Samuel Beckett’s Art of Abstraction
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-11-08 · 1:16:26 · 9,638 words
hegel-dialecticsideologypsychoanalysiscapitalismsubjectivitycinema-art-culturesexuality-gendercommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalreligion-theologyhistoryliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture touching on Hegel's openness to the future, Marx's continuing relevance and necessary critique, and the structure of ideological subjectivity under late capitalism. He argues that the hysterical subject's self-questioning is the true locus of critique, contrasting it with perversion as the hidden support of power, and illustrates this through discussions of surplus enjoyment, interpellation, the transgender movement, political correctness, and the logic of philanthropic capitalism. The lecture concludes with a meditation on Samuel Beckett as a writer of 'concrete universality' and materialist abstraction, linking Beckett's dramaturgy to the Hegelian dialectical method.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Hegelian rebel / Pöbel”
Hegel's concept of those excluded from the social edifice with no specific social position, which Žižek (following Frank Ruda) argues is more relevant than the Marxist proletariat for understanding today's immigrants and the unemployed.
as “coincidence of opposites”
The old philosophical motif that a thing and its opposite coincide; Žižek uses it to analyse contemporary ideology where oppressive brutality is presented as liberation (biodegradable bullets, philanthropic capitalism).
as “bureaucratic socialism”
Žižek's deliberately provocative formula, a plea for an efficient, anonymous bureaucratic state as the necessary precondition for any genuine local cooperative democracy, against the fantasy of total participatory self-governance.
as “spiritualized hedonism / enlightened western Buddhism”
Žižek's ironic label for the dominant ideological message of late capitalism: there are no higher causes worth sacrificing for; instead, look inward, recreate yourself, explore your potentials.
Žižek's thesis that hysteria, the subject's refusal to fully identify with its interpellated role and the question 'why am I what you say I am?', is the most elementary, objective form of ideological critique.
Žižek's thesis that clinical categories like hysteria are always historically specified, what counts as pathology versus normality shifts with ideology, as illustrated by the reversal in psychoanalytic attitudes to sexual fidelity.
Althusser's mechanism by which ideology assigns subjects their symbolic identity ('you are my wife, you are a professor'); hysteria is the elementary undermining of interpellation by asking 'but why am I what you say I am?'
as “perversion as the obscene support of power”
Contrary to 68-era celebrations of perversion as subversive, Žižek argues that perversion is always the hidden, obscene other side of every power structure, because the pervert has answers and does not question.
as “subject as excess / subject without substance”
The subject, like a photon whose mass is entirely velocity, has no substantial core, it exists only as an excess over any positive identity, which Žižek links to Hegel's formula 'subject is not substance'.
as “objet petit a / object a”
Lacan's object-cause of desire, described here as a paradoxical entity that exists only as excess, analogous to a photon whose entire mass comes from velocity, not from any substance at rest.
Žižek follows Lacan in insisting that enjoyment is not a basic quantum plus an added surplus but is in itself an excess, there is no 'basic enjoyment' beneath the surplus.
as “materialist Christianity”
Žižek's self-description for a reading of Christ not as cosmic saviour but as a being who would understand suffering from the inside, one who gets the joke, opposed to a transcendent god who 'was not there'.
Žižek's name for the first Hegelian analytical move: isolate one feature that appears pathological or marginal, tear it from the organic whole, and use it as the privileged lens through which to re-read the totality.
Against empiricist contextualism, Žižek invokes the Hegelian notion that true universality is reached by radically abstracting one pathological feature from a totality and re-establishing the whole from that distorting angle.
Implicitly present in the discussion of symbolic identity, interpellation, and the question of whether god 'was there' at Auschwitz, the symbolic order that assigns identity and validates meaning.
Stories he reaches for 12
Jean-Pierre Dupuy was present the day after Fukushima when the Japanese government briefly considered evacuating 30–40 million people from Tokyo, illustrating the scale of change required to handle ecological catastrophe.
“japanese government was in a total panic. they thought that they will have to evacuate the entire tokyo area. 30 to 40 million people.”
Malcolm X rejected Afrocentrism, arguing that the destruction of roots, signified by the X replacing the slave name, was a unique chance for a new freedom rather than a wound to be healed by invented continuity.
“malcolm x, x means we don't have roots, we cannot return to roots, they are destroyed, and this gives us a unique chance of new freedom.”
When audiences applauded Stalin, he would stand and join the applause, unlike Hitler who simply received it, signalling 'I am not the master, I serve the historical cause,' illustrating Stalinist as opposed to fascist logic of authority.
“whenever people applaud to stalin, he stands up and joins the applause. the message is, i am one with you, i'm not the master, i'm a servant.”
Even in the worst Gulag years, inmates were assembled annually to sign a collective telegram wishing Stalin a happy birthday, impossible under Nazism because Stalinist ideology still required universal participation in reason, even from its victims.
“in a gulag camp, all inmates were brought together and they all had to sign a telegram to stalin wishing him all the best.”
A painting in a Soviet gallery shows Krupskaya having sex with a young communist; the title is 'Lenin in Warsaw'. A visitor asks where Lenin is; the guide answers: 'Of course, Lenin is in Warsaw, that's why he is doing this here.'
“why this title? where is Lenin? and the guide says, of course, Lenin is in Warsaw. that's why he's doing this here.”
In synagogue the rabbi and a rich merchant each declare themselves 'nothing before God'; a poor ordinary Jew does the same, whereupon the merchant kicks the rabbi and says 'who does this nobody think he is to say he is nothing?'
“but who is this guy? this is nobody, he can say, who does he think that he can just say that he is also nothing?”
At a round table, Rushdie responded to being accused of betraying his Indian origins by saying his two crucial Indian influences were Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Austen for Mumbai middle-class life, Dickens for Indian poverty. Žižek takes this as the model of true universality.
“jane austen is the middle-class mumbai life i come from as to poverty in india today, it's oliver twist and so on. that's the true universality.”
Marcel hears his grandmother's voice in abstraction for the first time via telephone and notices she sounds like a vulgar, senile old woman; when he visits her in person the impression is not dispelled but intensified, illustrating Hegelian brutal abstraction.
“when he hears for the first time grandmother's voice in its abstraction... he all of a sudden noticed what a vulgar, stupid old lady she is.”
Beckett's short play Catastrophe, written in solidarity with Václav Havel, ends with the victim-actor raising his head to look at the applauding audience, implicating them (and the dissident event itself) in the same logic of spectacle and power they claim to oppose.
“when you stage this in theater, are you not participating in the same idea... when we are at the big dissident event of solidarity with prisoners, are we not in some sense participating in the same process.”
The US military sought proposals for bullets that biodegrade and contain seeds so that plants grow where they hit the ground, allowing one to 'bomb a country to make it green'.
“imagine bomb a country and you can say we really want to make it green. we will just bomb it to make it green, full of plants with no waste left on the ground.”
Soros spends the first half of his day in ruthless financial speculation and the second half in humanitarian activities, embodying the coincidence of the problem and its remedy.
“soros stands for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation, combined with its counteragent, the humanitarian worry about catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy.”
Tom Cruise's role as a misogynist sex-guru in Magnolia is the exception in his filmography that, when taken as the key, unlocks the whole persona, illustrating Hegelian brutal abstraction applied to cinema.
“what if we take this as the key to his entire personality? and it gets very interesting.”
Works invoked 12
Philosophy of Right book
Usually read as Hegel's endorsement of a conservative corporate state, but Žižek reads it via the Owl of Minerva as a description of a social order already dissolving, not a blueprint for the future.
Communist Manifesto book
Žižek cites the 'all that is solid melts into air' passage to argue that Marx was more right than he knew, the dissolution extends even to nature and gender identity.
The Unnamable book
Žižek describes Not I as a stage version of The Unnamable, both representing the extreme reduction of subjective identity.
Finnegans Wake book
Dismissed as arrogant, 'what an arrogance to give something to do to literary analysts for 400 years', in contrast to Beckett.
Not I play
Žižek calls it Beckett's single greatest play: subjectivity reduced to a mouth, a stage version of The Unnamable.
The grandmother-telephone episode is used as the key illustration of Hegelian brutal abstraction: hearing a voice in isolation distorts the organic whole and produces a new, truer totality.
Gulag: A History book
Anne Applebaum's anti-communist history; Žižek cites it as the source for the detail about Gulag inmates signing birthday telegrams to Stalin, noting even an anti-communist source confirms this.
Catastrophe play
Beckett's short play written in solidarity with Havel; Žižek praises it as showing the movement of abstraction, from police interrogation to theatrical spectacle to the audience itself, implicating all spectators in the same logic.
Malone Dies book
Part of Beckett's trilogy; Žižek notes its historical context (post-WWII displaced populations) while arguing Beckett achieves a concrete universality by abstracting away from that context.
Magnolia film
Tom Cruise's role as a misogynist sex guru is used as a Hegelian 'pathological exception' that re-illuminates his entire star persona.
Gandhi (film) film
Žižek says 'I hate Gandhi and all that bullshit'; the performance is presented as a false image of saintly wisdom corrected by viewing it through the lens of Sexy Beast.
Sexy Beast film
Ben Kingsley's brutal gangster role is the pathological exception that allows a re-reading of his Gandhi performance, illustrating Hegelian brutal abstraction.
People invoked 25
Franz Kafka positive
Listed alongside Beckett and Andrei Platonov as one of the three great writers of the 20th century in Europe.
Marcel Proust positive
The telephone/grandmother episode from In Search of Lost Time is Žižek's central literary illustration of Hegelian brutal abstraction.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as a good friend and 'very good theorist of catastrophes'; used as an eyewitness source on the Fukushima crisis.
Emilie Morin positive
Wrote a book demonstrating that Beckett's work is saturated with political context and references; Žižek praises it as convincing.
George Soros negative
Used as the paradigmatic example of the philanthropist-speculator who embodies the coincidence of the problem and its remedy; not personally attacked but ideologically analysed as symptomatic.
Mentioned in passing as another thinker who has quoted the synagogue 'I am nothing' joke.
Jacques Lacan positive
Key theoretical source for the discussions of objet a, surplus enjoyment, and the subject; Žižek consistently draws on Lacanian categories throughout the lecture.
Louis Althusser positive
Author of the concept of interpellation which Žižek uses as the target of hysterical questioning.
Frank Ruda positive
Žižek's close friend and intellectual interlocutor; praises Ruda's book on Hegel's concept of the Pöbel as indispensable and credits him with correcting the standard Marxist reading of Hegel.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek says he is 'in good relations' with Butler personally but disputes her politically: she accurately describes late capitalist subjectivity but mistakes that description for a revolutionary critique.
Tim Cook negative
Mentioned as one of the major capitalists who fanatically supported transgender causes, illustrating that such support fits capitalist subjectivity rather than being revolutionary.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned in the context of a possible distinction between Badiou and Lacan on whether the subject requires an object; Žižek is uncertain but treats Badiou as a serious interlocutor.
Andrei Platonov positive
Listed alongside Beckett and Kafka as one of the three great European writers of the 20th century; said to operate at the same level of materialist abstraction.
Named as the dissident figure in solidarity with whom Beckett wrote the play Catastrophe.
Samuel Beckett positive
Žižek's primary literary example in this lecture; calls him one of three great European writers of the 20th century (with Kafka and Platonov) and a materialist Platonist who achieves concrete universality through abstraction.
Malcolm X positive
Žižek admires Malcolm X's rejection of Afrocentric root-seeking; the X as erasure of slave name is read as a positive gesture of freedom from identity.
Žižek says 'I'm not a Foucauldian' and 'I don't agree with him', but acknowledges Foucault is 'not an idiot' and cites his observation on psychoanalytic norm-setting as apt.
Žižek says he doesn't like Rushdie ('too liberal for me now') but acknowledges one good anecdote: Rushdie's claim that Jane Austen and Dickens are his key Indian influences is the model of true universality.
General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party; cited as the most rhetorically horrible example of a Stalinist show trial in which the victim provided a rational self-condemnation.
Bill Gates negative
Exemplifies the same philanthropic-capitalist logic as Soros: ruthless digital monopolist and simultaneously the greatest humanitarian in history.
Cited as the source of the Cromwell 'I will free you even if I have to kill you all' quotation.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for emphasising the comic dimension of Christ's arrival on earth via the metaphor of a small figure slipping in behind a curtain instead of a king entering in majesty.
