the condition of truth.
as “capitalism without capital”
Žižek's characterisation of Marx's utopian vision: Marx wanted to retain capitalist dynamics of expanded reproduction but without capital, meaning he remained within capitalism's frame rather than truly transcending it.
as “Kalvarie des Geistes (Calvary of Spirit)”
Žižek cites this phrase from the last page of the Phenomenology of Spirit to argue that for Hegel, history is not a happy progress but a via crucis of failed projects.
Fredric Jameson's concept, cited by Žižek to characterise our present lack of any general framework for locating global events such as China's hybrid capitalism-communism.
as “Selbstbewusstsein as pure formal reflexivity”
Žižek stresses that for Hegel, self-consciousness is not an inner experiential richness but a purely formal reflexive moment, which is why it maps onto the Freudian unconscious as a virtual rather than substantial entity.
as “bestimmte Negation (determinate negation)”
Illustrated by the 'coffee without cream/milk' joke: negation is never abstract but always specific, so 'plain coffee', 'coffee without milk', and 'coffee without cream' are materially identical yet logically distinct, pointing to the virtual level echoing in what one thinks.
Hegel's own term for the class of no class produced necessarily by modern capitalist society; Žižek argues (via Frank Ruda) that Hegel fails to draw the conclusion that the rabble, having no particular place, embodies universal humanity.
as “la part des sans-part”
Rancière's phrase (cited approvingly) for a part that has no proper part in the social edifice, which Žižek links to Hegel's Pöbel as the bearer of universality.
as “madness as the first step of humanisation”
Drawing on Hegel's Encyclopedia (Anthropology), Žižek highlights that for Hegel, the transition from animal to human passes through madness, the loss of natural rootedness, so all human Bildung is a struggle against this excess.
Žižek's self-description in a debate with Tyler Cowen: intelligent communism never accepted naïve liberal-anarchic freedom-loving, and the coming communism required by ecological/viral crises may well be oppressive rather than emancipatory.
as “mehr Entfremdung (more alienation)”
Žižek's deliberately provocative formula: against the multicultural-liberal imperative of proximity and understanding, he argues we need greater distance and alienation as a solution to today's social pathologies.
as “Über-Ich / super-ego”
Žižek argues against a simple liberation model: the super-ego is not merely a repressive social force but is structurally linked to the Id, so 'playing with the unconscious' releases horrible rather than liberating things.
as “das Unbewusste (the unconscious) as reflexive”
Žižek proposes that the Freudian unconscious is not a deeper instinctual stratum but is itself reflexive, symptoms inscribe one's true position, making it structurally close to Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein as a pure formal moment.
as “singularity (wired-brain)”
Borrowed from tech-neognostic discourse, Žižek uses it to describe the projected emergence of a new collective divine self-awareness through directly networked human brains, which he then argues will not dissolve the pure subject or the unconscious.
as “Aufhebung (sublation)”
The dialectical movement in which something is negated and yet preserved at a higher level; Žižek invokes it when explaining why he destroyed his family photos, everything is 'kept' in his books.
Žižek's term for the paradoxical effect of media that appear to make interaction more direct (Zoom, social media) but actually further remove us from natural immediacy, a process he treats as potentially productive rather than simply negative.
Stories he reaches for 4
A customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so can only offer coffee without milk. The joke illustrates that materially identical coffees differ logically depending on what is negated.
“Give me coffee without cream. Sorry, we have no cream, we have only milk. So I can only give you coffee without milk.”
Žižek cites Chinese elementary schools where pupils wear metal rings that detect brain activity so the teacher's computer clicks when they are inattentive, a real-world instance of wired-brain social control at a primitive level.
“All pupils have to wear a kind of a metal ring which detects their brain activity.”
Nixon, Brezhnev, and Honecker each ask God what will become of their country; God tells Nixon the US will be a Soviet republic, tells Brezhnev the USSR will be a Chinese province, and when Honecker asks about the GDR, God himself starts to cry. The self-reflexive punchline is that the speaker's position falls into what is being described.
“God tells him 'Sorry, United States will be a Soviet Republic'. Nixon turns around and starts to cry.”
Žižek notes that the last text Hegel published was an analysis of the English Reform Bill moving toward universal democracy, and Hegel was horrified by it, showing his awareness that a new epoch was beginning and that his own model of the state was already disintegrating.
“Hegel was horrified by it. But he saw that we are entering a new epoch.”
Works invoked 22
Ninotchka film
Source of the 'coffee without cream / coffee without milk' joke that Žižek uses to illustrate bestimmte Negation.
One of Hegel's two genuinely creative books (alongside the Logic); closing passage 'Kalvarie des Geistes' cited; Aufklärung chapter invoked; penis/mouth example noted.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's 'big fat book of pages' where he deals with the differences and connections between Hegel and Freud.
Philosophy of Right book
Read as a description of an already-disintegrating form of social life, not a utopian blueprint; ends not in harmony but in the necessity of war; Hegel's analysis of the English Reform Bill cited.
Psycho film
Hitchcock film used as a spatial map of Freud's psychic topology (house levels = ego/super-ego/unconscious) and as the source of the Norman Bates / Trump comparison.
Science of Logic book
Žižek's preferred book over the Phenomenology (he says 'I am for Logic'); argues the key is the opening chapters on three types of reflection.
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin's first full talking picture; cited as evidence of his long resistance to sound cinema, which paradoxically enabled a sharper understanding of what sound adds.
Žižek's own book under discussion; he enjoyed writing it and outlines its argument: wired-brain singularity, its theological dimension, Soviet precedents, and the survival of the pure subject and unconscious.
The Unnamable book
Beckett's novel; Žižek calls it an image of wired-brain subjectivity, the speaker is not human but a strange partial object, and urges readers to re-read it.
Classed by Žižek as a university manual rather than a creative work; the Anthropology section (on madness as first step of humanisation) is cited positively.
Finnegans Wake book
Called 'the most arrogant book'; Žižek says he has 'almost a Goebbels's reaction to it' and it 'should be publicly burned', his sharpest aesthetic rejection in the talk.
A Spirit of Trust book
Brandom's close reading of the Phenomenology; praised as a tremendous achievement but criticised for projecting a utopian 'spirit of trust' onto Hegel against Žižek's 'spirit of distrust'.
Fritz Lang film cited as an example of sound cinema's denaturalising use of the voice, the free-floating haunting voice that sound enabled rather than greater realism.
Adorno and Horkheimer's book; cited for the Kant avec Sade thesis and as the prior source of that formula before Lacan.
Habermas's book, called 'still I think his best book'; cited for the reading of psychoanalysis as Hegelian dialectics of alienation, which Žižek nevertheless rejects as incomplete.
The Irishman film
Scorsese's Netflix film; cited as evidence of a new economic logic where massive investment is made with no expectation of return, signalling the decoupling of financial from material capital.
Helmut Dahmer's work; read by Žižek in youth and admired, though its equation of psychoanalysis with Hegelian reconciliation is rejected.
Ulysses book
Mentioned only as the work Joyce had to go into Trieste exile to write, an example of geographical distance enabling understanding.
Book by Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay; noted for the 'simple but true' observation that Hegel's creative output consists essentially of only two books.
Transcribed lectures by students; Žižek sees them as over-focused on master–slave dialectic and as a serial misidentification of present realities with Hegel's absolute.
Commercial joke anthology attributed partly to Žižek and compiled by two Norwegian editors; Žižek distances himself, calling it 'too much commercial exploitation'.
Hitchcock film used to illustrate the 'Trouble with Hegel': just as Harry's corpse cannot be got rid of, Hegel's philosophical corpse keeps returning no matter how many times it is buried.
People invoked 41
Franz Kafka positive
One of Žižek's three favourite 20th-century writers, named alongside Beckett and Platonov.
The Irishman cited as an example of Netflix's paradoxical economics: massive investment with no expectation of profit recovery.
Robert Pippin negative
Reads Hegel's Logic as a general logic of argumentative discourse, neutralising ontological claims; Žižek credits him for noting the 'owl of Minerva' point but otherwise disagrees.
Mentioned only for his documentary answer (sex life) to what he would ask Hegel; Žižek contrasts his own interest in Hegel's political fears.
Robert Brandom negative
Author of A Spirit of Trust, praised as a tremendous close reading but criticised for projecting a utopian 'spirit of trust' onto Hegel; Žižek opposes this with a 'spirit of distrust'.
Rebecca Comay positive
Co-author with Frank Ruda of The Dash, The Other Side of Absolute Knowing; noted for the observation that Hegel's creative output is essentially two books (Phenomenology and Logic).
Used as an example alongside Eisenstein of a filmmaker who resisted sound for years; The Great Dictator cited as his first full talking picture.
Georg Lukács negative
Cited as the first major 'not-yet-there' Hegelian: absolute spirit as alienated image of the proletariat, Hegel realised in revolution.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Co-author (with Horkheimer) of Dialektik der Aufklärung, which Žižek uses for the Kant-avec-Sade thesis; Adorno's question ('What is our time in Hegel's view?') is cited approvingly against Croce.
Klaus Vieweg negative
Great Hegel biographer, appreciated but criticised for still reading Hegel as heralding a more egalitarian democratic future rather than as a fundamentally destructive thinker.
Helmut Dahmer positive
Author of Libido und Gesellschaft; read in Žižek's youth and admired, but his reading that psychoanalysis enacts Hegelian reconciliation is rejected as not the right formula.
Jacques Lacan positive
Essential partner in Žižek's Hegel avec Lacan formula; Lacan's reading of Kant avec Sade and his account of the unconscious as virtual negation are central tools.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Typed as a 'not-yet-there' Hegelian who identified liberal capitalist democracy with Hegel's absolute; Žižek grants he grasped a real tendency of the 1990s but that end of history never arrived.
Benedetto Croce negative
Author of 'What is alive and what is dead in Hegel?'; Adorno (and Žižek) invert the question: 'What is our time in Hegel's view?'
Fritz Lang positive
Cited as a director who perceived, via Dr. Mabuse / The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, that sound gave the cinematic voice autonomy and a haunting free-floating character.
Frank Ruda positive
Friend and author of a book on Hegel's Pöbel which Žižek relies on to argue the rabble embodies universality.
Judith Butler negative
Grouped with Fukuyama as a recognition-focused liberal Hegelian; Žižek disagrees with her view that Hegel's errors could simply have been avoided, Hegel insists you must go through them.
Analysed as a dialectical paradox: not a simple liar but someone who shamelessly tells the truth where truth is most embarrassing; compared to Norman Bates carrying the super-ego into the basement of obscenity.
Mentioned as an example of extreme wealth concentration alongside Elon Musk, used to contextualise the decoupling of financial capital from material reproduction.
Andrei Platonov positive
One of Žižek's three favourite 20th-century writers; cited for seeing the deadlock of Soviet technognosticism.
Elon Musk negative
Cited for promoting the elimination of language via direct brain communication; Žižek calls this 'extremely stupid' and uses it as the paradigm case of the wired-brain horizon he criticises.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the concept of 'cognitive mapping' to describe our inability to locate global events such as China's hybrid system.
Alexandre Kojève negative
Too focused on master–slave dialectic; serially misidentified current societies (USSR, EU, Japan) as Hegel realised; Žižek is closer to the later Kojève who read Philosophy of Right.
Samuel Beckett positive
Ranked among Žižek's three favourite 20th-century writers; The Unnamable is cited as an image of how subjectivity will look in the wired-brain age, a partial object that speaks.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Cited for the claim that there is something immanently comical in the Hegelian process, its reversals are intrinsically funny.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Friend cited for the observation that stock markets perform better as unemployment grows, evidence of financial capital uncoupled from material reproduction.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as 'not exactly a communist friend' but cited approvingly for arguing we need new distance rather than multicultural proximity.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited for 'la part des sans-part' as the French parallel to Hegel's Pöbel.
Criticised for humourlessness, the only joke in the entire Heidegger corpus is a letter remark about Lacan needing a psychiatrist, suggesting a philosophical sensibility Žižek finds deficient.
Described as a conservative friend with whom Žižek debated in Bergen, prompting his self-description as 'a moderately conservative communist'.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the idea that a work of art is like a film for which we don't yet have the developer, generalised by Žižek into a spatial as well as temporal thesis about the necessity of distance for understanding.
James Joyce negative
Explicitly not Žižek's literary hero; Finnegans Wake is called 'the most arrogant book' that should be 'publicly burned', while Ulysses is mentioned only in passing as enabled by Joyce's Trieste exile.
Boris Groys positive
Read the unpublished Russian Kojève manuscript; also used in the Wired Brain book for the connection between Soviet technognosticism and contemporary digital dreams.
Jürgen Habermas negative
His critique of Adorno/Horkheimer for lacking positive normativity is rejected; Žižek argues that immanent critique measuring a society by its own norms is precisely the Hegelian (and Adornian) method.
Max Horkheimer positive
Co-author of Dialektik der Aufklärung; invoked alongside Adorno for the Kant avec Sade thesis.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Cited as a director who resisted sound cinema and thereby saw its denaturalising potential more clearly than those who welcomed it.
Wilhelm Reich negative
Representative of the 1930s/1960s view that super-ego and ego are oppressive while the Id is a liberating force, a naïve position Žižek argues Freud never endorsed.
Karl Marx positive
Praised for seeing the proletariat as class of no class and for the formula that crisis is key to understanding normal capitalism; criticised for not going far enough beyond capitalism's frame.
Sigmund Freud positive
Central to Žižek's argument that psychopathology illuminates normal life, and that the unconscious is reflexive rather than a reservoir of liberated instincts; Freud never falls into the Reich-style liberation model.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The central figure of the talk; Žižek defends a pessimistic, distrust-centred reading against liberal domestication, calling Hegel 'a living dead' and the most open philosopher imaginable.
Immanuel Kant positive
Invoked for the pure subject of transcendental apperception (not reducible to empirical inner life) and for defining the human as an animal needing a master due to its excess of wilderness.
What it argues
the liberal Hegel of recognition versus a pessimistic, distrust-centred HegelHegel as undead philosophical corpse that resists burialnoble projects necessarily turning catastrophic (French Revolution, Communism)wired-brain singularity and the survival of subjectivity and the Freudian unconsciousbestimmte Negation and the purely virtual dimension of the unconsciousend of history as an expectation that never arrivesdialectical jokes as Hegelian self-reflexivity
Dialectical moves 9
“It is not that Kant is a sadist; it is that Sade is a Kantian.”
The reversal shows that unconditional enjoyment-for-its-own-sake mirrors pure formal duty, so the Sadean ethics is the truth of Kantianism rather than Kantianism being crypto-sadism.
“The true Hegel is not a spirit of trust but a spirit of distrust — the zero level of his procedure is that any noble project will necessarily go wrong.”
Against Brandom's optimistic reading, Žižek inverts Hegel into a thinker of structural catastrophism: progress is real but necessarily produces its own catastrophe.
