Slavoj Zizek lecture: the double nature of the capitalist discourse
Lecture · John Hillman ·
2016 · 1:29:13 · 11,662 words
psychoanalysisideologyrace-antisemitismsexuality-genderphilosophy-generalhegel-dialecticscommunism-socialismhistoryreligion-theologycinema-art-culturecapitalism
Žižek critiques Joel Miller’s Lacanian interpretation of modern capitalism, arguing that the Real is not an external chaotic force but an immanent inconsistency within the symbolic order. He uses the Wolfman case and a British joke about a Lord doing push-ups to illustrate that trauma is secondary to the symbolic deadlock. He then deconstructs the formulas of sexuation, rejecting the idea that woman is 'outside' the symbolic order, and analyzes Otto Weininger’s antisemitic/feminist theories to show how figures like the Jew or the Shark function as ideological fill-ins for social inconsistency. Žižek analyzes the function of the 'master signifier' using antisemitism and a Polish anti-communist joke to illustrate how signifiers constitute consistency by masking inconsistency. He reinterprets Marx’s class struggle as an operator of inconsistency rather than a positive essence, and discusses the Lacanian four discourses, specifically the analyst's discourse and the hysteric. The excerpt concludes with a defense of hysteria over perversion and a reinterpretation of Aztec human sacrifice as a ritual to maintain the ordinary order of the Real. Žižek addresses the philosophical problem of nature and culture, arguing for a refined model that avoids both naive realism and transcendental exceptions, before pivoting to a detailed Lacanian analysis of the four discourses. He interprets hysteria as a subversive reaction to ideological interpellation, using examples from art, religion, and politics, while contrasting it with the certainty of perversion and the normative bias of university discourse. Žižek analyzes the psychoanalytic structure of Stalinism as a split ego where the Party acts as a maternal phallus, arguing that omnipotence is merely a mask for impotence. He critiques Lacan's Four Discourses as historically limited, proposing instead that the discourse of knowledge/perversion defines totalitarianism, while the university discourse characterizes modern capitalism. He concludes with a humorous anecdote about attending a performance of Richard III by Ralph Fiennes, using it to illustrate his political sympathy for Richard over the Tudors and his anxiety about social interaction.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 34
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “real outside the law”
Miller's concept of a disordered, contingent reality in capitalism that cannot be symbolized, which Žižek rejects.
as “total immanence of the real to the symbolic”
Žižek's core thesis: the Real is not an external obstacle but the internal gap/antagonism of the symbolic order itself.
as “impasse de la formalisation”
Lacan's term for the Real as a necessary deadlock or inconsistency of formalization, not an external thing.
The common misreading of the Real as a traumatic event that cannot be symbolized, which Žižek argues against using the Wolfman example.
The primary inconsistency of sexuality/symbolization; the Real comes second as a reaction to this deadlock.
Žižek's reading of Lacan's formula: male sexuality uses the real partner merely as a prop to actualize a fantasy.
Often misread as an excess outside the symbolic; Žižek argues it is the same enjoyment from a different stance.
Spinoza's idea that God is a name for our ignorance; similarly, the Phallus is a false positive covering a gap.
The mechanism by which multiple inconsistent fears are exchanged for one consistent, fascinating figure (the Jew/Shark).
The chaotic, contradictory anxieties of the petit bourgeois (immigrants, capital, nature) that antisemitism consolidates.
The point where the signifier falls into the signified, serving as the anchor that constitutes the consistency of a symbolic order by masking its inherent inconsistency.
as “class struggle essentialism”
A reading of Marx where class struggle is not the ultimate positive meaning of history, but an operator that reveals the inconsistency of other social struggles (ecological, political).
The proposition that the 'anatomy' (true nature/structure) of a later or secondary event (Haiti) is the key to understanding the 'anatomy' of the primary event (French Revolution).
The object of fantasy (object petit a) that is produced in the analyst's discourse, relating to the barred subject to propel the chain of signifiers (knowledge).
as “pervert as obscene shadow of power”
The concept that every political power structure requires an 'obscene shadow' (the pervert) to sustain it, meaning perversion supports rather than subverts the master.
as “object small a”
The remainder of meaning that escapes meaning, a positive form of the void that fills the gap in symbolic representation.