James Joyce negative
Dismissed as 'boring, bling' and Finnegans Wake as an act of arrogance; Žižek prefers Beckett over Joyce as the more serious writer.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek both affirms and critiques Marx: Marx was more right than he knew (capitalism dissolves even nature and gender), but his residual historical teleology must be abandoned to remain faithful to him.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical reference; Žižek defends Hegel as the most open thinker ever against liberal-idealist caricatures, and reads the Philosophy of Right via the Owl of Minerva passage as describing a vanishing order rather than a blueprint.
What it argues
Hegel as an open, future-oriented thinker against liberal and Marxist teleological misreadingsHysteria as the elementary form of ideological critique versus perversion as power's obscene supportSurplus enjoyment and the paradox of self-humiliation conferring ideological authorityCapitalist subjectivity and the co-optation of gender fluidity by late capitalismBeckett's materialist abstraction and concrete universality as critical methodThe coincidence of opposites in contemporary ideology (biodegradable bullets, philanthropic billionaires)The Stalinist versus fascist logic of universality and guilt
Dialectical moves 10
“The very thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses — the bullet is also the seed, the financial speculator is also the humanitarian.”
Contemporary ideology operates by presenting the agent of destruction as simultaneously the cure, which Žižek analyses as a pathological coincidence of opposites.
“Far from being the most rigid idealist, Hegel is perhaps the most open thinker we have ever had.”
The reversal corrects the liberal caricature of Hegel as a totalising rationalist by reading the Owl of Minerva passage as a radical acknowledgement that philosophy cannot anticipate the future.
“Precisely where Marx was most right, he was right to such an extent that he could not even imagine how right he is — and that is why he was also wrong.”
Marx's failure was not that he was wrong but that he underestimated his own insight; he should have extended his dissolution-of-stable-forms thesis to nature and sexuality themselves.
“Perversion is not subversive — it is the hidden, obscene other side of every power structure.”
The 68-era celebration of perversion as liberation is inverted: perversion, because it has answers and does not question, is the secret support of authority rather than its transgression.
“The truly subversive position is not the perverse one but the hysterical one — the questioning of knowledge.”
Against the romanticisation of transgression, Žižek argues that the humble, neurotic question 'why am I what you say I am?' is more radically destabilising than any perverse act.
“Enjoyment is in itself an excess — there is no basic enjoyment of which surplus enjoyment is merely the supplement.”
The reversal dissolves the intuition that enjoyment has a natural baseline: for Lacan (and Žižek), jouissance is constitutively excessive, never a satisfied need.
“The apparent self-humiliation — 'I am nothing' — is precisely what gives one an extraordinary position of authority.”
Self-abasement before universality is not humble but is the mechanism through which the subject arrogates to itself the position of speaking for the universal.
“To understand Elizabethan England today, you have to read Shakespeare — not the other way around.”
Great works of art do not require historical context to be understood; rather, they provide the lens through which historical context becomes intelligible.
“The problem of Stalinism is precisely that it was never able to build a simple efficient bureaucratic state — which is why it needed purges all the time.”
Žižek inverts the standard critique of Stalinism-as-bureaucracy: Stalinism's horror arose not from too much bureaucracy but from too little, from its failure to achieve functional impersonal administration.
“The plus in LGBT+ is not merely a placeholder for unlisted groups — one can identify with the excess itself, be plus as such.”
The Hegelian inversion: the remainder or excess of any classificatory scheme is not an oversight to be filled in but the very site of subjectivity, the subject just is the plus.
Claims 15
asserts
Hegel is the most open thinker we have ever had — his claim that the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk means philosophy can only describe a dissolving order, leaving the future radically open.Hegel's philosophy of history and political philosophy
asserts
To remain faithful to Marx today we must move beyond Marx, especially his residual historical teleology, precisely because he was more right than he knew.Marx and Marxist theory
asserts
The transgender movement is not inherently revolutionary but fits perfectly the dynamic of late capitalist subjectivity with its infinite plasticity.transgender politics and capitalism
reframes
Judith Butler's account of gender performativity correctly describes modern late capitalist subjectivity rather than offering a genuinely revolutionary alternative.Judith Butler's gender theory
asserts
Perversion is not subversive; it is always the hidden, obscene underside of every power structure.perversion and power
asserts
Hysteria — the elementary question 'why am I what you say I am?' — is the true, objective form of ideological critique, superior to the perverse celebration of 68.hysteria, ideology critique, and the legacy of 1968
rejects
The model of total non-representative local democracy does not work in a globalised society without an efficient state providing basic infrastructure.participatory/council democracy
asserts
Stalinism, unlike Nazism, remained part of European Enlightenment in that even its victims were expected to participate in universal reason and confess their guilt.Stalinism vs. fascism and Enlightenment universalism
asserts
The apparent self-humiliation of white anti-racist multiculturalists ('we are nobody') confers upon them a position of ideological authority and surplus enjoyment.identity politics and white liberal self-abasement
asserts
Beckett is a materialist Platonist: rather than depicting concrete historical situations, he abstracts the Idea — the form of existential anxiety — which is why his work survives and speaks beyond its context.Beckett's literary method and politics
asserts
The proof of greatness in a work of art is that it survives abstraction from its original historical context.aesthetics and the test of universality
asserts
Market mechanisms alone cannot address the scale of the ecological crisis because catastrophic scenarios require rapid collective action that markets cannot provide.ecology and market solutions
asserts
Today we may need to return from Marx back to Hegel on the question of social exclusion, because the Hegelian Pöbel better captures the situation of immigrants and the unemployed than the Marxist proletariat.Hegel, Marx, and social exclusion
asserts
Political correctness, in the very manner it protests against violence, reproduces violence in its own operation.political correctness
asserts
The use of victimhood as a position of power — as in some strands of #MeToo — is a logic analogous to the surplus enjoyment of self-humiliation.victimhood politics and MeToo
Quotes 15
“the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses”Slavoj Žižek · coincidence of opposites / ideological structure
“either hegel was a total idiot or we should apply this also to his philosophy of right. hegel is not presenting there the way future society should be. he's describing a model which is literally like vanishing, dissipating between his fingers.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's openness and the misreading of Philosophy of Right
“if we want to remain faithful to marx, we have to move further here.”Slavoj Žižek · critique and fidelity to Marx
“hysteria is the elementary form of critique of ideology at its most elementary, objective level.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as ideology critique
“the basic hysterical question is, but why am i what you are saying that i am? this elementary doubt.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria and interpellation
“perversion is not subversive. perversion is always the hidden, obscene other side of every power structure.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion and power
“when lac speaks about surplus enjoyment, it's not we have a basic enjoyment and then a surplus enjoyment. basic enjoyment is simple pleasure, it's not enjoyment for lacan. enjoyment is in itself an excess.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment / jouissance as constitutive excess
“subject is not substance. subject is in itself an excess.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian subject as excess
“the proof of the greatness of a work of art is precisely that it survives the abstraction from its context.”Slavoj Žižek · universality and art
“to understand elizabethan england today, you have to read shakespeare — not the other way around.”Slavoj Žižek · art as key to history, not vice versa
“the moment you can answer why you are in love, it's by definition not love.”Slavoj Žižek · love, faith, and the structure of belief
“i am well aware of discrete power relations, why it's not innocent to assert your identity. but the hidden bias of those who pretend to say we have no right to assert our identity is that this apparent self-humiliation gives them an extraordinary position of authority.”Slavoj Žižek · self-humiliation and ideological authority / surplus enjoyment
“true hegelians are not thinkers of the concrete in the sense of put it in its context. no, the first step is always a brutal abstraction — you take one feature which even appears pathological, and by tearing out this feature you denaturalize all of it.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian method / brutal abstraction
“beckett is, in a platonic sense, abstracting from historical context the idea — a concrete universality relatively independent from context.”Slavoj Žižek · Beckett as materialist Platonist
“i would like to live in a nice alienated society where some invisible bureaucratic network organises basic things so i can do what i like to do, watch movies, read books, write books.”Slavoj Žižek · defence of alienation / bureaucratic socialism
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
thanks very much. no, i... h quite seriously, and you will soon see why i am very grateful. for this invitation, i'm proud to be here and this is not like empty talk. on the contrary. when i talk directly and praise people, i like to insult them and so on. what i mean is that in today's world, i notice this in especially in the united states. this ivy league and other big universities in our domain. our. specific. domain of our type of humanity they are. not. interesting. nothing of any interest happens there. what happens today in philosophy in harvard and princeton? nothing. you have to look around to smaller colleges. and the same i heard, it's here, for example, the old big name, oxford, cambridge, and so on. no, places like this one is where i'm proud to be, especially with my good friend. frank and now comes a little bit of irony, you will get back. you know, when he went into this... eh. different versions of how people introduce me and so on, you know. and he just added another version which was also already repeated, that you improv on the difficulty to make an introduction,? you begin with, i don't want to make a long introduction, then you get caught in these reflections and you are even longer than all others. second thing, but this is a very interesting philosophical topic, more in the freudian sense of small details which tell a lot. for example, what you try to do, this is not an interesting subject, how people introduce me, but remember years ago, i think we talked about it. for example, to classify an epoch. bye. the titles of the books which predominate, which are typical hegemonic for that epoch. i remember when i was young, it was after 68. gradual crisis of marxism, if some of you are old enough, you may have the same vague memories like already from the 70s onward, nobody dared to do a book simply marxist aesthetics. you have to do something like... elements for a future marxist aesthetics or prolegomena for like we are not yet there, you know. and even some leftist parties that emerged at that point were not communist party, but group to organize a communist movement and sov were distance. then comes the period which i really, although i was even at some point a little bit identified with it that i find disgusting, 80s and 90s. it was this typically post-modern distinction between poetic title explanatory subtitle. like the one i remember is like beat me harder, darling, madochism in feminist poetry of the 19th century or whatever. you know, you have to do something poetic in the title, you know. frankly, i don't have a theory what. comes after that, but it's an interesting choice. now, for some insults to my really good friend frank. we are really friends and i will give you a proof which will embarrass him. because this is my crazy universe. that's why i get so many problems with political correctness and so on. for me, you can be polite, kind towards enemies. i think that precisely not you scotland, but the british way of life has this. how to speak in very nice words but really insult totally. your. my idea is that a true friend is the one to whom you can say very, even vulgar, brutal things. and the implied logic, it is a very beautiful one maybe. it's the logic of, you see, we are such good friends that we can talk like this and still be friends. and i can go pretty far here since we are talking today about beckett. i think maybe i went just a little bit too far, you remember? he is now happily married, recently with a wife, eve, who is a specialist in beckett. and, sorry, it's my nature. you know, it's like the scorpio who bites the frog. i couldn't resist it. i told him, i know what your wife told you after you spent the first night together. you know what? the most famous line from beckett. try again, fail again, fail better. sorry, that's the price of being associated to me. what i really want to say is what important role. he played. really in my development, first, if you... are not convinced that hegel is our contemporary. read his book on hegel's, it's translated into english, on hegel's concept of rebel. you know, i sorry, here is a lady with a small child. you know what my dream? i have this masochist dream. one would have been to ask me, please talk a little bit less loud. the girl wants to fall asleep and so on. i have all the time this, or my ultimate masochist dream is that a phone rings and i excuse myself and calmly for 10 minutes totally private met. unfortunately, we are not. we are the last surviving race. i think if the present trend of political correctness goes on, such an introduction as i made now will no longer be possible. i want to say that his book on hegel's notion of pe, rebels, he mentioned it, those who are not part of. social edifice with no specific social positions, but as excluded stands for the universal dimension. he! frank? avs the usual marxist reading that hegelian rebel is just a preparatory step for marxist proletariat working class. but hegel was still blah blah blah. no, if anything, today with immigrants, unemployed and so on, those without full citizenship, we have in a way even to return from marx back to hegel. and maybe he is also doing an extremely interesting stuff on determinism, freedom and so on. maybe even at another level, we should return to hegel. hegel is usually read and interpreted, especially in today's image of liberal hegel as the crazy idealist, reason encompasses everything, we know everything. i think hegel is maybe the most