“There was never a choice between abstract freedom and terror; the only way to concrete freedom is through the horror of the Terror.”
Hegel's reading of the French Revolution inverts liberal gradualism: bourgeois freedom is not an alternative to Jacobin terror but arrives only by passing through it.
“Today alienation is not the problem but the solution; the problem is that our societies are becoming too non-alienated.”
Against the standard critique of alienation, Žižek inverts the valence: in a world of invasive proximity (wired brain, social media), proper distance and alienation are curative.
“Far from being undead philosophical corpse, Hegel is a living dead who does not want to remain buried — every attempt to bury him is itself Hegelian.”
Each successive effort to overcome Hegel (Marx, Feuerbach, poststructuralism) demonstrates the very dialectical persistence Hegel theorised, so anti-Hegelianism is the highest form of Hegelianism.
“It is not that we tried to change the world too slowly; the time has come to step back and interpret the world again.”
Žižek inverts Marx's Thesis 11: the lesson of the catastrophic 20th century is that hasty praxis preceded adequate theory, and renewed interpretation is now the urgent task.
“Trump does not lie where we expect him to; he says the truth shamelessly where the truth should be embarrassing for him.”
The reversal dismantles the liberal framing of Trump as a simple liar and shows instead a more perverse logic: truth-telling deployed as a form of obscene power.
“The end of history is an expectation that never ends — it is an end of history which just drags on.”
Fukuyama's teleology is internally contradicted: the promised terminus is infinitely deferred, making 'end of history' a name for permanent non-arrival.
“What resisted sound movies (Eisenstein, Chaplin) saw better what was new in them than those who simply welcomed them.”
Conservative resistance to a technical novelty paradoxically generates sharper theoretical insight into it, here applied to media that appear to bring us closer but actually further denaturalise us.
Claims 19
rejects
The dominant 'liberal Hegel' centred on recognition (Brandom, Pippin, Fukuyama, Butler) must be critically confronted because it suppresses the negativity essential to Hegel's thought.liberal Hegel / recognition-centred readings
asserts
Hegel's Versöhnung (reconciliation) does not mean the subject absorbs its otherness but that one must reconcile oneself with the gap and alienation as constitutive of being.Hegelian reconciliation
asserts
The zero-level of Hegel's procedure is the 'spirit of distrust': any historical project or noble idea will necessarily turn wrong, as shown by the French Revolution's terror and Communism's Stalinist outcome.Hegel's dialectical method
reframes
We should return from Marx to Hegel, and today the task is to interpret the world anew rather than hastily change it (counter to Marx's Thesis 11).the relationship between theory and praxis
asserts
Marx's vision of communism is essentially capitalism without capital — he retained the capitalist dynamics of expanded reproduction and thus remained within capitalism's frame.Marx's utopianism
asserts
Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie describes a form of social life already in the process of disintegrating when written, not a positive model of a future emancipated society.Hegel's Philosophy of Right
rejects
Hegel's immanent critique measures a society against its own norms and detects the gap — it does not impose an external ideal of recognition, contrary to Habermas's charge against Adorno and Horkheimer.Habermas's critique of Adorno/Horkheimer's lack of positive normativity
asserts
The Freudian unconscious is not a deeper instinctual layer but a purely reflexive formal entity — structurally close to Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein — and as such will escape being read by a wired-brain machine.Freudian unconscious and wired brain
rejects
Singularity (collective digital self-awareness through networked brains) will not constitute the true end of history because the pure formal subject and the Freudian unconscious as virtual negation will elude the machine.tech-neognostic singularity as end of history
asserts
Mistakes are not secondary but necessarily symptomatic — the only way to understand normal functioning is through its failures (paralleling Freud on psychopathology and Marx on crisis).the role of failure/error in Hegelian dialectics
rejects
Against multicultural proximity, we need more alienation and proper distance today — the problem with contemporary society is not too much alienation but too little.liberal-multicultural imperative of understanding the Other
asserts
Hegel's notion of Pöbel (rabble) — a class of no class — should be rehabilitated because those with no particular place in the social edifice embody the universality of being human, a conclusion Hegel himself failed to draw.Hegel's concept of the rabble and universality
rejects
Kojève's reading is too focused on the master–slave dialectic and too eager to identify some present or future reality (Soviet Union, European Union, Japan) as Hegel's absolute knowledge realised.Kojève's interpretation of Hegel
reframes
The end of history is an expectation that never arrives — we live at an end of history that just drags on without the promised culmination.Fukuyama's end of history
asserts
Financial capital is now uncoupled from material capitalist reproduction, signalling that classical capitalism has already ended and something new — whose nature we cannot yet name — is emerging.the current state of capitalism
reframes
Trump's novelty is not that he lies but that he shamelessly tells the truth when the truth should be embarrassing — a move Hegel would have identified as a dialectical reversal.Trump and political truth/lying
reframes
Sade is a Kantian — his ethics of unconditional enjoyment fully fits Kantian formal ethics of pure duty — rather than Kant being secretly a sadist.Kant–Sade relationship
asserts
Human culture is developed not to discipline raw nature but to deal with the excess of 'wilderness' (Kant) — neither nature nor culture — that characterises the human animal, and Hegel's failure to apply this to sexuality is a point where he is not Hegelian enough.human nature, culture, and sexuality in Hegel
asserts
Coming communism is likely but may be dystopian and oppressive (Chinese-style) rather than emancipatory, so one should be a 'moderately conservative communist'.communism's prospects
Quotes 14
“The true spiritual meaning of September 11th: it meant no, we are not at the end of history. History returned.”Slavoj Žižek · end of history refuted by September 11
“Mistakes are not just secondary mistakes that maybe we could have avoided. Mistakes happen necessarily.”Slavoj Žižek · necessity of historical error in Hegel
“Hegel is a living dead. He doesn't want to remain buried there.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's undead persistence in philosophy
“To be a Hegelian today is just to openly confront these deadlocks without any quick idea of maybe later a happy ending.”Slavoj Žižek · what it means to be a Hegelian today
“Versöhnung in Hegel means precisely to reconcile yourself with the gap, with alienation and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian reconciliation as acceptance of the gap
“We live in a time of Hegelian crazy reversals.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporaneity of Hegelian dialectics
“I'm an instrument for writing my books. I don't exist, I don't deserve to exist outside it.”Slavoj Žižek · the author as instrument of the work
“My Hegelian formula for today: we need mehr Entfremdung, more alienation.”Slavoj Žižek · alienation as solution rather than problem
“Truth comes truth comes too late.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian Verspätung / belatedness of truth
“I think Finnegans Wake is the most arrogant book, I have almost a Goebbels's reaction to Finnegans Wake, it should be publicly burned.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's hostile verdict on Joyce's Finnegans Wake
“The end of history is paradoxically one big expectation that something tremendous will happen which never happens.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of the non-arriving end of history
“Not that he lies — all politicians do more or less — but that he says the truth where the truth should be embarrassing for him.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump's shameless truth-telling as perverse political logic
“Guilty with pleasure. Guilty in the sense of guilty for the eyes of establishment but I proudly — 'Shoot me, I admit I am guilty'.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's self-identification as unrepentant Hegelian
“A virus, which is the most stupid thing you can imagine, just a biochemical not even bio more chemical mechanism of self-reproduction threatens us all.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian reversal illustrated by COVID
Transcript 74 turns
unknown
So is it even still possible to be a Hegelian today? Or is it not deeply old-fashioned or counter-revolutionary in terms of that time?
So is it even still possible to be a Hegelian today? Or is it not deeply old-fashioned or counter-revolutionary in terms of that time?
Slavoj Žižek
That's a good question because something interesting happened in the last, I would say, maximum years. Till that time, years ago, to be a Hegelian meant either you are a conservative, this image of Hegel as almost proto-fascist theorist of a corporate state against egalitarian democracy and liberal disorder, or we had extreme left Hegelians who focused just on negativity and read it as a kind of a philosophical name for social unrest, revolution or whatever. But the interesting thing of the last years is that another Hegel exploded and predominates today. Let's call him a liberal Hegel. There are two features by which one can immediately recognize this Hegel. One is the accent focus on Anerkennung, recognition. As if the whole Hegel's social-political thought focuses on a free society of mutual recognition. We know...
That's a good question because something interesting happened in the last, I would say, maximum years. Till that time, years ago, to be a Hegelian meant either you are a conservative, this image of Hegel as almost proto-fascist theorist of a corporate state against egalitarian democracy and liberal disorder, or we had extreme left Hegelians who focused just on negativity and read it as a kind of a philosophical name for social unrest, revolution or whatever. But the interesting thing of the last years is that another Hegel exploded and predominates today. Let's call him a liberal Hegel. There are two features by which one can immediately recognize this Hegel. One is the accent focus on Anerkennung, recognition. As if the whole Hegel's social-political thought focuses on a free society of mutual recognition. We know...
unknown
Fukuyama, Fukuyama or Judith Butler in these...
Fukuyama, Fukuyama or Judith Butler in these...
Slavoj Žižek
Yes, precisely. And I like it very much. She would have killed you for this, and that's why I am on your side, that you brought the two together. Fukuyama, Butler, no? And we can talk about it why this doesn't work. The second feature is you can clearly see it, although they deny it, in Robert Pippin and and Brandom. This idea that Hegel should be read as a kind of general logic of argumentative discourse. They try to neutralize or ignore the ontological claims of Hegel. For example, they read Hegel's Logic not as a pure abstract let's call it ontology but as a kind of general description of all possible argumentative modes. And I think that if we want to save Hegel's legacy truly, we should critically confront precisely this liberal Hegel. And it's interesting that you mentioned Fukuyama because for me Fukuyama is one in the series of, I call them ironically, "not yet there", Noch nicht dort Hegelians. By this I mean the following: they see Hegel as the great one blah blah, but they claim Hegel wasn't fully aware of what he is doing. He misunderstood himself. The first big model is not so much Marx as the young György Lukács. For him, what Hegel called absoluter Geist, absolute spirit, or das Absolute, is just an alienated fetishized image of proletarian working class as the subject-object of history. What Hegel conceptualized as the reconciliation in the medium of spirit will effectively happen with the proletarian revolution. Then we have Fukuyama, as you mentioned. For him, Hegel just came too early. It's not Hegel's vision of the state as described in his Rechtsphilosophie, Philosophy of Right, it's today's today's global capitalist liberal democracy that is it. And interestingly enough, I developed this in my book on Hegel and the Wired Brain. I think that many of today's, how should I call them, wired brain neognostics, who think that with this prospect of our brains directly linked to computers... and then through computers we can directly communicate, I can read your mind, you mine, that a kind of collective self-consciousness will emerge which will finally realize Hegel's unity of subject and object. So it's only today with today's technology that what Hegel aimed at becomes possible. I think that we should radically oppose this. And now of course, I will immediately give you the word back. No, the point of course is if we disclaim or reject these versions, what remains of Hegel? I mean, can Hegel still be thought as actual? And my entire effort for years is to prove that he can, even against Marx. The more and more I think about Hegel, the more I feel that what we have to do today is to, you know this metaphor of Marx, Hegel should be turned around from his head to his legs, to the actual foundation of social life and so on and so on. I think what we should do is to return from Marx to Hegel again. And especially, now I know some Marxists will hate me for this, I especially reject Marxist's Thesis You know, philosophers have only interpreted the world, the time is also to change it. Shouldn't our Thesis today be: maybe in the 20th century we tried a little bit too quickly to change reality. The time has come with all the confusion today, social problems, ecological problems, to step back and to interpret the world again in a new way. Mhm. It fits perfectly to my to my next question because originally I had suggested Immer Ärger mit Hegel, The Trouble with Hegel, as the title for our talk. Hegel as a kind of a philosophical corpse I would propose that is constantly being buried... Can I interrupt you? I love this question. Sorry, you know why? Because it's exactly the same problem, you are right, as with, you know, Hitchcock's film, The Trouble with Harry, which in German is translated Immer Ärger mit Harry. What's the problem there? How to get rid of a guy of his corpse? They bury it again and again, it doesn't work. Isn't this the entire history of the last a little bit less, years of philosophy? From Junghegelianer, Marx, Feuerbach, they try to bury Hegel. Every philosopher, all philosophy of the last years are versions to reject Hegel. Okay, either you claim Hegel is a total deadlock, stupid irrelevant, or in a more friendly way, but to leave Hegel behind. Hegel is a living dead. No, he doesn't want to remain buried there. Sorry, now now the title is "Happy Birthday Hegel", which I think is fine too. But anniversaries are always good opportunities to bury someone again for a long period of time, if not forever. But Hegel is more alive for you than ever, or let's put it this way, he is a kind of a, we talked about this, a kind of a philosophical zombie who cannot die. But one of his revenants, you say,
Yes, precisely. And I like it very much. She would have killed you for this, and that's why I am on your side, that you brought the two together. Fukuyama, Butler, no? And we can talk about it why this doesn't work. The second feature is you can clearly see it, although they deny it, in Robert Pippin and and Brandom. This idea that Hegel should be read as a kind of general logic of argumentative discourse. They try to neutralize or ignore the ontological claims of Hegel. For example, they read Hegel's Logic not as a pure abstract let's call it ontology but as a kind of general description of all possible argumentative modes. And I think that if we want to save Hegel's legacy truly, we should critically confront precisely this liberal Hegel. And it's interesting that you mentioned Fukuyama because for me Fukuyama is one in the series of, I call them ironically, "not yet there", Noch nicht dort Hegelians. By this I mean the following: they see Hegel as the great one blah blah, but they claim Hegel wasn't fully aware of what he is doing. He misunderstood himself. The first big model is not so much Marx as the young György Lukács. For him, what Hegel called absoluter Geist, absolute spirit, or das Absolute, is just an alienated fetishized image of proletarian working class as the subject-object of history. What Hegel conceptualized as the reconciliation in the medium of spirit will effectively happen with the proletarian revolution. Then we have Fukuyama, as you mentioned. For him, Hegel just came too early. It's not Hegel's vision of the state as described in his Rechtsphilosophie, Philosophy of Right, it's today's today's global capitalist liberal democracy that is it. And interestingly enough, I developed this in my book on Hegel and the Wired Brain. I think that many of today's, how should I call them, wired brain neognostics, who think that with this prospect of our brains directly linked to computers... and then through computers we can directly communicate, I can read your mind, you mine, that a kind of collective self-consciousness will emerge which will finally realize Hegel's unity of subject and object. So it's only today with today's technology that what Hegel aimed at becomes possible. I think that we should radically oppose this. And now of course, I will immediately give you the word back. No, the point of course is if we disclaim or reject these versions, what remains of Hegel? I mean, can Hegel still be thought as actual? And my entire effort for years is to prove that he can, even against Marx. The more and more I think about Hegel, the more I feel that what we have to do today is to, you know this metaphor of Marx, Hegel should be turned around from his head to his legs, to the actual foundation of social life and so on and so on. I think what we should do is to return from Marx to Hegel again. And especially, now I know some Marxists will hate me for this, I especially reject Marxist's Thesis You know, philosophers have only interpreted the world, the time is also to change it. Shouldn't our Thesis today be: maybe in the 20th century we tried a little bit too quickly to change reality. The time has come with all the confusion today, social problems, ecological problems, to step back and to interpret the world again in a new way. Mhm. It fits perfectly to my to my next question because originally I had suggested Immer Ärger mit Hegel, The Trouble with Hegel, as the title for our talk. Hegel as a kind of a philosophical corpse I would propose that is constantly being buried... Can I interrupt you? I love this question. Sorry, you know why? Because it's exactly the same problem, you are right, as with, you know, Hitchcock's film, The Trouble with Harry, which in German is translated Immer Ärger mit Harry. What's the problem there? How to get rid of a guy of his corpse? They bury it again and again, it doesn't work. Isn't this the entire history of the last a little bit less, years of philosophy? From Junghegelianer, Marx, Feuerbach, they try to bury Hegel. Every philosopher, all philosophy of the last years are versions to reject Hegel. Okay, either you claim Hegel is a total deadlock, stupid irrelevant, or in a more friendly way, but to leave Hegel behind. Hegel is a living dead. No, he doesn't want to remain buried there. Sorry, now now the title is "Happy Birthday Hegel", which I think is fine too. But anniversaries are always good opportunities to bury someone again for a long period of time, if not forever. But Hegel is more alive for you than ever, or let's put it this way, he is a kind of a, we talked about this, a kind of a philosophical zombie who cannot die. But one of his revenants, you say,
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repeater, is the French philosopher Jacques Lacan, and in your your last books you always said that we need Lacan to keep Hegel alive. Is this still your position that we need Lacan as a repeater of of Hegel to keep him alive? Not so much repeater. I am here, I in an interview that I recently
repeater, is the French philosopher Jacques Lacan, and in your your last books you always said that we need Lacan to keep Hegel alive. Is this still your position that we need Lacan as a repeater of of Hegel to keep him alive? Not so much repeater. I am here, I in an interview that I recently
Slavoj Žižek
gave, I think I draw a nice parallel between this formula mine, Hegel avec Lacan, Hegel with Lacan, and Jacques Lacan's thesis, which is already in a different way developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialektik der Aufklärung, Kant avec Sade. The idea that Sade is the truth of Kant. That Sade's ethics of unconditional jouissance, enjoyment, is the truth of Kant's pure ethics of duty for the sake of duty. But I think this holds but in a more complex way. In this case, Adorno, Horkheimer and Lacan, the thesis is not Kant was really ein Sadist, a sadist. This is simple thesis of many ordinary people, that beneath Kantian radical ethics is a kind of a sadism, you always fail, you are always guilty because you never can live up to your ethics. No, Lacan's point is much more precise. It's not so much that Kant is a sadist, is that Sade is a Kantian. That the only way to grasp the the Sade's ethics of unconditional enjoyment is to read it as something that fully fits Kantian ethics. Because it's enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment. It's a kind of a pure
gave, I think I draw a nice parallel between this formula mine, Hegel avec Lacan, Hegel with Lacan, and Jacques Lacan's thesis, which is already in a different way developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialektik der Aufklärung, Kant avec Sade. The idea that Sade is the truth of Kant. That Sade's ethics of unconditional jouissance, enjoyment, is the truth of Kant's pure ethics of duty for the sake of duty. But I think this holds but in a more complex way. In this case, Adorno, Horkheimer and Lacan, the thesis is not Kant was really ein Sadist, a sadist. This is simple thesis of many ordinary people, that beneath Kantian radical ethics is a kind of a sadism, you always fail, you are always guilty because you never can live up to your ethics. No, Lacan's point is much more precise. It's not so much that Kant is a sadist, is that Sade is a Kantian. That the only way to grasp the the Sade's ethics of unconditional enjoyment is to read it as something that fully fits Kantian ethics. Because it's enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment. It's a kind of a pure
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ethical pressure to enjoy which can be even very painful and so on.
