Sex and the Failed Absolute
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2019-09-25 · 1:18:46 · 10,974 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticssexuality-genderideologycommunism-socialismecology-climateliberalism-political-correctnesssubjectivityscience-physicsphilosophy-generaltechnology-ai-cyberspacegeopolitics-war
In this public lecture and Q&A, Žižek presents core arguments from his book 'Sex and the Failed Absolute,' centering on the concept of the parallax split between naive realism and transcendental philosophy, and the claim that quantum physics reveals an ontologically incomplete reality. He argues that human sexuality, defined by failure, repetition, and the constitutive role of obstacles, offers our only genuine brush with the Absolute, and connects this to Kantian antinomies and Schelling's notion of an eternal transcendental choice. The talk ranges across transgender identity, leftist politics, the refugee crisis, ecology, digital control, and the failures of 20th-century communism, consistently applying his dialectical method to reveal how liberal-left ideology functions as a fetish that displaces genuine social antagonism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “parallax split”
The radical incompatibility between naive philosophical realism and the transcendental approach that cannot be resolved by dialectical synthesis, defining the Kant-Hegelian predicament of modern philosophy.
The tradition (Foucault, deconstruction, discourse analysis) that treats direct ontological questions as meaningless and limits thinking to describing the episteme or hermeneutic horizon.
The thesis drawn from Niels Bohr's reading of quantum physics that reality in itself is not fully constituted, not merely epistemically inaccessible but genuinely unfinished.
as “antinomy”
For Žižek, antinomies are not signs of our epistemic limitation but indices of the thing itself, reality in itself is antinomic, as demonstrated both by quantum physics and by the tensions within transgender theory.
as “eternal transcendental choice”
Schelling's concept of an unconscious, purely virtual choice of identity that is never made in present time but is always retroactively presupposed, used by Žižek to explain the essentialist language of transgender self-experience.
as “retroactive predestination”
The idea that fate and identity are not pre-given but created retroactively, we discover we have already chosen, as in falling in love.
In Žižek's psychoanalytic register, the pervert (as opposed to the hysteric) is the figure every totalitarian power needs, one who enacts the law without question.
as “the hysterical subject”
For Žižek, the subject whose identity is constituted as the plus-beyond-all-identities, exemplified by the feminine hysterical provocation 'tell me why you love me', the basic form of subjectivity from a psychoanalytic standpoint.
as “the unconscious as virtual third entity”
Žižek's desubstantialized conception of the unconscious as a purely virtual, fragile entity that emerges through repetition (bad novel + bad film = the ideal novel that should have been) rather than a substantial hidden reality.
as “bestimmte Negation”
Hegel's determinate negation: negation that retains a specific content, illustrated by the difference between 'coffee without cream' and 'coffee without milk,' which are materially identical but symbolically distinct.
Implicitly at work throughout as the symbolic order that mediates identity and enjoyment; surfaced in the discussion of the unconscious as symbolic 'without.'
as “sexuality as brush with the Absolute”
The thesis that human sexuality, precisely through its failure, repetition, and inability to achieve its goal, provides the only genuine contact with the dimension of the Absolute available to beings caught in the parallax gap.
as “personal responsibility turn”
An ideological trick in ecological discourse that shifts blame from corporations to individuals (did you recycle?) thereby neutralizing systemic critique while offering an easy moral alibi.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Žižek argues that capitalism is not nihilistic but metaphysical: a true capitalist sacrifices personal well-being for the reproduction of capital, in a structure analogous to religious devotion.
Žižek's label for the position, held even by most of the Left including Bernie Sanders, that accepts liberal democratic capitalism as the final horizon and merely seeks to humanize it.
Used by Žižek to name the shared domain (ecology, digital commons) that can be managed by neither state communism nor the market, requiring new forms of coordination beyond both.
The ideological structure whereby one acknowledges a social antagonism at some level while simultaneously disavowing it through a fetish object (e.g. Trump as stand-in for class struggle).
Stories he reaches for 10
A customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so can only offer coffee without milk. Materially identical, but symbolically distinct, illustrating Hegel's determinate negation and the reality of the purely virtual 'without.'
“"Coffee without cream, please." "Sorry sir, we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk."”
Against the communist optimist who says 'there is a light at the end of the tunnel,' Žižek retorts 'yes, it's another train coming', expressing his pessimism about political progress.
“Leftists like to say, 'There is a light at the end of the tunnel.' You know what's my answer? Yes, it's another train coming tomorrow.”
Both the Doctorow novel and its film adaptation are bad, yet through their repetition a third purely virtual entity emerges, the ideal novel that should have been. This is Žižek's model for the unconscious as a virtual, non-substantial entity.
“Bad novel, bad movie, but through this repetition, a third virtual entity emerges, and that would have been purely virtual, the unconscious.”
All the miracles of French cuisine (Camembert, Champagne) arose from mistakes and failures, lazy or fermentation errors, turned into something superior. Human sexuality works the same way: through failure, not direct satisfaction.
“All the miracles of French cuisine can be explained as turning a failure into a success... I think that human sexuality is never simply we just want and make.”
In the 1980s Germany was gripped by the fear that all European forests would soon die; today there are more forests in Europe than ever. Used to warn against ecological eschatology while maintaining the seriousness of ecological problems.
“There was this obsession with what they called Waldsterben. The forests are dying... Statistics tell you that today there are in Europe more forests than ever in the last years.”
Hugh Grant's famously clumsy, stuttering declaration of love to Andie MacDowell works precisely because the failure to say clearly what he wants gets the message through; a perfect declaration would have failed.
“Precisely in this way, through the failure to say clearly what he wants, he gets the message through. If it would have been a perfect regular statement, declaration of love, it wouldn't have worked.”
Hegel returned to Antigone repeatedly, in the Phenomenology, in the lectures on history of philosophy, and elsewhere, each time offering a different reading. Žižek uses this to defend his own practice of returning to the same problems, arguing this is what serious systematic philosophy looks like.
“Hegel returned to Antigone in his lessons of philosophy history, history of philosophy, phenomenology four five times always giving a different reading.”
Before Vikings arrived from Norway, Iceland was covered with forests; they destroyed everything. Used to debunk the idealization of pre-modern peoples living in harmony with nature.
“You know that before Vikings arrived there from Norway, it was full of forests, they destroyed everything and so on. So don't idealize pre-modern countries.”
If after shaking hands one does not release but simply repeats the same gesture, it immediately acquires a sexual charge, illustrating how repetition introduces the detour constitutive of human sexuality.
“If after we shake hands I would not drop your hand but I will just repeat the same gesture. Automatically your impression would have been something dirty is on his mind.”
When a man says 'I love you,' the woman asks 'why?', a question he can never answer. This hysterical provocation mirrors the master's demand 'tell me what's my identity,' which is by definition unanswerable.
“That's why I love it when you say to a woman 'I love you,' you get this eternal question: 'Tell me why you love.' You cannot answer.”
Works invoked 14
Capital book
Marx's unfinished magnum opus, referenced via the anecdote of Marx telling Engels the revolution would have to wait until he finished it, used to defend the priority of theoretical work.
Vertigo film
Used as the key metaphor for Žižek's philosophical self-presentation: Madeleine's tree-ring scene ('I was born here, I died there') maps the Kant-Hegel period of philosophy.
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch's classical comedy, source of the 'coffee without cream/milk' joke that Žižek uses to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation.
One of the two books Žižek says Hegel truly wrote (alongside the Logic); used to illustrate that even Hegel's supposed system was actually a series of insights requiring constant revision.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own earlier book cited as the point from which he has been 'basically rewriting the same book' with the same structure (transcendental antagonism, parallax, moving beyond).
Philosophy of Right book
Noted as a university lecture compilation rather than actively thought-through work; Žižek highlights that its final word is war and the necessity of war, something we must now move beyond.
Science of Logic book
Cited as the other truly authored Hegel book (as opposed to the university-lecture compilations), in Žižek's defense of obsessive philosophical repetition.
Billy Bathgate film
Described explicitly as 'not a good movie' and 'a bad movie,' but used to illustrate the virtual third entity (the ideal novel that should have been) as a model for the unconscious.
Identified as the birth-point of the Kant-Hegelian philosophical coordinates within which, Žižek argues, philosophy still operates.
Goldfinger film
Briefly referenced in a self-deprecating joke about being ejected for going on too long.
Described as 'kitschy' and 'disgusting' aesthetically, but Hugh Grant's stuttering love declaration is used philosophically to illustrate how failure in expression transmits the message more effectively than success.
Žižek's own book, the occasion for the talk; he describes its key theses (parallax, sexuality as brush with the Absolute) and acknowledges its structure as a rewriting of his earlier books.
Capitalism as Religion essay
Walter Benjamin's text cited approvingly to support Žižek's claim that capitalism functions as a metaphysical/religious phenomenon rather than as straightforward nihilism.
Humoreske other
Schumann's piano piece with a notated but unplayable third line; used alongside the Ninotchka joke and the Billy Bathgate example to illustrate the virtual unconscious.
People invoked 39
Mangosuthu Buthelezi negative
The one who played the card of African traditional roots, described as having been on the payroll of apartheid.
Tarana Burke positive
Described as 'my hero' and 'old American dignified black lady'; she invented the term 'Me Too' years earlier and is horrified at what the movement became (a medium for failed movie stars), aligning with Žižek's critique.
Mentioned as exemplar of the 'negative destructive' mode of contact with the Absolute, pure destruction as the only way to touch permanence.
Kristen Stewart positive
Called a 'political hero' for attacking the mainstream Me Too narrative and pointing out that studio makeup artists and secretaries are systematically harassed but ignored.
Marine Le Pen negative
Mentioned as 'definitely not' worth the kind of risk calculation Žižek made for Trump.
Edward Snowden positive
Cited alongside Assange as exemplifying rightful treason as the new highest ethical act.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek describes his calculation about Trump as 'a very brutal Leninist one', strategic use of a bad outcome to generate a better political alignment.
Identified as the founder of Western Marxism; cited for the claim that 'even nature is always a historical category,' representing the transcendental position that makes social practice the ultimate horizon.
Jacques Lacan positive
Psychoanalytic framework running throughout: fetishist disavowal, the hysteric, the pervert, the unconscious, sekundäre Bearbeitung all drawn from Lacanian/Freudian tradition.
Boris Johnson negative
Žižek explicitly says Boris Johnson 'is not worth the risk', unlike his calculated Trump judgment.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His name provides the term 'Fukuyamaist' for the position Žižek rejects: accepting liberal democratic capitalism as the final horizon.
Judith Butler negative
Her discursive constructivism ('Butlerism') is presented as one horn of the unresolved antinomy in transgender theory, the view that gender identities are contingent symbolic constructions, which Žižek argues cannot account for essentialist self-experience.
Described as 'disgusting' and 'crazy,' but Žižek made the calculated Leninist judgment that Trump in power would catalyze a genuine left alternative (Bernie Sanders). The calculation is presented as empirical, not principled support.
Álvaro García Linera positive
Vice-president of Bolivia, cited with admiration as doing a 'well-calculated modest game' successfully, contrasted favorably with Chavez.
Referenced in the context of UK politics; Žižek is troubled by how successfully Labour is 'screwing things up and ruining itself' but would still vote for them.
Treated positively as a sign that democratic socialism is being taken seriously again, though also classified as a Fukuyamaist who accepts liberal democratic capitalism as the framework.
Julian Assange positive
Cited alongside Snowden as exemplifying the new notion that the highest ethical act today may be a certain kind of treason.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Žižek sides against Heisenberg's epistemological reading of the uncertainty principle (we cannot measure both properties) in favor of Bohr's ontological reading (the particle doesn't have both).
Mentioned as author of a letter decrying capitalism; Žižek warns against idealizing pre-modern balance with nature even in Morales's framework.
Michel Foucault negative
Used as the exemplar of the transcendental/discourse-analysis approach that refuses direct ontological questions; Žižek disagrees with this position but engages it seriously.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited as another example of a great philosopher who returns obsessively to the same problem rather than building a completed system.
Greta Thunberg positive
Praised for her simple message 'just take the science seriously', her autism read as politically productive because it cuts through the fetishist disavowal of mainstream ecology discourse.
Mao Zedong negative
Referenced dismissively via 'I don't have this Maoist trust, learn from the ordinary people, there is no wisdom in them.'
Briefly cited alongside Wittgenstein and Heidegger as another philosopher who appears systematic but returns obsessively to the same problem.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Described as one of Žižek's favorite German idealists; his concept of the eternal transcendental/unconscious choice is applied to transgender identity. Also cited as an example of a philosopher who returns obsessively to the same problems.
Walter Benjamin positive
His text 'Capitalism as Religion' is cited approvingly to support Žižek's claim that capitalism is metaphysical rather than nihilistic.
Jordan Peterson negative
Referenced briefly in connection with an 'unfortunate debate' where Žižek used the French cuisine example; no positive engagement.
Hillary Clinton negative
According to Žižek's contacts, Clinton would in all probability have already attacked Iran or North Korea, offered as part of his justification for the Trump calculation.
Niels Bohr positive
Bohr's ontological interpretation of the uncertainty principle (the particle doesn't have both position and momentum) supports Žižek's thesis of ontological incompleteness.
Nelson Mandela positive
Cited approvingly: the ANC's greatness was refusing to play the card of African traditional roots and not romanticizing pre-modernity, contrasted with Buthelezi who did and was on apartheid's payroll.
Hugo Chávez negative
Described as 'Fidel Castro with money', he had enough money to throw at problems without resolving them and didn't develop a feasible new model.
Plato positive
Preferred over Aristotle; also cited as an example of a philosopher who returns obsessively to the same problem across different dialogues.
Aristotle negative
His ontology of hyle/morphe is criticized as secretly encoding the masculine/feminine opposition; Žižek prefers Plato precisely because of this.
Karl Marx positive
The 'let them wait a little bit' letter to Engels used to defend prioritizing theory; also invoked as a communist who understood structural rather than merely humanitarian problems.
Briefly referenced as the figure through whom external reality became 'gray meaningless matter' in modernity, part of the thumbnail history of transcendental philosophy.
Sigmund Freud positive
Defended as still actual against those who call him dated: his theory of childhood sexuality, the role of fantasy in adult sexuality, and total self-responsibility are all endorsed by Žižek.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's main philosophical anchor: used throughout for determinate negation, the dialectic, the antinomy as sign of the thing itself. Žižek defends Hegel's actual fragmentary method against the image of him as a mega-systematic thinker.
Immanuel Kant positive
Central reference point for the parallax split, the thing-in-itself, and the mathematical/dynamic antinomies; Žižek sees modern philosophy as still working within Kant-Hegelian coordinates.
Briefly cited as another example of a great philosopher characterized by obsessive return to the same problem rather than systematic completion.
What it argues
parallax split between realism and transcendental philosophyontological incompleteness of reality (quantum physics)sexuality as failure and brush with the Absolutefetishist disavowal in liberal-left ideologythe constitutive role of obstacles and limitationscommunism versus liberal democratic capitalism (Fukuyamaism)digital control, Neuralink, and threats to freedom
Dialectical moves 10
“The antinomy is not a sign of our limitation but precisely the sign that we are approaching the thing itself.”
What looks like cognitive failure is actually success, hitting the real antinomy of reality itself.