open thinker that we ever. god. a proof. you know? one of the best, segel is usually dismissed politically as kind of a soft liberal fascist. yes, human freedoms, but there must be a firm social hierarchy to each his their own position and so on. it is usually to prove this point. one usually makes reference to his philosophy of right, which effectively describes such a system. but wait a minute. it's one of the most often quoted passages of hegel, and people simply ignore its implication, namely, when hegel says, you know, in that famous passage that marx tried to turn around, that that the all of minerva, that is to say philosophical thought, takes off only in the evening to paint gray on gray. hegel's idea is that philosophy cannot see into the future. it can only describe, bring out. the conceptual structure of a a certain social order which is already slowly disintegrating, approaching its end. so either hegel was a total idiot or we should apply this also to his philosophy of right. hegel is not presenting there in this corporate model the way future society should be. he's describing a model which is literally like vanishing, dissipating between his fingers. hegel is absolutely open towards the future. here we should return two hegel. against this remainder, let's call it historical teleology in marx, it's a beautiful construct, the one of marx, but what marx still believed is that we are in unique point of history, this, you know. the zero point crisis, but then we can already see the turn towards some more emancipated society and so on. and if we can learn. anything from the 20th century, from the catastrophes of stalinism and so on, is that notes that the emancipatory large movement. communist revolutions and so on were also caught fully in this tragic dialectics. so precisely if we want to remain, and both of us still want to, if we want to remain faithful to marx? we have to move further here. sorry for this long introduction. now i will speak a lot about philosophy, hope it will not be too boring, so i tried to squeeze in between here and there some nasty problematic passages. i would like to begin with how in our age of ideological decay, when inconsistency is less and less considered a reproach the old philosophical motif of the coincidence of the opposites acquires a new specific form. oppressive brutality is presented as its opposite as an instrument of liberation. an example which did strike me as shocking. it's again just a detail, but i think it tells a lot. it's almost a kind of a symptom of where we stand. is there anything more brutal and destructive than a direct military conflict killing, shooting somebody? yes, of course there are worse things like chemical and nuclear attacks. but for most of us, shooting at the enemy is still the paradigm of aggression. should we then be surprised? that the us military is now searching for, this is not a joke, i was so shocked, it's really happening, is searching for bullets which would be biodegradable and contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. if you don't believe me, here is a report from some websites. firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations. but after the job is done, the environment suffers. not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, they can also prove to be a hazard to local wildlife, not to mention the impact that chemical residues can have on future plant growth. the u military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. a couple of years ago already, the us department of justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable ammunition loaded with special seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants. this effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components and so on and so on. quote these bullets are first to be used for training but then imagine a country imagine bomb a country and you can say we really want to make it green. we will just bomb it to make it green, full of plants with no waste left on the ground. but let me generalize this paradox. the same structure, the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses, is widely visible in today's ideological landscape. take the figure of the. great philanthropist george soros. soros stands! first we should not forget this. for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation, combined with its counteragent, the humanitarian worry about catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. so even i read soros's daily routine is marked by a self-eliminating counterpoint. the first half of the day. his. work is devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities, such as providing finances for cultural and democratic activities in post-communist countries and so on and so on. and basically all these modern humanitarian billionaires are doing the same. take bill gates, the most brutalless attempts to monopolize the digital field, but at the same time the greatest humanitarian in the history of humanity and so on and so on. even in ecology it's happening today. how the very companies which like excon, all those oil companies, are now presenting themselves as... the only one who can save us. so the model is simply let's use. market mechanisms to combat its destructive. the destructive effects of the market itself. now, i have nothing against this in principle. of course, we should tax heavily pollutants and so on and so on. but simply with the scope of ecological problematic that we get today, this cannot work. because the prospect of great catastrophes that we are facing today does not allow to this approach. you know you must act quickly, like i always mention this example, my good friend and very good theorist of catastrophes, jean-pierre dupuy, dup-p, why? as part of some european delegation, he was there the day after fukushima. catastrophe in japan. and he told me that for a couple of hours, japanese government was in a total panic. they thought that they will have to evacuate the entire tokyo area. 30 to 40 million people. okay. they decided not to. but what i'm saying is let's imagine, and i'm sure there will be catastrophes where something like this will be necessary. are we aware to what extent we will have to change our lives to make such large and fast movements of populations feasible. i mean, we have to install new forms of international cooperation and so on and so on. i'm not here just criticizing the left, sorry, the right. i'm even criticizing the left. now i will tell you something that you will not like politically. i'm more and more convinced that... after the fall of traditional social democracy, communism, of course, there is one last remainder of an alternate project in the heart of remaining radical left, this idea of non-representative local democracy. you know, like we all gather together, we organize collectively how to organize schooling, healthcare and so on and so on. i think this absolutely does work in today's conditions. we live in a global society and even in order to have, where they work, it's wonderful, this type of local cooperatives, you have to have a very efficient state to provide the basis, electricity, energy, and so on and so on. so that's why, to provoke my friends, leftist friends, i made, and it caused a shock. a year ago or so in madrid, a talk entitled a plea for bureaucratic socialism. now you will say, are you crazy? this is stalinism. no, if you read stalinism, the problem of stalinism is precisely that it was never able to build an simple efficient bureaucratic state, which is why it needed purges all the time. and what i like about bureaucracy, it's precisely what people condemn as utter alienation and so on. would you like to live in a city, small society, where every afternoon you have to debate how to organize kindergarten, this, that? no, i would like to live in a nice alienated society where some invisible bureaucratic network occurs, which also should be controlled in some way. sense of course, organizes basic things so i can do what i like to do, watch movies, read books, write books and so on. i think this model of total prerepresentative local democracy is very problematic. let's not get lost in politics let's just conclude from this very brief introduction that and now comes philosophy that we live in. crazy times. oui. make marksx actual. but for this very reason we should criticize marx. what do i mean by this? the problem with marx is that precisely where he was right, he was right to such an extent that he couldn't. even imagine how right he is. and that's why he no i will give you a simple example. you know the famous lines from communist manifesto that with capitalism everything solid melt into thin air, all stable forms are dissolved and so on, all stable hierarchies and so on. but would marx have even imagined where we are today? for marx, sexual gender coordinates were still stable. that even that is today experienced as something fluid and so on. or even nature itself. for marx, nature was still, in the typical modern european way, with all its storms, wild things and so on, the stable background of our being. we humans are promethean, we change things and so on. but somehow marx still counted that. nature is this. vast reservoir of forces and so on is somehow strong enough to incorporate or to neutralize the destructive effects of our activity. now, as we all know living in the era called anthropocene and so on. you see, marx was much more right. he should have also added in communist manifesto not only social forms, but even what we perceive as natural forms, life on earth, our gender sexual identities are much more fluid and natural and so on and so on. so this, i think... compels us to. think. more radically to question many. presuppositions. ah, another nasty thing i want to provoke you politically. marx mentions in communist manifesto also their all old patriarchal relations with developed capitalism are undermined, rendered fluid and so on and so on. and that's why i think with all my respect for transgender movement and so on that's why i am not surprised that transgender movement is so immensely popular among great! corporate figures of the united states you remember when months before. trump was elected. i mean, this is, i think, one of the reasons why he won. the main topic of big left liberal media like new york times and so on, what to do with transgender toilets. is it two, three, is it single toilet and so on and so on. what made me a little bit suspicious is that all of them, jeff bezos, bill gates, named them, all of them. fanatically, even the worst capitalists like who is now i forgot after steve jobs, the boss of apple, tim cook or who? they all fully supported it. i mean, we should accept it. yes, of course, but that's another topic. transgender be too. but they are not, i claim, inherently revolutionary. they fit perfectly the dynamic of state capitalist subjectivity with this infinite plasticity and so on and so on. that's why i also have a problem, although personally we are in good relations with my big philosophical nemesis is judith butler. i agree with her. she gives a correct description of what is happening today. you know, we no longer have or less and less this binary logic, predetermined sexual roles. we rediscover, recreate, repeat, reconstruct, invent our identities. my only problem is, what's so revolutionary about it? my reproach to her is that in some sense she is simply describing modern late capitalist typical modern late capitalist subjectivity. we live in a unique era where today if we can... construct this in a naive way. i simplify it. today, ideology. and i don't mean a personalized ideology, but in the most elementary sense, when you're growing up and all the time later, what society is telling you to be. in a very naive way. what? does it expect from you? my god, it's no longer obey your father, sacrifice yourself. it's what i ironically like to call spiritualized hedonism or enlightened western buddhism. basically, the message is, there are no higher causes. worth sacrificing for, enjoy life, but not in a stupid sense, look into yourself, recreate yourself, explore your potentials and so on and so on. sometimes this also has very comic effects. for example, recently, not so recently, years ago, i was in argentina. and i was told there a wonderful story from a historian of psychoanalysis, how things changed because as foucault, i don't agree with him, i'm not a foucauldian, but he's not an idiot, one him. so michel foucault noticed in a very nice way somewhere how the key decision, power decision of a psychoanalyst is what is a symptom that? has to be. analyzed as a clinical case and what is just a normal state that doesn't deserve to be analyzed. you know, somebody comes to you, if you are an analyst, i am not, and you can guess why. once a student, this is not a joke, unfortunately, once a student in new york told me, i would like to go to you in psychoanalysis. my idea was, you are really mad. seriously, they told me that a very simple stupid example. half a century ago and more very traditional, stupid point, simplistic, with regard to promiscuity. if you were a man or a wife, promiscuous sleeping around with others, it was considered pathological, something to be interpreted. you know, the idea was, what are you running from? why this fear from stable relations, whatever, did you have ed problems, blah, blah. today they told me it's the opposite. i'm not joking. if you are faithful to your wife or husband, get, oh my god, you have a traumatic fixation. this has to be. think, so you know what's the first lesson here? that. it's not just stupid. game of words. hiere ja, ich. historical. forms of hysteria are always historically specified. in what sense? in the sense that hysteria is my old lachenian and the center marxian thesis, hysteria is the elementary form of critique of ideology. critique at ideology at its most elementary. objective. level because as you already i think indicated incidentally, i will not go into it, but that's what nonetheless makes me some kind, at least i hope. some kind of a feminist because hysteria is feminine. if you want this opposition in types of pathology, obsessive neurosis is more masculine. there are even among some clinicians that i know, great debates of. can there be even a feminine obsessiveessional neurotic? but what i want to say is, what is hysteria at its most elementary? it. an undermining of interpellation. by interpellation, i mean this mechanism elaborated by louis elser of ideological identity, like society or figures of authority are telling you who you are, your symbolic identity. you are my wife, you are professor, you are a pupil, you are revolutionary, you are a communist, whatever. and you recognize yourself in it. but the basic hysterical question is, but why am i what you are saying that i am? this elementary doubt. it it's much more interesting skepticism. it's not about reality. are things really like that? the question is, who am i? am i really? you know, it's the old juliet from romeo and juliet question. what's in that name? am i that name? and so on and so on. and i claim that here we should move further from the revolutionary, i always doubt if there were so revolutionary 60s, 68, and so on. because there, and this is, i wonder why people do not analyze it more, this is one dark anti-feminist undercurrent. i know i was there, not participating too much, but i remember this tendency. undercurrent of 68. it was. mocking hysteria as feminine, they provoke the master, but it's really a desperate call for a new master and so on. and they were celebrating perversion. perversion, that's it. as even freud, in a very inappropriate way put it once, perverts really do go to the end what hysterics only dream about. i think, for reasons that i will not develop now, that this and jacques lacan and freud are very clear at this