ethical pressure to enjoy which can be even very painful and so on.
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So in the same way I think Hegel avec Lacan doesn't mean what some readers did at a very high level, I admire them, they were popular, I read them when I was younger, Habermas in I still think his best book, Erkenntnis und Interesse, and Helmut Dahmer, Libido und Gesellschaft, to claim that the only perfect actual process that we have which fits Hegelian dialectics of alienation and then Versöhnung, reconciliation, when you where you recognize yourself in the alienated substance, is the psychoanalytic process. You get symptoms, psychic events, which you simply experience as a as a äußere Störung, as an external intrusion. Through the analysis you recognize in all these strange
So in the same way I think Hegel avec Lacan doesn't mean what some readers did at a very high level, I admire them, they were popular, I read them when I was younger, Habermas in I still think his best book, Erkenntnis und Interesse, and Helmut Dahmer, Libido und Gesellschaft, to claim that the only perfect actual process that we have which fits Hegelian dialectics of alienation and then Versöhnung, reconciliation, when you where you recognize yourself in the alienated substance, is the psychoanalytic process. You get symptoms, psychic events, which you simply experience as a as a äußere Störung, as an external intrusion. Through the analysis you recognize in all these strange
Slavoj Žižek
things, perversions, the innermost of your own desires. Sorry. I politely, in a very correct way because I admire these authors, I don't think this is the right formula. I think that what Hegel aims at with his idea of reconciliation is not that, to put it in slightly simplified vulgar terms, that the subject should swallow its otherness. You know, it's not out there, it's really my work. No, you should precisely reconcile yourself with otherness as constitutive of your own being. Versöhnung in Hegel means precisely Versöhnung, reconcile to reconcile yourself with the gap, with alienation and so on and so on. So and just to finish, this type of Hegel for me is actual. Why? Just the last element then I give you the word of war. Maybe today I admire him, I mean it's a tremendous book, Robert Brandom's A Spirit of Trust. Which is the version the ultimate version maybe of close reading of Phänomenologie des Geistes, Phenomenology of Spirit, as pointing towards a utopian future where we will all be recognizing each other, the society of reconciliation and so on. And for him, here is that I in very simplified terms disagree with Brandom, for him Hegel's ultimate motive is the spirit of trust. Even if things go wrong, we encounter evil, terrible things and so on, alienation blah blah, we should trust the spirit that somehow all this will retroactively function as an element of in some teleological historical process of a harmonious totality. I think that if there is something which really characterizes Hegel, is it not the exact opposite: the spirit of distrust? That is to say, if there is a zero level of Hegel's procedure, it is you take some historical process or idea which can be very noble, very good with excellent intentions, you can be sure that it will somehow turn wrong. That's why I think retroactively we should read in
things, perversions, the innermost of your own desires. Sorry. I politely, in a very correct way because I admire these authors, I don't think this is the right formula. I think that what Hegel aims at with his idea of reconciliation is not that, to put it in slightly simplified vulgar terms, that the subject should swallow its otherness. You know, it's not out there, it's really my work. No, you should precisely reconcile yourself with otherness as constitutive of your own being. Versöhnung in Hegel means precisely Versöhnung, reconcile to reconcile yourself with the gap, with alienation and so on and so on. So and just to finish, this type of Hegel for me is actual. Why? Just the last element then I give you the word of war. Maybe today I admire him, I mean it's a tremendous book, Robert Brandom's A Spirit of Trust. Which is the version the ultimate version maybe of close reading of Phänomenologie des Geistes, Phenomenology of Spirit, as pointing towards a utopian future where we will all be recognizing each other, the society of reconciliation and so on. And for him, here is that I in very simplified terms disagree with Brandom, for him Hegel's ultimate motive is the spirit of trust. Even if things go wrong, we encounter evil, terrible things and so on, alienation blah blah, we should trust the spirit that somehow all this will retroactively function as an element of in some teleological historical process of a harmonious totality. I think that if there is something which really characterizes Hegel, is it not the exact opposite: the spirit of distrust? That is to say, if there is a zero level of Hegel's procedure, it is you take some historical process or idea which can be very noble, very good with excellent intentions, you can be sure that it will somehow turn wrong. That's why I think retroactively we should read in
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a Hegelian way the 20th
a Hegelian way the 20th
Slavoj Žižek
century. The second half of 19th century was at least in Europe, no, outside Europe, the time of relative gradual progress. In Germany Bismarck introduced healthcare, retirement plans and so on. Women got the right to vote. Slow progress. But then came the shock of First World War. This was much greater shock than Second World War. We just we just repeated First World War. This would have interested Hegel. How is it that that continuous progress exploded into this? Or another example: Communism. It began as a noble attempt of radical emancipation, it ended with Comrade Stalin and so on, you know? That and so what's Hegel's point here? Here I again in a friendly way disagree with Judith Butler. Hegel's point is not we made a mistake there. Yes, there is another option to do it better. But you have to go through this mistake. Hegel's point is not we shouldn't be egotist who humiliate and dominate others, we should live in mutual recognition. No, Hegel's point is exactly the opposite one. Yes, we should strive at mutual recognition, but the only way to arrive at it is through extreme terror and so on and so on. You see, just one example and then I stop. Here you see what Hegel really aimed at, it's unique in his reading of French Revolution. We have on the one hand liberals, Kant and so on, who are if I may put it like this, for against The first phase was good just bourgeois freedom, ah Jacobins bad terror, no? But and then you have outright conservatives who claim it was failed from the beginning. Hegel's position is much more tragic. There never was a choice to to get the freedom without the excess of terror. Hegel always insisted was a necessary consequence of of of the first phase of revolution, and the only way to concrete freedom is through that horror. You cannot make a choice: either abstract terror or concrete society of Anerkennung and so on. You have to go through the terror to arrive at that point. So that the eventual result at the end, a better bourgeois society, arrives only through terror. And Versöhnung means you have to go through that zero point. You have to accept your own negative negativity. Yes. Maybe maybe something similar is happening at the at the moment. My next question would be that you said in an interview some time ago that not even Francis Fukuyama, Hegel's most loyal student, is no longer a Fukuyamist because the end of history has not happened after all. In your opinion Hegel was not a Hegelian just as Marx was not a Marxist. So again, you did not answer my my first question to be honest: how can one be a Hegelian today if not even Hegel himself was one during his lifetime? To be a Hegelian today, I think, is just to openly confront these deadlocks without any quick idea at the maybe later a happy ending and so on and so on. To be a Hegelian is not to just make fun of Fukuyama. Fukuyama did grasp the tendency of a certain moment, Clinton's Bill Clinton's happy 90s, where it really looked as if liberal capitalism has won and so on and so on. Then things began to happen. For me, that's the true spiritual meaning of September 11th. It meant no, we are not at the end of history. History returned. Liberal democracy is not the universal formula so that as Fukuyama somewhere put it, we can only that the battle is already won, it's only a long boring process, you have local resistances, will it work here, there and so on and so on. No, if there is another very Marxist-Freudian here I am for them motive of Hegel is that mistakes are always symptomatic. Mistakes are not just secondary mistakes that maybe we could have avoided. You know, mistakes happen necessarily. In the same way as Freud said that psychopathological phenomena are the key to understanding our normal psychic life. In the same way that Marx said to understand crisis is the only way to understand normal functioning of capitalism. That's the formula that's the formula of Hegel. So I think Hegel would have loved to do this: to take liberal democracy, Fukuyama, as a utopian moment and then to demonstrate why it had to go wrong, economically, politically and so on and so on. So you you see, now I will say another central point and here, although I appreciate him, Vieweg, the great biographer today of Hegel, no? Yeah, exactly, Vieweg. He wrote the thick one. I appreciate I like to read him, I appreciate him very much. But my problem with him is that he still reads Hegel as announcing some more egalitarian democratic future and so on and so on. Hegel never does this. That's why I also don't agree with Habermas's critique of Adorno Horkheimer, I am not getting confused, I will return to Hegel. You know, Habermas's basic approach is that Adorno and Horkheimer just criticize the liberal bourgeois freedoms but without any positive normative model. That there is a lack of positive normativity there. But I think this is Hegel. Hegel when he critically analyzed a certain society, he doesn't impose the measures of some ideal society of recognition. No, he just measures a society by the measure of its own norms and sees a gap. I think Hegel is Hegel is much more destructive as people like Klaus Vieweg, for example, he is. He is not that much positive. Yeah, you know Hegel I take very seriously Hegel who, in I think it's forward I am not sure of his Rechtsphilosophie, you know, everybody quotes this passage but nobody thinks about it, you know, the owl of Minerva only takes off in the evening. Robert Pippin drew my attention to this. I don't generally agree with him but here he was onto something. You
century. The second half of 19th century was at least in Europe, no, outside Europe, the time of relative gradual progress. In Germany Bismarck introduced healthcare, retirement plans and so on. Women got the right to vote. Slow progress. But then came the shock of First World War. This was much greater shock than Second World War. We just we just repeated First World War. This would have interested Hegel. How is it that that continuous progress exploded into this? Or another example: Communism. It began as a noble attempt of radical emancipation, it ended with Comrade Stalin and so on, you know? That and so what's Hegel's point here? Here I again in a friendly way disagree with Judith Butler. Hegel's point is not we made a mistake there. Yes, there is another option to do it better. But you have to go through this mistake. Hegel's point is not we shouldn't be egotist who humiliate and dominate others, we should live in mutual recognition. No, Hegel's point is exactly the opposite one. Yes, we should strive at mutual recognition, but the only way to arrive at it is through extreme terror and so on and so on. You see, just one example and then I stop. Here you see what Hegel really aimed at, it's unique in his reading of French Revolution. We have on the one hand liberals, Kant and so on, who are if I may put it like this, for against The first phase was good just bourgeois freedom, ah Jacobins bad terror, no? But and then you have outright conservatives who claim it was failed from the beginning. Hegel's position is much more tragic. There never was a choice to to get the freedom without the excess of terror. Hegel always insisted was a necessary consequence of of of the first phase of revolution, and the only way to concrete freedom is through that horror. You cannot make a choice: either abstract terror or concrete society of Anerkennung and so on. You have to go through the terror to arrive at that point. So that the eventual result at the end, a better bourgeois society, arrives only through terror. And Versöhnung means you have to go through that zero point. You have to accept your own negative negativity. Yes. Maybe maybe something similar is happening at the at the moment. My next question would be that you said in an interview some time ago that not even Francis Fukuyama, Hegel's most loyal student, is no longer a Fukuyamist because the end of history has not happened after all. In your opinion Hegel was not a Hegelian just as Marx was not a Marxist. So again, you did not answer my my first question to be honest: how can one be a Hegelian today if not even Hegel himself was one during his lifetime? To be a Hegelian today, I think, is just to openly confront these deadlocks without any quick idea at the maybe later a happy ending and so on and so on. To be a Hegelian is not to just make fun of Fukuyama. Fukuyama did grasp the tendency of a certain moment, Clinton's Bill Clinton's happy 90s, where it really looked as if liberal capitalism has won and so on and so on. Then things began to happen. For me, that's the true spiritual meaning of September 11th. It meant no, we are not at the end of history. History returned. Liberal democracy is not the universal formula so that as Fukuyama somewhere put it, we can only that the battle is already won, it's only a long boring process, you have local resistances, will it work here, there and so on and so on. No, if there is another very Marxist-Freudian here I am for them motive of Hegel is that mistakes are always symptomatic. Mistakes are not just secondary mistakes that maybe we could have avoided. You know, mistakes happen necessarily. In the same way as Freud said that psychopathological phenomena are the key to understanding our normal psychic life. In the same way that Marx said to understand crisis is the only way to understand normal functioning of capitalism. That's the formula that's the formula of Hegel. So I think Hegel would have loved to do this: to take liberal democracy, Fukuyama, as a utopian moment and then to demonstrate why it had to go wrong, economically, politically and so on and so on. So you you see, now I will say another central point and here, although I appreciate him, Vieweg, the great biographer today of Hegel, no? Yeah, exactly, Vieweg. He wrote the thick one. I appreciate I like to read him, I appreciate him very much. But my problem with him is that he still reads Hegel as announcing some more egalitarian democratic future and so on and so on. Hegel never does this. That's why I also don't agree with Habermas's critique of Adorno Horkheimer, I am not getting confused, I will return to Hegel. You know, Habermas's basic approach is that Adorno and Horkheimer just criticize the liberal bourgeois freedoms but without any positive normative model. That there is a lack of positive normativity there. But I think this is Hegel. Hegel when he critically analyzed a certain society, he doesn't impose the measures of some ideal society of recognition. No, he just measures a society by the measure of its own norms and sees a gap. I think Hegel is Hegel is much more destructive as people like Klaus Vieweg, for example, he is. He is not that much positive. Yeah, you know Hegel I take very seriously Hegel who, in I think it's forward I am not sure of his Rechtsphilosophie, you know, everybody quotes this passage but nobody thinks about it, you know, the owl of Minerva only takes off in the evening. Robert Pippin drew my attention to this. I don't generally agree with him but here he was onto something. You
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know, he gives a certain vision of social order in his Rechtsphilosophie, Philosophy of Right, Hegel. But wait a minute, he himself says in the introduction that philosophy comes like our debate here zu spät always, with a delay, you know? That it only can describe a certain form of life, Gestalt, when this form of life is already disintegrating. But wait a minute, either Hegel was a total idiot, which he wasn't, or he knew very well that this holds also for the image of society that he presents in his Rechtsphilosophie. This is not Hegel's idea of a future emancipated society. He describes
know, he gives a certain vision of social order in his Rechtsphilosophie, Philosophy of Right, Hegel. But wait a minute, he himself says in the introduction that philosophy comes like our debate here zu spät always, with a delay, you know? That it only can describe a certain form of life, Gestalt, when this form of life is already disintegrating. But wait a minute, either Hegel was a total idiot, which he wasn't, or he knew very well that this holds also for the image of society that he presents in his Rechtsphilosophie. This is not Hegel's idea of a future emancipated society. He describes
Slavoj Žižek
there a certain conceptual a little bit utopian model of how society at that point before full capitalism developed could have developed its inner form. But Hegel at some point knew it very well that the real if he can describe its notional structure, its time its over. And Hegel was aware of it. Don't forget that if I am correct I think the last text that Hegel published was his analysis of the English Reform Bill, which makes a move towards universal generalized democracy. And Hegel was horrified by it. But he saw that we are entering a new epoch and this is why I think Hegel is the most open philosopher that you can imagine. Hegel always emphasized we cannot talk about the future. It's not the task of philosophy to describe the ideal of what is to be done. Wait a minute, we have to be careful here. It doesn't mean that we are simply caught into our present. What Hegel was aware and here I am on Hegel's side against Marx is that each epoch is not just what it is, each historical epoch includes implies its own utopian model. And when we criticize a certain social form, we should always ask ourselves to what extent the positive model that we want to replace the existing society with is itself still branded marked by this society. For example, I am ready to develop, as I did in some of my books, that Marx's vision of capitalism is in a way capitalism without capital. Marx wants to retain this capitalist dynamics of you know always expanded reproduction and so on, just without capital. The problem with Marx is not that he was too utopian, but that he remained within the general frame of of capitalism. Just wanted again a capitalism without its excess. And so Hegel is not saying forget about the future. Hegel is just saying let's be really open towards future. Let's accept that all our ideas about future will necessarily turn into a catastrophe, wrong, and then maybe through going through this painful point something new will emerge. That's why at the end of Hegel we get