“Far from being the higher form, all so-called higher spiritual experiences are grounded in eroticism—eroticism is the original experience of transcendence.”
The spiritual does not transcend the erotic; the erotic is the ground from which the spiritual is constructed.
“If you take the limitation away you don't get the higher thing itself, you lose everything—the obstacle is what creates transcendence as its echo.”
Obstacles do not block access to the Absolute; they constitute the Absolute as such.
“What we experience as our freedom is just the form of our un-freedom.”
Digital freedom, surfing the net freely, is the precise ideological form taken by total surveillance and control.
“The problem with capitalism is not that it is nihilistic but that it is in practice too metaphysical.”
Capitalism mobilizes a religious-metaphysical structure of self-sacrifice for a beyond (capital) rather than ordinary egotist satisfaction.
“Maybe today the highest ethical act is treason—the right kind of treason.”
The traditional ethical horizon (sacrifice your life for your country) must be inverted: authentic ethics now requires betraying the state.
“Trump without Trump would have meant no Bernie Sanders—Trump is the catalyst for democratic socialism.”
The very thing that looks like a catastrophe (Trump) is the condition of possibility for the positive political alternative.
“Greta Thunberg's autism is not a deficiency but part of her political position and is very productive.”
What mainstream discourse pathologizes as a personal limitation turns out to be the precise form of ideological lucidity.
“I try to be systematic, but to really be systematic you must get caught in this vicious cycle of repeating yourself all the time.”
True systematicity in philosophy reveals itself as the necessity of constant repetition and self-revision rather than linear completion.
“The Democratic Party is the main agent of Trump—it does everything possible to make Trump re-elected.”
The ostensible opposition to Trump is dialectically its most effective support, by sabotaging the only credible alternative.
Claims 26
asserts
The central struggle in philosophy over the last decades remains within Kant-Hegelian coordinates and has not genuinely moved beyond them.the history of modern philosophy
asserts
Reality in itself is ontologically incomplete—not just epistemically inaccessible—as Niels Bohr's interpretation of quantum physics suggests.ontology and quantum physics
asserts
Antinomies are not signs of our cognitive limitation but indicators that we are approaching the thing itself, which is itself contradictory.Kantian antinomies and the nature of reality
reframes
The transgender movement reveals an unresolved antinomy between Butlerite discursive constructivism and an essentialist psychic identity, which should not be dissolved but held as a productive tension.transgender identity and gender theory
asserts
Falling in love demonstrates that identity is constituted through retroactive predestination—we never choose in the present but discover we have already chosen.love, freedom, and the structure of identity
asserts
Human sexuality is always structured by failure, detour, and the constitutive role of obstacles, which is what differentiates it from animal mating.human sexuality and Freudian theory
asserts
Sexuality—through its very failure—is our only genuine brush with the Absolute for beings caught in the parallax gap.sexuality and metaphysics
asserts
If you remove the obstacle or surplus that creates the illusion of perfection, you do not obtain the ideal thing itself—you lose everything.the constitutive role of limitation and surplus
asserts
Eroticism is the original experience of metaphysical transcendence, and all so-called higher spiritual experiences are grounded in it.eroticism and transcendence
asserts
Liberal-left ideology functions as a fetish that displaces genuine social antagonism and class struggle with identity politics and humanitarian concerns.liberal-left ideology and class struggle
asserts
Trump functions as a fetish for liberal-left discourse—the last thing they see before they would have to confront class struggle.Trump and liberal ideology
reframes
The Me Too movement as appropriated by mainstream media has been displaced from its original working-class feminist aims to a concern with failed movie stars.Me Too movement
asserts
The liberal obsession with open borders for refugees is a manipulation that keeps the upper classes insulated while generating conflict between two groups of the underprivileged.refugee crisis and liberal humanitarianism
asserts
China's economic development under communist rule represents perhaps the greatest economic miracle in history, achieved by combining wild capitalism with authoritarian state power—a combination the Western left hates most.China, communism, and economic development
reframes
Almost all contemporary leftists are Fukuyamaists who accept liberal democratic capitalism as the final horizon—communism is the name for refusing this acceptance.communism and the left
asserts
Ecology, digital control, and new forms of poverty cannot be addressed by the market, the state, or popular initiative alone—they require new forms of coordination larger than the state.ecology and political economy
asserts
Ecology discourse is thoroughly permeated by ideology, from denial to capitalist market solutions to the ideological trick of personal responsibility.ecology and ideology
rejects
Nature is not a benign harmonious whole to which we should return—it is already 'crazy,' a site of catastrophe prior to humanity.the myth of good Mother Nature
reframes
The problem today is not nihilism but nihilism as the form of appearance of a false transcendence—capitalism is itself too metaphysical in practice.nihilism and capitalism
asserts
What we experience as our freedom in digital life (surfing the net, buying things) is precisely the form of our unfreedom, since everything is registered and controlled.digital freedom and surveillance
asserts
Today the highest ethical act may be a certain kind of treason, as exemplified by Assange and Snowden.ethics and political whistleblowing
rejects
Pre-modern indigenous traditions should not be idealized as living in balance with nature—capitalism can always exploit pre-modern traditions, and pre-modern societies also destroyed nature extensively.pre-modern ecology and indigenous movements
asserts
Greta Thunberg's apparent autism is politically productive because her blunt literalism cuts through the fetishist disavowal ('I know, but…') of mainstream ecological discourse.Greta Thunberg and ideology
asserts
All human creativity is based on radical limitations, and abolishing the limitation (as Neuralink threatens to do) would not yield a higher thing but destroy everything.Neuralink, creativity, and limitation
reframes
Sexual difference is not a difference between two types of gender identity but two types of the same deadlock or antinomy.sexual difference and Kantian antinomies
asserts
The traditional masculine-feminine opposition has secretly influenced the most abstract ontology, including Aristotle's hyle/morphe schema.gender and ontology
Quotes 16
“I believe in fate, but not in eternal fate. I believe in predestination, but it's a retroactive predestination. We create it retroactively.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive predestination and identity
“Irony: we with quantum physics caught God with his pants down. We were a little bit too bright of him.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness revealed by quantum physics
“In psychoanalysis you are even responsible for what you don't know.”Slavoj Žižek · total responsibility in psychoanalysis
“Bad novel, bad movie, but through this repetition, a third virtual entity emerges, and that would have been purely virtual, the unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · the unconscious as virtual third entity
“That's what Hegel meant with bestimmte Negation, determinate negation.”Slavoj Žižek · coffee without cream illustrating determinate negation
“All our human creativity is based on radical limitations. What happens if this limitation will be abolished?”Slavoj Žižek · limitation as the ground of creativity
“I cannot imagine anything more happy than not being passionately in love.”Slavoj Žižek · passionate love as catastrophe, not happiness
“Trump is the last thing they see before they see class struggle, social antagonism.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump as fetish for liberal-left ideology
“What we experience as our freedom is just the form of our un-freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · digital freedom as ideological form of surveillance
“Maybe today the highest ethical act is treason. But the right kind of treason.”Slavoj Žižek · treason as contemporary ethical act
“Leftists like to say, 'There is a light at the end of the tunnel.' You know what's my answer? Yes, it's another train coming tomorrow.”Slavoj Žižek · pessimism about political progress
“The problem with capitalism is not that it's nihilistic. It's that in some sense it's in its practice too metaphysical.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as metaphysical not nihilistic
“Mother Nature is a bitch, dirty bitch. Can we even imagine catastrophes which must have happened before humanity on our earth?”Slavoj Žižek · nature is not benign
“The hysterical provocation of a master: 'Tell me what's my identity.' And of course you never can get an answer to this one.”Slavoj Žižek · hysterical subject as excess over identity
“I try to be systematic, but to really be systematic you must get caught in this vicious cycle of repeating yourself all the time.”Slavoj Žižek · systematic philosophy as necessary repetition
“The best definition of Hugo Chavez was Fidel Castro with money. He was—to have enough money so he threw money at problems, he didn't resolve them.”Slavoj Žižek · Chavez's failure to develop a new political model
Transcript 62 turns
unknown
He has a lot of fans, enthusiasts, and also a lot of critics and detractors. I think he’s saying that he’s now said so many unpopular things that although he’s been called things like, you know, the Elvis and rockstar philosopher, that his audience—And I even never liked Elvis Presley. This is what really annoys me.
He has a lot of fans, enthusiasts, and also a lot of critics and detractors. I think he’s saying that he’s now said so many unpopular things that although he’s been called things like, you know, the Elvis and rockstar philosopher, that his audience—And I even never liked Elvis Presley. This is what really annoys me.
Slavoj Žižek
Can I tell something? So, you know what I am now rediscovering from my youth? Some English bands, rock. If you are old enough, do you remember a band, Family? Weaver’s Answer, No Mule’s Fool and so on. You are also too young, I think, for them. Okay, sorry for interrupting
Can I tell something? So, you know what I am now rediscovering from my youth? Some English bands, rock. If you are old enough, do you remember a band, Family? Weaver’s Answer, No Mule’s Fool and so on. You are also too young, I think, for them. Okay, sorry for interrupting
unknown
you. No problem. It was just a bit of a get-out story. Anyway, so his latest book, Sex and the Failed Absolute—we’ll talk a bit about that. There’s a sentence in the book that struck me, which he says, "The true enemy of the present book is the finesse of non-thinking, an art which more and more pervades our public space." So hopefully this will be an evening of thinking rather than non-thinking. Now, I want to start off, I mean, if paradox is one of your favorite words, and one sort of paradox perhaps of your career is you have achieved this huge popularity and yet your work’s often actually very—it’s heavy, serious, quite difficult. In this book, one of the key ideas at the beginning is an idea that you come back to a lot in your work, which is this idea of the parallax. Are you able to explain that to us in words that we can understand?
you. No problem. It was just a bit of a get-out story. Anyway, so his latest book, Sex and the Failed Absolute—we’ll talk a bit about that. There’s a sentence in the book that struck me, which he says, "The true enemy of the present book is the finesse of non-thinking, an art which more and more pervades our public space." So hopefully this will be an evening of thinking rather than non-thinking. Now, I want to start off, I mean, if paradox is one of your favorite words, and one sort of paradox perhaps of your career is you have achieved this huge popularity and yet your work’s often actually very—it’s heavy, serious, quite difficult. In this book, one of the key ideas at the beginning is an idea that you come back to a lot in your work, which is this idea of the parallax. Are you able to explain that to us in words that we can understand?
Slavoj Žižek
No, no. First, I am very grateful for this correct introduction because almost often I am presented as, you know, cultural critic, paradox, postmodern and so on. No, I—I already used in a self-presentation this metaphor. I want to share it with you. I love it. I hope you saw—everybody did—Hitchcock’s Vertigo. You know that famous scene, and I was there in that Sequoia Park south of San Francisco. I saw it when Kim Novak, Madeleine, approaches that tree cut in—cut, and so you can see the years there. From, I don’t know, years old tree, and she says, "I was born here, I died there," no, as that Carlotta or whatever. And if somebody were to ask me, I would say, if we were to get like Madeleine dressed in Vertigo, a muse of philosophy, she would have said, "I was born here," 700—when was it? I don’t know. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and "I died there," Hegel’s death, My big obsession is that we haven’t really left that period behind. That even the big struggle in philosophy of the last decades is still within this Kant-Hegelian, you may disagree, coordinates. On the one—I think what defines our predicament in the last decades—now we are maybe slowly moving beyond it—is this precisely, I didn’t forget your question, parallax split. Parallax means you cannot bring—there is no pseudo-Hegelian dialectical synthesis. It’s a radical incompatibility between, on the one hand, naive philosophical realism—we should simply describe the world as it is and so on—and on the other hand, what I very broadly call transcendental approach. Who are for me transcendental philosophers? I will try to be as clear as possible. The entire deconstructionism or this so-called discourse analysis. And please interrupt me if I get lost or if you disagree. I mean, most of the people are idiots but you are not among them. Oh, thank you. So please interrupt me. Let’s say—let’s say if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, a big this—discourse analyst, does a man have an immortal soul? His answer would have been, we can only talk about this within a certain episteme, within a certain discursive context, and all that thinking can do is to describe this episteme. By episteme, he means vaguely—I simplify—what phenomenologists would have called hermeneutic horizon and so on. In this transcendental tradition, to ask the direct ontological question, "What is reality?" is meaningless. All you can do is return the question: what do you mean by reality? In modernity, reality means a different thing than in medieval times. In medieval times, there was a meaning inscribed into reality, so we are hearing. I am not so sure. With Descartes and so on, external reality becomes this gray meaningless matter and we only project. So you see my point? From philosophical thinking—this, I call it naively the realist problem. Okay, then, let’s say you are Foucault. But if I ask you then, but f—three points off, tell me, so do I have a soul or not? He would not budge. He would say meaningless question, or like—and I think that—would you agree with this simple analysis that as a revenge then, these big metaphysical questions returned in natural sciences? Like human freedom. Ah, today you look into cognitive sciences to get an answer, or artificial intelligence, "Are we free or not?" The origin of the universe, you look into quantum cosmology and so on. And I think—I wonder if you would agree, I mean really—that maybe we should break out of this transcendental approach and dare to confront in some sense also not in the old naive way, but nonetheless somehow, the big ontological
No, no. First, I am very grateful for this correct introduction because almost often I am presented as, you know, cultural critic, paradox, postmodern and so on. No, I—I already used in a self-presentation this metaphor. I want to share it with you. I love it. I hope you saw—everybody did—Hitchcock’s Vertigo. You know that famous scene, and I was there in that Sequoia Park south of San Francisco. I saw it when Kim Novak, Madeleine, approaches that tree cut in—cut, and so you can see the years there. From, I don’t know, years old tree, and she says, "I was born here, I died there," no, as that Carlotta or whatever. And if somebody were to ask me, I would say, if we were to get like Madeleine dressed in Vertigo, a muse of philosophy, she would have said, "I was born here," 700—when was it? I don’t know. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and "I died there," Hegel’s death, My big obsession is that we haven’t really left that period behind. That even the big struggle in philosophy of the last decades is still within this Kant-Hegelian, you may disagree, coordinates. On the one—I think what defines our predicament in the last decades—now we are maybe slowly moving beyond it—is this precisely, I didn’t forget your question, parallax split. Parallax means you cannot bring—there is no pseudo-Hegelian dialectical synthesis. It’s a radical incompatibility between, on the one hand, naive philosophical realism—we should simply describe the world as it is and so on—and on the other hand, what I very broadly call transcendental approach. Who are for me transcendental philosophers? I will try to be as clear as possible. The entire deconstructionism or this so-called discourse analysis. And please interrupt me if I get lost or if you disagree. I mean, most of the people are idiots but you are not among them. Oh, thank you. So please interrupt me. Let’s say—let’s say if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, a big this—discourse analyst, does a man have an immortal soul? His answer would have been, we can only talk about this within a certain episteme, within a certain discursive context, and all that thinking can do is to describe this episteme. By episteme, he means vaguely—I simplify—what phenomenologists would have called hermeneutic horizon and so on. In this transcendental tradition, to ask the direct ontological question, "What is reality?" is meaningless. All you can do is return the question: what do you mean by reality? In modernity, reality means a different thing than in medieval times. In medieval times, there was a meaning inscribed into reality, so we are hearing. I am not so sure. With Descartes and so on, external reality becomes this gray meaningless matter and we only project. So you see my point? From philosophical thinking—this, I call it naively the realist problem. Okay, then, let’s say you are Foucault. But if I ask you then, but f—three points off, tell me, so do I have a soul or not? He would not budge. He would say meaningless question, or like—and I think that—would you agree with this simple analysis that as a revenge then, these big metaphysical questions returned in natural sciences? Like human freedom. Ah, today you look into cognitive sciences to get an answer, or artificial intelligence, "Are we free or not?" The origin of the universe, you look into quantum cosmology and so on. And I think—I wonder if you would agree, I mean really—that maybe we should break out of this transcendental approach and dare to confront in some sense also not in the old naive way, but nonetheless somehow, the big ontological
unknown
questions. Well, I—it’s nice for you to ask me, but I’m not sure. I mean, from my point of view, I suppose, you know, I read Kant and everything. Kant introduces this idea that the world in itself, the thing in itself, is simply unknowable. We’re only in the phenomenal world, what you’re calling this transcendental perspective. Now, maybe in my overly relaxed way, I kind of think, okay, that’s fine, I can see that. So why—why does this—why does this impulse persist that, you know, we want to penetrate through this—this transcendental perspective, the purely—the world of experience? We feel this yearning to kind of want to see reality in itself.
questions. Well, I—it’s nice for you to ask me, but I’m not sure. I mean, from my point of view, I suppose, you know, I read Kant and everything. Kant introduces this idea that the world in itself, the thing in itself, is simply unknowable. We’re only in the phenomenal world, what you’re calling this transcendental perspective. Now, maybe in my overly relaxed way, I kind of think, okay, that’s fine, I can see that. So why—why does this—why does this impulse persist that, you know, we want to penetrate through this—this transcendental perspective, the purely—the world of experience? We feel this yearning to kind of want to see reality in itself.