The interpretation of Aztec human sacrifice not as a transaction for a specific benefit (rain, sun), but as a ritual to ensure the most ordinary, expected thing (the sun rising) happens, highlighting the Real.
as “transcendental exception”
The position where naturalists claim we are part of nature but must presuppose a rational, discursive logic outside nature to study it, creating a paradox in naturalist philosophy.
as “signifier represents subject for other signifiers”
Lacan's formula describing how the subject is constituted in the symbolic order, an operation that always fails and leaves a remainder.
Fantasy is not just a master narrative but the answer to the abyssal question 'why did I say this?' behind every symbolic statement.
The discourse where the divided subject confronts the master with the demand to produce knowledge about what kind of object the subject is for the other.
A concept from Jean Laplanche describing the adult's enigmatic behavior toward the child, which generates the child's unconscious and hysterical questioning.
as “hysterical constellation”
The structure of questioning ('What am I?') shared by hysteria and obsessional neurosis, contrasted with the pervert's certainty.
Althusser's theory of ideological recognition where society confers a symbolic identity (e.g., 'Hey you!') upon the subject.
as “hysteria as subversive reaction to interpellation”
Žižek's reading of hysteria not as pathology but as the fundamental critical stance: 'Why am I what you claim I am?' challenging the Big Other's authority.
Žižek's reading of Christ's last words not as a sequence but as a quantum superposition of inconsistent statements, preserving the 'barred Other'.
as “hystericalization”
The process of making a pervert question their desire, which Žižek argues is a necessary condition for analytic work.
The psychoanalytic structure of the pervert, where the ego is split between the conscious self and the superegoic command.
The signifier of the Party's claim to total knowledge, representing a mother who possesses the phallus (knowledge/power) that the subject lacks.
The paradox that the appearance of total power (omnipotence) is actually a defensive mask covering a fundamental lack or inability to decide (impotence).
A signifier produced by the analyst (or the patient's breakthrough) that interrupts the endless, repetitive logic of the perverse game.
as “discourse of totalitarianism”
Žižek's re-reading of Lacan's discourses, identifying the combination of the discourse of knowledge and perversion as the structural core of totalitarian regimes.
The dialectical tension between eternal structural truths (like psychoanalysis) and their specific historical manifestations (like modern capitalism or Stalinism).
Discourse that addresses the surplus/excess resisting symbolization, but whose truth is always the position of the master (normative bias) disguised as neutral knowledge.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek recalls Fidel Castro claiming Jaws was an anti-capitalist film where the shark stands for big capital, which Žižek dismisses as missing the ideological point.
“He said no, it’s clear that the shark stands for the exploitative big capital and it is a deeply anti-capitalist film.”
Reinterprets Freud's Wolfman: the childhood sight of parents copulating was not a trauma but an 'empty memory' that was only 'retraumatized' years later by the deadlock of sexuality.
“The experience was as it were retraumatized. What was officially just okay, f*ck it, I don't know what they are doing there.”
Spinoza's personalized God is a 'false positive term' for our ignorance/gap; similarly, the Phallus is a name for the inconsistency of the symbolic order.
“Spinoza says that what appears to us as the signifier of the highest, the most noble thing like God, it's a false positive term.”
Žižek reads Scorsese's film as Christ acting as a hysteric, resisting his role ('Why do I have to play this role?') and wanting to 'screw ladies in Samaria.'
“Christ's resistance. 'F*ck it, why should I be the son of God?'”
Works invoked 23
Vertigo film
Used to illustrate Lacan's subtitle: 'I love you but because I love in you something more than you, I will destroy you.'
Melancholia film
Žižek's 'favorite movie,' which he agrees with regarding its tragic conclusion of collective suicide.
Jaws film
Used to illustrate 'pure ideological operation' where the shark consolidates inconsistent fears.
The Castle book
Cited as containing 'Weininger figures' (waitresses/teachers) in Kafka's work.
The Trial book
Cited as containing 'Weininger figures' in Kafka's work.
Encore (Seminar XX) book
Lacan's seminar defining the Real as 'impasse de la formalisation.'
Gibson's film, criticized for its 'obscenity' of arranging Christ's last words into a logical order.