there a certain conceptual a little bit utopian model of how society at that point before full capitalism developed could have developed its inner form. But Hegel at some point knew it very well that the real if he can describe its notional structure, its time its over. And Hegel was aware of it. Don't forget that if I am correct I think the last text that Hegel published was his analysis of the English Reform Bill, which makes a move towards universal generalized democracy. And Hegel was horrified by it. But he saw that we are entering a new epoch and this is why I think Hegel is the most open philosopher that you can imagine. Hegel always emphasized we cannot talk about the future. It's not the task of philosophy to describe the ideal of what is to be done. Wait a minute, we have to be careful here. It doesn't mean that we are simply caught into our present. What Hegel was aware and here I am on Hegel's side against Marx is that each epoch is not just what it is, each historical epoch includes implies its own utopian model. And when we criticize a certain social form, we should always ask ourselves to what extent the positive model that we want to replace the existing society with is itself still branded marked by this society. For example, I am ready to develop, as I did in some of my books, that Marx's vision of capitalism is in a way capitalism without capital. Marx wants to retain this capitalist dynamics of you know always expanded reproduction and so on, just without capital. The problem with Marx is not that he was too utopian, but that he remained within the general frame of of capitalism. Just wanted again a capitalism without its excess. And so Hegel is not saying forget about the future. Hegel is just saying let's be really open towards future. Let's accept that all our ideas about future will necessarily turn into a catastrophe, wrong, and then maybe through going through this painful point something new will emerge. That's why at the end of Hegel we get
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you
you
Slavoj Žižek
know beautiful words from the last page of Phenomenology of Spirit, Kalvarie des Geistes. That's for him history. It's not a happy progress towards some future and so on and so on. And for this reason we need Hegel today. Again, 20th century was the century of things turning wrong. It goes even now. We thought we are masters of nature. Now ha ha, a virus, which is the most stupid thing you can imagine. Just a biochemical not even bio more chemical mechanism of self-reproduction threatens us all. That would have, you know, the chapter in Hegel on in Phenomenology of Spirit on Aufklärung, Enlightenment against Superstition. Isn't this going today again with modernity against new religious fundamentalisms and so on and so on? It's Hegel's time today. We live in a time of Hegelian crazy reversals. And again, what I like in the Hegelian approach is that
know beautiful words from the last page of Phenomenology of Spirit, Kalvarie des Geistes. That's for him history. It's not a happy progress towards some future and so on and so on. And for this reason we need Hegel today. Again, 20th century was the century of things turning wrong. It goes even now. We thought we are masters of nature. Now ha ha, a virus, which is the most stupid thing you can imagine. Just a biochemical not even bio more chemical mechanism of self-reproduction threatens us all. That would have, you know, the chapter in Hegel on in Phenomenology of Spirit on Aufklärung, Enlightenment against Superstition. Isn't this going today again with modernity against new religious fundamentalisms and so on and so on? It's Hegel's time today. We live in a time of Hegelian crazy reversals. And again, what I like in the Hegelian approach is that
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it's a kind of a critique without a positive model. Hegel doesn't imply an ideal society of full
it's a kind of a critique without a positive model. Hegel doesn't imply an ideal society of full
Slavoj Žižek
recognition. He nowhere says this. Okay, Philosophy of Right. Two things. First as I already said at the end of Philosophy of Right, we get never forget you know what we get at the end: not a happy bürgerliche bourgeois society but the necessity of war. Why we need war necessary why society needs war through as a kind of ethical purification to reproduce itself. And again, second thing he knew he is describing a mode of life which is already disintegrating and so on. I think that today especially when we live in a time of what my Marxist friend Fredric Jameson calls the lack of cognitive mapping. We don't even have a general frame to locate what is going on today. What is happening in Kina, in China today? Is this a strange version of communism, is this simply a new form of totalitarian capitalism or what? We are lacking this. That's why again we need Hegel more than ever. And maybe maybe we should talk a little bit about the about the unconscious. I told you before I am sitting here in the in the basement of the Hegel house. Above is the exhibition on Hegel's life and on the next floor is a kind of they call it escape room room on the phenomenology of spirit including a sleeping Hegel. And and you once it reminds me you once compared the house of Norman Bates from Psycho with Freud's model of the psyche. On the ground floor the ego, on the upper floor the mother as moral authority super-ego, and in the basement where I am sitting the unconscious and repressed. So you are not only one of the most important philosophers of our time but you are also a skilled psychoanalyst. From the point of... Not skilled. I mean look at me. Ask yourself a simple question. If you were in serious psychic trouble would you ever go to me as your analyst? If your answer is yes then you are really in trouble. Okay. To be to be honest but I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you this is a kind of psychoanalysis. But from the point of view from the analyst is there in Hegel the master of reflection a non-reflective possibly obscene rest? I don't mean in his life but in his thinking or is his attitude to the unconscious simple, I know you speak a little German, was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß. Is he what's his position to the unconscious? Does the unconscious lie in the future for example? Is it something that's coming or or is there no? No I I think that the first thing to take into account for from Freud which is more actual than ever today is that you know even when I was young but already in the 1930s Wilhelm Reich and then in the 60s there was this idea that Über-Ich, super-ego and das Ich, the ego are oppressive forces of society. But then deep in us there is the Id, das Es, all these instinctual forces of unconscious and we should liberate them. Freud never falls into this. Freud's basic thesis is that there is a strange link between Über-Ich, super-ego and das Es. That's why when I use that metaphor Psycho, the mother's house there, I always say that the crucial moment is when Norman carries mother from Über-Ich the down to... and this is what Trump is doing today. Isn't he carrying Trump is our Norman Bates who is carrying lofty ideas American to the basement of incredible vulgarities and so on and so on. So you know don't play with das Es, with Unbewusste. Unbewusste is not a force of liberation, horrible things are hidden there. But another thing, when there are great problems here, I try to deal with them in my big fat book of pages, Less than Nothing. Namely how of course there is a big difference between Hegel and Freud. For Freud, unconscious is fragmentary full of Überdeterminierungen, partial links, contingent. The Hegelian unconscious is more a formal one. It's the form itself of when you think about something. Hegel even calls this in introduction to Phänomenologie des Geistes, das Formelle, the formal side, or even to use the classical Kantian terms the the transcendental formal structure. But at one point, and that's another of my theses, if we read Freudian topic of symptoms and so on through Hegel, it becomes clear something about Hegel himself: that what Hegel it's crucial that you mentioned the term Reflexivität, self-reflection. I think that that for Freud unconscious is not some primitive deeper instinctual level. Unconscious is in itself reflexive. What do I mean by this? Let's say an extremely primitive example. Let's say I pretend to love somebody officially. But let's say that I make some Fehlleistungen or slip slips of tongue where the opposite desire explodes that I really very primitive example hate this person. Isn't it that through this symptom I reflectively mark inscribe my true position. In this sense for me symptoms are moments of reflection. You think you are fascinated by that person. No. A symptom reflectively describes or inscribes renders visible your true position. So I think that it's a crazy thesis I know I would have to develop it, that what Freud calls das Unbewusste is in a way a form is a very close to what Hegel calls Selbstbewusstsein. For Hegel Selbstbewusstsein is not Erfahrung. Selbstbewusstsein is a purely formal reflexive moment. That's why I am sorry to bore some of my friends who are listening to us now but I like these examples of jokes and so on which I repeated at least times even in my printed work which give us a hint of reflexivity. You know that eternal joke, my I am embarrassed to mention it, from from from Ninotchka, where a guy comes to a restaurant and says give me coffee give me coffee give me coffee but without cream please. And the waiter tells him sorry we have no cream, we have only milk. So I can only give you coffee without milk. You this is what Hegel meant by bestimmte Negation, determinant negation. And this coffee-milk is here like the unconscious. Consciously we have three types of the same coffee. If you have plain coffee, coffee without milk and coffee without cream, they are all materially the same, the same shitty black coffee. But it's not the same thing for Hegel to have
recognition. He nowhere says this. Okay, Philosophy of Right. Two things. First as I already said at the end of Philosophy of Right, we get never forget you know what we get at the end: not a happy bürgerliche bourgeois society but the necessity of war. Why we need war necessary why society needs war through as a kind of ethical purification to reproduce itself. And again, second thing he knew he is describing a mode of life which is already disintegrating and so on. I think that today especially when we live in a time of what my Marxist friend Fredric Jameson calls the lack of cognitive mapping. We don't even have a general frame to locate what is going on today. What is happening in Kina, in China today? Is this a strange version of communism, is this simply a new form of totalitarian capitalism or what? We are lacking this. That's why again we need Hegel more than ever. And maybe maybe we should talk a little bit about the about the unconscious. I told you before I am sitting here in the in the basement of the Hegel house. Above is the exhibition on Hegel's life and on the next floor is a kind of they call it escape room room on the phenomenology of spirit including a sleeping Hegel. And and you once it reminds me you once compared the house of Norman Bates from Psycho with Freud's model of the psyche. On the ground floor the ego, on the upper floor the mother as moral authority super-ego, and in the basement where I am sitting the unconscious and repressed. So you are not only one of the most important philosophers of our time but you are also a skilled psychoanalyst. From the point of... Not skilled. I mean look at me. Ask yourself a simple question. If you were in serious psychic trouble would you ever go to me as your analyst? If your answer is yes then you are really in trouble. Okay. To be to be honest but I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you this is a kind of psychoanalysis. But from the point of view from the analyst is there in Hegel the master of reflection a non-reflective possibly obscene rest? I don't mean in his life but in his thinking or is his attitude to the unconscious simple, I know you speak a little German, was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß. Is he what's his position to the unconscious? Does the unconscious lie in the future for example? Is it something that's coming or or is there no? No I I think that the first thing to take into account for from Freud which is more actual than ever today is that you know even when I was young but already in the 1930s Wilhelm Reich and then in the 60s there was this idea that Über-Ich, super-ego and das Ich, the ego are oppressive forces of society. But then deep in us there is the Id, das Es, all these instinctual forces of unconscious and we should liberate them. Freud never falls into this. Freud's basic thesis is that there is a strange link between Über-Ich, super-ego and das Es. That's why when I use that metaphor Psycho, the mother's house there, I always say that the crucial moment is when Norman carries mother from Über-Ich the down to... and this is what Trump is doing today. Isn't he carrying Trump is our Norman Bates who is carrying lofty ideas American to the basement of incredible vulgarities and so on and so on. So you know don't play with das Es, with Unbewusste. Unbewusste is not a force of liberation, horrible things are hidden there. But another thing, when there are great problems here, I try to deal with them in my big fat book of pages, Less than Nothing. Namely how of course there is a big difference between Hegel and Freud. For Freud, unconscious is fragmentary full of Überdeterminierungen, partial links, contingent. The Hegelian unconscious is more a formal one. It's the form itself of when you think about something. Hegel even calls this in introduction to Phänomenologie des Geistes, das Formelle, the formal side, or even to use the classical Kantian terms the the transcendental formal structure. But at one point, and that's another of my theses, if we read Freudian topic of symptoms and so on through Hegel, it becomes clear something about Hegel himself: that what Hegel it's crucial that you mentioned the term Reflexivität, self-reflection. I think that that for Freud unconscious is not some primitive deeper instinctual level. Unconscious is in itself reflexive. What do I mean by this? Let's say an extremely primitive example. Let's say I pretend to love somebody officially. But let's say that I make some Fehlleistungen or slip slips of tongue where the opposite desire explodes that I really very primitive example hate this person. Isn't it that through this symptom I reflectively mark inscribe my true position. In this sense for me symptoms are moments of reflection. You think you are fascinated by that person. No. A symptom reflectively describes or inscribes renders visible your true position. So I think that it's a crazy thesis I know I would have to develop it, that what Freud calls das Unbewusste is in a way a form is a very close to what Hegel calls Selbstbewusstsein. For Hegel Selbstbewusstsein is not Erfahrung. Selbstbewusstsein is a purely formal reflexive moment. That's why I am sorry to bore some of my friends who are listening to us now but I like these examples of jokes and so on which I repeated at least times even in my printed work which give us a hint of reflexivity. You know that eternal joke, my I am embarrassed to mention it, from from from Ninotchka, where a guy comes to a restaurant and says give me coffee give me coffee give me coffee but without cream please. And the waiter tells him sorry we have no cream, we have only milk. So I can only give you coffee without milk. You this is what Hegel meant by bestimmte Negation, determinant negation. And this coffee-milk is here like the unconscious. Consciously we have three types of the same coffee. If you have plain coffee, coffee without milk and coffee without cream, they are all materially the same, the same shitty black coffee. But it's not the same thing for Hegel to have
unknown
plain coffee, coffee without milk or coffee without cream. And unconscious is something like this: this virtual level, the "without", which echoes in what you think. When you think explicitly you see just coffee. Yeah but Hegel would have said what is negated with this coffee? Is it coffee without milk, is it coffee without cream? And this is my reading of the Freudian unconscious. It's not some substantial deep psychic reality with where you are bodily engaged. It's a purely virtual entity. Sorry, I I was waiting I was waiting for that example with cream and coffee. Did I interrupt you? Do you want to... No no no. You should stop me. You know what you should say. When you were young, sorry
plain coffee, coffee without milk or coffee without cream. And unconscious is something like this: this virtual level, the "without", which echoes in what you think. When you think explicitly you see just coffee. Yeah but Hegel would have said what is negated with this coffee? Is it coffee without milk, is it coffee without cream? And this is my reading of the Freudian unconscious. It's not some substantial deep psychic reality with where you are bodily engaged. It's a purely virtual entity. Sorry, I I was waiting I was waiting for that example with cream and coffee. Did I interrupt you? Do you want to... No no no. You should stop me. You know what you should say. When you were young, sorry
Slavoj Žižek
I just have a memory, when you were young were you still reading Karl May, Winnetou and so
I just have a memory, when you were young were you still reading Karl May, Winnetou and so
unknown
on? Or you are already the younger generation? I did. Yes, I did. Yeah.