Slavoj Žižek
Is it just a naive dream we should just give up? Yeah, but nonetheless the question persists. You will not squeeze out so simply. Are you a simple agnostic ultimately who claims there is some kind of reality we just cannot ever reach it? Or, as a Hegelian, I would be tempted to say, what if there is nothing beyond? Not nothing in the sense that we are just dealing with illusory phenomena, but nothing in the sense that there is no big mystery behind. And that’s my—I will try to give a very problematic example to provoke you, bringing us to sexuality, the title, to explain it. What if—I don’t agree with this approach that we are just limited to contradictory antinomic phenomena, we cannot ever reach what a thing really is or reality beyond. What if—and this is for me—I know I proceed very fast here, I develop it more in detail in the book—the biggest lesson—that’s why I think we haven’t yet really apprehended what it means—of quantum physics, what really attracts me there is this idea that it’s not just that our knowledge is imperfect, we cannot ever grasp the way reality is. What if reality in itself is somehow ontologically incomplete? If I may repeat an old story which I often use in my books. From some—maybe you know, it wasn’t you—some very good introduction to philosophy, simple. The guy—I’m very sorry, I’m just old and senile, no aggressiveness implied that I don’t mention his name, I forgot it—he draws a parallel between video games and quantum physics and says, you know, in a video game when you move in the virtual reality there immersed into a game, the reality there is not fully constituted. Like, for example, in the background you have a forest, but the—but the creator of the game didn’t program all the details of every tree because it’s not part of the game for you to go there, you know. Or you have houses, if it’s not part of the game that you enter the house, the inside of the house is not programmed. And the idea of this guy—I loved it—is that what if—it’s a very ironic reading—what if something similar happens in quantum physics? You know this—this Heisenberg principle, we cannot measure of the same particle at the same time velocity and position. Now there was an interesting polemics here between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, and of course I am on the side of Niels Bohr. For Heisenberg, this was just our epistemological deficiency, we cannot measure it. Bohr claimed no, it is in itself that the particle doesn’t have both the position and that. So now the ironic—and I love it—reading is this one: imagine God as the programmer of our universe. And God simply thought, "Oh, you humans are too stupid, you will not be able to reach beyond atom, so why should I lose time planning, programming for you part?" So if I may put it in this way, ironically, we with quantum physics, how do you put it in English, caught God with his pants down, you know. We were a little bit too bright of him, sorry, too intelligent, but I am not religious man, and the true problem for me is how to conceive this ontological openness, unfinished character of the universe without God. That reality in itself is not fully ontologically constituted. Which is why, a consequence, when you get to an antinomy—that’s my Hegelianism, I will try to explain it as simple as possible, and I see with full right you are getting nervous like cut it short, as I made a joke to Julian before referring to Goldfinger, you saw the movie, if he were to have in Goldfinger James Bond, he would have pressed the red button, you know, now to eject me—the antinomy, when we get caught in an antinomy, is for me not a sign of our limitation, but precisely the sign that we are approaching the thing itself. What if things in themselves are antinomic? To conclude and to offend you, some of you, although I am deeply pro—I am deeply pro transgender, LGBT, but you know what interests me so much in LGBT? The basic antinomy which many LGBT theorists try to obfuscate. On the one hand, the predominant ideology of transgender—correct me if I am wrong—people is let’s call it Judith Butlerism. It’s this type of discursive historicism. There is no essential gender identity, identities are constructed symbolically through contingent discursive games and so on and so on. Okay, okay. But at the same time, did you notice how the language that transgender people speak when they want to change sex is an extremely essentialist language? Again and again the media report how, for example, in my own country, Slovenia, we had many of them, but now a recent operation, a boy became a girl and he gave a big interview and he—she now of course—said, "Finally I exist in a body in which—into which I should have been born." I mean this is absolutely essentialist language. It is as if I have a fixed psychic identity but there can be a mistake, my psyche gets embodied in the wrong gender identity. Now for me it’s wrong to dwell into okay who is right, historicist or this. I think there is a solution from my perspective here, more even Kantian-Schellingian one. Of course I don’t believe in pre-existence of the soul while in eternity I look for, choose my sex and then there can be a mistake or whatever. But isn’t it—I like this notion developed by one of my favorite German idealists, Schelling, of—of this—he calls it eternal transcendental choice, he even calls it unconscious choice. Choice which you make choosing your identity, but it’s always a purely virtual presupposition, never in reality do you make this choice. Now to conclude, really, if you’re stupid enough to believe me, yeah—you will say but this is metaphysics, this is bullshit. No. I will remind you of, if you were ever passionately in love, of your most obvious self-experience. Isn’t—if there ever was a free act, is the act of falling in love. If you—you never choose in the present, to be vulgar in a male chauvinist way, falling in love doesn’t mean I look around, nice lady there, nice lady there, oh she has nice eyes, she has nice legs, oh let’s make a list, hop, this one has—you never fall in love in present time. At a certain point, you discover that you already are in love. And I think that without any involving any spiritual metaphysics, we should accept this as a basic fact of our identity. How—how contingent as our identities are and so on and so on. I believe in fate, but not in eternal fate. I believe in predestination, but it’s a retroactive predestination. We create it retroactively. And the last one then, please allow me short. And this comes—brings us to the problem of subjectivity. You know what for me, that’s why I sincerely, no arrogant irony here, I love LGBT theorists, intelligent, many of them are, who use this term LGBT whatever plus. It always bothered me what is this plus? The usual explanation is simple British empiricist openness. There shouldn’t be just binary identity, male, female. There are many identities, trigender, asexual, whatever, but we cannot ever be sure that we covered them all, so let’s leave it open. Maybe we will discover another identity, nobody should be excluded. No, I claim, this would be my Hegelian twist, that you can be directly a plus as such. Your identity can be precisely the excess over every identity, and my claim would have been, I cannot develop it now, read the book if you want to learn more, that hysterical subject, feminine hysterical subject, and from my psychoanalytic perspective subjectivity is feminine. For me hysteria is not depreciation, the bad guys are perverts for me. Perverts are—every totalitarian power needs a pervert. So, but—that this is the basic hysterical identity and to use to give you a ridiculous example. That’s why I love it when you say to a woman "I love you," you get this eternal question: "Tell me why you love." You cannot answer. Because the woman provokes you, that’s the hysterical provocation of a master: "Tell me what’s my identity." And of course you never can get an answer to this one, you know. Sorry for this confused introduction. I hope you're all keeping up. Alright, alright. No, no, I stopped, surprisingly I stopped now. Well I want—but I do want to rewind a bit because what was interesting in what you said was we were starting and we were talking about what seemed to be abstract metaphysics, right? Yeah. We were talking about, you know, how there’s a different—a view in which there’s an ultimate reality or whether we’re just stuck within whatever framework we have. And then we went and you started talking about transgender and—and the different sort of identities there and how there’s this contradiction between or a—maybe a tension between a view where everything is very fluid and nothing is determinate. I agree totally with you here. It's a very good point. That the term contradiction should be used very carefully. Sorry, yeah. Okay, good. So the point is, so is—but I just want to sort of like tease out the link there. What—what’s the connection between these sort of—these what seem like abstract metaphysical theories, which you said at one point you this is not just metaphysics, this is not just bullshit. What’s the connection between that metaphysical problem and a practical, political problem like this issues of transgender identity? I will give you a very maybe naive answer. I think that what is happening today, although many people dismiss me as, uh, misogynist, no, I think that what is happening today with transgenderism and so on and so on, even "me too," is—that for thousands of years, even before class society, there was a certain fixation of gender roles and that that is breaking down today. That we are at a point of incredible openness. Basic rules of gender identity and so on will have to be—will have to be rewritten. That’s the great thing that is happening. Where I dis—and second thing, I claim that, but I cannot of course develop it fully now, I claim that—this sexualized opposition, the traditional notion of masculine-feminine, always also secretly at least influenced our ontology, even the most abstract philosophy. For example, that’s why I prefer Plato to Aristotle. Aristotle’s ontology is hyle, morphe, is masculine versus feminine and so on, Aristotle openly says it and so on and so on. So that—these are for me as a Hegelian the most fascinating moments when—and that’s why we live in a great era, I think, even if we will all die because of ecology or what, that—even stuff of our daily experience, what to do with transgender people and so on, and what should they do with themselves of course—it’s not just one particular struggle, very basic things are at stake there. Even—this is what again always fascinates me, when we are apparently dealing with a minor problem of sexual politics, but it has radical, even philosophical, very fundamental philosophical implications. And also psychoanalytical ones because one of your other great influences is Lacan, right? So you bring this psychoanalytic view and like you said you
Is it just a naive dream we should just give up? Yeah, but nonetheless the question persists. You will not squeeze out so simply. Are you a simple agnostic ultimately who claims there is some kind of reality we just cannot ever reach it? Or, as a Hegelian, I would be tempted to say, what if there is nothing beyond? Not nothing in the sense that we are just dealing with illusory phenomena, but nothing in the sense that there is no big mystery behind. And that’s my—I will try to give a very problematic example to provoke you, bringing us to sexuality, the title, to explain it. What if—I don’t agree with this approach that we are just limited to contradictory antinomic phenomena, we cannot ever reach what a thing really is or reality beyond. What if—and this is for me—I know I proceed very fast here, I develop it more in detail in the book—the biggest lesson—that’s why I think we haven’t yet really apprehended what it means—of quantum physics, what really attracts me there is this idea that it’s not just that our knowledge is imperfect, we cannot ever grasp the way reality is. What if reality in itself is somehow ontologically incomplete? If I may repeat an old story which I often use in my books. From some—maybe you know, it wasn’t you—some very good introduction to philosophy, simple. The guy—I’m very sorry, I’m just old and senile, no aggressiveness implied that I don’t mention his name, I forgot it—he draws a parallel between video games and quantum physics and says, you know, in a video game when you move in the virtual reality there immersed into a game, the reality there is not fully constituted. Like, for example, in the background you have a forest, but the—but the creator of the game didn’t program all the details of every tree because it’s not part of the game for you to go there, you know. Or you have houses, if it’s not part of the game that you enter the house, the inside of the house is not programmed. And the idea of this guy—I loved it—is that what if—it’s a very ironic reading—what if something similar happens in quantum physics? You know this—this Heisenberg principle, we cannot measure of the same particle at the same time velocity and position. Now there was an interesting polemics here between Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, and of course I am on the side of Niels Bohr. For Heisenberg, this was just our epistemological deficiency, we cannot measure it. Bohr claimed no, it is in itself that the particle doesn’t have both the position and that. So now the ironic—and I love it—reading is this one: imagine God as the programmer of our universe. And God simply thought, "Oh, you humans are too stupid, you will not be able to reach beyond atom, so why should I lose time planning, programming for you part?" So if I may put it in this way, ironically, we with quantum physics, how do you put it in English, caught God with his pants down, you know. We were a little bit too bright of him, sorry, too intelligent, but I am not religious man, and the true problem for me is how to conceive this ontological openness, unfinished character of the universe without God. That reality in itself is not fully ontologically constituted. Which is why, a consequence, when you get to an antinomy—that’s my Hegelianism, I will try to explain it as simple as possible, and I see with full right you are getting nervous like cut it short, as I made a joke to Julian before referring to Goldfinger, you saw the movie, if he were to have in Goldfinger James Bond, he would have pressed the red button, you know, now to eject me—the antinomy, when we get caught in an antinomy, is for me not a sign of our limitation, but precisely the sign that we are approaching the thing itself. What if things in themselves are antinomic? To conclude and to offend you, some of you, although I am deeply pro—I am deeply pro transgender, LGBT, but you know what interests me so much in LGBT? The basic antinomy which many LGBT theorists try to obfuscate. On the one hand, the predominant ideology of transgender—correct me if I am wrong—people is let’s call it Judith Butlerism. It’s this type of discursive historicism. There is no essential gender identity, identities are constructed symbolically through contingent discursive games and so on and so on. Okay, okay. But at the same time, did you notice how the language that transgender people speak when they want to change sex is an extremely essentialist language? Again and again the media report how, for example, in my own country, Slovenia, we had many of them, but now a recent operation, a boy became a girl and he gave a big interview and he—she now of course—said, "Finally I exist in a body in which—into which I should have been born." I mean this is absolutely essentialist language. It is as if I have a fixed psychic identity but there can be a mistake, my psyche gets embodied in the wrong gender identity. Now for me it’s wrong to dwell into okay who is right, historicist or this. I think there is a solution from my perspective here, more even Kantian-Schellingian one. Of course I don’t believe in pre-existence of the soul while in eternity I look for, choose my sex and then there can be a mistake or whatever. But isn’t it—I like this notion developed by one of my favorite German idealists, Schelling, of—of this—he calls it eternal transcendental choice, he even calls it unconscious choice. Choice which you make choosing your identity, but it’s always a purely virtual presupposition, never in reality do you make this choice. Now to conclude, really, if you’re stupid enough to believe me, yeah—you will say but this is metaphysics, this is bullshit. No. I will remind you of, if you were ever passionately in love, of your most obvious self-experience. Isn’t—if there ever was a free act, is the act of falling in love. If you—you never choose in the present, to be vulgar in a male chauvinist way, falling in love doesn’t mean I look around, nice lady there, nice lady there, oh she has nice eyes, she has nice legs, oh let’s make a list, hop, this one has—you never fall in love in present time. At a certain point, you discover that you already are in love. And I think that without any involving any spiritual metaphysics, we should accept this as a basic fact of our identity. How—how contingent as our identities are and so on and so on. I believe in fate, but not in eternal fate. I believe in predestination, but it’s a retroactive predestination. We create it retroactively. And the last one then, please allow me short. And this comes—brings us to the problem of subjectivity. You know what for me, that’s why I sincerely, no arrogant irony here, I love LGBT theorists, intelligent, many of them are, who use this term LGBT whatever plus. It always bothered me what is this plus? The usual explanation is simple British empiricist openness. There shouldn’t be just binary identity, male, female. There are many identities, trigender, asexual, whatever, but we cannot ever be sure that we covered them all, so let’s leave it open. Maybe we will discover another identity, nobody should be excluded. No, I claim, this would be my Hegelian twist, that you can be directly a plus as such. Your identity can be precisely the excess over every identity, and my claim would have been, I cannot develop it now, read the book if you want to learn more, that hysterical subject, feminine hysterical subject, and from my psychoanalytic perspective subjectivity is feminine. For me hysteria is not depreciation, the bad guys are perverts for me. Perverts are—every totalitarian power needs a pervert. So, but—that this is the basic hysterical identity and to use to give you a ridiculous example. That’s why I love it when you say to a woman "I love you," you get this eternal question: "Tell me why you love." You cannot answer. Because the woman provokes you, that’s the hysterical provocation of a master: "Tell me what’s my identity." And of course you never can get an answer to this one, you know. Sorry for this confused introduction. I hope you're all keeping up. Alright, alright. No, no, I stopped, surprisingly I stopped now. Well I want—but I do want to rewind a bit because what was interesting in what you said was we were starting and we were talking about what seemed to be abstract metaphysics, right? Yeah. We were talking about, you know, how there’s a different—a view in which there’s an ultimate reality or whether we’re just stuck within whatever framework we have. And then we went and you started talking about transgender and—and the different sort of identities there and how there’s this contradiction between or a—maybe a tension between a view where everything is very fluid and nothing is determinate. I agree totally with you here. It's a very good point. That the term contradiction should be used very carefully. Sorry, yeah. Okay, good. So the point is, so is—but I just want to sort of like tease out the link there. What—what’s the connection between these sort of—these what seem like abstract metaphysical theories, which you said at one point you this is not just metaphysics, this is not just bullshit. What’s the connection between that metaphysical problem and a practical, political problem like this issues of transgender identity? I will give you a very maybe naive answer. I think that what is happening today, although many people dismiss me as, uh, misogynist, no, I think that what is happening today with transgenderism and so on and so on, even "me too," is—that for thousands of years, even before class society, there was a certain fixation of gender roles and that that is breaking down today. That we are at a point of incredible openness. Basic rules of gender identity and so on will have to be—will have to be rewritten. That’s the great thing that is happening. Where I dis—and second thing, I claim that, but I cannot of course develop it fully now, I claim that—this sexualized opposition, the traditional notion of masculine-feminine, always also secretly at least influenced our ontology, even the most abstract philosophy. For example, that’s why I prefer Plato to Aristotle. Aristotle’s ontology is hyle, morphe, is masculine versus feminine and so on, Aristotle openly says it and so on and so on. So that—these are for me as a Hegelian the most fascinating moments when—and that’s why we live in a great era, I think, even if we will all die because of ecology or what, that—even stuff of our daily experience, what to do with transgender people and so on, and what should they do with themselves of course—it’s not just one particular struggle, very basic things are at stake there. Even—this is what again always fascinates me, when we are apparently dealing with a minor problem of sexual politics, but it has radical, even philosophical, very fundamental philosophical implications. And also psychoanalytical ones because one of your other great influences is Lacan, right? So you bring this psychoanalytic view and like you said you