Jesus of Nazareth film
Zeffirelli's film, criticized alongside Gibson's for trying to order the seven words logically.
Solaris (film) film
Described as 'deeply Weiningerian,' enacting the thesis that women are hallucinations of men's ethical failure.
Scorsese's film, which Žižek dislikes personally but praises intellectually for portraying Christ as a hysteric resisting his role.
Lacan's seminar containing the subtitle about destroying the loved object.
Coriolanus play
Used as an example of Žižek's attempt to offer a 'working-class hero' reading to flatter Ralph Fiennes.
Cited as one of Marx's 'absolutely magnificent readings' where class struggle is analyzed as an operator of inconsistency.
Richard II play
Used as a vehicle for discussing historical revisionism, the Tudors, and the anxiety of social interaction with actors.
A classic text by Mladen Dolar that Žižek uses to link hysteria to Althusser's theory.
Seminar Encore book
Lacan's seminar on 'jouissance feminine,' often misread by Žižek as dividing woman.
Cited as one of Marx's 'absolutely magnificent readings' where class struggle is analyzed as an operator of inconsistency.
Lacan's Seminar II book
Criticized for Lacan missing the 'Lacanian point' of the matchmaker joke, showing Lacan as his own 'worst anti-Lacanian'.
Matthew film
Pasolini's film, included in the Vatican's list of 100 best religious films, which Žižek approves of.
Sex and Character book
Otto Weininger's book, described as 'brutal anti-feminism and antisemitism,' used to illustrate the false reading of feminine jouissance.
The Annunciation artwork
Holman Hunt's painting, used to illustrate the hysterical reaction to divine interpellation.
Used as a foil to critique Judith Butler's theoretical framework regarding trans-historicity.
Referenced as the source of the rhetorical text about making mistakes and patching them up.
People invoked 45
Fidel Castro negative
Cited as loving Jaws and misinterpreting the shark as 'big capital,' which Žižek uses to illustrate ideological misreading.
François Balmès positive
Described as a current top interpreter of Lacan in French who died of cancer.
Franz Kafka positive
Cited as a modern artist whose feminine figures are 'Weininger figures.'
Martin Scorsese positive
Žižek states 'I don't like Scorsese' but praises 'The Last Temptation of Christ' for its hysterical reading of Jesus.
Mel Gibson negative
Criticized for 'The Passion of the Christ' for arranging the seven words into a logical order, though Žižek enjoyed the 'kitsch' Aramaic.
Mentioned as a historian whose critique of Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production' is used to illustrate the concept of a pseudo-element.
Udi Aloni positive
Described as a 'Jewish good friend'; the anecdote illustrates the limits of irony and German guilt.
Richard III of England positive
Žižek claims a reactionary sympathy for the historical Richard III, viewing him as a progressive king enforcing legal equality, unlike the 'arch-Stalinist' Tudors.
Lars von Trier positive
Director of Melancholia, which Žižek calls his 'favorite movie' and agrees with its tragic position.
Arnold Schoenberg positive
Cited as a Jewish modern artist influenced by Weininger's ideas.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek defends Lacan against Miller, praising his 'greatness' and 'total immanence of the real to the symbolic.'
Louis Althusser positive
Cited for his theory of 'interpellation,' which Žižek uses as a foil to explain the function of hysteria.
Mentioned as a Pre-Raphaelite Žižik likes, but distinguishes Hunt's painting from Rossetti's.
William Holman Hunt positive
The painter of 'The Annunciation,' which Žižek uses as an example of hysterical reaction to interpellation.
Judith Butler negative
Criticized for a 'pseudo-Hegelian' attempt to claim her theory of gender is both trans-historical and historically specific simultaneously.
Pier Paolo Pasolini positive
Praised as the only filmmaker included in the Vatican's list of religious films, unlike Zeffirelli.
Ralph Fiennes positive
An actor Žižek knows socially; he feels obligated to attend his plays and attempts to flatter him with 'crazy readings' of his roles.
Heinrich von Kleist positive
Cited for the rhetorical technique of making a mistake and patching it up; Žižek admits his slip about Freud/Lacan followed this logic.
Friedrich Engels negative
Referenced as the style of 'dialectics of nature' that Žižek explicitly rejects in favor of a more refined model.