on? Or you are already the younger generation? I did. Yes, I did. Yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
Do you remember we all laughed
Do you remember we all laughed
unknown
at it how Winnetou says in this Karl Marx German Indian, Winnetou hat gesprochen, "I have spoken", no? I should maybe follow Winnetou a little bit more here. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Back to back to my questions. You claim in all your previous books on Hegel we talked about it that the updating of Hegel must be done through Lacan. But Lacan visited the famous lectures on the Phänomenologie des Geistes that Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève gave in
at it how Winnetou says in this Karl Marx German Indian, Winnetou hat gesprochen, "I have spoken", no? I should maybe follow Winnetou a little bit more here. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Back to back to my questions. You claim in all your previous books on Hegel we talked about it that the updating of Hegel must be done through Lacan. But Lacan visited the famous lectures on the Phänomenologie des Geistes that Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève gave in
Slavoj Žižek
the 1930s in Paris. Kojève's version of the Post-Histoire is seldom mentioned in your reading of Hegel. Why is that? Do you have a problem with Kojève? You never mention him. Absolutely, absolutely. I think he is another of those who was looking for in present society for a model of finally realizing what Hegel wanted. First it was for him as we know even Soviet Union at some point for Kojève. He thought that Soviet Union is absolute knowledge embodied in Stalin and so on. You know that there are proofs that Kojève was in the late 40s early 50s a Soviet agent even. No? Yeah yeah. It's not a joke this. It's not a joke. Then then at the end you know where he moved: then it was European Union, and at the end, that's more intelligent, Kojève arrived visited Japan and thought that that prosperity of Japan with their culture of irony, details, tender dealing with details and so on, that this is Hegel realized today. But we don't I don't have time to go into it now. What I want just to say is that I think that he Kojève provides a certain reading of Hegel which is so much focused on that chapter on Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, domination and servitude, that it simply doesn't work like that. I am not against generally such particular readings. I think all great readings are particular. In the sense you have to take a risk and say this is the key. For example, I agree with those who claim that the key to entire Hegel's Logic is those chapters at the beginning of Book on three types of reflection: positive reflection, external reflection, determinant reflection. That's the key. That's the model of it all. All I am saying is that we don't have time to go into it now in detail but that Hegel was not in this, sorry anything wrong? No? I am my battery went out here. So I asked him to... Ah sorry, sorry. No all I want to say is that Hegel was far from such a simple assertion of the the servant, Knecht, as the true agent of liberation and so on and so on. No no no it's it's much it's much more complex. At the end the servant also loses and so on and so on. I think that the way to recapture the liberating potential that one should see in Hegel is there are points, I wonder if you would agree, where Hegel and that's for me the only way to criticize Hegel, not modern things are going on that Hegel couldn't have grasped, but there are interesting points where Hegel himself is not Hegelian enough. And one thing I rely here on the book of my friend Frank Ruda on the notion of rabble, Pöbel in Hegel, where I simplify his reading very much: Hegel sees the necessity of Pöbel, rabble. How a social structure is never organically closed. It's never that every group has its proper post. A social edifice always necessarily produces, especially modern capitalist society, a class of no class. Or as Jacques Rancière put it in French, la part des sans-part, a part which is not part, doesn't fit as a part. So but what Hegel doesn't say and it's so clear to me that he should have said is that Pöbel, rabble, precisely as such with no determined place where it could be at home as it were in social edifice, stands for the universality. Because what Hegel and he is afraid to say this, that precisely those with no proper particular place in social edifice embody the universality of being human. Marx saw this, tried to recapture this in his notion of working class. Working class is as he puts it a class of no class. They at least stand for universality of human being. But if we have anything to learn from the last decades is that it's no longer at least not the traditional working class. Today we have refugees all other forms. So I think against the traditional notion of class we should rehabilitate Hegel's notion of Pöbel, of rabble. So here again, but there are other, don't you agree, points where Hegel is not Hegelian enough. For example, I was always fascinated by Kant where he says that why is the most beautiful definition of being human of Kant you must know him from his short text on education, pedagogics, where Kant says that human humans are animals, human is an animal who needs a master. But then he goes in why. He says because other animals have some kind of instinctual orientation, how to behave how to breed eat and so on. But humans have something that Kant calls an original, I forgot the German term, wildnerness, tendency to excess and so on. And now I come to the crucial point. This excess is no longer nature, it's unnatural. But it's not yet culture. So human culture is developed not to discipline nature to make our natural habits more cultivated but to deal with this excess of wilderness that Kant almost is tempted to call it the noumenal freedom. And now I come to the crucial point. One of my favorite Hegels, I read about it wrote about it sorry, is you know at the beginning of third part of Hegel's Encyclopedia when Hegel deals with madness. He is better than Foucault there. He
the 1930s in Paris. Kojève's version of the Post-Histoire is seldom mentioned in your reading of Hegel. Why is that? Do you have a problem with Kojève? You never mention him. Absolutely, absolutely. I think he is another of those who was looking for in present society for a model of finally realizing what Hegel wanted. First it was for him as we know even Soviet Union at some point for Kojève. He thought that Soviet Union is absolute knowledge embodied in Stalin and so on. You know that there are proofs that Kojève was in the late 40s early 50s a Soviet agent even. No? Yeah yeah. It's not a joke this. It's not a joke. Then then at the end you know where he moved: then it was European Union, and at the end, that's more intelligent, Kojève arrived visited Japan and thought that that prosperity of Japan with their culture of irony, details, tender dealing with details and so on, that this is Hegel realized today. But we don't I don't have time to go into it now. What I want just to say is that I think that he Kojève provides a certain reading of Hegel which is so much focused on that chapter on Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, domination and servitude, that it simply doesn't work like that. I am not against generally such particular readings. I think all great readings are particular. In the sense you have to take a risk and say this is the key. For example, I agree with those who claim that the key to entire Hegel's Logic is those chapters at the beginning of Book on three types of reflection: positive reflection, external reflection, determinant reflection. That's the key. That's the model of it all. All I am saying is that we don't have time to go into it now in detail but that Hegel was not in this, sorry anything wrong? No? I am my battery went out here. So I asked him to... Ah sorry, sorry. No all I want to say is that Hegel was far from such a simple assertion of the the servant, Knecht, as the true agent of liberation and so on and so on. No no no it's it's much it's much more complex. At the end the servant also loses and so on and so on. I think that the way to recapture the liberating potential that one should see in Hegel is there are points, I wonder if you would agree, where Hegel and that's for me the only way to criticize Hegel, not modern things are going on that Hegel couldn't have grasped, but there are interesting points where Hegel himself is not Hegelian enough. And one thing I rely here on the book of my friend Frank Ruda on the notion of rabble, Pöbel in Hegel, where I simplify his reading very much: Hegel sees the necessity of Pöbel, rabble. How a social structure is never organically closed. It's never that every group has its proper post. A social edifice always necessarily produces, especially modern capitalist society, a class of no class. Or as Jacques Rancière put it in French, la part des sans-part, a part which is not part, doesn't fit as a part. So but what Hegel doesn't say and it's so clear to me that he should have said is that Pöbel, rabble, precisely as such with no determined place where it could be at home as it were in social edifice, stands for the universality. Because what Hegel and he is afraid to say this, that precisely those with no proper particular place in social edifice embody the universality of being human. Marx saw this, tried to recapture this in his notion of working class. Working class is as he puts it a class of no class. They at least stand for universality of human being. But if we have anything to learn from the last decades is that it's no longer at least not the traditional working class. Today we have refugees all other forms. So I think against the traditional notion of class we should rehabilitate Hegel's notion of Pöbel, of rabble. So here again, but there are other, don't you agree, points where Hegel is not Hegelian enough. For example, I was always fascinated by Kant where he says that why is the most beautiful definition of being human of Kant you must know him from his short text on education, pedagogics, where Kant says that human humans are animals, human is an animal who needs a master. But then he goes in why. He says because other animals have some kind of instinctual orientation, how to behave how to breed eat and so on. But humans have something that Kant calls an original, I forgot the German term, wildnerness, tendency to excess and so on. And now I come to the crucial point. This excess is no longer nature, it's unnatural. But it's not yet culture. So human culture is developed not to discipline nature to make our natural habits more cultivated but to deal with this excess of wilderness that Kant almost is tempted to call it the noumenal freedom. And now I come to the crucial point. One of my favorite Hegels, I read about it wrote about it sorry, is you know at the beginning of third part of Hegel's Encyclopedia when Hegel deals with madness. He is better than Foucault there. He
unknown
says that the first step for an animal to become human
says that the first step for an animal to become human
Slavoj Žižek
is madness. Madness means you lose your
is madness. Madness means you lose your
unknown
roots in natural
roots in natural
Slavoj Žižek
habits, it's this disconnection. And then Hegel says that the entire human Bildung, education self-formation is a struggle with this excess of madness. Hegel says explicitly: it doesn't mean we all have to be mad. But all our Kultur, culture, is a struggle against the potential
habits, it's this disconnection. And then Hegel says that the entire human Bildung, education self-formation is a struggle with this excess of madness. Hegel says explicitly: it doesn't mean we all have to be mad. But all our Kultur, culture, is a struggle against the potential
unknown
threat of madness. Why does he not apply this to sexuality? Because with sexuality it's the same. Okay it's not just we have animal couplings and then coupling for breeding and so on and then we humans say if I want to seduce a woman I will not be like a primitive ape just knock her on her head and rape her, I write poems seduce her and so on. No no no what has to be disciplined is this deadly passion like Tristan und Isolde, ready to go to the end. This deadly passion which is not yet culture but no longer
threat of madness. Why does he not apply this to sexuality? Because with sexuality it's the same. Okay it's not just we have animal couplings and then coupling for breeding and so on and then we humans say if I want to seduce a woman I will not be like a primitive ape just knock her on her head and rape her, I write poems seduce her and so on. No no no what has to be disciplined is this deadly passion like Tristan und Isolde, ready to go to the end. This deadly passion which is not yet culture but no longer
Slavoj Žižek
Natur, nature. Hegel makes a mistake here, I think. So there are some points where and that's so thrilling to read Hegel: again, an immanent critique where Hegel is not Hegelian enough. I just wanted to say the magic sentence: "Winnetou hat gesprochen", but you stopped. This brings me back to really brings me back to Kojève. I wanted to ask you because it is always said that he never wrote a book himself. Almost almost all of his writings are transcribed from his students including the famous introduction. Did you know that there is a book manuscript of Kojève written long after the lectures that deals with the end of history again? Georges Bataille kept it, now it's in the National Library in Paris. Have you heard about this? Is it already yes because I even spoke with the guy I forgot his name there is a French guy... Boris Groys, Boris Groys found out all this and probably he's the only one who read the Russian manuscript. And Freud and Heidegger play an important role in this reconception of Kojève's later version of the end of history. Especially Freud which is interesting because for Kojève in the 20th century I think that's that's your point in the 20th century the animal side of man, the unconscious, shows itself again. The rabble part as you said, due to the consumer society. And for him only the philosopher, that was new for me, is capable of living after the end of history. Not all of us. And the other insight which is probably less astonishing is that the end of history we only come with communism and not with civil society that would be Hegel's version or Fukuyama's model we talked about that before of a worldwide liberal democracy combined with global capitalism. Surely you should like this this new old version of of Kojève. No no no. I only know I only know that there was another manuscript already published
Natur, nature. Hegel makes a mistake here, I think. So there are some points where and that's so thrilling to read Hegel: again, an immanent critique where Hegel is not Hegelian enough. I just wanted to say the magic sentence: "Winnetou hat gesprochen", but you stopped. This brings me back to really brings me back to Kojève. I wanted to ask you because it is always said that he never wrote a book himself. Almost almost all of his writings are transcribed from his students including the famous introduction. Did you know that there is a book manuscript of Kojève written long after the lectures that deals with the end of history again? Georges Bataille kept it, now it's in the National Library in Paris. Have you heard about this? Is it already yes because I even spoke with the guy I forgot his name there is a French guy... Boris Groys, Boris Groys found out all this and probably he's the only one who read the Russian manuscript. And Freud and Heidegger play an important role in this reconception of Kojève's later version of the end of history. Especially Freud which is interesting because for Kojève in the 20th century I think that's that's your point in the 20th century the animal side of man, the unconscious, shows itself again. The rabble part as you said, due to the consumer society. And for him only the philosopher, that was new for me, is capable of living after the end of history. Not all of us. And the other insight which is probably less astonishing is that the end of history we only come with communism and not with civil society that would be Hegel's version or Fukuyama's model we talked about that before of a worldwide liberal democracy combined with global capitalism. Surely you should like this this new old version of of Kojève. No no no. I only know I only know that there was another manuscript already published
unknown
some years ago which deals with Kojève reads Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, philosophy of state. And I am much closer to this Kojève. Not
some years ago which deals with Kojève reads Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, philosophy of state. And I am much closer to this Kojève. Not
Slavoj Žižek
that early pseudo-Marxist liberating Kojève. But you know the problem for me is this one paradoxically. And I think with virus, global warming and all these threats are approaching it. Now I am becoming an old Hegelian pessimist. Yes there will be communist communism, but it can also be a very dystopian communism. You know what kind of I think that now I will say something horrible. Everybody says oh capitalism only uses the COVID crisis to get even more efficient. I say wait a little bit we are not yet there. First we didn't even master COVID it's still exploding. After COVID it will be global warming whatever. So there will have to be some kind of communism. But it can also be a Chinese style or even another style of very oppressive communism. So when I had a debate with some conservative guy, but we are friends, called Tyler Cowen in Bergen, I defined myself as a moderately conservative communist. I really think that intelligent communists never accepted this simple liberal anarchic freedom loving and so on and so on. My Hegelian formula for today, for example, would you agree or not is: we need mehr Entfremdung, more alienation. I am sick and tired of this multicultural liberal formula: understand the other, try to get close to him. No this is a horrible vision. Even Sloterdijk, another of my not exactly communist friends, pointed this out, that for him we need new distance today. My ideal is not to know all other cultures. My ideal is to live in a big apartment block. Across the hall it's an Algerian then it's a Chinese, Latino-American, South African, whatever you want, an Arab, a Jew and so on. And I just want to politely not to them we politely ignore each other. Maybe maybe maybe I become friend with some of them maybe not. I don't like this Über-Ich super-ego pressure you have to understand all culture. Why? How can I understand other culture when we probably don't understand even our own culture? I am here here I would like to apply Walter Benjamin's idea, everybody quotes it, that you know a work of art is like a film for which we don't yet have the developer and it will be possible to read it properly even in a later epoch. I think the same holds even geographically. All writers who wanted to understand some country even if it's their own country had to move abroad. Joyce had to live in Trieste to do Ulysses and so on and so on. So I believe in distance. I believe that today we can understand Shakespeare better than Shakespeare understood himself. I believe in Verspätung here. Truth comes truth comes too late. Sorry, ich habe gesprochen. Very good. I agree, I totally agree to what you said. Let's come maybe to your to your current book, Hegel in a Wired Brain. I have it here to the audience so then they can buy and and read that book. I think in that book you turn the tables of all anniversaries, the question "Is Hegel still useful today?" into what we talked about "How does our time look in the eyes of Hegel?". At one point... Do you know whom I quote implicitly here? No. Adorno. He says at the beginning of his three three essays on Hegel, polemics against Benedetto Croce who wrote a book "What is alive and what is dead in Hegel?". He says no the question is the other way around: "What is our time in Hegel's view?". Sorry yes. And at one point you emphasize that the book is neither about Hegel nor about the wired brain. Can you briefly say what the book is about? Is the mind a digital machine or can it be replaced by it? I know it's a bit more complicated but what is the... Yes it's more I try to complicate things. No first let me say yes it's not about Hegel it's not about the wired brain. But it is I try to imagine how the phenomenon of wired brain, I don't go into technical details about it, is it possible, to what extent it's possible, many things are already possible there, it's not as utopian as you may think. How I try to imagine precisely because it would have been a total shock to Hegel. Hegel couldn't imagine something like this. How would he have reacted to it? And my idea is that of course Hegel would have focused on the fact of what happens with subjectivity, self self-reflexivity and so on here. So on the one hand I do point out the dangers of it. But nonetheless the dangers in the sense that my god if a machine can read your mind literally, you directly communicate with the machine, like you think about something, the machine reads it. Then this opens up a wholly new perspective of perspective of social control. And to give you an example, I read I was so glad, in China in some elementary schools they are already doing it at a primitive level. All pupils have to wear a kind of