unknown
think that these categories of masculine-feminine affect our thinking. I mean are you also saying that actually, you know, essentially unconscious, often sexual, desires as well have to be brought to the table if we’re going to understand the way we think even about politics and—and social issues, ethics? Uh, yeah, although, although I’m here first I must say that one has to be very precise here with what one means by the unconscious. I don’t believe in some substantial unconscious which then allows you to get rid of your responsibility for it. So that you can say, "Okay, I did that, but sorry guys, it’s not me, it’s my unconscious which determined me." First, in a very idealist way, I believe
think that these categories of masculine-feminine affect our thinking. I mean are you also saying that actually, you know, essentially unconscious, often sexual, desires as well have to be brought to the table if we’re going to understand the way we think even about politics and—and social issues, ethics? Uh, yeah, although, although I’m here first I must say that one has to be very precise here with what one means by the unconscious. I don’t believe in some substantial unconscious which then allows you to get rid of your responsibility for it. So that you can say, "Okay, I did that, but sorry guys, it’s not me, it’s my unconscious which determined me." First, in a very idealist way, I believe
Slavoj Žižek
in total self-responsibility. Freud already said this when he said
in total self-responsibility. Freud already said this when he said
unknown
psychoanalysis is much more
psychoanalysis is much more
Slavoj Žižek
severe than Christian Church. In Christian Church you are responsible for your acts, for what you
severe than Christian Church. In Christian Church you are responsible for your acts, for what you
unknown
know; in psychoanalysis you are even responsible for what you don’t know. That you are so—I am not in this sense referring to the—to the—to the unconscious. For me unconscious is something much more subtle. Let me give you—I have it in the book, sorry, I know, I will make a joke at my expense. In our still male chauvinist universe, the idea is this one: only we men, ho ho, can think in abstract terms, concepts; women stupid, they have to go from particular to particular. Okay, then I am a woman, sorry. I always jump from particular to—so I will give you a wonderful example
know; in psychoanalysis you are even responsible for what you don’t know. That you are so—I am not in this sense referring to the—to the—to the unconscious. For me unconscious is something much more subtle. Let me give you—I have it in the book, sorry, I know, I will make a joke at my expense. In our still male chauvinist universe, the idea is this one: only we men, ho ho, can think in abstract terms, concepts; women stupid, they have to go from particular to particular. Okay, then I am a woman, sorry. I always jump from particular to—so I will give you a wonderful example
Slavoj Žižek
for what I mean, an indication as the unconscious. It’s not a substantial reality, the real me. It’s something very fragile, virtual. Let me retell you a story, maybe some of you know it, that I use probably in two or three my books. I—did you see the movie Billy Bathgate? It’s not a good movie. Nicole Kidman and I don’t know who. Okay, it’s based on a novel by Doctorow. A movie, it’s a bad movie, but somehow you discern in it the ecos, echoes of how you feel that the novel should have been much better, how it failed to capture a great novel. Now comes the beautiful paradox, for me beautiful. Then I said, "Okay, let’s read the novel." It’s even worse. So, you know what happened? Bad novel, bad movie, but through this repetition, a third virtual entity emerges, and that would have been purely virtual, the unconscious. Or, to give you another my favorite musical example, I love classical music. Uh, uh, Schumann, Humoreske, piano piece. You have two lines of notes for right hand, for left hand. And then Schumann puts a third line, notes which are not supposed to be played. But the point is to play the written notes so that somehow they echo the third line. And now things get really mysterious where you have a series of notes, melody, with this third line. Then you get the same series of notes without the third line. To give you my last example along the same lines, my favorite joke, I repeated it I think in the last years five-six times in my books, my favorite joke, very Hegelian, from Ernst Lubitsch’s classical comedy Ninotchka. You know, everybody knows this joke: a guy goes to a cafeteria and says, "Coffee without cream, please." And the waiter says, "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk." That’s what Hegel meant with bestimmte Negation, determinate negation.
for what I mean, an indication as the unconscious. It’s not a substantial reality, the real me. It’s something very fragile, virtual. Let me retell you a story, maybe some of you know it, that I use probably in two or three my books. I—did you see the movie Billy Bathgate? It’s not a good movie. Nicole Kidman and I don’t know who. Okay, it’s based on a novel by Doctorow. A movie, it’s a bad movie, but somehow you discern in it the ecos, echoes of how you feel that the novel should have been much better, how it failed to capture a great novel. Now comes the beautiful paradox, for me beautiful. Then I said, "Okay, let’s read the novel." It’s even worse. So, you know what happened? Bad novel, bad movie, but through this repetition, a third virtual entity emerges, and that would have been purely virtual, the unconscious. Or, to give you another my favorite musical example, I love classical music. Uh, uh, Schumann, Humoreske, piano piece. You have two lines of notes for right hand, for left hand. And then Schumann puts a third line, notes which are not supposed to be played. But the point is to play the written notes so that somehow they echo the third line. And now things get really mysterious where you have a series of notes, melody, with this third line. Then you get the same series of notes without the third line. To give you my last example along the same lines, my favorite joke, I repeated it I think in the last years five-six times in my books, my favorite joke, very Hegelian, from Ernst Lubitsch’s classical comedy Ninotchka. You know, everybody knows this joke: a guy goes to a cafeteria and says, "Coffee without cream, please." And the waiter says, "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk." That’s what Hegel meant with bestimmte Negation, determinate negation.
unknown
Of course we have three entities here, materially they are the same: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. But in their symbolic identity they are not the same. And this would have been something like unconscious, this purely virtual "without," but which as "without" is still there. So that would be my point, to totally desubstantialize, how should I put it, the unconscious. Forget about those metaphors, this iceberg you see just one tenth and the deep majority, largest part of the ice beneath water. It’s not this substantial
Of course we have three entities here, materially they are the same: plain coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. But in their symbolic identity they are not the same. And this would have been something like unconscious, this purely virtual "without," but which as "without" is still there. So that would be my point, to totally desubstantialize, how should I put it, the unconscious. Forget about those metaphors, this iceberg you see just one tenth and the deep majority, largest part of the ice beneath water. It’s not this substantial
Slavoj Žižek
identity, it’s something purely virtual, very fragile. And to give you the last teasing moment, that’s what worries me now. I follow—this will be my next book, I also with Bloomsbury I am not betraying them—I am now deeply into problem the problem of—are you dealing with it, did you write something about it?—so-called wired brain, Neuralink, whatever. No, no, no, yeah—at first I also thought that’s bullshit, they are dreaming. But quite many things they already can do it. And what interests me immensely is if, even in a modest way, something like wired brain, the idea is if a machine can somehow decrypt your line of thoughts, then maybe this can be connected with another brain and we will not even need words, we will be able directly to share our experiences. Here I am asking quite naive questions like, sorry, again my old guy’s dream about sex vulgarity is like me—can you imagine how this will affect our process of seduction? It’s none of this charm, we flirt, I indicate something ambiguous. If I’m with somebody and we flirt and if our mind are in direct contact, it’s just "I want to f you," "Yes, okay let's do it," you know. All this—and what will remain? I claim that all our human creativity is based on radical limitations. What happens if this limitation will be abolished? Well we’re halfway there with a lot of apps anyway because a lot of people get that out of the way. Sorry, they—we’re halfway there with hookup apps anyway, I think, to taking out the seduction part of it. Yeah, yeah, I know. But listen, but—but let’s just take one thing which perhaps is the most surprising, one might sound even ludicrous sounding claim in the book. I know, I know. There are many of them. I’m the first one to admit, yes. Okay. So, this idea of—you mentioned it earlier—that this idea that you say is suggested by quantum theory that, you know, imperfection is a part of reality itself. Our connection with ultimate reality is in a sense the incompleteness and imperfection of ultimate reality. And so your second theorem, you divide the book into sort of—into clear sections. It’s a little bit pretentious and bombastic, I agree, yeah. Yeah, the—the second theorem is that sex is our brush with the absolute. So if I can just read the theorem, it says, "The only way for us humans caught in the parallax gap to break out of it is through the experience of sexuality, which in its very failure to achieve its goal enables us to touch the dimension of the absolute." That sounds to me like perhaps a—a very intellectual chat-up line, but um— Are you? Yeah, but I—I agree and I expected this reaction, of course. But I must say that first, what I mean by this, it’s obviously not this for me really ludicrous line "Oh my God, when you are f-ing somebody intensely that’s it, you feel the absolute." Quite on the contrary, for me human sexuality is always about failure, postponement, repetition and so on. Let me give you again, I will do what you already noticed, a jump from high speculation to everyday experience. Let’s say you are a woman, although I don’t know why I say this, whoever. Let’s say we shake hands. We just shake hands. It’s okay. But let’s say that after we shake hands I would not drop your hand but I will just repeat the same gesture. Automatically your impression would have been something dirty is on his mind. Why is he going on? And I think human sexuality always has this link with failure and then how to turn—this is what differentiates human sexuality from—from animal mating. I used in that unfortunate debate with Jordan Peterson my favorite example of French cuisine. A French friend of mine explained to me that all the miracles of French cuisine can be explained as turning a failure into a success. Like you are doing normal Swiss cheese, you were lazy, the cheese got rotten, haha, we invented Camembert or whatever, you know. Or you are doing wine, something goes wrong with fermentation, wait a minute, we got Champagne or whatever, you know. And I think that human sexuality is never simply we just want and make, or whatever, we do it. It’s always through this detour, seduction and so on, which is why, and here Freud I think is still actual. You know, Freud’s theory is much more radical, it’s not already dated as many people claim. Freud’s claim is a very strange one. His point about—uh—children’s sexuality is that you have this first form of sexual awakening, five-six years or whatever, where you have many fantasies and so on, you don’t know what it is about. But then Freud says something much more radical. It’s not that once you are adult it’s over, you know. No. All the time you need some fantasy. I’m never alone in my with my partner or partners or whatever. You always need a fantasy, you always need a fantasy support. So back to your question, I think that, and I in the first chapter I approach this problem quite naively. I ask in a very naive way the question of—and I like this to return to traditional philosophy—what are our possible contacts with the absolute? The first version is traditional metaphysical mystical experience. There are moments of metaphysical trance whatever, we are there. Then the second version would be the negative destructive one, Marquis de Sade and so on. Only our only contact, since all reality is transient, uh, disappearing, every thing that arises will be destroyed, the only way to touch the absolute is the in acts of absolute destruction. Then we get the what I call the transcendental position, which for me is what—what is at work in so-called Western Marxism. For them, social practice is the ultimate transcendental horizon. Which means, Georg Lukács, the great
identity, it’s something purely virtual, very fragile. And to give you the last teasing moment, that’s what worries me now. I follow—this will be my next book, I also with Bloomsbury I am not betraying them—I am now deeply into problem the problem of—are you dealing with it, did you write something about it?—so-called wired brain, Neuralink, whatever. No, no, no, yeah—at first I also thought that’s bullshit, they are dreaming. But quite many things they already can do it. And what interests me immensely is if, even in a modest way, something like wired brain, the idea is if a machine can somehow decrypt your line of thoughts, then maybe this can be connected with another brain and we will not even need words, we will be able directly to share our experiences. Here I am asking quite naive questions like, sorry, again my old guy’s dream about sex vulgarity is like me—can you imagine how this will affect our process of seduction? It’s none of this charm, we flirt, I indicate something ambiguous. If I’m with somebody and we flirt and if our mind are in direct contact, it’s just "I want to f you," "Yes, okay let's do it," you know. All this—and what will remain? I claim that all our human creativity is based on radical limitations. What happens if this limitation will be abolished? Well we’re halfway there with a lot of apps anyway because a lot of people get that out of the way. Sorry, they—we’re halfway there with hookup apps anyway, I think, to taking out the seduction part of it. Yeah, yeah, I know. But listen, but—but let’s just take one thing which perhaps is the most surprising, one might sound even ludicrous sounding claim in the book. I know, I know. There are many of them. I’m the first one to admit, yes. Okay. So, this idea of—you mentioned it earlier—that this idea that you say is suggested by quantum theory that, you know, imperfection is a part of reality itself. Our connection with ultimate reality is in a sense the incompleteness and imperfection of ultimate reality. And so your second theorem, you divide the book into sort of—into clear sections. It’s a little bit pretentious and bombastic, I agree, yeah. Yeah, the—the second theorem is that sex is our brush with the absolute. So if I can just read the theorem, it says, "The only way for us humans caught in the parallax gap to break out of it is through the experience of sexuality, which in its very failure to achieve its goal enables us to touch the dimension of the absolute." That sounds to me like perhaps a—a very intellectual chat-up line, but um— Are you? Yeah, but I—I agree and I expected this reaction, of course. But I must say that first, what I mean by this, it’s obviously not this for me really ludicrous line "Oh my God, when you are f-ing somebody intensely that’s it, you feel the absolute." Quite on the contrary, for me human sexuality is always about failure, postponement, repetition and so on. Let me give you again, I will do what you already noticed, a jump from high speculation to everyday experience. Let’s say you are a woman, although I don’t know why I say this, whoever. Let’s say we shake hands. We just shake hands. It’s okay. But let’s say that after we shake hands I would not drop your hand but I will just repeat the same gesture. Automatically your impression would have been something dirty is on his mind. Why is he going on? And I think human sexuality always has this link with failure and then how to turn—this is what differentiates human sexuality from—from animal mating. I used in that unfortunate debate with Jordan Peterson my favorite example of French cuisine. A French friend of mine explained to me that all the miracles of French cuisine can be explained as turning a failure into a success. Like you are doing normal Swiss cheese, you were lazy, the cheese got rotten, haha, we invented Camembert or whatever, you know. Or you are doing wine, something goes wrong with fermentation, wait a minute, we got Champagne or whatever, you know. And I think that human sexuality is never simply we just want and make, or whatever, we do it. It’s always through this detour, seduction and so on, which is why, and here Freud I think is still actual. You know, Freud’s theory is much more radical, it’s not already dated as many people claim. Freud’s claim is a very strange one. His point about—uh—children’s sexuality is that you have this first form of sexual awakening, five-six years or whatever, where you have many fantasies and so on, you don’t know what it is about. But then Freud says something much more radical. It’s not that once you are adult it’s over, you know. No. All the time you need some fantasy. I’m never alone in my with my partner or partners or whatever. You always need a fantasy, you always need a fantasy support. So back to your question, I think that, and I in the first chapter I approach this problem quite naively. I ask in a very naive way the question of—and I like this to return to traditional philosophy—what are our possible contacts with the absolute? The first version is traditional metaphysical mystical experience. There are moments of metaphysical trance whatever, we are there. Then the second version would be the negative destructive one, Marquis de Sade and so on. Only our only contact, since all reality is transient, uh, disappearing, every thing that arises will be destroyed, the only way to touch the absolute is the in acts of absolute destruction. Then we get the what I call the transcendental position, which for me is what—what is at work in so-called Western Marxism. For them, social practice is the ultimate transcendental horizon. Which means, Georg Lukács, the great