Mentioned in the rumor that Hitler read Weininger and considered him the only Jew not to be killed.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Used to explain the 'false positive term' (God) as a name for ignorance/gap, analogous to the Phallus.
Someone who 'hinted gently' that Ralph Fiennes wanted Žižek to attend the theater.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan negative
The Turkish President who attacked Žižek; Žižek mocks him and his 'Goebbels' figure for calling him 'irrational'.
Edvard Munch positive
Cited as a modern artist influenced by Weininger.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my friend' who developed the concept of 'Beyond Interpellation' linking hysteria to Althusser.
Guy Le Gaufey positive
Praised for writing the best reading of Lacan's formula of sexuation and for insights on impotence/omnipotence.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for his work on 'discipline control,' which Žižek reads through the lens of Lacan's university discourse.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Criticized for the same 'pseudo-Hegelian' problem as Butler regarding his theory of hegemony (is it trans-historical or historically conditioned?).
Mentioned as someone who also struggles with the problem of nature/culture and the transcendental exception.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Cited for the joke that psychoanalysis is 'ultra-capitalism' because the patient works and pays.
Franco Zeffirelli negative
Criticized for trying to order Christ's last words logically; identified as a member of the Italian neo-fascist party.
Jean Laplanche positive
Described as 'not his follower, although associated with him,' who developed the 'logic of enigmatic signifier' which Žižek praises.
A student or colleague whose text Žižek read, referencing her work on trans gender and the disappearance of sexual difference.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Cited as holding the 'Habermasian position' that scientific argumentation is a transcendental exception to nature, which Žižek critiques.
August Strindberg positive
Cited as a modern artist influenced by Weininger.
Otto Weininger negative
Described as 'the ultimate antisemite, anti-feminist' whose 'brutal' theories Žižek uses to illustrate the false reading of feminine jouissance.
Described as one of the 'efficient digital girls who know everything,' whom Žižek jokingly hates.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Cited as the director of Solaris, which Žižek calls 'deeply Weiningerian.'
Joseph Stalin positive
Used as the primary example of 'Stalinism' and the 'basic obscenity' of totalitarian knowledge, illustrating the split ego and maternal phallus.
Joel S. Miller negative
Žižek is 'totally opposed' to Miller's vision, calling it a 'tragic breakdown' and 'vulgar capitalist ideology elevated into a Lacanian insight.'
Steven Spielberg positive
Director of Jaws, used as an example of ideological operation.
Noam Chomsky positive
Mentioned as another person attacked by Erdoğan, implying solidarity.
Karl Marx positive
Referenced in the context of class struggle readings and the '18th Brumaire'; Žižek claims Marx was on the trace of reading class struggle as an operator of inconsistency.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the concept of the 'splitting of the ego in the pervert' as orthodox psychoanalytic treatment.
Immanuel Kant negative
Cited as the source of the 'thing-in-itself' concept, which Lacan rejects as a wrong equation for the Real.
Transcript 23 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I said, but you know for the ancient Greeks on earth things were chaotic, but you look up in the sky there, always the same, an order. The big invention, invention insight of Newton was: no, it's the same, exactly the same laws on our earth and in the sky. But nonetheless for Miller, it still remains a well-ordered universe. And then his big discovery: with modern capitalism, through its utter contingency asserted in capitalism, we get a new type of the real, a real, as he puts it, outside the law, a totally disordered real, a real which cannot any longer be symbolized. And following this line, Miller even not renounces but relativizes Lacan’s earlier attempts of four discourses, of formulas of sexuation, as something which still belongs to the basically pre-modern order of meaning. For example, for Miller now, sex is something, sexuality—libido rather—is something totally chaotic, outside the real, and Miller even denounces Lacan’s formulas of sexuation as nonetheless a clumsy attempt to symbolize this real. And then Miller, basically, it’s a very tragic breakdown, I claim, because he goes so far as to claim that the basic, it’s basically a very vulgar capitalist ideology elevated into a Lacanian insight. It’s that today everything is becoming contingent, you can change sex, everything is plastic and so on. On the market, everything is crazy, dynamic, there are no laws, and so on and so on. So psychoanalysis should teach us how to confront this, how to cope with this. I, for reasons which are