point, no, perversion is not subversive. perversion is always the hidden, obscene other side of every power structure. every power structure, needs. some kind of a support in perversion and maybe. what is happening now with trump and so on is that simply this perverse underground is coming directly. into the open. but the true undermining of authority is the hysterical one is this questioning and i think. and this now will bring me to. philosophy, death. this questioning why am i what you are telling me that i am? i mean, you can detect this questioning. even! and it's a very deep question. which is usually dismissed by men as woman annoys me and so on. this proverbial boring. questioning of a man from a woman when they are a couple, tell me why do you love me? it's a very good question. because there is no answer to it. the paradox is that the moment you can answer it, it's by definition not love. my god, love is not like, you know. sorry for vulgarity. i have three women. ah, this one has good legs, nice smile, this one has nice eyes, this one, whatever, and then, oh my god, this one has four points, the other only one, no. you know, let's go a little bit in theology here. intelligent theologologists are dogmatic in a correct marxist way. they know very well that if you say, i believe in jesus christ because i've studied comparatively all religions and, my god, christianity has the best argument. if we were to be in medieval times, if somebody claims that, i would say, burn him immediately. the proper christian answer is, yes, there are reasons to believe in christ. but to understand these reasons you have to believe. and it's exactly the same with love. you can say why you are in love. that woman, and you always notice details, nice smile, whatever, the way she laughs. but these details appear as cause of love only when you are in love. to others, they are just ordinary features and so on and so on. now, you will ask me, okay, this is some kind of religious erotic mystique. what does this have to do with marxism? it has because marx is claiming exactly in contrast to stalinism, although i'm not saying marx is innocent and so on, i mean about stalinism. about proletarian position that you frank mentioned that for marx, it's not the way stalin describes it. social analysts look at history and see a tendency. oh my god, look, proletariat is now weak, but the future belongs to proletarians. this is the winning horse, so let's join the working class no, the point of marx is that marx's theory is not a neutral theory. it's a theory which appears to you in its truth only if you occupy a certain subjective proletarian position. but okay, what i want to do here now it's something else. tool. elaborate a little more this structure of subjectivity implied here. subjectivity as such is this self-questioning. there is no subjectivity without this self-questioning. that's why perverts, and perverts by definition don't... question things, which is why every good psychoanalyst will tell you it's very difficult to cure in psychoanalysis perverts because they have answers. they know what's good for you, even if you suffer in it, you know. perverts are typical politically totalitarians. like... you in, not you you, but in england, i mean great britain. there was this wonderful formula which is pure perversion by... charles i before orwell, no, orwell, sorry cromwell did the good thing. chop, chop his cat. didn't he? it's quoted, i think, by hannah arendt. he made this wonderful statement, my god, i will set free the british people even if i have to kill them all or whatever, you know. this idea of i know better than you. what is good for yourself? precisely when i appear a cruel bastard to you, i'm really. working for your own good. it's the position of knowledge. that's why i don't have time to go into it, but just to make you see how things are connected here. that's why, for example, i was tempted as an old stalinist, when you applauded me briefly after this worthless introduction. to join the applause. because you know why? i'm sorry if you know this old joke of mine, but... this is the difference between stalinism and fascism, similar as they may appear. a fascist master is a pure master. hitler gives a speech, people applaud. hitler just stands up and receives the applause. check it up if you don't believe me in old. documents from communist party congress, whenever people applaud to stalin, he stands up and joins the applause. you know, the message is, i am one with you, i'm not the master, i'm a servant. i serve you, the people. we are all together servants to the historical cause. and this changes subjectively everything. let me improvise a little bit to amuse you. maybe that's why, for example, you have something in stalinism that is unimaginable in fascism. i read this, not from some crazy left-winger, from one who is very much anti-communist, and appelbaum gulak. do you know that in the worst years of gulak, 4950. every year on stalin's birthday, in a gulag camp, all inmates were brought together and they all had to sign a telegram to stalin wishing him all the best. can you imagine something like this? it doesn't work in nazism. on hitler's birthday, they collect jewels in auschwitz. now, you know why not? it's very interesting. because stalinism is, in all its horror, part of european enlightenment, which means that even if you are the worst scum, traitor, whatever, still you are able to participate in universal reason and see what kind of a scam you are. no, no, it's literally read their horrible reading. the minutes of... interrogations in stalin's horrible show trials. it's incredible how, for example, the one maybe most horrible rhetorically, i read it, on rudolf slánský in czechoslovakia, general secretary of the party, he was then tortured and. his interrogation goes like this. the prosecutor tells him, explain to us, how did you, i simplify it, how did you become an enemy of the people? and he answers, already in my youth, my parents installed in me the hatred of the working class. and you know, he gives an entire objective explanation explanation. so it's as if... you are, even if you are the worst. trokai traitor, you're at the same time. vermin, piece of shit, stalinist use, all this, but at the same time you participate in universal reason and you can see, of course this is all a charade, it's a horrible spectacle, but the truth about yourself in fascism this doesn't work. it would have been easy for hitler to organize a mega trial of leading jewish figures in germany where they would have to confess the jewish plot or whatever. this is meaningless in the nazi universe. why? maybe nazism is here a little bit worse nonetheless, because, and that's the horror of nazi anti-semitism. you don't have to prove anything to a jew. you just have to prove that he is a jew. you are guilty literally, fully for existing, for what you are. but let's go on. so, perverts, no. but... the truly subversive position is the hysterical one of questioning knowledge. and here. i think. we can clearly see that progressive legacy of modern, even cartesian philosophy. of the notion of cogito. thinking subject and so on and so on. now let's improvise this a little bit. what do i mean by this? let me take a strange example. i'm sorry if some of you know it in some of my books, i mentioned it already, the last books a little bit. i will not be ironic as people accuse me against lgbt+. i will try to convince you precisely what is great in this movement. y plus lgbtq whatever plus. you have, here i'm critical of you, not of you, but of british empiricism. the predominant reading is the ironically i say this, british empiricist one. they claim we so that the idea is this one. in patriarchy, we have this binary logic. you have two main positions. masculine, feminine defined as gender roles, but this is binary patriarchal oppression. there are many gender roles, positions, and we have to be open. so they propose instead of the binary and then maybe you tolerate some exceptions, the list of all possible. sexual positions. the state of new york even proposed, i think, 33 or 34 identities. but, bi, bigender, transgender, asexual, and so on, all of them. but they want to be careful, that's the usual explanation of plus. they want to be careful and claim, but what if our list is not complete? because as we know, all classifications tend to be incomplete. what if a group will emerge, will say, wait a minute, we are not on the list there. so, to keep this open, you add a plus. and it's not my invention. i know some from australia, i forgot their names. there is an lgbt plus group which did something, now we are in frank's domain, very hegelian. their point is, but i want to be plus as such, directly. don't take plus as just a shorthand for all other. you can be plus itself. in the sense of you in your subjective position identify with the excess itself. i am, and this is the best definition of the subject, i claim. this is what hegel means when he says subject is not substance. subject is in itself an access. this means... uh... this. status means something beautifully paradoxical. we don't have time to go into it. once i compared it with the status of... st stupid here. i think it's a photon in microparticle physics. namely, the idea is this one. every particle has a certain basic. must it must be something. and then, of course, this mass grows, at least in the way it affects environment if this element moves, for example. this bottle. has a certain weight. and if i put it like this, it exerts a certain pressure. on the surface of this table. but if i drop it, and it doesn't then explode. if i drop it from high above, if it hits the table, with a certain higher velocity, its pressure will be much greater. if instead of this we put a heavy. peak of iron. if i gently put this iron on this table, nothing happens. if i drop it from two yards up, maybe it will break the table. but then... the definition of some particles like photon, so i read is that they are the paradox of elements whose entire substance, mass, comes from velocity. it's not mass plus what is added through movement. they are only as excess. you know what i mean? like if you take away this surplus way which comes from movement, they are nothing. and i think that human desire and subjectivity, to cut a long story short, are something like this. and when la. talks about when jacques lacan talks about so-called object a, object cause of desire, it's pre-end of surplus enjoyment. plus, it's precisely a paradoxical entity which exists only in excess. when lac speaks about surplus enjoyment, it's not we have a basic enjoyment and then a surplus enjoyment. basic enjoyment is simple pleasure, it's not enjoyment for lacon. enjoyment is in itself an excess. and now... let's go further. to amuse you a little bit. i will try to develop it now. uh. uh. here, maybe you can correct me later, maybe i'm simplifying things, but i undoubtedly end, but like i would like to draw, maybe there is, maybe not, i'm not so sure, a difference here. it doesn't matter if i really hit with this alain badiou view or not. the difference between badu and laconbe. but but you subject is without an object. what makes subject subject is precisely it's not embedded in and so on. for lacon, there is no subject without an object. even the most abstract subjectivity, the hegelian pure self-re-relating or cartesian cogito. need to be sustained by an object. but this object is not a paradoxical object, it's precisely this object as excess, as surplus enjoyment. now, all this was an excuse to tell you a wonderful old jewish joke. which, i'm so sorry, i will disappoint you, it's not a dirty joke. i like to do things which today in the united states require, as they say, trigger warning, you know, now in american academia. and once i even proposed that a student should enter. the room prior to my clash with the great poster, trigger warning, trigger warning. so the joke is a well-known one quoted already by derrida, by others. i'm sure you probably know it. on saturday in a synagogue, jews are. saying things to each other, not confession in christian sense, they don't confess but okay so the rabbi powerful figure says, oh my god, i am nothing. i'm not worthy of your attention, i'm nothing. then a rich jewish merchant stands up and says, oh my god, i'm also nothing, i'm not worthy of your attention and so on. then a poor ordinary jew stands up and says, god, i'm also nothing. and then the rich merchant kicks the powerful rah and says, but who is this guy? this's nobody he can say, who does he think that he can just say that he is also nothing? and so on. it's a very interesting joke because what you find in this joke is the idea, precisely, that's the point of this joke, that to say you are nothing. is not as innocent. it may appear as an utter self-humiliation. but! this very gesture of claiming. of denying all your particular features, of abandoning your identity, bring object a brings a surplus enjoyment now i will give you. precisely a very problematic example. it's moral. adapted to united states situation but i think it's a nice way. involved in many polemics and debates in the united states states. i encountered this problem. i noticed how, first, it's a very simple observation. some people even claim it's not true, but more and more i it's true. you know? how the more you are perceived as marginal. powerless the more you are it's not only tolerated but you are even required to assert your. particular identity, like to be vulgar. if. so-called native americans. i say so called because i have many friends among them and they hate this term. you know what? i'm sorry if i repeat an old joke. you know what one of them told me? he told me, i much prefer to be called indian. than native american because native american means what? we are native, natural, and you white people are cultural or what? it if you call us indians, at least. at least the name indian is a reminder of your white man's stupidity. you thought that you were in india, you know. no, they have an incredible sense of how false this... patronizing respect towards them is, you know, like we white people exploit nature, but when native americans dig a mountain, they first ask the spirit of the mountain for permission and so on, all that stuff. they hate this. one of them wrote a wonderful book, short essay, notebook sorry, trying to prove that native americans killed more buffaloes and burned more forest. than all white men combined. no, i mean, probably not true, but his point was we are tired of this false. so what do i want to say here? that in this line, okay, native americans, if you return to your tribal traditions, oh, wonderful, wonderful, they're restoring their culture and so on. then. black okay. still absolutely okay. especially if i always thought it was the worst ideology. if you like that route. idea, you know, you go to africa, oh, i discovered a tribe from where? my grand grandparents were incidentally, that's why i like malcolm x. he was absolutely opposed to it. he said, malcolm x, x means we don't have roots, we cannot return to roots, they are destroyed, and this gives us a unique chance of... new freedom. but what i want to say is that, and then it goes on. japanese orientals, yes, still. you begin to smell bad, but still. italians species. germans, i and then at the end, white protestants. if you say we want to assert our identity. you are practically immediately denounced as white supremacistacists, fascist and so on. i am well known of discrete power relations, why it's not innocent to assert your identity. that's not my point. my point is... the hidden bias of those who pretend to. say, you know, this eternal self-witting, like you say, we. our identity embodies oppression of others and we don't have the right to assert our identity. but you know what i noticed systematically again and