unknown
founder of Western Marxism, said that even nature is always a historical category. This doesn’t mean there is no nature, but the way we understand nature is always socially overdetermined. So, even if you walk, even if you, sorry, talk about I don’t know primordial void, Big Bang and so on, it’s always mediated in its horizon of meaning by our social practice. We have only—and my—I try to offer another solution, which is a deeply Freudian one, I claim, that what the properly—it’s
founder of Western Marxism, said that even nature is always a historical category. This doesn’t mean there is no nature, but the way we understand nature is always socially overdetermined. So, even if you walk, even if you, sorry, talk about I don’t know primordial void, Big Bang and so on, it’s always mediated in its horizon of meaning by our social practice. We have only—and my—I try to offer another solution, which is a deeply Freudian one, I claim, that what the properly—it’s
Slavoj Žižek
very naive what I will say—the properly
very naive what I will say—the properly
unknown
metaphysical dimension—by metaphysical I don’t mean another realm, I mean you live your ordinary life and something happens which interrupts the flow, you get fixated—that originally this is eroticism. And even, let me give you again another everyday experience. Did you ever fall really passionately in love? And I’m not talking about some spiritual love, but this really "I want to f you like crazy" and so on. Admit it, it’s a catastrophe, it’s not happiness. I cannot imagine anything more happy than not being passionately in love. You meet friends, you drink beer, one night stand here and there, life goes on. Then you fall in love, it’s a catastrophe. Your life is ruined, you have to worry all the time and so on and so on. This is for me, and I think the Freudian hypothesis is that this is the original, if we mean by
metaphysical dimension—by metaphysical I don’t mean another realm, I mean you live your ordinary life and something happens which interrupts the flow, you get fixated—that originally this is eroticism. And even, let me give you again another everyday experience. Did you ever fall really passionately in love? And I’m not talking about some spiritual love, but this really "I want to f you like crazy" and so on. Admit it, it’s a catastrophe, it’s not happiness. I cannot imagine anything more happy than not being passionately in love. You meet friends, you drink beer, one night stand here and there, life goes on. Then you fall in love, it’s a catastrophe. Your life is ruined, you have to worry all the time and so on and so on. This is for me, and I think the Freudian hypothesis is that this is the original, if we mean by
Slavoj Žižek
metaphysics, again not any transcendent dimension, but something that interrupts the flow of ordinary life, that it’s—it’s eroticism. This erotic fixation. And—and now, I don’t have time to go more into Hegelian waters where my idea would have been that of course religious people would have said, "Maybe, but this is only the lower form of like you begin maybe with erotic transcendence but then you have to go pure ideas, God." I’m saying no, that’s the original experience of transcendence and then that all so-called higher spiritual experiences are—are based on this. And I am here talking not only about some spiritual love, but even about sexual experience at its most concrete. It’s an interruption, something that breaks the flow and so on and so on. And then I do something even more crazy, I admit it. I link this sexual experience to—I know this is the craziest hypothesis for some people, but I think my reading is justified to—I don’t know, I don’t want to bore you too much with—Kant, Kant isolates two types of antinomies of pure reason, mathematical and dynamic antinomies. And I think there is sexual difference inscribed there. In other words, for me sexual difference is not a difference between two types of gender identities. It’s just two types of the same—two types of the same—deadlock. Again, what fascinates me here, and I think this is human eroticism, is how—what you already mentioned also—how the very limitation—limitation comes first, limitation opens up the space for transcendence. That’s the paradox, that if you take the limitation away you don’t get the higher thing itself, you lose everything. My favorite example is a little bit male chauvinist, I use it in my books, I’m sorry. I was years ago in some country—I don’t want to embarrass anyone, I will not mention—just flirting with an elder lady. And to probably seduce me, she told me when her last lover saw her naked that he told her, "Except for one or two pounds too much, you have a perfect body." You can imagine what my reaction to the lady was: "Just don't lose that. Don’t try to lose one or two pounds." If you—because the perfection was a mirage created by that surplus. If you take away one or two pounds, you don’t get a perfect body, you get a bland ordinary body. You see, this is what fascinates me at all levels. This, I—or let me give you another example, it’s erotic and then I will stop. Did you see that movie? I consider it disgusting otherwise, but it’s a kitschy scene. Did you see Four Weddings and a Funeral? Hugh Grant’s love declaration to Andie MacDowell. How he gets involved all this—faked of course—stuttering, confusion, repeats himself. But the idea of course is obvious of the scene, that precisely in this way, through the failure to say clearly what he wants, he gets the message through. If it would have been a perfect regular statement, declaration of love, it wouldn’t have worked. This is what fascinates me at all levels, this idea of how we get obstacles to some authentic transcendence, but the very obstacle creates as its echo—echo—the dimension of transcendence. If you want—if your idea is let’s get rid of the obstacle, let’s get directly at the thing itself, you lose the thing. Okay, I’ve probably one more question before I open up to the audience because I want to get the audience in. We are—we are like leaders of the working class. Screw them, why don’t we talk? We—now I will talk like a Stalinist—we know better than the people what is really good for the people. Okay, there you go. Sorry, but this joke was very serious. That’s my problem with populism. We intellectuals maybe even more stupid than ordinary people, but unfortunately I don’t have this Maoist trust—learn from the ordinary people, there is no wisdom in them. Okay. Well, for these not ordinary people, these are the—anyway. Listen, there were a lot—you mentioned earlier how, you know, you’ve managed to sort of offend so many people now that, you know. More or less everybody, yeah. More or less everyone now. I mean, there are lots of—you talk about specific things that you said. You said, for example, although you find—you’re horrified by Trump, you would have voted for him for various reasons. You—you’ve got sort of— I’m sorry to interrupt you. Wouldn’t you agree? My point, and I made it very clear, without Trump there wouldn’t have been a Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism. My calculation was a very brutal Leninist one. Trump is a great risk, although if you ask me, I have friends who know people who know people—it may surprise you, I’m a weird guy who have connection in State Department and even a Pentagon—and they told me in all probability Hillary Clinton would already have attacked Iran or North Korea. So, but what I’m—yeah, but—okay, yeah—so don't, but what I am saying is this: are we aware what great thing is happening? For the first time in a half a century socialism is taken seriously, there is serious alternative. That’s what I predicted, and it happened. Yeah, okay. So what I wanted to ask is, rather than going to a specific issue, um, you know, you’re obviously—you’re very critical of what you might call sort of left-liberal— Absolutely left-liberal. So can we get to—what’s the nub of your problem with them? What’s—what’s the heart of it? What’s the essence, as it were, to use the word? Horrible word essence. Essence of—of your—your disagreement of with the liberal-left position. Could—what’s the core of the problem with their worldview? The core of the problem is again, in psychoanalytic terms, uh, you could put it that it’s the problem of fetishist denial of—I don’t know, like this old word of class struggle, let’s say social tension or whatever. I think, you know, this very naive, we can debate about it, psychoanalytic notion of fetish. Fetish is—very naive Freudian theory—the last thing you see before you notice that—is very naive, I’m not advocating it—before you see that woman has no penis. So that’s why it’s fur like pubic hair and so on. But this idea is important that you are confronting a social antagonism and fetish is the element which somehow stands in for that antagonism but at the same time obfuscates it. That’s why, for example, in—in fascist antisemitism, Jew is a fetish. Jew is a stand-in for social antagonism. That’s why if you analyze antisemitic figure of the Jew, it combines upper and lower class features. Jews are too intellectual, money laundering and dirty, promiscuous and so on. So my suspicion is that this is why left-liberals hate Trump so much. I mean, I hate him, he’s disgusting, he’s crazy, he married a Slovene girl, how can—serious guy. But what I’m saying is that—it’s as if Trump is the last thing they see before they see class struggle, social antagonism. And that’s why Trump won, because left-liberals like to displace social antagonism with, you know, they love fight against racism, feminist struggle and so on, just not to control social antagonisms. I am all for anti-racism, feminism and so on, but connected with social struggles and so on. And that’s what, for example, bothers me with "me too." My hero, do I quote her here or somewhere else, I don’t know, it’s a lady called, I think I didn’t confuse the name, Tarana Burke, an old American dignified black lady who even invented the term years ago of Me Too and it’s horrified at what happened now with this, basically the medium for failed movie stars and so on. You know who is even my hero here? You know the actress, political hero, Kirsten Stewart. She made recently a wonderful interview for, I don’t know, Vanity Fair or Vogue, where she also—he sorry, she—also attacks this official line of Me Too and she says, "Why focus on failed stars?" She says, "Make just one step back. Go to any studio. All the makeup girls, all the secretaries, they are regularly sexually harassed. Nobody even mentions that," and so on and so on. I mean, and this Tarana Burke says the same. They said originally Me Too was meant—and in some countries work like this, I like South Korea where it’s a mass movement of women tens of thousand demonstrating and so on—and the way it was twisted here, you know. That’s my bad feeling with left-liberals. It’s the same with refugees. This got me into a lot of trouble, no, as if I’m brutal, let the refugees starve. No, I’m saying let’s not turn the problem of refugees into the problem of—into a humanitarian problem. Let’s make a step back. Let’s try to change the situation which creates refugees. Why did we—why did United States attacked Iraq? What goes on in Syria? Go to Libya, go to Congo. Human nightmare. No, you change it into humanitarian problem, people are arriving there starving, we will do something. More has to be done. I more and more think that this liberal obsession with refugees, open our gates today, it’s a very disgusting manipulation with ordinary people. The upper classes, they live in their enclosed areas, they never get into a contact with refugees, and it’s ideal so
metaphysics, again not any transcendent dimension, but something that interrupts the flow of ordinary life, that it’s—it’s eroticism. This erotic fixation. And—and now, I don’t have time to go more into Hegelian waters where my idea would have been that of course religious people would have said, "Maybe, but this is only the lower form of like you begin maybe with erotic transcendence but then you have to go pure ideas, God." I’m saying no, that’s the original experience of transcendence and then that all so-called higher spiritual experiences are—are based on this. And I am here talking not only about some spiritual love, but even about sexual experience at its most concrete. It’s an interruption, something that breaks the flow and so on and so on. And then I do something even more crazy, I admit it. I link this sexual experience to—I know this is the craziest hypothesis for some people, but I think my reading is justified to—I don’t know, I don’t want to bore you too much with—Kant, Kant isolates two types of antinomies of pure reason, mathematical and dynamic antinomies. And I think there is sexual difference inscribed there. In other words, for me sexual difference is not a difference between two types of gender identities. It’s just two types of the same—two types of the same—deadlock. Again, what fascinates me here, and I think this is human eroticism, is how—what you already mentioned also—how the very limitation—limitation comes first, limitation opens up the space for transcendence. That’s the paradox, that if you take the limitation away you don’t get the higher thing itself, you lose everything. My favorite example is a little bit male chauvinist, I use it in my books, I’m sorry. I was years ago in some country—I don’t want to embarrass anyone, I will not mention—just flirting with an elder lady. And to probably seduce me, she told me when her last lover saw her naked that he told her, "Except for one or two pounds too much, you have a perfect body." You can imagine what my reaction to the lady was: "Just don't lose that. Don’t try to lose one or two pounds." If you—because the perfection was a mirage created by that surplus. If you take away one or two pounds, you don’t get a perfect body, you get a bland ordinary body. You see, this is what fascinates me at all levels. This, I—or let me give you another example, it’s erotic and then I will stop. Did you see that movie? I consider it disgusting otherwise, but it’s a kitschy scene. Did you see Four Weddings and a Funeral? Hugh Grant’s love declaration to Andie MacDowell. How he gets involved all this—faked of course—stuttering, confusion, repeats himself. But the idea of course is obvious of the scene, that precisely in this way, through the failure to say clearly what he wants, he gets the message through. If it would have been a perfect regular statement, declaration of love, it wouldn’t have worked. This is what fascinates me at all levels, this idea of how we get obstacles to some authentic transcendence, but the very obstacle creates as its echo—echo—the dimension of transcendence. If you want—if your idea is let’s get rid of the obstacle, let’s get directly at the thing itself, you lose the thing. Okay, I’ve probably one more question before I open up to the audience because I want to get the audience in. We are—we are like leaders of the working class. Screw them, why don’t we talk? We—now I will talk like a Stalinist—we know better than the people what is really good for the people. Okay, there you go. Sorry, but this joke was very serious. That’s my problem with populism. We intellectuals maybe even more stupid than ordinary people, but unfortunately I don’t have this Maoist trust—learn from the ordinary people, there is no wisdom in them. Okay. Well, for these not ordinary people, these are the—anyway. Listen, there were a lot—you mentioned earlier how, you know, you’ve managed to sort of offend so many people now that, you know. More or less everybody, yeah. More or less everyone now. I mean, there are lots of—you talk about specific things that you said. You said, for example, although you find—you’re horrified by Trump, you would have voted for him for various reasons. You—you’ve got sort of— I’m sorry to interrupt you. Wouldn’t you agree? My point, and I made it very clear, without Trump there wouldn’t have been a Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism. My calculation was a very brutal Leninist one. Trump is a great risk, although if you ask me, I have friends who know people who know people—it may surprise you, I’m a weird guy who have connection in State Department and even a Pentagon—and they told me in all probability Hillary Clinton would already have attacked Iran or North Korea. So, but what I’m—yeah, but—okay, yeah—so don't, but what I am saying is this: are we aware what great thing is happening? For the first time in a half a century socialism is taken seriously, there is serious alternative. That’s what I predicted, and it happened. Yeah, okay. So what I wanted to ask is, rather than going to a specific issue, um, you know, you’re obviously—you’re very critical of what you might call sort of left-liberal— Absolutely left-liberal. So can we get to—what’s the nub of your problem with them? What’s—what’s the heart of it? What’s the essence, as it were, to use the word? Horrible word essence. Essence of—of your—your disagreement of with the liberal-left position. Could—what’s the core of the problem with their worldview? The core of the problem is again, in psychoanalytic terms, uh, you could put it that it’s the problem of fetishist denial of—I don’t know, like this old word of class struggle, let’s say social tension or whatever. I think, you know, this very naive, we can debate about it, psychoanalytic notion of fetish. Fetish is—very naive Freudian theory—the last thing you see before you notice that—is very naive, I’m not advocating it—before you see that woman has no penis. So that’s why it’s fur like pubic hair and so on. But this idea is important that you are confronting a social antagonism and fetish is the element which somehow stands in for that antagonism but at the same time obfuscates it. That’s why, for example, in—in fascist antisemitism, Jew is a fetish. Jew is a stand-in for social antagonism. That’s why if you analyze antisemitic figure of the Jew, it combines upper and lower class features. Jews are too intellectual, money laundering and dirty, promiscuous and so on. So my suspicion is that this is why left-liberals hate Trump so much. I mean, I hate him, he’s disgusting, he’s crazy, he married a Slovene girl, how can—serious guy. But what I’m saying is that—it’s as if Trump is the last thing they see before they see class struggle, social antagonism. And that’s why Trump won, because left-liberals like to displace social antagonism with, you know, they love fight against racism, feminist struggle and so on, just not to control social antagonisms. I am all for anti-racism, feminism and so on, but connected with social struggles and so on. And that’s what, for example, bothers me with "me too." My hero, do I quote her here or somewhere else, I don’t know, it’s a lady called, I think I didn’t confuse the name, Tarana Burke, an old American dignified black lady who even invented the term years ago of Me Too and it’s horrified at what happened now with this, basically the medium for failed movie stars and so on. You know who is even my hero here? You know the actress, political hero, Kirsten Stewart. She made recently a wonderful interview for, I don’t know, Vanity Fair or Vogue, where she also—he sorry, she—also attacks this official line of Me Too and she says, "Why focus on failed stars?" She says, "Make just one step back. Go to any studio. All the makeup girls, all the secretaries, they are regularly sexually harassed. Nobody even mentions that," and so on and so on. I mean, and this Tarana Burke says the same. They said originally Me Too was meant—and in some countries work like this, I like South Korea where it’s a mass movement of women tens of thousand demonstrating and so on—and the way it was twisted here, you know. That’s my bad feeling with left-liberals. It’s the same with refugees. This got me into a lot of trouble, no, as if I’m brutal, let the refugees starve. No, I’m saying let’s not turn the problem of refugees into the problem of—into a humanitarian problem. Let’s make a step back. Let’s try to change the situation which creates refugees. Why did we—why did United States attacked Iraq? What goes on in Syria? Go to Libya, go to Congo. Human nightmare. No, you change it into humanitarian problem, people are arriving there starving, we will do something. More has to be done. I more and more think that this liberal obsession with refugees, open our gates today, it’s a very disgusting manipulation with ordinary people. The upper classes, they live in their enclosed areas, they never get into a contact with refugees, and it’s ideal so