very precise, allow me to briefly present them, I am totally opposed to this vision. My first reaction is: my God, did this guy ever read Lacan? Miller. Because if there is something really pertinent in Lacan, is that he doesn't substantialize the real into an external impenetrable—you know, all this pseudo-postmodern poetics of the real as a traumatic outside that we cannot ever symbolize, we try, fail again and again to symbolize it. No, for Lacan, the real is in a way absolutely immanent to the process of symbolization. It's its immanent obstacle, as it were. It's something in the very structure of the symbolic order which makes it fail. It's its internal antagonism, gap, negativity, however you call it. So you see my point, it's not an external obstacle, it's a totally... This is why Lacan is emphatic about how the idea of any equation between real and the Kantian, Kant, Immanuel Kant's thing-in-itself is totally wrong. The real is not out there, impenetrable, and we try to penetrate it but always fail, and all this pseudo-Nietzschean metaphoric also, you know that, that the real is like looking directly into the sun, too strong, it blinds us, we cannot, and so on and so on. No, the greatness of Lacan again is total immanence of the real to the symbolic. Which doesn't mean that symbolic is everything, that's another question, I will address it later. But Lacan's idea, if I get it correctly, is that the real in itself, if you want, is nothing but, as he Lacan puts it in his Seminar XX, an impasse de la formalisation, a deadlock of formalization, the necessary short circuit inconsistency of normalization. And the temptation to be resisted is precisely to project the cause of this inconsistency into an external realm, as if in itself symbolic order is consistent but it is disturbed from the outside through traumatic impacts of the real and so on and so on. Let me go back to Freud. Just look at his best known example of a traumatic real: Wolfman. You know, the guy seeing his parents' coitus a tergo. But read Freud carefully. Freud is not saying this was a trauma, something that the small guy Wolfman was not able to symbolize and so on. No, Freud says almost the exact opposite. He says that the small kid, okay maybe we are not sure, one year and a half old, saw probably mother and father copulating a tergo. And then as Freud emphasizes, at that point he didn't know what to do with it. There was no trauma. He just stored this as an empty memory. It’s years later, around four, five years, when the small Hans boy began to—no it's not Hans, sorry, it’s that Russian guy—began to be disturbed by sexuality, where do children come from, all that stuff, that he resuscitated that experience. The experience was as it were retraumatized. What was officially just okay, f*ck it, I don't know what they are doing there, moving like idiots and so on. And I think this is the most healthy attitude towards sex. Imagine not being aroused and observing two adults making love. Admit it, if you are honest, there is something extremely stupid about it. What's the point of it? I mean, more and more I’m—what? You don't believe in it? My favorite British joke, if you ask me, is that a Lord is doing on the park of his palace, how do you call this, push-ups, you know. And Butler comes to him—you must know the joke—and tells him: did his lordship not notice that the lady has already left, you know and so on. I mean, that's the truth of it. But okay, that's another story. What I want to say is this: that you see the point, that the real deadlock is not oh my God, the trauma, what my parents were doing and so on. The real deadlock is the immanent deadlock of sexuality, symbolic deadlock. What does it mean? Inconsistent and so on. And the real comes second. What I like to use here as a rather rough metaphor would have been antisemitism or other forms of racism. It's precisely the antisemitic vision that, you know, we have a harmonious social order, a Jew comes from outside, disturbs this order. Or in different, for us in Western Europe now, up to a point we can say there are refugees from the Middle East, whatever you want. My point is that, you see the paradox: the obstacle, the inconsistency, comes first. The Jew, the figure of the Jew, is just an attempt to fill in or to even to re-normalize, I would have said, an inconsistency which is immanent. And that's how, haha, I will answer one of your questions, I’m not so bad as you think. Just forget about these four discourses, I hate them so much. Do you have this here? You remember you asked me what does it mean in the—this is the lower part, the formulas of Lacan. This is the male side, S relates to woman as—this is very simple to read. This simply means that the male subject relates mostly, it’s more open, to woman reducing her to the object-cause of her desire. Which, when Lacan says this, we should read into this all the violence implied. You know that famous subtitle of Lacan somewhere in Seminar XI where he says: I love you but because I love in you something more than you, I will destroy you and so on and so on. I mean, there is even a