again? how? okay, they absolutely prohibit to their own group. white anti-racist multiculturalists to assert their identity. no, and then, you know, the more you are away, marginalized, the more you can. but it's so evident. from all the debates where i participated, of how this apparent self-humiliation, we are guilty of, blah blah blah, gives them an extraordinary position of authority precisely as negating their particular identity, they stand for universality. they always... i was so often. for example, after that thing happened, you know, indians didn't want to be called indians, but native americans, there was immediately a good white guy who told them, you shouldn't call them this. is you are falling into the trap of white whatever, whatever, whatever. it's incredible to what extent. and this is the surplus enjoyment. i apparently humiliate myself. who am i? nobody. but you know very well the nobody gives me a certain ideological preference and so on. and what i am afraid, we will not have time to go into this today. uh... what i am so afraid. is dead. in parts of me too and so on, you have a similar logic of. using victimhood, proclaiming yourself powerless gives you an immense power. i mean, i often am. maybe because i talk in decent ways often. i am often a victim of this. like people attack me, they stop even interrupt my lectures and so on and claim that. they talk from the position of victim, i'm making fun of victims, but it's so clear that in the concrete academic constellation when they say this, they act as the pure figures of brutal power. i'm not even allowed to defend myself and so on. now i want to make a step further. if you, uh... allow me and tell you. another jewish joke. which works even better. it's a very sad tragic. joke? but again, no. yeah it also tells us how? a true atheist. which doesn't mean simply ignoring religion. should! a true atheist, which is for me this pure hysterical subject, denying its own identity, should refer to divinity. uh. it's a joke about auschwitz and incidentally this shocks me all the time. i think that how. when things are really tragic. horrible. beyond tragedy. often, the only appropriate think to do is comedy. it's not... easy comedy. like that you laugh. but, you know, when things get really crazy, so what do i mean here? let's go on. i mean, i know numerous jewish jokes about auschwitz, even from my recent past of my ex-country, yugoslavia. i know that survivors of srebrenica have series of extremely vulgar jokes making fun of themselves being slaughtered by by seri at that point. but okay, that's not the point. the point is that this is a joke. to understand this joke, you only have to remember this old theological motif. god died at auschwitz. the idea is dead. what happened in auschwitz and elsewhere with holocaust is so horrible that. if god was there, it was too much for him. god couldn't have tolerated that. so the idea is god died in auschwitz or godgods not. there. uh gott was not there. it couldn't have been. the idea of god somehow regulating our universe is too much for it. so now comes the really evil part. it takes place in paradise. a group of jews who died at auschwitz it's paradise. they have a nice time, they sit on a nice bench in a meadow and tell dirty jokes about their experience in auschwitz. and one of them says this mocking way says to another jew, they are all dead.? you remember jacob how? when they were dragging us towards the gas chambers, you slip down and hit your head and died even before entering the gas chamber. and they all laugh, they make fun of. and then down comes the beauty. of this joke. then god, he has a break, god himself, walks around to have a short break and listens to these jokes. and. looks at them in a strange way and one of the jews asked him, tell us, our master, what's wrong? and he says, sorry. i don't understand this. and then an old drew steps towards him, embraced him and said, don't worry, of course you don't understand it because you were not there. you know. but you know what's the beauty of this joke? it's that it's not about, it turns around the standard clichliche, you were not there. because you couldn't tolerate such horror. no, the idea is, of course god can tolerate the horror. god doesn't hate the joke. that's what escapes god, that you can even make fun of. and i don't have time to go into it now, but i would have said that. this is my materialist, i'm a total materialist christianity, that with christ you get a totally different type of joke. christ is not a savior. he is one. from. would understand this joke. i always think that we should read the new testament as a comical book. like, didn't you get it? how... for example, often christ says something, the disciples don't understand it, and then christ says, i will tell you a parable. and then this parable is totally confusing and you need to read it back even to understand the parable. you know who knew this, so that you will not accuse me of going into cheap obscenities. it's kierkegaard who emphasized this. he has the most beautiful metaphor for what christ's arrival on earth means. he said, imagine there is a court castle, big hall in a castle, all the earth... all the curtains, blah, blah, and you expect the king to arrive in all his majesty. and then behind a small curtain, a small dock. r as if by mistake. on the scene and he says, this is the arrival of christ. no, things are much more complex here, but okay, let's now in the remaining time, sorry, because they're gone, no, and i almost... forget to we didn't yet come to beckett, no but it's already one hour and i almost wanted to say maybe the title of this talk should have been a version of my old joke that i quote all the time, read in my first book, you must know it. the standard, one of the most beautiful, complex soviet anti-communist jokes about lenin in warsaw. you know it. that is the myth. of course, it's a joke. there is in soviet times, in a gallery, an exhibition, and there is a painting there. on the painting, it's nadezhda krupskaya. in the middle of a sex act, fact like crazy by a young communist communeal member, and the title of the painting is lenin in warsaw. and a surprised visitor asks, but why this title? where is lenin? and the guide says, of course, lenin is in warsaw. that's why he's doing this here. so maybe i can say this title is like something like, you know, be is in warsaw. i cannot mention him, but it's still the title. no. now comes, if you allow me just a little bit, i will condense it, the philosophical part. m. the lesson of this empty-hysterical subject ich. praising. abstraction. true hegelians are not thinkers of the concrete in the sense of let's have a concrete analysis to understand the phenomenon you have to put it in its context and so on. no, the first step is always to understand a situation. it's a brutal abstraction. you take privilege, one feature which even appears pathological, marginal, and then and and then by bye... tearing out this feature you denaturalize all of it. the organic whole is lost and then you re-establish totality but from this standpoint, from the standpoint of this feature. to go quickly. i will give you an example which i already used in two, three my books, but it's very clear, so forgive me. for some of you, i'm repeating myself. yeah. there is a wonderful passage in marcel proust's in search of a lost time, where marcel, not pr, but the narrator, the figure, for the first time speaks with his talks to his grandmother via phone. he calls her to paris. something weird happens. when he hears for the first time grandmother's voice in its abstraction, not as part of her totality, entire personality, he all of a sudden noticed what a vulgar, stupid old lady she is. there is no klaram, she is senile and so on and so on. now, to dispel this impression, he goes to paris quickly to... meet her, to talk with her. and then things get even worse. why? because, of course, he notices all other features, but they are all spoiled by his experience of the voice. he notices how vulgar she is, senile, whatever, and so on and so on. this would be the passage to hegelian concrete totality. abstract totality is this organic, grandmother and so on. concrete totality is when you tear out one feature and to take a look at the totality, but from the distorting angle of this feature. now you will say, this is a bad joke, what has this to do with theory? well, marx and freud are doing exactly the same thing. when marx says, that economic crisis is the key to understand capitalism. it's precisely this. take a phenomenon which may appear an excess, it provides the key. freud is saying the same. pathological phenomena are the key to understand normal functioning of the mind. before i go, do i have some 10 minutes maximum? that's compromise five. my god, never did i felt so objectivized and terrorized as with this. no, i will try to be very brief, okay. first, i wanted to tell you that... i can but... larger! development here, but i will. yeah. uh. i will reduce myself to one example, how you can do the same thing, this was just meant pedagogically, with movie actors. take tom cruise, he plays a certain person. state persona and then there is one role. usually some courageous guy, whatever is, you know. but there is one exception. did you see his movie, no, his movie, he's one of them, magnolia, where he plays a very vulgar guy who gives some vulgar how to fuck them, screw them sexual education classes. what if we take this as the key to his entire personality? and it gets very interesting. or even a better example. ben kingsley. i hate gandhi and all that bullshit. and you know, this wise man that he plays. but did you see him in love beast? where he's this extremely brutal, vulgar guy. what if we need these lenses to perceive even his gandhi? then you notice that gandhi was not such an innocent guy and so on. and any honest indian will tell you this. that's why gandhi is now losing terribly in india. okay. now, to conclude, i'm saying that if there is. a writer of, i will try to be as short as possible, of abstraction. beckett. because on the one hand, beckett is not abstract in the sense, in the way he is perceived as abstract, you know, like with some abstract existential problems out of politics and so on and so on. uh. years ago. uh. a lady called émilie morin. wrote a wonderful book, i think even in the 90s, on beckett and politics. and she convincingly demonstrates how beckett's entire work is penetrated through and through by political context references and so on. for example, what is for me his high point, the three big novels, you know, especially malone dies and nibal. malone dies, it's all about the the historical context is the french situation and all around there in europe immediately after world war ii, you know, millions of people displaced from prisons to be repatriated, whatever. this is the background of malone dies, but now comes the genius of beckett. what he does cannot but appear to a traditional marxist as mystification. like instead of depicting a concrete historical situation, he provides just an abstract image of this anxiety situation. but i think he is, i wonder, frank, if you would agree, that he is, i'm sorry of disturbing you, you are probably thinking about more pleasant things. is that? becket is in this sense a platform. on. materialist. instead of going deeply into historical context, he, in a platonic sense, abstracts from it the idea. and this idea is not just the universality, but it's a concrete universality, the form of it, which is relatively independent from context. that's why. and, you know, if you want the obvious example of beckett and abstraction, it's of course what is for me his single greatest play, the short one, not i. where even... it's like, i claim a stage version of unnameable, where even subjective identity is reduced to a mouth. but beckett at his most subversive is in one of his even later short plays. called catastrophe and it's such an evil wonderful play because officially it fits, it was written i think in mid 70s or when václav havel was condemned by polish communist regime and it's in solidarity with him, blah blah. but if you look at this play, it's incredible in its power of abstraction. the ep. uh moves at three levels. first! you have on stage, if you know the play, otherwise download it on youtube, you find 10 versions. just on stage, it looks that somebody is somebody is questioning a prisoner who is there standing like that. then you soon got it that it's really a play about police interrogation and that the director is... basically terrorizing the actor, move your hand and so on and so on. then at the end. when people applaud. the guy who was totally broken down, the prisoner or actor playing the victim, just raises his hand and looks into it with a clear message, but you are doing the same. so from this concrete cheap dissident or communist horror, beckett's message is... but when you stage this in theater, are you not participating in the same idea and a clear, even step further when you. when we are at the big dissident event of solidarity with prisoners and so on, are we not in some sense oslo? participating in the same. in the same process. you know, it's this movement of abstraction. in beckett, which is, i think today... today actual more than ever these are questions to be raised today in what sense for example this would be a beckettian analysis of political correctness. in what sense political correctness? protesting against violence, but in the way it approaches it. reproduces violence on its own. so again. i. not five minutes, but six, seven minutes. i have much more, it will all be in my next book because i was always convinced that again. sorry to disappoint you, beckett is the one, not joyce. joyce is boring, bling, and so on. finnegan's wake is, my god, what an arrogance to give something to do to literary analysts, what did you say, for 400 years and so on. no, i am all for beckett. i think there are three great writers of the 20th century in europe. beckett! kafka and andrei platonov. the russian. and they all move at this same level. but to really conclude now, this is connected to what you said in introduction, this concrete universality and so on.? that the first step towards serious analysis, that was my philosophical point, is to break the spell of this, you know, you can only understand things by locating them in their historical context. no, first, i think that the proof of the greatness of a work of art is precisely that it survives the abstraction from its context. what is so great about shakespeare is that i'm ready to go so far. it's not it's not only that. it's not true that you have to understand all the details of elizabethan england to understand shakespeare. it's quite on the contrary. to understand elizabethan england today, you have to read shakespeare. and the mystery of shakespeare is precisely this power of abstraction, how he survives his own era. you can have modern shakespeare, you know all these versions of shakespeare's stage in today which sometimes work even which sometimes work even better. that's for me the true historicity, the true multiculturalism. i don't like salman rni. he's too liberal for me now. but once, and this is the concluding sentence, once i was with him at a round table and somebody attacked him for betraying his indian origins, like you are now to integrated into the west, blah, blah. and he gave a nice answer, i must admit it. he said, no, absolutely crucial influence of my work are two indian writers. you know which two? jane austen and charles dickens. he said, jane austen is the middle-class bomb life, mumbai life i come from as to poverty in india today, it's oliver twist and so on and so on. that's the true universality, this type of universality. i'm sorry, i was too long. on the underhand fuck you, i'm not sorry. thank you very.