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that you could cook up a conflict between two groups of underprivileged people: ordinary people and—and refugees, and you
that you could cook up a conflict between two groups of underprivileged people: ordinary people and—and refugees, and you
Slavoj Žižek
are above with your moral wisdom. In Slovenia, my country, when there were two-three years ago a big wave of refugees, I was for them, but I understand ordinary people. On the border with Croatia, there were farmers close to the border, one day, one morning in front of your house there is a column of refugees. And of course they are humans like us, there are criminals among them and so on. All the big city, Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, elite were shocked. "Racism!
are above with your moral wisdom. In Slovenia, my country, when there were two-three years ago a big wave of refugees, I was for them, but I understand ordinary people. On the border with Croatia, there were farmers close to the border, one day, one morning in front of your house there is a column of refugees. And of course they are humans like us, there are criminals among them and so on. All the big city, Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, elite were shocked. "Racism!
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Primitive ordinary people!" No, this is what I hate, you know, this fake upper middle class liberal approach which then—which—which
Primitive ordinary people!" No, this is what I hate, you know, this fake upper middle class liberal approach which then—which—which
Slavoj Žižek
basically
basically
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again is here to obfuscate through social antagonisms. Just want a short little follow up on that, because I mean you still use the term communism—communist to describe yourself and— To provoke again. It’s a good term. No. Everybody can be socialist. Bill Gates is a socialist.
again is here to obfuscate through social antagonisms. Just want a short little follow up on that, because I mean you still use the term communism—communist to describe yourself and— To provoke again. It’s a good term. No. Everybody can be socialist. Bill Gates is a socialist.
Slavoj Žižek
Ah, communism, it’s— Yeah. But you know, but you—partly because as you say that all these other things are distracting from the fundamental struggles. So for that reason, in America, Trump or Hillary, you vote Trump. Short question: in the UK today, Corbyn or Johnson? No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. It’s not that I’m Boris Johnson or that I’m in France Marine Le Pen. I made a judgment. This was not a principal decision for one— I understand, I understand. But I will— I will give you a very precise answer. I think, and it’s an empirical judgment, maybe I was wrong, but I think the United States are such a diverse country with so many different structures of power that Trump in power in the United States, it’s different than Boris Johnson
Ah, communism, it’s— Yeah. But you know, but you—partly because as you say that all these other things are distracting from the fundamental struggles. So for that reason, in America, Trump or Hillary, you vote Trump. Short question: in the UK today, Corbyn or Johnson? No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. It’s not that I’m Boris Johnson or that I’m in France Marine Le Pen. I made a judgment. This was not a principal decision for one— I understand, I understand. But I will— I will give you a very precise answer. I think, and it’s an empirical judgment, maybe I was wrong, but I think the United States are such a diverse country with so many different structures of power that Trump in power in the United States, it’s different than Boris Johnson
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here, or even more than Alternative for Germany in Germany, or especially Marine Le Pen in—in—in France. I—I think that Trump is worth—maybe I was wrong—it was not a transcendental decision for one— I know. Trump is maybe worth the risk. Boris Johnson is not, Marine Le Pen is definitely not and so on. But what worries me, aren’t you worried like the total disorientation, how successfully Labour Party is screwing things up and ruining itself? Are they all working for Boris
here, or even more than Alternative for Germany in Germany, or especially Marine Le Pen in—in—in France. I—I think that Trump is worth—maybe I was wrong—it was not a transcendental decision for one— I know. Trump is maybe worth the risk. Boris Johnson is not, Marine Le Pen is definitely not and so on. But what worries me, aren’t you worried like the total disorientation, how successfully Labour Party is screwing things up and ruining itself? Are they all working for Boris
Slavoj Žižek
Johnson or what? And this is the question I ask myself. I would still vote for them but—or in United States, my God, what the Democratic Party is doing now trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders, all the dirty games, they’re really doing everything possible to make Trump re-elected. If I were to be a Stalinist, I would have said Democratic Party is the main agent of Trump. Okay. Now is the chance to have your say. So we’re going to raise the lights, we’ve got some microphones, we’re going to take—could—could we ask for your questions if at all possible to be questions rather than speeches with the words "do you agree" at the end? And um, also to be as brief as possible because— Because I’m not brief as possible. He’s not brief as possible. Okay, um, let me—let me see here. We do—we do have I think I just go the microphone there at the—at the side there. But sorry, at the end can I get a question from you? Because I appreciate you, I know your work, I take it very seriously and can you scrap this politeness and ask me a really brutal question? I’m not bluffing now, like "Here I don't agree with you." All right, I’ll ask you a brutal—I think I have the brutal question as we're taking questions from the room. Okay. So we have the first one here. Please. I hope it will work that we will hear it. Yes, yes. Uh, yeah, hello. Um, so I’ll just preface this by saying I’m a huge fan of your work, I’ve read a huge bunch of your books. But— I already hear you sharpening your knife behind your back. Yeah, please, sorry. That’s fine. Uh, my question really is like, why have you chosen to write this book about this topic now? It just seems like there are maybe kind of bigger issues at the moment like for instance climate change and ecological crisis, um, and the od—this idea of like repetition through history and that’s fine if you’ve got like enough time for that, so Marxism had time, hundreds of years, Lenin, Marx, Mao, blah blah blah, but what if we don’t have time because of, you know, climate change and ecological collapse? What if the next time the absolute fails is the final time and we don’t get another chance to repeat it? Like, I mean— Okay. You say we sit through eight years of Trump to get Sanders, but what if eight years of Trump is all we have? Okay, so I think we’ve got the gist of the question, yeah. Very—very briefly, uh, it’s even worse than you imply. People who follow vaguely my work notice that somewhere from Less Than Nothing I’m basically rewriting again and again the same book. Even the structure is similar: transcendental antagonism, parallax, then how to move beyond it and so on and so on. Why? Because I—first, I still, no matter how urgent the situation is, I believe in big thinking. My favorite quote from Marx, passage, is you know it looked for a brief moment—it was an illusion, but French-Prussian War—that there will be a revolution. And Marx wrote at that point a letter to Engels where he says, "My God, already a revolution, but I haven't yet finished Capital, let them wait a little bit." I deeply sympathize with this idea that let’s have trust in theory. We need it more than ever today, pure theory, because today—like our situation with—with wired brain, ecology and so on—these are all very concrete pressing problems. Just think about wired brain and digital control. What an incredible threat to our freedoms this is. Because till now, the threat to our freedom was more or less visible: the Soviet Union threat. You turn around, "Oh my God, there is a guy following me." Today, the—our very freedom, what we experience as our freedom, is just the form of our un-freedom. What can be more free than freely surfing on the net and so on, buying things? But everything is registered, we have—so I claim that that’s maybe what is so exciting, but also in a desperate sense today. We are obviously in an era where we have to really think new. We need new forms of thinking. The ethical dilemmas we are confronting today with mind control, with ecology and so on and so on. Our entire ethics is changing. Here we have to move beyond Hegel because Hegel was not an optimist, never forget. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s final word is not this new corporate almost fascist state that he described, it’s war. The necessity of war. And Hegel is there saying something with which we shouldn’t agree but it in some historical sense true. Our notion of duty, of ethics, is all grounded on war. The idea is in everyday life you
Johnson or what? And this is the question I ask myself. I would still vote for them but—or in United States, my God, what the Democratic Party is doing now trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders, all the dirty games, they’re really doing everything possible to make Trump re-elected. If I were to be a Stalinist, I would have said Democratic Party is the main agent of Trump. Okay. Now is the chance to have your say. So we’re going to raise the lights, we’ve got some microphones, we’re going to take—could—could we ask for your questions if at all possible to be questions rather than speeches with the words "do you agree" at the end? And um, also to be as brief as possible because— Because I’m not brief as possible. He’s not brief as possible. Okay, um, let me—let me see here. We do—we do have I think I just go the microphone there at the—at the side there. But sorry, at the end can I get a question from you? Because I appreciate you, I know your work, I take it very seriously and can you scrap this politeness and ask me a really brutal question? I’m not bluffing now, like "Here I don't agree with you." All right, I’ll ask you a brutal—I think I have the brutal question as we're taking questions from the room. Okay. So we have the first one here. Please. I hope it will work that we will hear it. Yes, yes. Uh, yeah, hello. Um, so I’ll just preface this by saying I’m a huge fan of your work, I’ve read a huge bunch of your books. But— I already hear you sharpening your knife behind your back. Yeah, please, sorry. That’s fine. Uh, my question really is like, why have you chosen to write this book about this topic now? It just seems like there are maybe kind of bigger issues at the moment like for instance climate change and ecological crisis, um, and the od—this idea of like repetition through history and that’s fine if you’ve got like enough time for that, so Marxism had time, hundreds of years, Lenin, Marx, Mao, blah blah blah, but what if we don’t have time because of, you know, climate change and ecological collapse? What if the next time the absolute fails is the final time and we don’t get another chance to repeat it? Like, I mean— Okay. You say we sit through eight years of Trump to get Sanders, but what if eight years of Trump is all we have? Okay, so I think we’ve got the gist of the question, yeah. Very—very briefly, uh, it’s even worse than you imply. People who follow vaguely my work notice that somewhere from Less Than Nothing I’m basically rewriting again and again the same book. Even the structure is similar: transcendental antagonism, parallax, then how to move beyond it and so on and so on. Why? Because I—first, I still, no matter how urgent the situation is, I believe in big thinking. My favorite quote from Marx, passage, is you know it looked for a brief moment—it was an illusion, but French-Prussian War—that there will be a revolution. And Marx wrote at that point a letter to Engels where he says, "My God, already a revolution, but I haven't yet finished Capital, let them wait a little bit." I deeply sympathize with this idea that let’s have trust in theory. We need it more than ever today, pure theory, because today—like our situation with—with wired brain, ecology and so on—these are all very concrete pressing problems. Just think about wired brain and digital control. What an incredible threat to our freedoms this is. Because till now, the threat to our freedom was more or less visible: the Soviet Union threat. You turn around, "Oh my God, there is a guy following me." Today, the—our very freedom, what we experience as our freedom, is just the form of our un-freedom. What can be more free than freely surfing on the net and so on, buying things? But everything is registered, we have—so I claim that that’s maybe what is so exciting, but also in a desperate sense today. We are obviously in an era where we have to really think new. We need new forms of thinking. The ethical dilemmas we are confronting today with mind control, with ecology and so on and so on. Our entire ethics is changing. Here we have to move beyond Hegel because Hegel was not an optimist, never forget. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s final word is not this new corporate almost fascist state that he described, it’s war. The necessity of war. And Hegel is there saying something with which we shouldn’t agree but it in some historical sense true. Our notion of duty, of ethics, is all grounded on war. The idea is in everyday life you
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work for your profit, blah blah, but the moment of ethical truth is when your country is in danger. "Are you ready to sacrifice your life?" and so on and so on. It’s obvious that we have
work for your profit, blah blah, but the moment of ethical truth is when your country is in danger. "Are you ready to sacrifice your life?" and so on and so on. It’s obvious that we have
Slavoj Žižek
to move beyond this. That’s why I
to move beyond this. That’s why I
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advocate with all the mistakes he made, people like Julian Assange or Snowden and so on. It’s a wonderful new notion that maybe today the highest ethical act is treason. But the right kind
advocate with all the mistakes he made, people like Julian Assange or Snowden and so on. It’s a wonderful new notion that maybe today the highest ethical act is treason. But the right kind
Slavoj Žižek
of treason. Okay. So, sorry. So what I’m saying is that I—I precisely don’t want to renounce the
of treason. Okay. So, sorry. So what I’m saying is that I—I precisely don’t want to renounce the
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big metaphysical question because as I already
big metaphysical question because as I already
Slavoj Žižek
answered you, I think that—that this is what basically is at stake today. Look at ecology. There is maybe not a field today which would have been more penetrated by—by ideology than ecology. All possible forms of, sorry, ideology, all possible forms of ideology are there. There is simple—there is denial, Donald Trump. It’s a pseudo-problem. There is the capitalist solution: we will tax more within the market and so on. The worst version, then there is the conservative solution: Mother Nature, we should become more modest and so on. Then there is the worst one form of ideology in ecology: this personal responsibility turn. You criticize big company, what is society telling you? "Who are you to criticize? Did you recycle all Coca-Cola cans? Did you put all the paper aside?" And this is a wonderful ideological trick. It makes you responsible like, "Do your job here, don't criticize," but at the same time it offers you an easy way out, you know. "I recycle blah blah, so I can go on" and so on and so on. So but even like for me the greatest temptation of ecology is the idea of good big Mother Nature. Mother Nature is a bitch, dirty bitch. Imagine we live off fossils,
answered you, I think that—that this is what basically is at stake today. Look at ecology. There is maybe not a field today which would have been more penetrated by—by ideology than ecology. All possible forms of, sorry, ideology, all possible forms of ideology are there. There is simple—there is denial, Donald Trump. It’s a pseudo-problem. There is the capitalist solution: we will tax more within the market and so on. The worst version, then there is the conservative solution: Mother Nature, we should become more modest and so on. Then there is the worst one form of ideology in ecology: this personal responsibility turn. You criticize big company, what is society telling you? "Who are you to criticize? Did you recycle all Coca-Cola cans? Did you put all the paper aside?" And this is a wonderful ideological trick. It makes you responsible like, "Do your job here, don't criticize," but at the same time it offers you an easy way out, you know. "I recycle blah blah, so I can go on" and so on and so on. So but even like for me the greatest temptation of ecology is the idea of good big Mother Nature. Mother Nature is a bitch, dirty bitch. Imagine we live off fossils,
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oil and so on. Can we even imagine catastrophes which must have happened before humanity on our
oil and so on. Can we even imagine catastrophes which must have happened before humanity on our
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earth? So and that’s for me the true problem with ecology. There is—it’s not that we humanity are a hubris and we just have to return to nature. No, nature is already crazy. There is no easy way back. So I’m not avoiding your question, what I would always insist is what I already told you, that for me the unique feature of
earth? So and that’s for me the true problem with ecology. There is—it’s not that we humanity are a hubris and we just have to return to nature. No, nature is already crazy. There is no easy way back. So I’m not avoiding your question, what I would always insist is what I already told you, that for me the unique feature of
Slavoj Žižek
our era is how to confront these very pressing problems, refugees, ecology, digital control. We have to raise fundamental, I would even say, metaphysical
our era is how to confront these very pressing problems, refugees, ecology, digital control. We have to raise fundamental, I would even say, metaphysical
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questions. Thank you very much. Now that hand there, has been there from the beginning, so could we pass the microphone?