movie on this, I mean this would be Vertigo. Scottie loves in Madeleine something more than Madeleine and so—but okay. Then you have S of barred A, the woman who doesn't exist, and she is split between signifier of the barred other, signifier of the inconsistency of the other, and the capitalized Phi. Now, what's the main point I want to make here? That this again, this aspect is relatively simple for Lacan. Maybe he simplifies it, it’s more complex, but basically, the way I read it is that in a typical masculine sexuality, when man relates to a woman, basically it has immanently the structure of a masturbation with a real partner. What do you mean by this? We know the common sense definition of masturbation. You do it to yourself but you just imagine some fantasy, whatever you dream about it. Lacan turns this around implicitly and his claim is that, but real sex from the male standpoint is nothing but masturbation with a real partner. That is to say, even if you do it with a real partner, you use the real partner just as a prop to actualize, to fantasize in body, in body, in a body as it were. Now I will not go into it too much because Lacan’s position is not that every sex is that and so on. But okay. What I want to go is to this much more intriguing aspect of how the non-existing woman, this division of the woman between capitalized Phi, which is usually read as the phallic function, and signifier of the inconsistency of the other. Here I want to elaborate things a little bit. I think it is totally wrong to read this as a sign of a—the sign of a division of woman. Even Lacan’s Seminar Encore where he speaks about jouissance feminine is often read in this way, as if woman is partially caught into the symbolic order, but partially she escapes it. And then of course, this part of woman which is not caught into the phallic symbolic order then can be given either a positive or a negative spin, of course. You can be a masculine sexist and claim, yeah, yeah, women are not fully civilized, fully within culture. Women are just partially civilized, they just—you have these wonderful paranoiac theories. My favorite one, it's horror, but you should read it if you want to get horrified. Now there is a new translation in the United States, I think. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character. The ultimate antisemite, anti-feminist. There is even a rumor that Hitler said that this is the only Jew that he would not—that shouldn't be killed. Because he was a Jew, he wrote his book when he was twenty-three, Sex and Character, brutal anti-feminism and antisemitism, and at the end, since he was a Jew, he killed himself. I mean, no, it was an authentic tragic position. He drew the conclusion that the best solution for humanity is collective suicide, with which I tend to agree. My favorite movie is Lars von Trier's Melancholia, but that's another question. So what I'm saying is that this false reading, I hope to prove, of sex—of jouissance feminine as the woman is not wholly within the symbolic order, you find a very brutal although nicely elaborated version in Weininger where he gives such a brutal example. It's vulgar but it's so nicely elaborated. He says that a woman simply doesn't cannot relate to truth. No, she knows is she lying or not, but she is not able to pursue truth for the sake of itself. She says a woman can choose to tell the truth, but it will be always motivated by some hidden pathological, usually sexual, interest, you know. Like, I don't know, can I be vulgar? Sorry, you know my jokes. I ask you: will it be raining tomorrow? You know what Weininger would have said? That you would first have thought, what does he want from me? Is this a proposal to take me out tomorrow? Do I want this guy to be on a date on him? And then, you know, your answer will be always conditioned by this. You are, sorry to inform you about this, you are not able to directly—that's a disgusting theory. But you know why I'm telling it to you? Uh-uh, I'm tricky here. Not to—okay, many people will accuse me that my entire perverted pleasure is under the excuse of attacking antisemitism to enjoy telling you this dirty anti-feminist stuff. No, no, it's more complex because I want to spoil your enjoyment much more. You know what's the true shock of Weininger? You cannot imagine modern art without him. And by when I say modern art, I mean top modern art. I mean, for example, Kafka. It’s clear from his letters, diary. For Kafka, if you look at feminine figures in Kafka, Kafka's novels, all those teachers and how do you call it, waitresses in the inns, in Castle, in The Trial, they are, they are Weininger figures. Then Arnold Schoenberg, and you notice these are Jewish guys. Arnold Schoenberg, then Edvard Munch, Strindberg, name them. Absolutely crucial for early modernity at least. Up to—I am always, I think I was too good to watch him. I think already mentioned this, did you see Tarkovsky's especially Solaris? I think it's a deeply Weiningerian film. It's a man who is haunted by the presence of his dead wife and the whole trajectory of the film is how to get rid of this