thanks very much. no, i... h quite seriously, and you will soon see why i am very grateful. for this invitation, i'm proud to be here and this is not like empty talk. on the contrary. when i talk directly and praise people, i like to insult them and so on. what i mean is that in today's world, i notice this in especially in the united states. this ivy league and other big universities in our domain. our. specific. domain of our type of humanity they are. not. interesting. nothing of any interest happens there. what happens today in philosophy in harvard and princeton? nothing. you have to look around to smaller colleges. and the same i heard, it's here, for example, the old big name, oxford, cambridge, and so on. no, places like this one is where i'm proud to be, especially with my good friend. frank and now comes a little bit of irony, you will get back. you know, when he went into this... eh. different versions of how people introduce me and so on, you know. and he just added another version which was also already repeated, that you improv on the difficulty to make an introduction,? you begin with, i don't want to make a long introduction, then you get caught in these reflections and you are even longer than all others. second thing, but this is a very interesting philosophical topic, more in the freudian sense of small details which tell a lot. for example, what you try to do, this is not an interesting subject, how people introduce me, but remember years ago, i think we talked about it. for example, to classify an epoch. bye. the titles of the books which predominate, which are typical hegemonic for that epoch. i remember when i was young, it was after 68. gradual crisis of marxism, if some of you are old enough, you may have the same vague memories like already from the 70s onward, nobody dared to do a book simply marxist aesthetics. you have to do something like... elements for a future marxist aesthetics or prolegomena for like we are not yet there, you know. and even some leftist parties that emerged at that point were not communist party, but group to organize a communist movement and sov were distance. then comes the period which i really, although i was even at some point a little bit identified with it that i find disgusting, 80s and 90s. it was this typically post-modern distinction between poetic title explanatory subtitle. like the one i remember is like beat me harder, darling, madochism in feminist poetry of the 19th century or whatever. you know, you have to do something poetic in the title, you know. frankly, i don't have a theory what. comes after that, but it's an interesting choice. now, for some insults to my really good friend frank. we are really friends and i will give you a proof which will embarrass him. because this is my crazy universe. that's why i get so many problems with political correctness and so on. for me, you can be polite, kind towards enemies. i think that precisely not you scotland, but the british way of life has this. how to speak in very nice words but really insult totally. your. my idea is that a true friend is the one to whom you can say very, even vulgar, brutal things. and the implied logic, it is a very beautiful one maybe. it's the logic of, you see, we are such good friends that we can talk like this and still be friends. and i can go pretty far here since we are talking today about beckett. i think maybe i went just a little bit too far, you remember? he is now happily married, recently with a wife, eve, who is a specialist in beckett. and, sorry, it's my nature. you know, it's like the scorpio who bites the frog. i couldn't resist it. i told him, i know what your wife told you after you spent the first night together. you know what? the most famous line from beckett. try again, fail again, fail better. sorry, that's the price of being associated to me. what i really want to say is what important role. he played. really in my development, first, if you... are not convinced that hegel is our contemporary. read his book on hegel's, it's translated into english, on hegel's concept of rebel. you know, i sorry, here is a lady with a small child. you know what my dream? i have this masochist dream. one would have been to ask me, please talk a little bit less loud. the girl wants to fall asleep and so on. i have all the time this, or my ultimate masochist dream is that a phone rings and i excuse myself and calmly for 10 minutes totally private met. unfortunately, we are not. we are the last surviving race. i think if the present trend of political correctness goes on, such an introduction as i made now will no longer be possible. i want to say that his book on hegel's notion of pe, rebels, he mentioned it, those who are not part of. social edifice with no specific social positions, but as excluded stands for the universal dimension. he! frank? avs the usual marxist reading that hegelian rebel is just a preparatory step for marxist proletariat working class. but hegel was still blah blah blah. no, if anything, today with immigrants, unemployed and so on, those without full citizenship, we have in a way even to return from marx back to hegel. and maybe he is also doing an extremely interesting stuff on determinism, freedom and so on. maybe even at another level, we should return to hegel. hegel is usually read and interpreted, especially in today's image of liberal hegel as the crazy idealist, reason encompasses everything, we know everything. i think hegel is maybe the most open thinker that we ever. god. a proof. you know? one of the best, segel is usually dismissed politically as kind of a soft liberal fascist. yes, human freedoms, but there must be a firm social hierarchy to each his their own position and so on. it is usually to prove this point. one usually makes reference to his philosophy of right, which effectively describes such a system. but wait a minute. it's one of the most often quoted passages of hegel, and people simply ignore its implication, namely, when hegel says, you know, in that famous passage that marx tried to turn around, that that the all of minerva, that is to say philosophical thought, takes off only in the evening to paint gray on gray. hegel's idea is that philosophy cannot see into the future. it can only describe, bring out. the conceptual structure of a a certain social order which is already slowly disintegrating, approaching its end. so either hegel was a total idiot or we should apply this also to his philosophy of right. hegel is not presenting there in this corporate model the way future society should be. he's describing a model which is literally like vanishing, dissipating between his fingers. hegel is absolutely open towards the future. here we should return two hegel. against this remainder, let's call it historical teleology in marx, it's a beautiful construct, the one of marx, but what marx still believed is that we are in unique point of history, this, you know. the zero point crisis, but then we can already see the turn towards some more emancipated society and so on. and if we can learn. anything from the 20th century, from the catastrophes of stalinism and so on, is that notes that the emancipatory large movement. communist revolutions and so on were also caught fully in this tragic dialectics. so precisely if we want to remain, and both of us still want to, if we want to remain faithful to marx? we have to move further here. sorry for this long introduction. now i will speak a lot about philosophy, hope it will not be too boring, so i tried to squeeze in between here and there some nasty problematic passages. i would like to begin with how in our age of ideological decay, when inconsistency is less and less considered a reproach the old philosophical motif of the coincidence of the opposites acquires a new specific form. oppressive brutality is presented as its opposite as an instrument of liberation. an example which did strike me as shocking. it's again just a detail, but i think it tells a lot. it's almost a kind of a symptom of where we stand. is there anything more brutal and destructive than a direct military conflict killing, shooting somebody? yes, of course there are worse things like chemical and nuclear attacks. but for most of us, shooting at the enemy is still the paradigm of aggression. should we then be surprised? that the us military is now searching for, this is not a joke, i was so shocked, it's really happening, is searching for bullets which would be biodegradable and contain seeds for new plants to grow where the bullet hits the ground. if you don't believe me, here is a report from some websites. firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations. but after the job is done, the environment suffers. not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, they can also prove to be a hazard to local wildlife, not to mention the impact that chemical residues can have on future plant growth. the u military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue. a couple of years ago already, the us department of justice sent out a public request for proposals to develop biodegradable ammunition loaded with special seeds to grow environmentally beneficial plants. this effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components and so on and so on. quote these bullets are first to be used for training but then imagine a country imagine bomb a country and you can say we really want to make it green. we will just bomb it to make it green, full of plants with no waste left on the ground. but let me generalize this paradox. the same structure, the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses, is widely visible in today's ideological landscape. take the figure of the. great philanthropist george soros. soros stands! first we should not forget this. for the most ruthless financial speculative exploitation, combined with its counteragent, the humanitarian worry about catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. so even i read soros's daily routine is marked by a self-eliminating counterpoint. the first half of the day. his. work is devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities, such as providing finances for cultural and democratic activities in post-communist countries and so on and so on. and basically all these modern humanitarian billionaires are doing the same. take bill gates, the most brutalless attempts to monopolize the digital field, but at the same time the greatest humanitarian in the history of humanity and so on and so on. even in ecology it's happening today. how the very companies which like excon, all those oil companies, are now presenting themselves as... the only one who can save us. so the model is simply let's use. market mechanisms to combat its destructive. the destructive effects of the market itself. now, i have nothing against this in principle. of course, we should tax heavily pollutants and so on and so on. but simply with the scope of ecological problematic that we get today, this cannot work. because the prospect of great catastrophes that we are facing today does not allow to this approach. you know you must act quickly, like i always mention this example, my good friend and very good theorist of catastrophes, jean-pierre dupuy, dup-p, why? as part of some european delegation, he was there the day after fukushima. catastrophe in japan. and he told me that for a couple of hours, japanese government was in a total panic. they thought that they will have to evacuate the entire tokyo area. 30 to 40 million people. okay. they decided not to. but what i'm saying is let's imagine, and i'm sure there will be catastrophes where something like this will be necessary. are we aware to what extent we will have to change our lives to make such large and fast movements of populations feasible. i mean, we have to install new forms of international cooperation and so on and so on. i'm not here just criticizing the left, sorry, the right. i'm even criticizing the left. now i will tell you something that you will not like politically. i'm more and more convinced that... after the fall of traditional social democracy, communism, of course, there is one last remainder of an alternate project in the heart of remaining radical left, this idea of non-representative local democracy. you know, like we all gather together, we organize collectively how to organize schooling, healthcare and so on and so on. i think this absolutely does work in today's conditions. we live in a global society and even in order to have, where they work, it's wonderful, this type of local cooperatives, you have to have a very efficient state to provide the basis, electricity, energy, and so on and so on. so that's why, to provoke my friends, leftist friends, i made, and it caused a shock. a year ago or so in madrid, a talk entitled a plea for bureaucratic socialism. now you will say, are you crazy? this is stalinism. no, if you read stalinism, the problem of stalinism is precisely that it was never able to build an simple efficient bureaucratic state, which is why it needed purges all the time. and what i like about bureaucracy, it's precisely what people condemn as utter alienation and so on. would you like to live in a city, small society, where every afternoon you have to debate how to organize kindergarten, this, that? no, i would like to live in a nice alienated society where some invisible bureaucratic network occurs, which also should be controlled in some way. sense of course, organizes basic things so i can do what i like to do, watch movies, read books, write books and so on. i think this model of total prerepresentative local democracy is very problematic. let's not get lost in politics let's just conclude from this very brief introduction that and now comes philosophy that we live in. crazy times. oui. make marksx actual. but for this very reason we should criticize marx. what do i mean by this? the problem with marx is that precisely where he was right, he was right to such an extent that he couldn't. even imagine how right he is. and that's why he no i will give you a simple example. you know the famous lines from communist manifesto that with capitalism everything solid melt into thin air, all stable forms are dissolved and so on, all stable hierarchies and so on. but would marx have even imagined where we are today? for marx, sexual gender coordinates were still stable. that even that is today experienced as something fluid and so on. or even nature itself. for marx, nature was still, in the typical modern european way, with all its storms, wild things and so on, the stable background of our being. we humans are promethean, we change things and so on. but somehow marx still counted that. nature is this. vast reservoir of forces and so on is somehow strong enough to incorporate or to neutralize the destructive effects of our activity. now, as we all know living in the era called anthropocene and so on. you see, marx was much more right. he should have also added in communist manifesto not only social forms, but even what we perceive as natural forms, life on earth, our gender sexual identities are much more fluid and natural and so on and so on. so this, i think... compels us to. think. more radically to question many. presuppositions. ah, another nasty thing i want to provoke you politically. marx mentions in communist manifesto also their all old patriarchal relations with developed capitalism are undermined, rendered fluid and so on and so on. and that's why i think with all my respect for transgender movement and so on that's why i am not surprised that transgender movement is so immensely popular among great! corporate figures of the united states you remember when months before. trump was elected. i mean, this is, i think, one of the reasons why he won. the main topic of big left liberal media like new york times and so on, what to do with transgender toilets. is it two, three, is it single toilet and so on and so on. what made me a little bit suspicious is that all of them, jeff bezos, bill gates, named them, all of them. fanatically, even the worst capitalists like who is now i forgot after steve jobs, the boss of apple, tim cook or who? they all fully supported it. i mean, we should accept it. yes, of course, but that's another topic. transgender be too. but they are not, i claim, inherently revolutionary. they fit perfectly the dynamic of state capitalist subjectivity with this infinite plasticity and so on and so on. that's why i also have a problem, although personally we are in good relations with my big philosophical nemesis is judith butler. i agree with her. she gives a correct description of what is happening today. you know, we no longer have or less and less this binary logic, predetermined sexual roles. we rediscover, recreate, repeat, reconstruct, invent our identities. my only problem is, what's so revolutionary about it? my reproach to her is that in some sense she is simply describing modern late capitalist typical modern late capitalist subjectivity. we live in a unique era where today if we can... construct this in a naive way. i simplify it. today, ideology. and i don't mean a personalized ideology, but in the most elementary sense, when you're growing up and all the time later, what society is telling you to be. in a very naive way. what? does it expect from you? my god, it's no longer obey your father, sacrifice yourself. it's what i ironically like to call spiritualized hedonism or enlightened western buddhism. basically, the message is, there are no higher causes. worth sacrificing for, enjoy life, but not in a stupid sense, look into yourself, recreate yourself, explore your potentials and so on and so on. sometimes this also has very comic effects. for example, recently, not