questions. Thank you very much. Now that hand there, has been there from the beginning, so could we pass the microphone?
Slavoj Žižek
But I noticed that you are a right-winger. What about left?
But I noticed that you are a right-winger. What about left?
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Yeah, yeah, no, no. I was— I've noticed hands there. Yeah, I—I am trying to notice hands everywhere, but this one’s been there first. I’m going to take
Yeah, yeah, no, no. I was— I've noticed hands there. Yeah, I—I am trying to notice hands everywhere, but this one’s been there first. I’m going to take
Slavoj Žižek
this one and then we're going to go to the— I’m sorry
this one and then we're going to go to the— I’m sorry
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but yeah— You—you— Go on. I need to look up here too. Anyone up here? Anyway, you ask your question. I’m going to look for hands up here. Hi there. Uh, I was wondering, uh, what your essential message would be to nihilistic youths that can’t even assert any kind of fundamental value to their lives to begin asking and discussing these kind of questions? That’s an interesting question but you know what would have been mine answer here? I was recently—it’s not really, you know, I’m a legend for this and I don’t
but yeah— You—you— Go on. I need to look up here too. Anyone up here? Anyway, you ask your question. I’m going to look for hands up here. Hi there. Uh, I was wondering, uh, what your essential message would be to nihilistic youths that can’t even assert any kind of fundamental value to their lives to begin asking and discussing these kind of questions? That’s an interesting question but you know what would have been mine answer here? I was recently—it’s not really, you know, I’m a legend for this and I don’t
Slavoj Žižek
deserve to be a legend—that I never answer questions, you know. I only, as Marxists said, sorry to go to a brief detour. I remember it would be a wonderful essay to write about the different predominant titles of the books in different epochs. Half a century ago, more, it was simple direct title: Aesthetic Theory. Then after people began to doubt it, and all of a sudden titles change, if you’re a Marxist, not Marxist Aesthetics but Elements for a Future Marxist Aesthetic. You know, you were afraid to be there. Yeah. Then came the abominable ‘80s, ‘90s, postmodernism. Did you notice there was a formula which was uh, poetic title, explanatory subtitle. Like, sorry for tasteless example, "Beat Me, Beat Me More Violently Darling: Masochism in English Feminine Poetry in the 19th Century." Now I—I think and I think I am still regressive in the second stage: I give elements for an—for an—for an answer. So what was the question? I forgot. I can’t remember the question either. I wanted but I had a point. The question was, I’m very sorry, I will be brief, I promise. Go on. What do you say to nihilistic— Ah, yeah, yeah. Nihilistic. I would say that the problem is not, how do you say it, correct English, nihilism, nihilism? People say it both ways. Okay, okay. I think that the way, you know, uh, people say, I refer I recently read that Walter Benjamin text on capitalism as religion. If you look closely at capitalism, it’s a very religious metaphysical phenomenon. A true capitalist, it’s not an egotist. He is ready to work day and night, to ruin his life just for the reproduction of the capital. So we don’t need these ethical calls, you know. "Don't be egotist" and so on. Maybe we need more rational egotism even. The problem with capitalism is not that it’s nihilistic, nihilistic. It’s that in some sense it’s in its practice too metaphysical. If by metaphysics we mean our material reality is not all, there is another dimension for which we are ready to ruin everything, that’s capitalism. We all know our earth is falling apart, but we play our metaphysical game with circulation of capital and so on and so on. So I would say I—it’s—that I don’t think the problem today is simply nihilism. It’s nihilism as form appearance of a false transcendence or a false metaphysics. That's it. Now do we have the microphone on the balcony and could it if so can it go there? Who’s— Yes we do. We do. At the front, at the front down here. It’s coming, it’s coming. Ah, she’s standing so we’re getting there. That was efficient. I was afraid that we would lose five minutes but— No, no, no. We—we lost seconds. Good. So you’re a socialist? No, I’m a communist. Okay. No, sorry, I’m not kidding. Everybody is socialist today, almost. Even—even worse. How many times do we have to try? We failed miserably so many times. Who? Socialism. Yes, and communism. It’s like making a soufflé again and again and again, and it’s failing. How many times and why? Okay, a good honest question. I totally agree with it. Although, and this is for me very sad a very sad thing, I don’t celebrate what I will say now. But you know when people told me communists when they get into power always screw it up. Now again I repeat it, don’t misunderstand me, this is a very sad thing for me but, do you know of any greater economic miracle maybe in the entire history of humanity than what China achieved in the last half a century? Communists in power did this. And how they did it, it’s horrible. The Western Left in the West really hated two things in the 20th century: wild unbridled capitalism and authoritarian state. And the Chinese Communists combined precisely these two. Where I disagree with liberals is when they say, "Oh if after Tiananmen they would have allowed more also political freedom," no, it would have been chaos I think. It wouldn’t have worked. And this makes me extremely sad. Your question. I totally agree, that’s why most of the Leftists proclaim me now already a neo-fascist or whatever. 20th century the fate of communism—with socialism it’s more complex, I mean what social democrats did in some countries, it was a nice thing, whatever you say about it. No, no, I will say now something which is horrible for a Leftist, but take this left-leaning center-left Western Europe till recently. Now I will ask you a very naive question: was there ever in the history of humanity a period where so many people lived relatively free, welfare lives than in Europe
deserve to be a legend—that I never answer questions, you know. I only, as Marxists said, sorry to go to a brief detour. I remember it would be a wonderful essay to write about the different predominant titles of the books in different epochs. Half a century ago, more, it was simple direct title: Aesthetic Theory. Then after people began to doubt it, and all of a sudden titles change, if you’re a Marxist, not Marxist Aesthetics but Elements for a Future Marxist Aesthetic. You know, you were afraid to be there. Yeah. Then came the abominable ‘80s, ‘90s, postmodernism. Did you notice there was a formula which was uh, poetic title, explanatory subtitle. Like, sorry for tasteless example, "Beat Me, Beat Me More Violently Darling: Masochism in English Feminine Poetry in the 19th Century." Now I—I think and I think I am still regressive in the second stage: I give elements for an—for an—for an answer. So what was the question? I forgot. I can’t remember the question either. I wanted but I had a point. The question was, I’m very sorry, I will be brief, I promise. Go on. What do you say to nihilistic— Ah, yeah, yeah. Nihilistic. I would say that the problem is not, how do you say it, correct English, nihilism, nihilism? People say it both ways. Okay, okay. I think that the way, you know, uh, people say, I refer I recently read that Walter Benjamin text on capitalism as religion. If you look closely at capitalism, it’s a very religious metaphysical phenomenon. A true capitalist, it’s not an egotist. He is ready to work day and night, to ruin his life just for the reproduction of the capital. So we don’t need these ethical calls, you know. "Don't be egotist" and so on. Maybe we need more rational egotism even. The problem with capitalism is not that it’s nihilistic, nihilistic. It’s that in some sense it’s in its practice too metaphysical. If by metaphysics we mean our material reality is not all, there is another dimension for which we are ready to ruin everything, that’s capitalism. We all know our earth is falling apart, but we play our metaphysical game with circulation of capital and so on and so on. So I would say I—it’s—that I don’t think the problem today is simply nihilism. It’s nihilism as form appearance of a false transcendence or a false metaphysics. That's it. Now do we have the microphone on the balcony and could it if so can it go there? Who’s— Yes we do. We do. At the front, at the front down here. It’s coming, it’s coming. Ah, she’s standing so we’re getting there. That was efficient. I was afraid that we would lose five minutes but— No, no, no. We—we lost seconds. Good. So you’re a socialist? No, I’m a communist. Okay. No, sorry, I’m not kidding. Everybody is socialist today, almost. Even—even worse. How many times do we have to try? We failed miserably so many times. Who? Socialism. Yes, and communism. It’s like making a soufflé again and again and again, and it’s failing. How many times and why? Okay, a good honest question. I totally agree with it. Although, and this is for me very sad a very sad thing, I don’t celebrate what I will say now. But you know when people told me communists when they get into power always screw it up. Now again I repeat it, don’t misunderstand me, this is a very sad thing for me but, do you know of any greater economic miracle maybe in the entire history of humanity than what China achieved in the last half a century? Communists in power did this. And how they did it, it’s horrible. The Western Left in the West really hated two things in the 20th century: wild unbridled capitalism and authoritarian state. And the Chinese Communists combined precisely these two. Where I disagree with liberals is when they say, "Oh if after Tiananmen they would have allowed more also political freedom," no, it would have been chaos I think. It wouldn’t have worked. And this makes me extremely sad. Your question. I totally agree, that’s why most of the Leftists proclaim me now already a neo-fascist or whatever. 20th century the fate of communism—with socialism it’s more complex, I mean what social democrats did in some countries, it was a nice thing, whatever you say about it. No, no, I will say now something which is horrible for a Leftist, but take this left-leaning center-left Western Europe till recently. Now I will ask you a very naive question: was there ever in the history of humanity a period where so many people lived relatively free, welfare lives than in Europe
unknown
from till Let me tell you something like that. One has to be honest here. Why am I still a communist? I totally agree with you, it was in spite of its partial successes but they were terrifying
from till Let me tell you something like that. One has to be honest here. Why am I still a communist? I totally agree with you, it was in spite of its partial successes but they were terrifying
Slavoj Žižek
successes like China,
successes like China,
unknown
Maoism and so on. Uh, it was a catastrophe. I agree. The problem I see is simply the following
Maoism and so on. Uh, it was a catastrophe. I agree. The problem I see is simply the following
unknown
one. We are confronting serious problems today. Let’s name them, basically the way I see—uh—digitalization, new forms of control, uh, ecology and maybe population, uh, mix, new forms of poverty and so on and so on.
one. We are confronting serious problems today. Let’s name them, basically the way I see—uh—digitalization, new forms of control, uh, ecology and maybe population, uh, mix, new forms of poverty and so on and so on.