dream, to establish a relationship with his father. And he literally almost quotes or enacts Weininger’s thesis that a woman doesn't exist, a woman is just a hallucination of men. A woman—and Weininger paradoxically even draws from this a kind of a democratic, not feminist, but open conclusion. He says it's meaningless to fight women because they don't exist. Women just materialize the ethical failure of men. What really only exists is man fighting for his ethical stance. And if you fail, you embody your failure in a woman. So the idea is you look, you get rid of this hold of a woman upon you, woman ontologically disappears. So again, my point now is that this reading of course has to be totally rejected. This reading of woman as whatever then you, in whatever way you formulate this excess, some primordial, natural, evil, cunningness, calculation, whatever, not fully in the symbolic order. In the sense of, and Weininger is here Kantian, he claims a woman—he can be very vulgar here—cannot understand categorical imperative. A woman is constitutively unable to do an ethical act in the sense of just for the sake of duty. There always has to be some calculation and so on. So again, not only we have absolutely to reject this, this version of the substantialization of woman as if we have the symbolic order and men can fully enter it in the sense of their entire jouissance is phallicized, which means subjected to symbolic castration, and then women who are just partially in it. Because you know what is even more dangerous is the opposite aspect, where you in a false way, and I find this in a way even more disgusting than this outright anti-feminist attitude, where you read that excess which in a woman resists symbolization as something great, positive. In the sense of, we men are fully into symbolic and we—that's why we lose our true vitality—while in a woman some part resists symbolization, some part is still connected to some earthly substantial vitality and so on. They even along these lines read phallic enjoyment as a pseudo-castrated enjoyment. We men can enjoy only in a castrated form. The wave of enjoyment survives symbolization which all—always has a castrating effect. In the sense that it's already within the symbolic order where the original object of desire is lost, whatever you want, while women still have contact with that pre-symbolic authentic jouissance feminine. So my first thesis would have been: it doesn't matter what do you choose. This very paradigm of man is fully within the symbolic order while woman is only partially in it, there is a part in her that resists, is absolutely to be abandoned. So, but nonetheless, you will say now, but nonetheless, there is a division here. Oh, the first thing to note is that this signifier of the barred other, which is on the feminine side, did you notice that it's not nothing real in the naive sense of outside the symbolic order in it? It's a signifier. It's just signifier of the inconsistency of the symbolic order. And now comes my big thesis. Big, okay. That this is not to be read as a division in the sense of here is one enjoyment, here is another enjoyment. No, it's just a distinction in stance, it's the same enjoyment just from a different perspective. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by a signifier of the inconsistency of the big other? There are old examples that I use all the time, so I will be very short. Think about Spinoza, his definition of God. Not Deus sive Natura, but this personalized God. He says very nicely that although God, as father up there, personalized God appears as the highest being, a fascinating greatness, it's just a name for our ignorance. Yes, we lost your sound. Really? At the crucial time. My God, this is a wonderful effect. I hope you would start to laugh, you know it's the same as—I always like this, you remember on TV, if you watch opera and then the sound goes off, it's the same as what I was describing as sex done by a British Lord, you know. All of a sudden you see the stupidity of, of gestures and so on. Okay, thanks, I hope now it works. What I wanted to say is that all that happens, the—this, it’s not simply phallic function, Lacan oscillates here, this capitalized Phi is phallus but phallus in its fascinating dimension also. Phallus—Spinoza is telling us something about Spinoza. Yeah, but I'm coming to that. Spinoza says that what appears to us as the signifier of the highest, the most noble thing like God, it's a false positive term. It's just, it's just imposing a false positive form on, on a gap, a negativity. And the thing to do is just to render this negativity, inconsistency, visible. Let me give you another example that I've used twenty, thirty times, not more. Precisely—okay, I'm ashamed to mention it, but okay, it works. You know Steven Spielberg, Jaws? Shark. Yeah. When I was young, there were debates, what does the shark which is slaughtering, attacking people at the seaside resort, what does it stand for? And there were right-wing theories, or leftists reading it in a right-wing way, claiming that oh, it’s clear, shark stands for the fear