so recently, years ago, i was in argentina. and i was told there a wonderful story from a historian of psychoanalysis, how things changed because as foucault, i don't agree with him, i'm not a foucauldian, but he's not an idiot, one him. so michel foucault noticed in a very nice way somewhere how the key decision, power decision of a psychoanalyst is what is a symptom that? has to be. analyzed as a clinical case and what is just a normal state that doesn't deserve to be analyzed. you know, somebody comes to you, if you are an analyst, i am not, and you can guess why. once a student, this is not a joke, unfortunately, once a student in new york told me, i would like to go to you in psychoanalysis. my idea was, you are really mad. seriously, they told me that a very simple stupid example. half a century ago and more very traditional, stupid point, simplistic, with regard to promiscuity. if you were a man or a wife, promiscuous sleeping around with others, it was considered pathological, something to be interpreted. you know, the idea was, what are you running from? why this fear from stable relations, whatever, did you have ed problems, blah, blah. today they told me it's the opposite. i'm not joking. if you are faithful to your wife or husband, get, oh my god, you have a traumatic fixation. this has to be. think, so you know what's the first lesson here? that. it's not just stupid. game of words. hiere ja, ich. historical. forms of hysteria are always historically specified. in what sense? in the sense that hysteria is my old lachenian and the center marxian thesis, hysteria is the elementary form of critique of ideology. critique at ideology at its most elementary. objective. level because as you already i think indicated incidentally, i will not go into it, but that's what nonetheless makes me some kind, at least i hope. some kind of a feminist because hysteria is feminine. if you want this opposition in types of pathology, obsessive neurosis is more masculine. there are even among some clinicians that i know, great debates of. can there be even a feminine obsessiveessional neurotic? but what i want to say is, what is hysteria at its most elementary? it. an undermining of interpellation. by interpellation, i mean this mechanism elaborated by louis elser of ideological identity, like society or figures of authority are telling you who you are, your symbolic identity. you are my wife, you are professor, you are a pupil, you are revolutionary, you are a communist, whatever. and you recognize yourself in it. but the basic hysterical question is, but why am i what you are saying that i am? this elementary doubt. it it's much more interesting skepticism. it's not about reality. are things really like that? the question is, who am i? am i really? you know, it's the old juliet from romeo and juliet question. what's in that name? am i that name? and so on and so on. and i claim that here we should move further from the revolutionary, i always doubt if there were so revolutionary 60s, 68, and so on. because there, and this is, i wonder why people do not analyze it more, this is one dark anti-feminist undercurrent. i know i was there, not participating too much, but i remember this tendency. undercurrent of 68. it was. mocking hysteria as feminine, they provoke the master, but it's really a desperate call for a new master and so on. and they were celebrating perversion. perversion, that's it. as even freud, in a very inappropriate way put it once, perverts really do go to the end what hysterics only dream about. i think, for reasons that i will not develop now, that this and jacques lacan and freud are very clear at this point, no, perversion is not subversive. perversion is always the hidden, obscene other side of every power structure. every power structure, needs. some kind of a support in perversion and maybe. what is happening now with trump and so on is that simply this perverse underground is coming directly. into the open. but the true undermining of authority is the hysterical one is this questioning and i think. and this now will bring me to. philosophy, death. this questioning why am i what you are telling me that i am? i mean, you can detect this questioning. even! and it's a very deep question. which is usually dismissed by men as woman annoys me and so on. this proverbial boring. questioning of a man from a woman when they are a couple, tell me why do you love me? it's a very good question. because there is no answer to it. the paradox is that the moment you can answer it, it's by definition not love. my god, love is not like, you know. sorry for vulgarity. i have three women. ah, this one has good legs, nice smile, this one has nice eyes, this one, whatever, and then, oh my god, this one has four points, the other only one, no. you know, let's go a little bit in theology here. intelligent theologologists are dogmatic in a correct marxist way. they know very well that if you say, i believe in jesus christ because i've studied comparatively all religions and, my god, christianity has the best argument. if we were to be in medieval times, if somebody claims that, i would say, burn him immediately. the proper christian answer is, yes, there are reasons to believe in christ. but to understand these reasons you have to believe. and it's exactly the same with love. you can say why you are in love. that woman, and you always notice details, nice smile, whatever, the way she laughs. but these details appear as cause of love only when you are in love. to others, they are just ordinary features and so on and so on. now, you will ask me, okay, this is some kind of religious erotic mystique. what does this have to do with marxism? it has because marx is claiming exactly in contrast to stalinism, although i'm not saying marx is innocent and so on, i mean about stalinism. about proletarian position that you frank mentioned that for marx, it's not the way stalin describes it. social analysts look at history and see a tendency. oh my god, look, proletariat is now weak, but the future belongs to proletarians. this is the winning horse, so let's join the working class no, the point of marx is that marx's theory is not a neutral theory. it's a theory which appears to you in its truth only if you occupy a certain subjective proletarian position. but okay, what i want to do here now it's something else. tool. elaborate a little more this structure of subjectivity implied here. subjectivity as such is this self-questioning. there is no subjectivity without this self-questioning. that's why perverts, and perverts by definition don't... question things, which is why every good psychoanalyst will tell you it's very difficult to cure in psychoanalysis perverts because they have answers. they know what's good for you, even if you suffer in it, you know. perverts are typical politically totalitarians. like... you in, not you you, but in england, i mean great britain. there was this wonderful formula which is pure perversion by... charles i before orwell, no, orwell, sorry cromwell did the good thing. chop, chop his cat. didn't he? it's quoted, i think, by hannah arendt. he made this wonderful statement, my god, i will set free the british people even if i have to kill them all or whatever, you know. this idea of i know better than you. what is good for yourself? precisely when i appear a cruel bastard to you, i'm really. working for your own good. it's the position of knowledge. that's why i don't have time to go into it, but just to make you see how things are connected here. that's why, for example, i was tempted as an old stalinist, when you applauded me briefly after this worthless introduction. to join the applause. because you know why? i'm sorry if you know this old joke of mine, but... this is the difference between stalinism and fascism, similar as they may appear. a fascist master is a pure master. hitler gives a speech, people applaud. hitler just stands up and receives the applause. check it up if you don't believe me in old. documents from communist party congress, whenever people applaud to stalin, he stands up and joins the applause. you know, the message is, i am one with you, i'm not the master, i'm a servant. i serve you, the people. we are all together servants to the historical cause. and this changes subjectively everything. let me improvise a little bit to amuse you. maybe that's why, for example, you have something in stalinism that is unimaginable in fascism. i read this, not from some crazy left-winger, from one who is very much anti-communist, and appelbaum gulak. do you know that in the worst years of gulak, 4950. every year on stalin's birthday, in a gulag camp, all inmates were brought together and they all had to sign a telegram to stalin wishing him all the best. can you imagine something like this? it doesn't work in nazism. on hitler's birthday, they collect jewels in auschwitz. now, you know why not? it's very interesting. because stalinism is, in all its horror, part of european enlightenment, which means that even if you are the worst scum, traitor, whatever, still you are able to participate in universal reason and see what kind of a scam you are. no, no, it's literally read their horrible reading. the minutes of... interrogations in stalin's horrible show trials. it's incredible how, for example, the one maybe most horrible rhetorically, i read it, on rudolf slánský in czechoslovakia, general secretary of the party, he was then tortured and. his interrogation goes like this. the prosecutor tells him, explain to us, how did you, i simplify it, how did you become an enemy of the people? and he answers, already in my youth, my parents installed in me the hatred of the working class. and you know, he gives an entire objective explanation explanation. so it's as if... you are, even if you are the worst. trokai traitor, you're at the same time. vermin, piece of shit, stalinist use, all this, but at the same time you participate in universal reason and you can see, of course this is all a charade, it's a horrible spectacle, but the truth about yourself in fascism this doesn't work. it would have been easy for hitler to organize a mega trial of leading jewish figures in germany where they would have to confess the jewish plot or whatever. this is meaningless in the nazi universe. why? maybe nazism is here a little bit worse nonetheless, because, and that's the horror of nazi anti-semitism. you don't have to prove anything to a jew. you just have to prove that he is a jew. you are guilty literally, fully for existing, for what you are. but let's go on. so, perverts, no. but... the truly subversive position is the hysterical one of questioning knowledge. and here. i think. we can clearly see that progressive legacy of modern, even cartesian philosophy. of the notion of cogito. thinking subject and so on and so on. now let's improvise this a little bit. what do i mean by this? let me take a strange example. i'm sorry if some of you know it in some of my books, i mentioned it already, the last books a little bit. i will not be ironic as people accuse me against lgbt+. i will try to convince you precisely what is great in this movement. y plus lgbtq whatever plus. you have, here i'm critical of you, not of you, but of british empiricism. the predominant reading is the ironically i say this, british empiricist one. they claim we so that the idea is this one. in patriarchy, we have this binary logic. you have two main positions. masculine, feminine defined as gender roles, but this is binary patriarchal oppression. there are many gender roles, positions, and we have to be open. so they propose instead of the binary and then maybe you tolerate some exceptions, the list of all possible. sexual positions. the state of new york even proposed, i think, 33 or 34 identities. but, bi, bigender, transgender, asexual, and so on, all of them. but they want to be careful, that's the usual explanation of plus. they want to be careful and claim, but what if our list is not complete? because as we know, all classifications tend to be incomplete. what if a group will emerge, will say, wait a minute, we are not on the list there. so, to keep this open, you add a plus. and it's not my invention. i know some from australia, i forgot their names. there is an lgbt plus group which did something, now we are in frank's domain, very hegelian. their point is, but i want to be plus as such, directly. don't take plus as just a shorthand for all other. you can be plus itself. in the sense of you in your subjective position identify with the excess itself. i am, and this is the best definition of the subject, i claim. this is what hegel means when he says subject is not substance. subject is in itself an access. this means... uh... this. status means something beautifully paradoxical. we don't have time to go into it. once i compared it with the status of... st stupid here. i think it's a photon in microparticle physics. namely, the idea is this one. every particle has a certain basic. must it must be something. and then, of course, this mass grows, at least in the way it affects environment if this element moves, for example. this bottle. has a certain weight. and if i put it like this, it exerts a certain pressure. on the surface of this table. but if i drop it, and it doesn't then explode. if i drop it from high above, if it hits the table, with a certain higher velocity, its pressure will be much greater. if instead of this we put a heavy. peak of iron. if i gently put this iron on this table, nothing happens. if i drop it from two yards up, maybe it will break the table. but then... the definition of some particles like photon, so i read is that they are the paradox of elements whose entire substance, mass, comes from velocity. it's not mass plus what is added through movement. they are only as excess. you know what i mean? like if you take away this surplus way which comes from movement, they are nothing. and i think that human desire and subjectivity, to cut a long story short, are something like this. and when la. talks about when jacques lacan talks about so-called object a, object cause of desire, it's pre-end of surplus enjoyment. plus, it's precisely a paradoxical entity which exists only in excess. when lac speaks about surplus enjoyment, it's not we have a basic enjoyment and then a surplus enjoyment. basic enjoyment is simple pleasure, it's not enjoyment for lacon. enjoyment is in itself an excess. and now... let's go further. to amuse you a little bit. i will try to develop it now. uh. uh. here, maybe you can correct me later, maybe i'm simplifying things, but i undoubtedly end, but like i would like to draw, maybe there is, maybe not, i'm not so sure, a difference here. it doesn't matter if i really hit with this alain badiou view or not. the difference between badu and laconbe. but but you subject is without an object. what makes subject subject is precisely it's not embedded in and so on. for lacon, there is no subject without an object. even the most abstract subjectivity, the hegelian pure self-re-relating or cartesian cogito. need to be sustained by an object. but this object is not a paradoxical object, it's precisely this object as excess, as surplus enjoyment. now, all this was an excuse to tell you a wonderful old jewish joke. which, i'm so sorry, i will disappoint you, it's not a dirty joke. i like to do things which today in the united states require, as they say, trigger warning, you know, now in american academia. and once i even proposed that a student should enter. the room prior to my clash with the great poster, trigger warning, trigger warning. so the joke is a well-known one quoted already by derrida, by others. i'm sure you probably know it. on saturday in a synagogue, jews are. saying things to each other, not confession in christian sense, they don't confess but okay so the rabbi powerful figure says, oh my god, i am nothing. i'm not worthy of your attention, i'm nothing. then a rich jewish merchant stands up and says, oh my god, i'm also nothing, i'm not worthy of your attention and so on. then a poor ordinary jew stands up and says, god, i'm also nothing. and then the rich merchant kicks the powerful rah and says, but who is this guy? this's nobody he can say, who does he think that he can just say that he is also nothing? and so on. it's a very interesting joke because what you find in this joke is the idea, precisely, that's the point of this joke, that to say you are nothing. is not as innocent. it may appear as an utter self-humiliation. but! this very gesture of claiming. of denying all your particular features, of abandoning your identity, bring object a brings a surplus enjoyment now i will give you. precisely a very problematic example. it's moral. adapted to united states situation but i think it's a nice way. involved in many polemics and debates in the united states states. i encountered this problem. i noticed how, first, it's a very simple observation. some people even claim it's not true, but more and more i it's true. you know? how the more you are perceived as marginal. powerless the more you are it's not only tolerated but you are even required to assert your. particular identity, like to be vulgar. if. so-called native americans. i say so called because i have many friends among them and they hate this term. you know what? i'm sorry if i repeat an old joke. you know what one of them told me? he told me, i much prefer to be called indian. than native american because native american means what? we are native, natural, and you white people are cultural or what? it if you call us indians, at least. at least the name indian is a reminder of your white man's stupidity. you thought that you were in india, you know. no, they have an