that early pseudo-Marxist liberating Kojève. But you know the problem for me is this one paradoxically. And I think with virus, global warming and all these threats are approaching it. Now I am becoming an old Hegelian pessimist. Yes there will be communist communism, but it can also be a very dystopian communism. You know what kind of I think that now I will say something horrible. Everybody says oh capitalism only uses the COVID crisis to get even more efficient. I say wait a little bit we are not yet there. First we didn't even master COVID it's still exploding. After COVID it will be global warming whatever. So there will have to be some kind of communism. But it can also be a Chinese style or even another style of very oppressive communism. So when I had a debate with some conservative guy, but we are friends, called Tyler Cowen in Bergen, I defined myself as a moderately conservative communist. I really think that intelligent communists never accepted this simple liberal anarchic freedom loving and so on and so on. My Hegelian formula for today, for example, would you agree or not is: we need mehr Entfremdung, more alienation. I am sick and tired of this multicultural liberal formula: understand the other, try to get close to him. No this is a horrible vision. Even Sloterdijk, another of my not exactly communist friends, pointed this out, that for him we need new distance today. My ideal is not to know all other cultures. My ideal is to live in a big apartment block. Across the hall it's an Algerian then it's a Chinese, Latino-American, South African, whatever you want, an Arab, a Jew and so on. And I just want to politely not to them we politely ignore each other. Maybe maybe maybe I become friend with some of them maybe not. I don't like this Über-Ich super-ego pressure you have to understand all culture. Why? How can I understand other culture when we probably don't understand even our own culture? I am here here I would like to apply Walter Benjamin's idea, everybody quotes it, that you know a work of art is like a film for which we don't yet have the developer and it will be possible to read it properly even in a later epoch. I think the same holds even geographically. All writers who wanted to understand some country even if it's their own country had to move abroad. Joyce had to live in Trieste to do Ulysses and so on and so on. So I believe in distance. I believe that today we can understand Shakespeare better than Shakespeare understood himself. I believe in Verspätung here. Truth comes truth comes too late. Sorry, ich habe gesprochen. Very good. I agree, I totally agree to what you said. Let's come maybe to your to your current book, Hegel in a Wired Brain. I have it here to the audience so then they can buy and and read that book. I think in that book you turn the tables of all anniversaries, the question "Is Hegel still useful today?" into what we talked about "How does our time look in the eyes of Hegel?". At one point... Do you know whom I quote implicitly here? No. Adorno. He says at the beginning of his three three essays on Hegel, polemics against Benedetto Croce who wrote a book "What is alive and what is dead in Hegel?". He says no the question is the other way around: "What is our time in Hegel's view?". Sorry yes. And at one point you emphasize that the book is neither about Hegel nor about the wired brain. Can you briefly say what the book is about? Is the mind a digital machine or can it be replaced by it? I know it's a bit more complicated but what is the... Yes it's more I try to complicate things. No first let me say yes it's not about Hegel it's not about the wired brain. But it is I try to imagine how the phenomenon of wired brain, I don't go into technical details about it, is it possible, to what extent it's possible, many things are already possible there, it's not as utopian as you may think. How I try to imagine precisely because it would have been a total shock to Hegel. Hegel couldn't imagine something like this. How would he have reacted to it? And my idea is that of course Hegel would have focused on the fact of what happens with subjectivity, self self-reflexivity and so on here. So on the one hand I do point out the dangers of it. But nonetheless the dangers in the sense that my god if a machine can read your mind literally, you directly communicate with the machine, like you think about something, the machine reads it. Then this opens up a wholly new perspective of perspective of social control. And to give you an example, I read I was so glad, in China in some elementary schools they are already doing it at a primitive level. All pupils have to wear a kind of
unknown
a metal ring which detects their brain activity. It's still very primitive but that's so that the teacher doesn't have to control the pupils. If the pupils are not attentive listening to what the teacher is saying his computer makes a click, they measure their brain activity and so on. But what I want to say is this: the first question is what gets lost
a metal ring which detects their brain activity. It's still very primitive but that's so that the teacher doesn't have to control the pupils. If the pupils are not attentive listening to what the teacher is saying his computer makes a click, they measure their brain activity and so on. But what I want to say is this: the first question is what gets lost
Slavoj Žižek
here.
here.
unknown
Let's say, sorry for the vulgarity, let's say that you were to be a woman, sorry for heterosexism, and we were to flirt. Can you imagine what would have happened to our love life without all the process of flirting and so on? No poetry, no mistakes and the whole charm of life of love is that I try to say something in seduction I do something else through all these misunderstandings it functions. But it would just have meant I look at a woman she reads my mind, I read her mind. "I want to F you", "Yes okay", and that's it. It's horrible. Because I claim and that I read Hegel, I quote him about the fall and so on, precisely as fallen beings where language always fails us. This is what opens all the depth of our spirituality. That's why I find extremely
Let's say, sorry for the vulgarity, let's say that you were to be a woman, sorry for heterosexism, and we were to flirt. Can you imagine what would have happened to our love life without all the process of flirting and so on? No poetry, no mistakes and the whole charm of life of love is that I try to say something in seduction I do something else through all these misunderstandings it functions. But it would just have meant I look at a woman she reads my mind, I read her mind. "I want to F you", "Yes okay", and that's it. It's horrible. Because I claim and that I read Hegel, I quote him about the fall and so on, precisely as fallen beings where language always fails us. This is what opens all the depth of our spirituality. That's why I find extremely
Slavoj Žižek
stupid what Elon Musk is now promoting. I read an interview with him a month ago where he said years from now we will no longer use language, we will be directly communicating with each other. So the first question I try to answer in the book is what does this mean for our notion of spirituality? Do we survive as subjects? Okay it's a horrible position. Then nonetheless I try to outline a dimension which will escape this whatever you call it, neural network which will be able to read my mind. My idea is: A) pure form of subjectivity, this Cartesian cogito, what Kant would have called subject of transcendental apperception, which and Lacan always emphasizes this, should not be confused by the wealth of my inner life. I cannot be reduced to my inner life. For Kant already my inner life is pathological contingent, there is pure form. On the other hand I try to demonstrate the Freudian unconscious. Remember that my boring always repeated example coffee without milk. I've spoken with many computer programmers and they agree with me at least those with whom I spoke that this negative dimension of something that is only virtually present... the machine will not be able to read it. It will elude the machine. So I nonetheless insist that with all the possible horrors total control and so on and so on, this basic constellation of the pure subject whose other side is das Unbewusste, the unconscious, will escape this the universe of wired brain. But again apart from this I do many other things. I enjoyed writing that book very much. For example before the long last chapter I try to imagine, I call it a literary fantasy, my hero is not James Joyce of writers of the 20th century. He is pretentious boring. I think Finnegans Wake is the most arrogant book, I have almost a Goebbels's reaction to Finnegans Wake, it should be publicly burned. But Samuel Beckett, Unnamable. You know who is the the the the speaker? It's not even a human being. It's a kind of a strange partial object the one who speaks there, no? And I think that this is an image of a wired brain: how our subjectivity will look in wired brain. Read read read again Beckett's Unnamable, his ultimate novel. Then I do another thing. I go into Soviet Union using the work of you mentioned him Boris Groys and so on. How all these digital technognostic dreams of today, shared thought one big collective self-awareness, well already part of the radical form of Bolshevism in the 1920s, you know? And here I come to another of my favorite writings, there are three in the 20th century if you ask me: Beckett, Andrey Platonov and Franz Kafka, of course no? And Platonov saw the deadlock of this technognosticism. So it's not as confused a book as some people who criticize me think. No. First I describe wired brain what will be missing
stupid what Elon Musk is now promoting. I read an interview with him a month ago where he said years from now we will no longer use language, we will be directly communicating with each other. So the first question I try to answer in the book is what does this mean for our notion of spirituality? Do we survive as subjects? Okay it's a horrible position. Then nonetheless I try to outline a dimension which will escape this whatever you call it, neural network which will be able to read my mind. My idea is: A) pure form of subjectivity, this Cartesian cogito, what Kant would have called subject of transcendental apperception, which and Lacan always emphasizes this, should not be confused by the wealth of my inner life. I cannot be reduced to my inner life. For Kant already my inner life is pathological contingent, there is pure form. On the other hand I try to demonstrate the Freudian unconscious. Remember that my boring always repeated example coffee without milk. I've spoken with many computer programmers and they agree with me at least those with whom I spoke that this negative dimension of something that is only virtually present... the machine will not be able to read it. It will elude the machine. So I nonetheless insist that with all the possible horrors total control and so on and so on, this basic constellation of the pure subject whose other side is das Unbewusste, the unconscious, will escape this the universe of wired brain. But again apart from this I do many other things. I enjoyed writing that book very much. For example before the long last chapter I try to imagine, I call it a literary fantasy, my hero is not James Joyce of writers of the 20th century. He is pretentious boring. I think Finnegans Wake is the most arrogant book, I have almost a Goebbels's reaction to Finnegans Wake, it should be publicly burned. But Samuel Beckett, Unnamable. You know who is the the the the speaker? It's not even a human being. It's a kind of a strange partial object the one who speaks there, no? And I think that this is an image of a wired brain: how our subjectivity will look in wired brain. Read read read again Beckett's Unnamable, his ultimate novel. Then I do another thing. I go into Soviet Union using the work of you mentioned him Boris Groys and so on. How all these digital technognostic dreams of today, shared thought one big collective self-awareness, well already part of the radical form of Bolshevism in the 1920s, you know? And here I come to another of my favorite writings, there are three in the 20th century if you ask me: Beckett, Andrey Platonov and Franz Kafka, of course no? And Platonov saw the deadlock of this technognosticism. So it's not as confused a book as some people who criticize me think. No. First I describe wired brain what will be missing
unknown
in it then I go through history then I cover the let's call it theological dimension of it. Because advocates of the wired brain clearly think that this will be a new form of collective divinity. It will not, I try to prove this through Hegel. Then I go through the unconscious and finally what will survive the wired brain. But Hegel in a Wired Brain, let
in it then I go through history then I cover the let's call it theological dimension of it. Because advocates of the wired brain clearly think that this will be a new form of collective divinity. It will not, I try to prove this through Hegel. Then I go through the unconscious and finally what will survive the wired brain. But Hegel in a Wired Brain, let
Slavoj Žižek
me interrupt you at this point, Hegel in a
me interrupt you at this point, Hegel in a
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Wired Brain
Wired Brain
Slavoj Žižek
ends with the final question, so our excursion on the end of history was not in vain, whether the singularity that would emerge from our
ends with the final question, so our excursion on the end of history was not in vain, whether the singularity that would emerge from our
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brains linked together and wired to the world would be the true end of history, you wrote. For for all for all who have not yet read the book and also a little bit for me I dare say, can you roughly explain what
brains linked together and wired to the world would be the true end of history, you wrote. For for all for all who have not yet read the book and also a little bit for me I dare say, can you roughly explain what
Slavoj Žižek
you mean by singularity? A kind of code word or leitmotif of the book, and then please answer the question why singularity is not the true end of history. First what is it and why is it not the end... First what I mean by singularity is a term precisely from those neognostic interpretations of the wired brain where it's not just a technical thesis that our brains will be directly connected communicating through the machine, but they claim that through this direct communication between all our brains a singularity will emerge. Singularity in the sense of a new collective self-awareness, and they use directly theological terms. It will I no longer will be aware of myself as a single individual. I will just be a moment in the divine God's self-awareness. I like this thesis in the sense as this God is not the old God of transcendence. This God will be our own technological product, through the gigantic digital machinery again a new form of collective awareness will emerge. And you know what is so interesting, that some reactions to COVID also use this notion. They claim that we are fucked up, it looks bad for us in reality, but maybe we should all escape into this type of virtual existence and so on. Like physically we will be more isolated than ever, no, but if we move into this virtual dimension of participating in a some collective self-awareness it will be okay. The reason I think this will not work is that you know that things with the end of history are much more paradoxical as it may appear. You know this because look, we are hearing this story about end of history from Fukuyama onwards, but then where we are now? We are at the end of history which if I may put it so which never ends. It just drags on, you know? So the end of history it's not now we are there. It's we wait something to happen, nothing happens, it just goes on and on and on. And we are so the end of history is paradoxically one big expectation that something tremendous will happen which never happens. So I think that that that precisely because of the reasons that I enumerated and some others like global from global warming to technological dangers, viruses and so on, radical changes are ahead. The thesis of end of history even in its pessimist version like we will all be some techno-automata just cogs in the machinery of a global digital computer are way too optimistic. I think that we should become aware that we live already now in a time of great incredible change. That would have interested Hegel. For example some leftists who claim oh capitalism won just the richer getting richer and it's interesting, I know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos now Elon I just read that Jeff Bezos this week reached billions his wealth. Yes but on the other hand, you know what's my friend Varoufakis told me this: you know what's so interesting? You remember what is happening now if you follow economic news: the more unemployment grows and economic crisis an is exploding, the better the stock market is doing. And according to Varoufakis this means that we are already out of the classical capitalism where stock markets reflected profit rate and so on and so on. Financial capital is now moving in its own dimension, uncoupled from the normal basic material whatever capitalist reproduction. And this has consequences, maybe even good ones. You know which company interests me now immensely? Netflix. Look, they are immensely successful getting more and more people to watch them, but you know they are losing money all the time. And the way they produce movies, to that what was I forgot the title, the big gangster movie by Scorsese, they put The Irishman or what I forgot, they put millions into it, they knew they will never get the money. It's something very strange and new that is emerging in our economy already. And not to mention this what Trump means as a phenomenon. I think we haven't yet fully grasped what Trump means. By Trump I mean this open dismantling of truth and rehabilitation of direct of direct obscenity. I read a wonderful analysis of Trump. Hegel