Slavoj Žižek
And the only serious question for me is the following one: Are we Fukuyamaists or not? By this I mean—and almost all the Leftists that I know, even Bernie Sanders and so on are Fukuyamaists—by this I mean they accept liberal democratic capitalism as a form and just want to make it a little bit more human, more human rights, more social solidarities, blah blah. Is this enough? So I am to provoke people, I declare myself a communist because I think that if we go systematically through these problems, neither the state—state regulation in the old communist way—nor the market, or even not some—that’s why I’m against populism—kind of a popular initiative can really confront these problems, like ecology, which is the problem of the commons. You cannot leave it to the market. Ecology—threats are too great. Imagine Fukushima or Chernobyl or whatever. Imagine probably it will happen even stronger. We need to invent, I don’t know how, new forms of larger than state coordination. It’s clear that ecology can—cannot be dealt with at the level of—at the level of—and one doesn’t have, I agree with you here if this will be your point. I’m the first one against this easy eschatology, even many ecologists are prone to it. It’s so easy to—to succumb to this temptation. I
And the only serious question for me is the following one: Are we Fukuyamaists or not? By this I mean—and almost all the Leftists that I know, even Bernie Sanders and so on are Fukuyamaists—by this I mean they accept liberal democratic capitalism as a form and just want to make it a little bit more human, more human rights, more social solidarities, blah blah. Is this enough? So I am to provoke people, I declare myself a communist because I think that if we go systematically through these problems, neither the state—state regulation in the old communist way—nor the market, or even not some—that’s why I’m against populism—kind of a popular initiative can really confront these problems, like ecology, which is the problem of the commons. You cannot leave it to the market. Ecology—threats are too great. Imagine Fukushima or Chernobyl or whatever. Imagine probably it will happen even stronger. We need to invent, I don’t know how, new forms of larger than state coordination. It’s clear that ecology can—cannot be dealt with at the level of—at the level of—and one doesn’t have, I agree with you here if this will be your point. I’m the first one against this easy eschatology, even many ecologists are prone to it. It’s so easy to—to succumb to this temptation. I
unknown
remember some years ago, in Germany
remember some years ago, in Germany
Slavoj Žižek
there was this and then in all of Europe there was the obsession with what they called Waldsterben. The forests are dying. And they make charts, our era around I remember: there will be no forests in Europe. Statistics tell you that today there are in Europe more forests than ever in the last years. So it’s not so simple, but I nonetheless claim this problem is a serious one. Take the problem of new forms of digital control. I’m just asking you how would you confront these problems? We are really and Chinese already doing it. We are also doing it, we are just doing it a little bit more discreetly than Chinese. New form of social manipulation, control, and I think that again neither the state nor the capital can regulate, can confront this problem. It will—something will have to be done. Will it be done? I’m even a pessimist. You
there was this and then in all of Europe there was the obsession with what they called Waldsterben. The forests are dying. And they make charts, our era around I remember: there will be no forests in Europe. Statistics tell you that today there are in Europe more forests than ever in the last years. So it’s not so simple, but I nonetheless claim this problem is a serious one. Take the problem of new forms of digital control. I’m just asking you how would you confront these problems? We are really and Chinese already doing it. We are also doing it, we are just doing it a little bit more discreetly than Chinese. New form of social manipulation, control, and I think that again neither the state nor the capital can regulate, can confront this problem. It will—something will have to be done. Will it be done? I’m even a pessimist. You
unknown
know what’s more and more my old man’s resigned vision? That we need hopefully controllable moderate catastrophes to awaken
know what’s more and more my old man’s resigned vision? That we need hopefully controllable moderate catastrophes to awaken
Slavoj Žižek
us. I’m a—I’m a pessimist, I’m not this optimist communist. You know my standard—maybe you know my standard joke, you know, communists
us. I’m a—I’m a pessimist, I’m not this optimist communist. You know my standard—maybe you know my standard joke, you know, communists
unknown
or Leftists like to say, "There is a light at the end of the tunnel." You know what’s my answer? Yes, it’s another train coming tomorrow. Listen, if you want me to ask my rude direct question, you'll have to answer
or Leftists like to say, "There is a light at the end of the tunnel." You know what’s my answer? Yes, it’s another train coming tomorrow. Listen, if you want me to ask my rude direct question, you'll have to answer
Slavoj Žižek
this last question briefly. Finally to the Left. I already have a room in Gulag reserved for you. Now you are redeemed. Uh, please a little bit— Just hold it to your mouth. Is it on? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don’t know if you’ve addressed this issue directly, but I wanted to know your thoughts about the phenomenon that has become Greta Thunberg, as we all probably know. Um, why has this happened now? Is she the collective wake-up call that we all need, or—I mean, especially because the things she’s saying now is something that indigenous leaders in, for example, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia have been saying all along? Um, why do you think this is? Without undermining— You know what, I— Okay, thanks. Sorry, I wrote some comments on her and it’s not sure, you know, will he succumb to be in a more refined way manipulated by the media and so on. But where I praised her basically I’m still for her is what is apparently a private feature of her. I think we need—he she is usually decried as autistic, you know. I think her autism is part of her political position and it’s very productive. What—because our everyday ideology is what in psychoanalysis we describe as fetishist disavowal. We know how serious things are but nonetheless do not exaggerate and so on. And her basic message of Greta Thunberg is simply "Don't tell me I know very well but. Forget about 'but,' as she repeated now, just take the science seriously." It’s a very simple message and it’s a very actual message. But what I find when you mention this Latin American movements—with my great admiration for—I am honored to being contact not with the top guy Morales but with Linera—but you know Morales wrote a couple of years ago I think a public letter decrying capitalism. "Don't I—this is where I remain a Marxist. Don't idealize the previous eras as something more in balance with nature." Just look how much nature, almost more than in capitalism, was destroyed also in pre-modern societies. Like my favorite country in Europe, Iceland, how do you pronounce it, Iceland, Reykjavik. Yeah. You know that before Vikings arrived there from Norway, it was full of forests, they destroyed everything and so on. So don’t idealize pre-modern countries and so on. But nonetheless I sincerely admire Linera. You know, Linera is not Venezuela, Bolivia regime, they are doing there not in the media they are doing a well-calculated modest game, but they are doing it very successfully, they are not destroying economy and so on. I think that the problem with Chavez was it’s not just external in the American intervention—yes, all that is true—but he really didn’t have a feasible new model. For me the best definition of Hugo Chavez was Fidel Castro with money. He was—to have enough money so he threw money at problems, he didn’t resolve them. My hope is again something like Bolivia. So I totally support all this indigenous movement, just I have two problems. One problem is don’t fall into this myth of—even some of my Latin American friends has it—there are in Upper Amazon some indigenous tribes and they have some wisdom that— No, my dogma is always that the most developed capitalism can always exploit ideally pre-modern traditions. My lesson is South Africa. Remember ANC with all its failures, that was the greatness of Mandela and so on? They never played the cards of our African great traditions and so on. They didn’t mention any return to African roots and so on. The one who did it was the King Buthelezi, who was on the payroll of apartheid, of course, and so on. So let’s not fall into this trap of celebrating pre-modernity and so on. But with this proviso, I—I—I totally agree and what attracts me in this vision is that it’s not simply some pre-modern mythology, but this unique chance of a pact between Third World countries and the most modern, the utmost science of the West today. Only the combination of the two can do the job. Okay. Very finally, you were evil. But very briefly, very
this last question briefly. Finally to the Left. I already have a room in Gulag reserved for you. Now you are redeemed. Uh, please a little bit— Just hold it to your mouth. Is it on? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don’t know if you’ve addressed this issue directly, but I wanted to know your thoughts about the phenomenon that has become Greta Thunberg, as we all probably know. Um, why has this happened now? Is she the collective wake-up call that we all need, or—I mean, especially because the things she’s saying now is something that indigenous leaders in, for example, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia have been saying all along? Um, why do you think this is? Without undermining— You know what, I— Okay, thanks. Sorry, I wrote some comments on her and it’s not sure, you know, will he succumb to be in a more refined way manipulated by the media and so on. But where I praised her basically I’m still for her is what is apparently a private feature of her. I think we need—he she is usually decried as autistic, you know. I think her autism is part of her political position and it’s very productive. What—because our everyday ideology is what in psychoanalysis we describe as fetishist disavowal. We know how serious things are but nonetheless do not exaggerate and so on. And her basic message of Greta Thunberg is simply "Don't tell me I know very well but. Forget about 'but,' as she repeated now, just take the science seriously." It’s a very simple message and it’s a very actual message. But what I find when you mention this Latin American movements—with my great admiration for—I am honored to being contact not with the top guy Morales but with Linera—but you know Morales wrote a couple of years ago I think a public letter decrying capitalism. "Don't I—this is where I remain a Marxist. Don't idealize the previous eras as something more in balance with nature." Just look how much nature, almost more than in capitalism, was destroyed also in pre-modern societies. Like my favorite country in Europe, Iceland, how do you pronounce it, Iceland, Reykjavik. Yeah. You know that before Vikings arrived there from Norway, it was full of forests, they destroyed everything and so on. So don’t idealize pre-modern countries and so on. But nonetheless I sincerely admire Linera. You know, Linera is not Venezuela, Bolivia regime, they are doing there not in the media they are doing a well-calculated modest game, but they are doing it very successfully, they are not destroying economy and so on. I think that the problem with Chavez was it’s not just external in the American intervention—yes, all that is true—but he really didn’t have a feasible new model. For me the best definition of Hugo Chavez was Fidel Castro with money. He was—to have enough money so he threw money at problems, he didn’t resolve them. My hope is again something like Bolivia. So I totally support all this indigenous movement, just I have two problems. One problem is don’t fall into this myth of—even some of my Latin American friends has it—there are in Upper Amazon some indigenous tribes and they have some wisdom that— No, my dogma is always that the most developed capitalism can always exploit ideally pre-modern traditions. My lesson is South Africa. Remember ANC with all its failures, that was the greatness of Mandela and so on? They never played the cards of our African great traditions and so on. They didn’t mention any return to African roots and so on. The one who did it was the King Buthelezi, who was on the payroll of apartheid, of course, and so on. So let’s not fall into this trap of celebrating pre-modernity and so on. But with this proviso, I—I—I totally agree and what attracts me in this vision is that it’s not simply some pre-modern mythology, but this unique chance of a pact between Third World countries and the most modern, the utmost science of the West today. Only the combination of the two can do the job. Okay. Very finally, you were evil. But very briefly, very
unknown
briefly. Yeah, why don't I kill myself? The question I have is really like how
briefly. Yeah, why don't I kill myself? The question I have is really like how
Slavoj Žižek
to read you. You when I first interviewed you about years ago you said something like "I do too
to read you. You when I first interviewed you about years ago you said something like "I do too
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many books" and you write lots of books, things come out— And I said I will not and now I do even more
many books" and you write lots of books, things come out— And I said I will not and now I do even more
unknown
books. Talk, talk, talk. Um, but I recycle
books. Talk, talk, talk. Um, but I recycle
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myself. I knew you recycled yourself. I am an ecological writer. I plagiarize myself. Right. So things just come out, they come out, they come out. Right. This is in the framework of a system. There always seems to be a system,
myself. I knew you recycled yourself. I am an ecological writer. I plagiarize myself. Right. So things just come out, they come out, they come out. Right. This is in the framework of a system. There always seems to be a system,
Slavoj Žižek
there’s Lacanian theory, there’s a Hegelian theory. But actually in some ways it seems like there’s kind of no filter, there’s no editor there. I suppose my challenging question is, should—do we take your work seriously as a kind of a coherent whole, or do we just take the constant outpouring and pick the gems and—and just say yes, but there’s a lot of junk in there too? I already answered you this when we were privately—I will very briefly answer you now. First, I’m as such the way you described me, the second, the bad option, non-systematic, I’m in very good company. Almost all of my favorite philosophers were doing exactly this even if they appeared systematic like Schelling, Hegel. They were really struggling again and again repetitively with the same problem. For example, Hegel, Antigone. Do you know that Hegel returned to Antigone in his lessons of philosophy history, history of philosophy, phenomenology four five times always giving a different reading? Heidegger, another big example. In a different way Husserl, Wittgenstein and so on. I think Plato already, isn’t he? Even if it appears that you have this dialogue about this, that dialogue about that, he is always struggling with the same problem. And now to conclude with the mega paradox, you know which one. Maybe I’m the way you described it, particular to particular, but I think Hegel is my model here. Forget about Hegel, it’s a wrong image: the great systematic thinker, everything is deduced and so on. Read Hegel really closely. It’s really often even patched up obviously artificially combined without what in psychoanalysis we would have called sekundäre Bearbeitung. This secondary work through where you patch up the gaps and make it continuous. Hegel is this: this insight, that insight and so on and so on. And I find this a wonderful paradox that the philosopher who is usually perceived as the mega systematic philosopher is effectively improvising, desperately looking for a way—al—because you know, I will tell you another thing you would agree, Hegel basically wrote just two books. People forget this. Phenomenology and Logic. All other books are just wrote down by s—okay his—he wrote two others, Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right, but they are university notes. He there doesn’t actively think, he resumes facts which are given in his thinking. Hegel really wrote two books and he was constantly changing them, rewriting them and so on. So my answer to you would be
there’s Lacanian theory, there’s a Hegelian theory. But actually in some ways it seems like there’s kind of no filter, there’s no editor there. I suppose my challenging question is, should—do we take your work seriously as a kind of a coherent whole, or do we just take the constant outpouring and pick the gems and—and just say yes, but there’s a lot of junk in there too? I already answered you this when we were privately—I will very briefly answer you now. First, I’m as such the way you described me, the second, the bad option, non-systematic, I’m in very good company. Almost all of my favorite philosophers were doing exactly this even if they appeared systematic like Schelling, Hegel. They were really struggling again and again repetitively with the same problem. For example, Hegel, Antigone. Do you know that Hegel returned to Antigone in his lessons of philosophy history, history of philosophy, phenomenology four five times always giving a different reading? Heidegger, another big example. In a different way Husserl, Wittgenstein and so on. I think Plato already, isn’t he? Even if it appears that you have this dialogue about this, that dialogue about that, he is always struggling with the same problem. And now to conclude with the mega paradox, you know which one. Maybe I’m the way you described it, particular to particular, but I think Hegel is my model here. Forget about Hegel, it’s a wrong image: the great systematic thinker, everything is deduced and so on. Read Hegel really closely. It’s really often even patched up obviously artificially combined without what in psychoanalysis we would have called sekundäre Bearbeitung. This secondary work through where you patch up the gaps and make it continuous. Hegel is this: this insight, that insight and so on and so on. And I find this a wonderful paradox that the philosopher who is usually perceived as the mega systematic philosopher is effectively improvising, desperately looking for a way—al—because you know, I will tell you another thing you would agree, Hegel basically wrote just two books. People forget this. Phenomenology and Logic. All other books are just wrote down by s—okay his—he wrote two others, Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right, but they are university notes. He there doesn’t actively think, he resumes facts which are given in his thinking. Hegel really wrote two books and he was constantly changing them, rewriting them and so on. So my answer to you would be
unknown
the usual pretty boring Hegelian paradox: I try to be systematic, but to really be systematic you must get caught in this vicious cycle of repeating yourself
the usual pretty boring Hegelian paradox: I try to be systematic, but to really be systematic you must get caught in this vicious cycle of repeating yourself
Slavoj Žižek
all the time. Well look, thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Um, before we go, I—I'm going to say something, I was going to—I like to thank the stewards at these events because they’re all volunteers, but I’m realizing that on Žižek’s view here what I might be doing is it’s another fetish, isn't it? I’m praising the stewards to disguise the fact that there’s actually this sort of like the people who are not being employed to do work etc., etc. So maybe—maybe it’s a distraction to thank the stewards, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to thank you for coming. Um, the book signing—there will be a book signing and it will be here on the stage, so make your way up at the end. Um, lots of other festival ideas events coming up, please look out for them.
all the time. Well look, thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Um, before we go, I—I'm going to say something, I was going to—I like to thank the stewards at these events because they’re all volunteers, but I’m realizing that on Žižek’s view here what I might be doing is it’s another fetish, isn't it? I’m praising the stewards to disguise the fact that there’s actually this sort of like the people who are not being employed to do work etc., etc. So maybe—maybe it’s a distraction to thank the stewards, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to thank you for coming. Um, the book signing—there will be a book signing and it will be here on the stage, so make your way up at the end. Um, lots of other festival ideas events coming up, please look out for them.
unknown
But for the—for now could we just thank the force of nature
But for the—for now could we just thank the force of nature
unknown
which is Slavoj Žižek.
which is Slavoj Žižek.