incredible sense of how false this... patronizing respect towards them is, you know, like we white people exploit nature, but when native americans dig a mountain, they first ask the spirit of the mountain for permission and so on, all that stuff. they hate this. one of them wrote a wonderful book, short essay, notebook sorry, trying to prove that native americans killed more buffaloes and burned more forest. than all white men combined. no, i mean, probably not true, but his point was we are tired of this false. so what do i want to say here? that in this line, okay, native americans, if you return to your tribal traditions, oh, wonderful, wonderful, they're restoring their culture and so on. then. black okay. still absolutely okay. especially if i always thought it was the worst ideology. if you like that route. idea, you know, you go to africa, oh, i discovered a tribe from where? my grand grandparents were incidentally, that's why i like malcolm x. he was absolutely opposed to it. he said, malcolm x, x means we don't have roots, we cannot return to roots, they are destroyed, and this gives us a unique chance of... new freedom. but what i want to say is that, and then it goes on. japanese orientals, yes, still. you begin to smell bad, but still. italians species. germans, i and then at the end, white protestants. if you say we want to assert our identity. you are practically immediately denounced as white supremacistacists, fascist and so on. i am well known of discrete power relations, why it's not innocent to assert your identity. that's not my point. my point is... the hidden bias of those who pretend to. say, you know, this eternal self-witting, like you say, we. our identity embodies oppression of others and we don't have the right to assert our identity. but you know what i noticed systematically again and again? how? okay, they absolutely prohibit to their own group. white anti-racist multiculturalists to assert their identity. no, and then, you know, the more you are away, marginalized, the more you can. but it's so evident. from all the debates where i participated, of how this apparent self-humiliation, we are guilty of, blah blah blah, gives them an extraordinary position of authority precisely as negating their particular identity, they stand for universality. they always... i was so often. for example, after that thing happened, you know, indians didn't want to be called indians, but native americans, there was immediately a good white guy who told them, you shouldn't call them this. is you are falling into the trap of white whatever, whatever, whatever. it's incredible to what extent. and this is the surplus enjoyment. i apparently humiliate myself. who am i? nobody. but you know very well the nobody gives me a certain ideological preference and so on. and what i am afraid, we will not have time to go into this today. uh... what i am so afraid. is dead. in parts of me too and so on, you have a similar logic of. using victimhood, proclaiming yourself powerless gives you an immense power. i mean, i often am. maybe because i talk in decent ways often. i am often a victim of this. like people attack me, they stop even interrupt my lectures and so on and claim that. they talk from the position of victim, i'm making fun of victims, but it's so clear that in the concrete academic constellation when they say this, they act as the pure figures of brutal power. i'm not even allowed to defend myself and so on. now i want to make a step further. if you, uh... allow me and tell you. another jewish joke. which works even better. it's a very sad tragic. joke? but again, no. yeah it also tells us how? a true atheist. which doesn't mean simply ignoring religion. should! a true atheist, which is for me this pure hysterical subject, denying its own identity, should refer to divinity. uh. it's a joke about auschwitz and incidentally this shocks me all the time. i think that how. when things are really tragic. horrible. beyond tragedy. often, the only appropriate think to do is comedy. it's not... easy comedy. like that you laugh. but, you know, when things get really crazy, so what do i mean here? let's go on. i mean, i know numerous jewish jokes about auschwitz, even from my recent past of my ex-country, yugoslavia. i know that survivors of srebrenica have series of extremely vulgar jokes making fun of themselves being slaughtered by by seri at that point. but okay, that's not the point. the point is that this is a joke. to understand this joke, you only have to remember this old theological motif. god died at auschwitz. the idea is dead. what happened in auschwitz and elsewhere with holocaust is so horrible that. if god was there, it was too much for him. god couldn't have tolerated that. so the idea is god died in auschwitz or godgods not. there. uh gott was not there. it couldn't have been. the idea of god somehow regulating our universe is too much for it. so now comes the really evil part. it takes place in paradise. a group of jews who died at auschwitz it's paradise. they have a nice time, they sit on a nice bench in a meadow and tell dirty jokes about their experience in auschwitz. and one of them says this mocking way says to another jew, they are all dead.? you remember jacob how? when they were dragging us towards the gas chambers, you slip down and hit your head and died even before entering the gas chamber. and they all laugh, they make fun of. and then down comes the beauty. of this joke. then god, he has a break, god himself, walks around to have a short break and listens to these jokes. and. looks at them in a strange way and one of the jews asked him, tell us, our master, what's wrong? and he says, sorry. i don't understand this. and then an old drew steps towards him, embraced him and said, don't worry, of course you don't understand it because you were not there. you know. but you know what's the beauty of this joke? it's that it's not about, it turns around the standard clichliche, you were not there. because you couldn't tolerate such horror. no, the idea is, of course god can tolerate the horror. god doesn't hate the joke. that's what escapes god, that you can even make fun of. and i don't have time to go into it now, but i would have said that. this is my materialist, i'm a total materialist christianity, that with christ you get a totally different type of joke. christ is not a savior. he is one. from. would understand this joke. i always think that we should read the new testament as a comical book. like, didn't you get it? how... for example, often christ says something, the disciples don't understand it, and then christ says, i will tell you a parable. and then this parable is totally confusing and you need to read it back even to understand the parable. you know who knew this, so that you will not accuse me of going into cheap obscenities. it's kierkegaard who emphasized this. he has the most beautiful metaphor for what christ's arrival on earth means. he said, imagine there is a court castle, big hall in a castle, all the earth... all the curtains, blah, blah, and you expect the king to arrive in all his majesty. and then behind a small curtain, a small dock. r as if by mistake. on the scene and he says, this is the arrival of christ. no, things are much more complex here, but okay, let's now in the remaining time, sorry, because they're gone, no, and i almost... forget to we didn't yet come to beckett, no but it's already one hour and i almost wanted to say maybe the title of this talk should have been a version of my old joke that i quote all the time, read in my first book, you must know it. the standard, one of the most beautiful, complex soviet anti-communist jokes about lenin in warsaw. you know it. that is the myth. of course, it's a joke. there is in soviet times, in a gallery, an exhibition, and there is a painting there. on the painting, it's nadezhda krupskaya. in the middle of a sex act, fact like crazy by a young communist communeal member, and the title of the painting is lenin in warsaw. and a surprised visitor asks, but why this title? where is lenin? and the guide says, of course, lenin is in warsaw. that's why he's doing this here. so maybe i can say this title is like something like, you know, be is in warsaw. i cannot mention him, but it's still the title. no. now comes, if you allow me just a little bit, i will condense it, the philosophical part. m. the lesson of this empty-hysterical subject ich. praising. abstraction. true hegelians are not thinkers of the concrete in the sense of let's have a concrete analysis to understand the phenomenon you have to put it in its context and so on. no, the first step is always to understand a situation. it's a brutal abstraction. you take privilege, one feature which even appears pathological, marginal, and then and and then by bye... tearing out this feature you denaturalize all of it. the organic whole is lost and then you re-establish totality but from this standpoint, from the standpoint of this feature. to go quickly. i will give you an example which i already used in two, three my books, but it's very clear, so forgive me. for some of you, i'm repeating myself. yeah. there is a wonderful passage in marcel proust's in search of a lost time, where marcel, not pr, but the narrator, the figure, for the first time speaks with his talks to his grandmother via phone. he calls her to paris. something weird happens. when he hears for the first time grandmother's voice in its abstraction, not as part of her totality, entire personality, he all of a sudden noticed what a vulgar, stupid old lady she is. there is no klaram, she is senile and so on and so on. now, to dispel this impression, he goes to paris quickly to... meet her, to talk with her. and then things get even worse. why? because, of course, he notices all other features, but they are all spoiled by his experience of the voice. he notices how vulgar she is, senile, whatever, and so on and so on. this would be the passage to hegelian concrete totality. abstract totality is this organic, grandmother and so on. concrete totality is when you tear out one feature and to take a look at the totality, but from the distorting angle of this feature. now you will say, this is a bad joke, what has this to do with theory? well, marx and freud are doing exactly the same thing. when marx says, that economic crisis is the key to understand capitalism. it's precisely this. take a phenomenon which may appear an excess, it provides the key. freud is saying the same. pathological phenomena are the key to understand normal functioning of the mind. before i go, do i have some 10 minutes maximum? that's compromise five. my god, never did i felt so objectivized and terrorized as with this. no, i will try to be very brief, okay. first, i wanted to tell you that... i can but... larger! development here, but i will. yeah. uh. i will reduce myself to one example, how you can do the same thing, this was just meant pedagogically, with movie actors. take tom cruise, he plays a certain person. state persona and then there is one role. usually some courageous guy, whatever is, you know. but there is one exception. did you see his movie, no, his movie, he's one of them, magnolia, where he plays a very vulgar guy who gives some vulgar how to fuck them, screw them sexual education classes. what if we take this as the key to his entire personality? and it gets very interesting. or even a better example. ben kingsley. i hate gandhi and all that bullshit. and you know, this wise man that he plays. but did you see him in love beast? where he's this extremely brutal, vulgar guy. what if we need these lenses to perceive even his gandhi? then you notice that gandhi was not such an innocent guy and so on. and any honest indian will tell you this. that's why gandhi is now losing terribly in india. okay. now, to conclude, i'm saying that if there is. a writer of, i will try to be as short as possible, of abstraction. beckett. because on the one hand, beckett is not abstract in the sense, in the way he is perceived as abstract, you know, like with some abstract existential problems out of politics and so on and so on. uh. years ago. uh. a lady called émilie morin. wrote a wonderful book, i think even in the 90s, on beckett and politics. and she convincingly demonstrates how beckett's entire work is penetrated through and through by political context references and so on. for example, what is for me his high point, the three big novels, you know, especially malone dies and nibal. malone dies, it's all about the the historical context is the french situation and all around there in europe immediately after world war ii, you know, millions of people displaced from prisons to be repatriated, whatever. this is the background of malone dies, but now comes the genius of beckett. what he does cannot but appear to a traditional marxist as mystification. like instead of depicting a concrete historical situation, he provides just an abstract image of this anxiety situation. but i think he is, i wonder, frank, if you would agree, that he is, i'm sorry of disturbing you, you are probably thinking about more pleasant things. is that? becket is in this sense a platform. on. materialist. instead of going deeply into historical context, he, in a platonic sense, abstracts from it the idea. and this idea is not just the universality, but it's a concrete universality, the form of it, which is relatively independent from context. that's why. and, you know, if you want the obvious example of beckett and abstraction, it's of course what is for me his single greatest play, the short one, not i. where even... it's like, i claim a stage version of unnameable, where even subjective identity is reduced to a mouth. but beckett at his most subversive is in one of his even later short plays. called catastrophe and it's such an evil wonderful play because officially it fits, it was written i think in mid 70s or when václav havel was condemned by polish communist regime and it's in solidarity with him, blah blah. but if you look at this play, it's incredible in its power of abstraction. the ep. uh moves at three levels. first! you have on stage, if you know the play, otherwise download it on youtube, you find 10 versions. just on stage, it looks that somebody is somebody is questioning a prisoner who is there standing like that. then you soon got it that it's really a play about police interrogation and that the director is... basically terrorizing the actor, move your hand and so on and so on. then at the end. when people applaud. the guy who was totally broken down, the prisoner or actor playing the victim, just raises his hand and looks into it with a clear message, but you are doing the same. so from this concrete cheap dissident or communist horror, beckett's message is... but when you stage this in theater, are you not participating in the same idea and a clear, even step further when you. when we are at the big dissident event of solidarity with prisoners and so on, are we not in some sense oslo? participating in the same. in the same process. you know, it's this movement of abstraction. in beckett, which is, i think today... today actual more than ever these are questions to be raised today in what sense for example this would be a beckettian analysis of political correctness. in what sense political correctness? protesting against violence, but in the way it approaches it. reproduces violence on its own. so again. i. not five minutes, but six, seven minutes. i have much more, it will all be in my next book because i was always convinced that again. sorry to disappoint you, beckett is the one, not joyce. joyce is boring, bling, and so on. finnegan's wake is, my god, what an arrogance to give something to do to literary analysts, what did you say, for 400 years and so on. no, i am all for beckett. i think there are three great writers of the 20th century in europe. beckett! kafka and andrei platonov. the russian. and they all move at this same level. but to really conclude now, this is connected to what you said in introduction, this concrete universality and so on.? that the first step towards serious analysis, that was my philosophical point, is to break the spell of this, you know, you can only understand things by locating them in their historical context. no, first, i think that the proof of the greatness of a work of art is precisely that it survives the abstraction from its context. what is so great about shakespeare is that i'm ready to go so far. it's not it's not only that. it's not true that you have to understand all the details of elizabethan england to understand shakespeare. it's quite on the contrary. to understand elizabethan england today, you have to read shakespeare. and the mystery of shakespeare is precisely this power of abstraction, how he survives his own era. you can have modern shakespeare, you know all these versions of shakespeare's stage in today which sometimes work even which sometimes work even better. that's for me the true historicity, the true multiculturalism. i don't like salman rni. he's too liberal for me now. but once, and this is the concluding sentence, once i was with him at a round table and somebody attacked him for betraying his indian origins, like you are now to integrated into the west, blah, blah. and he gave a nice answer, i must admit it. he said, no, absolutely crucial influence of my work are two indian writers. you know which two? jane austen and charles dickens. he said, jane austen is the middle-class bomb life, mumbai life i come from as to poverty in india today, it's oliver twist and so on and so on. that's the true universality, this type of universality. i'm sorry, i was too long. on the underhand fuck you, i'm not sorry. thank you very.