you mean by singularity? A kind of code word or leitmotif of the book, and then please answer the question why singularity is not the true end of history. First what is it and why is it not the end... First what I mean by singularity is a term precisely from those neognostic interpretations of the wired brain where it's not just a technical thesis that our brains will be directly connected communicating through the machine, but they claim that through this direct communication between all our brains a singularity will emerge. Singularity in the sense of a new collective self-awareness, and they use directly theological terms. It will I no longer will be aware of myself as a single individual. I will just be a moment in the divine God's self-awareness. I like this thesis in the sense as this God is not the old God of transcendence. This God will be our own technological product, through the gigantic digital machinery again a new form of collective awareness will emerge. And you know what is so interesting, that some reactions to COVID also use this notion. They claim that we are fucked up, it looks bad for us in reality, but maybe we should all escape into this type of virtual existence and so on. Like physically we will be more isolated than ever, no, but if we move into this virtual dimension of participating in a some collective self-awareness it will be okay. The reason I think this will not work is that you know that things with the end of history are much more paradoxical as it may appear. You know this because look, we are hearing this story about end of history from Fukuyama onwards, but then where we are now? We are at the end of history which if I may put it so which never ends. It just drags on, you know? So the end of history it's not now we are there. It's we wait something to happen, nothing happens, it just goes on and on and on. And we are so the end of history is paradoxically one big expectation that something tremendous will happen which never happens. So I think that that that precisely because of the reasons that I enumerated and some others like global from global warming to technological dangers, viruses and so on, radical changes are ahead. The thesis of end of history even in its pessimist version like we will all be some techno-automata just cogs in the machinery of a global digital computer are way too optimistic. I think that we should become aware that we live already now in a time of great incredible change. That would have interested Hegel. For example some leftists who claim oh capitalism won just the richer getting richer and it's interesting, I know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos now Elon I just read that Jeff Bezos this week reached billions his wealth. Yes but on the other hand, you know what's my friend Varoufakis told me this: you know what's so interesting? You remember what is happening now if you follow economic news: the more unemployment grows and economic crisis an is exploding, the better the stock market is doing. And according to Varoufakis this means that we are already out of the classical capitalism where stock markets reflected profit rate and so on and so on. Financial capital is now moving in its own dimension, uncoupled from the normal basic material whatever capitalist reproduction. And this has consequences, maybe even good ones. You know which company interests me now immensely? Netflix. Look, they are immensely successful getting more and more people to watch them, but you know they are losing money all the time. And the way they produce movies, to that what was I forgot the title, the big gangster movie by Scorsese, they put The Irishman or what I forgot, they put millions into it, they knew they will never get the money. It's something very strange and new that is emerging in our economy already. And not to mention this what Trump means as a phenomenon. I think we haven't yet fully grasped what Trump means. By Trump I mean this open dismantling of truth and rehabilitation of direct of direct obscenity. I read a wonderful analysis of Trump. Hegel
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would have
would have
Slavoj Žižek
been interested in it as a you know usually we assume we accuse Trump of lying. Oh that guy is twisting data, you know all these CNN liberal sites where they enumerate this week Trump said lies and so on no? But I read an analysis which puts no, the true paradox of Trump is not that he lies, all politicians do more or less, but that he says the truth where the truth should be embarrassing for him and you would never expect him to tell the truth. For example, you know when he tried to to to to to give less money to post service, to make more difficult postal voting so that Democrats will get less votes. Critics accused him that he is doing this so that Democrats will get less votes. You know what he said: "Yes, of course, that's why I'm doing it". It's you know there is something much more horrible in this: not just lying but saying the truth shamelessly when the truth should be horrifying for you. That would Hegel would have added this reversal. So I think what more do you want? We live today in a time which is extremely dangerous ecologically, which economically Hegel would have detected it signaled a significant change of
been interested in it as a you know usually we assume we accuse Trump of lying. Oh that guy is twisting data, you know all these CNN liberal sites where they enumerate this week Trump said lies and so on no? But I read an analysis which puts no, the true paradox of Trump is not that he lies, all politicians do more or less, but that he says the truth where the truth should be embarrassing for him and you would never expect him to tell the truth. For example, you know when he tried to to to to to give less money to post service, to make more difficult postal voting so that Democrats will get less votes. Critics accused him that he is doing this so that Democrats will get less votes. You know what he said: "Yes, of course, that's why I'm doing it". It's you know there is something much more horrible in this: not just lying but saying the truth shamelessly when the truth should be horrifying for you. That would Hegel would have added this reversal. So I think what more do you want? We live today in a time which is extremely dangerous ecologically, which economically Hegel would have detected it signaled a significant change of
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it's no longer the old capitalism you know, you invest, you profit and so on. It's no longer about profiting in that way. Financial capital has its own dynamic. It's a tremendous psychological crisis, new forms of violence and so on and so on. We live in a crazy world. I told you another another
it's no longer the old capitalism you know, you invest, you profit and so on. It's no longer about profiting in that way. Financial capital has its own dynamic. It's a tremendous psychological crisis, new forms of violence and so on and so on. We live in a crazy world. I told you another another
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theme I told you that in the conception of the museum here there is an escape room and there's a sleeping Hegel so I think let's wake him a little bit up so because there is a rumor I read that at an early stage you should be commissioned to redesign the Hegel house. I don't know
theme I told you that in the conception of the museum here there is an escape room and there's a sleeping Hegel so I think let's wake him a little bit up so because there is a rumor I read that at an early stage you should be commissioned to redesign the Hegel house. I don't know
Slavoj Žižek
if you've ever been asked, but very roughly... I am a dirty old man, you know the first thing... Very roughly, yeah, and what... I would have have a bedroom and then offered to couples, they can fuck the Hegelian way, how should I put it that? Exactly. What would would this be your concept of a Hegel Hegel museum? Would that look like this? You know he's one of the founding fathers of the museum. You know what's interesting, if I you know this question that Derrida was asked famously, if he were to meet Hegel in a documentary on Derrida, what would he have asked Hegel? And Derrida's answer was sex life. What was Hegel's sex life? I am not. From what I can gather he was ordinary conservative a little bit corrupt guy. Like he had a wife, he cheated with some household lady, when she got pregnant he escaped and so on, then he married a younger, nothing special there. What I would have asked him is his true political beliefs. He must have known that something horrible is approaching, that his concept of modern state the way he describes it in Rechtsphilosophie no longer holds that it's disintegrating. What were his he his fears, his dreams there? I think he was not simply a conservative. Or if he was, conservatives when something new is emerging often see more. My big example here is sound cinema. You know that it's precisely those who resisted sound movies like Russians, Eisenstein and so on and Charlie
if you've ever been asked, but very roughly... I am a dirty old man, you know the first thing... Very roughly, yeah, and what... I would have have a bedroom and then offered to couples, they can fuck the Hegelian way, how should I put it that? Exactly. What would would this be your concept of a Hegel Hegel museum? Would that look like this? You know he's one of the founding fathers of the museum. You know what's interesting, if I you know this question that Derrida was asked famously, if he were to meet Hegel in a documentary on Derrida, what would he have asked Hegel? And Derrida's answer was sex life. What was Hegel's sex life? I am not. From what I can gather he was ordinary conservative a little bit corrupt guy. Like he had a wife, he cheated with some household lady, when she got pregnant he escaped and so on, then he married a younger, nothing special there. What I would have asked him is his true political beliefs. He must have known that something horrible is approaching, that his concept of modern state the way he describes it in Rechtsphilosophie no longer holds that it's disintegrating. What were his he his fears, his dreams there? I think he was not simply a conservative. Or if he was, conservatives when something new is emerging often see more. My big example here is sound cinema. You know that it's precisely those who resisted sound movies like Russians, Eisenstein and so on and Charlie
unknown
Chaplin. He used years to
Chaplin. He used years to
Slavoj Žižek
accept full speaking movie, The Great Dictator is his first full speaking movie. You have before movies with some background sound but not real... but they saw much better what is new in the sound movie. Because the realistic option opinion was that with sound movies they will become more realistic. People will also speak, you will see them speaking, it's more reproduction of real life. Intelligent directors like Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse, Testament and so on, saw that with sound movies voice will gain autonomy. It will become a free floating voice haunting you and so on. It will be further denaturalization. And I think that something like this Hegel would be able to detect in what is going on today. How all those media who apparently made our interaction more direct, like Zooming and so on, are further denaturalizing us. The problem is not that they are alienated, that would be my paradox. The problem is that our societies are becoming too much too non-alienated. Today alienation is a solution, a proper distance. Finally finally a more private question which has been on my mind for a long time. Years ago I read in an interview that you gave to a German philosophical magazine that you destroyed all your family photos or your family photo albums. Is that true and for Hegel of course... Absolutely true. For Hegel of course history rages and destroys everything, an operation which he calls sublation, but at the same time everything is kept, which is also a meaning of the German word aufgehoben. Everything is kept in my books. I'm an instrument for writing my books. I don't exist, I don't deserve to exist outside it. That's true, the story is true. Yeah you know why but I will tell you why. Now this may sound paradoxical with all the stuff I wrote about psychoanalysis, about psychoanalysis. But if I hate something is to analyze myself. I am deeply convinced that if you look deep into yourself or I deep into myself, you just discover some dirty private secrets, some shit we all have dirty dreams and so on. It doesn't interest me. I am in my books. I am an instrument for writing books. And I I hate this idea that I express myself in my books. No, it's the other way around. My books unfortunately need me to be written and have to tolerate my idiosyncrasy and so on and so on. And Hegel was I think a little bit this type of a guy, you know? You can see that he knew how to enjoy private life and so on but his books were for his theory. Although there is another paradox and I would I would ask my friends to those who are listening to us to think about it. Again Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay in their book, The Dash—the Other Side of Absolute Knowing, on Hegel noticed this. It's such a simple observation but true. If we discard Hegel's early System der Sittlichkeit, he was not yet Hegel there. You know that Hegel basically wrote just two books: Phänomenologie and Logic. All other stuff are okay he wrote of course two more, Rechtsphilosophie and Enzyklopädie. But these are not books in the sense of texts which recapture a living thought. These are university manuals written in a legal way in paragraphs and so on. They are necessary. But if you want a really in other words sorry when Hegel wrote Enzyklopädie and Rechtsphilosophie he just recapitulated his lectures. He wasn't creative there. He already knew what he wants to say. But and so it's just the two books, Phänomenologie and Logic. And I think the big enigma... like in communism are you Trotskyist
accept full speaking movie, The Great Dictator is his first full speaking movie. You have before movies with some background sound but not real... but they saw much better what is new in the sound movie. Because the realistic option opinion was that with sound movies they will become more realistic. People will also speak, you will see them speaking, it's more reproduction of real life. Intelligent directors like Fritz Lang, Dr. Mabuse, Testament and so on, saw that with sound movies voice will gain autonomy. It will become a free floating voice haunting you and so on. It will be further denaturalization. And I think that something like this Hegel would be able to detect in what is going on today. How all those media who apparently made our interaction more direct, like Zooming and so on, are further denaturalizing us. The problem is not that they are alienated, that would be my paradox. The problem is that our societies are becoming too much too non-alienated. Today alienation is a solution, a proper distance. Finally finally a more private question which has been on my mind for a long time. Years ago I read in an interview that you gave to a German philosophical magazine that you destroyed all your family photos or your family photo albums. Is that true and for Hegel of course... Absolutely true. For Hegel of course history rages and destroys everything, an operation which he calls sublation, but at the same time everything is kept, which is also a meaning of the German word aufgehoben. Everything is kept in my books. I'm an instrument for writing my books. I don't exist, I don't deserve to exist outside it. That's true, the story is true. Yeah you know why but I will tell you why. Now this may sound paradoxical with all the stuff I wrote about psychoanalysis, about psychoanalysis. But if I hate something is to analyze myself. I am deeply convinced that if you look deep into yourself or I deep into myself, you just discover some dirty private secrets, some shit we all have dirty dreams and so on. It doesn't interest me. I am in my books. I am an instrument for writing books. And I I hate this idea that I express myself in my books. No, it's the other way around. My books unfortunately need me to be written and have to tolerate my idiosyncrasy and so on and so on. And Hegel was I think a little bit this type of a guy, you know? You can see that he knew how to enjoy private life and so on but his books were for his theory. Although there is another paradox and I would I would ask my friends to those who are listening to us to think about it. Again Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay in their book, The Dash—the Other Side of Absolute Knowing, on Hegel noticed this. It's such a simple observation but true. If we discard Hegel's early System der Sittlichkeit, he was not yet Hegel there. You know that Hegel basically wrote just two books: Phänomenologie and Logic. All other stuff are okay he wrote of course two more, Rechtsphilosophie and Enzyklopädie. But these are not books in the sense of texts which recapture a living thought. These are university manuals written in a legal way in paragraphs and so on. They are necessary. But if you want a really in other words sorry when Hegel wrote Enzyklopädie and Rechtsphilosophie he just recapitulated his lectures. He wasn't creative there. He already knew what he wants to say. But and so it's just the two books, Phänomenologie and Logic. And I think the big enigma... like in communism are you Trotskyist
Julian Assange
or Stalinist? Here it is: are you Logic or Phänomenologie? Are you a historicist who thinks that Logic is just an abstract
or Stalinist? Here it is: are you Logic or Phänomenologie? Are you a historicist who thinks that Logic is just an abstract
unknown
conceptual scheme but real life is in the historical material of Phänomenologie, or the other way around.
conceptual scheme but real life is in the historical material of Phänomenologie, or the other way around.
Slavoj Žižek
I am for Logic
I am for Logic
unknown
of course. Me too. Me too. Of course. But maybe we
of course. Me too. Me too. Of course. But maybe we
Slavoj Žižek
should end our talk with a with a joke because most of your jokes most of the jokes that you mention in your books are used to illustrate philosophical ideas of Hegel. The collection of your best jokes is available at Suhrkamp... But sorry you know that Hegel also uses much more even obscene jokes than one thinks. Tell me one. Tell me one. Not simple joke but just a let's say it's not a joke but in Phänomenologie des Geistes when he uses to explain der Geist ist ein Knochen, penis as the organ of highest and lowest, urination and insemination. And you know that people don't know but he applies the same to mouth. He says that mouth is for the lowest eating and for the highest speaking and so on, you know? There oh Hegel was you know that's the bad thing I can say about Martin Heidegger. I spoke with fanatical Heideggerians to whom who knew everything all the black all the notebooks and so on. And I asked them: is there in entire Heidegger one only one joke? They couldn't remember it. The only joke I know is in a letter to that guy Medard Boss, a psychiatrist friend. Lacan, it's not a great joke but at least an ironic remark. No sorry Heidegger reports after meeting Lacan that Lacan seems to him a psychiatrist who is himself in need of a psychiatrist. Okay it's not a bad joke but it's the only point where Heidegger comes this close close to a close to a joke, you know? Yeah, he was not that funny guy Heidegger. No I really think that my favorite jokes if you ask me, I used them in my old books, I hope people don't know them, are those self-reflexive jokes. They are properly Hegelian jokes. Where first you speak about something for a from a certain position and then this position which appears
should end our talk with a with a joke because most of your jokes most of the jokes that you mention in your books are used to illustrate philosophical ideas of Hegel. The collection of your best jokes is available at Suhrkamp... But sorry you know that Hegel also uses much more even obscene jokes than one thinks. Tell me one. Tell me one. Not simple joke but just a let's say it's not a joke but in Phänomenologie des Geistes when he uses to explain der Geist ist ein Knochen, penis as the organ of highest and lowest, urination and insemination. And you know that people don't know but he applies the same to mouth. He says that mouth is for the lowest eating and for the highest speaking and so on, you know? There oh Hegel was you know that's the bad thing I can say about Martin Heidegger. I spoke with fanatical Heideggerians to whom who knew everything all the black all the notebooks and so on. And I asked them: is there in entire Heidegger one only one joke? They couldn't remember it. The only joke I know is in a letter to that guy Medard Boss, a psychiatrist friend. Lacan, it's not a great joke but at least an ironic remark. No sorry Heidegger reports after meeting Lacan that Lacan seems to him a psychiatrist who is himself in need of a psychiatrist. Okay it's not a bad joke but it's the only point where Heidegger comes this close close to a close to a joke, you know? Yeah, he was not that funny guy Heidegger. No I really think that my favorite jokes if you ask me, I used them in my old books, I hope people don't know them, are those self-reflexive jokes. They are properly Hegelian jokes. Where first you speak about something for a from a certain position and then this position which appears
unknown
external, this position of enunciation let's call it, falls itself into the joke. You know this is the Hegelian moment of reflexivity. For example I have a whole sorry series of them. If I may quickly to conclude repeat one, you must know it. It's from my youth the era of of who were there: Brezhnev, Nixon and Honecker, no let's say. Okay it's they confront God. First Nixon asks "Dear God, tell me what
external, this position of enunciation let's call it, falls itself into the joke. You know this is the Hegelian moment of reflexivity. For example I have a whole sorry series of them. If I may quickly to conclude repeat one, you must know it. It's from my youth the era of of who were there: Brezhnev, Nixon and Honecker, no let's say. Okay it's they confront God. First Nixon asks "Dear God, tell me what
Slavoj Žižek
will become of the United States years from now?". God tells him "Sorry, United States will be a Soviet Republic".
will become of the United States years from now?". God tells him "Sorry, United States will be a Soviet Republic".
unknown
Nixon
Nixon
Slavoj Žižek
turns around and starts to cry. Then Brezhnev "Oh tell me God what will become of the Soviet Union glad?". God says "Oh it will be a Chinese province". No. Brezhnev turns around and starts to cry. Then Honecker asks "And what will become with my beautiful German Democratic Republic?". You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. You know this is Hegelian. But this is not a Hegelian joke. I just want one of your Hegelian jokes because the collection of your best jokes published at Suhrkamp has the title Treffen sich zwei Hegelianer... Yes. Three three jokes were considered I forgot which I think they had something to do with the Jews and Palestinians were considered too rough. But that book wasn't even done with me it was too much by me it was two Norwegian guys did it. It was too much commercial exploitation if you ask me. I think so. Good that you mentioned that. But there is no Hegelian joke. Not one on Hegel. Two Hegelians are meeting, something like that. I've tried to invent it, you caught me here. Okay my usual excuse would have been that dialectic itself is comical in its reversals. Brecht said this in a famous passage. Brecht says that there is something immanently comical in a Hegelian process. But come to think yes apart from some big comical remarks which appear ironic or comical or whatever, yes Hegel doesn't have many explicit jokes. But I still think that he comes closest to something like there is a joke in Hegelian dialectical reversals themselves. This fundamental reversal where you yourself are already part of the series on which you are talking. There is a there is a comical reversal in it. And you know what I especially like
turns around and starts to cry. Then Brezhnev "Oh tell me God what will become of the Soviet Union glad?". God says "Oh it will be a Chinese province". No. Brezhnev turns around and starts to cry. Then Honecker asks "And what will become with my beautiful German Democratic Republic?". You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. You know this is Hegelian. But this is not a Hegelian joke. I just want one of your Hegelian jokes because the collection of your best jokes published at Suhrkamp has the title Treffen sich zwei Hegelianer... Yes. Three three jokes were considered I forgot which I think they had something to do with the Jews and Palestinians were considered too rough. But that book wasn't even done with me it was too much by me it was two Norwegian guys did it. It was too much commercial exploitation if you ask me. I think so. Good that you mentioned that. But there is no Hegelian joke. Not one on Hegel. Two Hegelians are meeting, something like that. I've tried to invent it, you caught me here. Okay my usual excuse would have been that dialectic itself is comical in its reversals. Brecht said this in a famous passage. Brecht says that there is something immanently comical in a Hegelian process. But come to think yes apart from some big comical remarks which appear ironic or comical or whatever, yes Hegel doesn't have many explicit jokes. But I still think that he comes closest to something like there is a joke in Hegelian dialectical reversals themselves. This fundamental reversal where you yourself are already part of the series on which you are talking. There is a there is a comical reversal in it. And you know what I especially like
unknown
Hegel would have loved this. I don't know if I even have this joke in the book because I learned there is another version. You know in old communist
Hegel would have loved this. I don't know if I even have this joke in the book because I learned there is another version. You know in old communist
Slavoj Žižek
Yugoslavia we had many political jokes and now they disappear, this is a tragedy for me. One was that a stupid Yugoslav politician visits Germany and he travels on a train near Baden-Baden and asks his guide "What's the name of this city?". You everybody in Germany must know this joke. The guide tells him "Baden-Baden". And the politician says "I'm not stupid, you don't have to tell me twice", you know? But you know what's so beautiful: you have another version of this joke where the politician is stupid in another way. The politician tell no the guide they he talks with another politician and asks him
Yugoslavia we had many political jokes and now they disappear, this is a tragedy for me. One was that a stupid Yugoslav politician visits Germany and he travels on a train near Baden-Baden and asks his guide "What's the name of this city?". You everybody in Germany must know this joke. The guide tells him "Baden-Baden". And the politician says "I'm not stupid, you don't have to tell me twice", you know? But you know what's so beautiful: you have another version of this joke where the politician is stupid in another way. The politician tell no the guide they he talks with another politician and asks him
unknown
"Where
"Where
Slavoj Žižek
do you come from?". And the politician German says "From Baden-Baden". And the politician Serb from Belgrade thinks that you have to say it twice and says "I come from Belgrade-Belgrade" and so on. No I like there is nothing that I like more than this. And this is very Hegelian moment. You think you see the contingency of jokes you know you think it's one formula no there is another way to read a joke. Which is why the most Hegelian jokes are those, in Freud you find some of them, these doppelte, double two levels jokes. You think it's already the final punchline then another reversal comes, you know? If Hegel were to do jokes they would have been these. Slavoj, I have no more questions. Maybe one final question. Maybe you
do you come from?". And the politician German says "From Baden-Baden". And the politician Serb from Belgrade thinks that you have to say it twice and says "I come from Belgrade-Belgrade" and so on. No I like there is nothing that I like more than this. And this is very Hegelian moment. You think you see the contingency of jokes you know you think it's one formula no there is another way to read a joke. Which is why the most Hegelian jokes are those, in Freud you find some of them, these doppelte, double two levels jokes. You think it's already the final punchline then another reversal comes, you know? If Hegel were to do jokes they would have been these. Slavoj, I have no more questions. Maybe one final question. Maybe you
unknown
want to add something to our conversation. But final question would be of course in this trial guilty or not guilty
want to add something to our conversation. But final question would be of course in this trial guilty or not guilty
Slavoj Žižek
of being a Hegelian? What would you say? Oh I would say guilty with pleasure. Because guilty in guilty but guilty in the sense of guilty for the eyes of establishment but I proudly you know this heroic gesture of political prisoners
of being a Hegelian? What would you say? Oh I would say guilty with pleasure. Because guilty in guilty but guilty in the sense of guilty for the eyes of establishment but I proudly you know this heroic gesture of political prisoners
unknown
you tear your shirt apart: "Shoot me, I admit I am guilty". That would be my answer to being a Hegelian. I
you tear your shirt apart: "Shoot me, I admit I am guilty". That would be my answer to being a Hegelian. I
Slavoj Žižek
think perfect ending. What do you think? Thanks very much. I appreciate very much. It was time. And I'm just sorry I cannot be with you there. I am generally it's very atypical. We Slovenians are a normal alcoholic nation. Never in my life did I get did I get drunk. But I would like for Hegel wine it's an exception. Okay. Is it a white wine or or a dark? It's red. It's it's a red wine. It's red, it's it's a dark red wine. It's a strong. And maybe I to finish in a very dirty way: I am for red wine against white wine. You
think perfect ending. What do you think? Thanks very much. I appreciate very much. It was time. And I'm just sorry I cannot be with you there. I am generally it's very atypical. We Slovenians are a normal alcoholic nation. Never in my life did I get did I get drunk. But I would like for Hegel wine it's an exception. Okay. Is it a white wine or or a dark? It's red. It's it's a red wine. It's red, it's it's a dark red wine. It's a strong. And maybe I to finish in a very dirty way: I am for red wine against white wine. You
unknown
know
know
Slavoj Žižek
Italians have a wonderful proverb, I hope it's not too obscene:
Italians have a wonderful proverb, I hope it's not too obscene:
unknown
vino bianco cazzo stanco, white wine
vino bianco cazzo stanco, white wine
Slavoj Žižek
penis limp, vino rosso cazzo grosso, red wine
penis limp, vino rosso cazzo grosso, red wine
unknown
big penis,
big penis,
Slavoj Žižek
you know? This is my ideological guideline here.
you know? This is my ideological guideline here.
unknown
Thanks
Thanks
Slavoj Žižek
very much, it was a pleasure. Nicely. Thank you very much. Good ending. Thank you. Bye Slavoj. Bye bye. Okay.
very much, it was a pleasure. Nicely. Thank you very much. Good ending. Thank you. Bye Slavoj. Bye bye. Okay.
unknown
I drop out. Bye bye.
I drop out. Bye bye.