of ordinary Americans of nature, of immigrants and so on, all the external threats. Then there was our beloved haha, Fidel Castro, who I remember loved the movie. He said no, it's clear, I don't know how it was clear to him, he said no, it’s clear that the shark stands for the exploitative big capital and it is a deeply anti-capitalist film and so on. So what does the shark truly stand for? I claim it's the wrong question. It stands for everything and nothing. It's pure ideological operation. In what sense? Ordinary Americans, I give a very simplified reading, have many inconsistent fears. You fear immigrants, you fear global warming, nature, you fear big capital, banks, whatever, moral degradation. And it’s an ingenious operation to exchange all these fears for one big fear: the shark. The shark is all of that. The shark has nothing to do with the shark. It’s just one fascinating image which re—retains your consistency. And why am I saying this? As I developed already twenty, thirty times. It's exactly the same in classic antisemitism. Now my theory here, I don't want to go into it, I’m here apropos antisemitism, my position is much more elaborated. Because on the one hand I claim antisemitism really exists today. On the other hand, and I was nicely surprised how they were ready to swallow this in Tel Aviv when I gave a talk there. On the other hand I claim Zionism the way it functions today is the latest form of antisemitism. But okay, let's not develop it. What I wanted to say is that how does the figure of the Jew function? The first in classic antisemitism. The first thing you note immediately is that it's the same as with shark. It's absolutely inconsistent. The Jew is at the same time calculating, you know Jews are supposed just to count money all the time and so on, and, and, and sleazy, Jews are obsessed with sex, they want our—so too intellectual and sleazy. They are, they work too hard. This is a classical antisemitic cliché about Jews. We ordinary Americans, British men, we have some fun. Jews they just work all the night, no wonder they beat us at exams and so on. Over-intellectual, hardworking, and lazy. They don't wash, they smell bad and so on and so on. So did you see the parallel that I wanted to draw? You have a series of, if you are a normal petit bourgeois, a series of inconsistent fears. You are afraid of being screwed up by big capital, exploited, losing your job. You are afraid of immigrants as a threat, of nature, whatever. But the ingenuity of antisemitism is that all this inconsistent multiplicity of fears is replaced by one, by the fascinating presence of the Jew. And that's why I claim Jewish plot is plot, a plot in the
I said, but you know for the ancient Greeks on earth things were chaotic, but you look up in the sky there, always the same, an order. The big invention, invention insight of Newton was: no, it's the same, exactly the same laws on our earth and in the sky. But nonetheless for Miller, it still remains a well-ordered universe. And then his big discovery: with modern capitalism, through its utter contingency asserted in capitalism, we get a new type of the real, a real, as he puts it, outside the law, a totally disordered real, a real which cannot any longer be symbolized. And following this line, Miller even not renounces but relativizes Lacan’s earlier attempts of four discourses, of formulas of sexuation, as something which still belongs to the basically pre-modern order of meaning. For example, for Miller now, sex is something, sexuality—libido rather—is something totally chaotic, outside the real, and Miller even denounces Lacan’s formulas of sexuation as nonetheless a clumsy attempt to symbolize this real. And then Miller, basically, it’s a very tragic breakdown, I claim, because he goes so far as to claim that the basic, it’s basically a very vulgar capitalist ideology elevated into a Lacanian insight. It’s that today everything is becoming contingent, you can change sex, everything is plastic and so on. On the market, everything is crazy, dynamic, there are no laws, and so on and so on. So psychoanalysis should teach us how to confront this, how to cope with this. I, for reasons which are very precise, allow me to briefly present them, I am totally opposed to this vision. My first reaction is: my God, did this guy ever read Lacan? Miller. Because if there is something really pertinent in Lacan, is that he doesn't substantialize the real into an external impenetrable—you know, all this pseudo-postmodern poetics of the real as a traumatic outside that we cannot ever symbolize, we try, fail again and again to symbolize it. No, for Lacan, the real is in a way absolutely immanent to the process of symbolization. It's its immanent obstacle, as it were. It's something in the very structure of the symbolic order which makes it fail. It's its internal antagonism, gap, negativity, however you call it. So you see my point, it's not an external obstacle, it's a totally... This is why Lacan is emphatic about how the idea of any equation between real and the Kantian, Kant, Immanuel Kant's thing-in-itself is totally wrong. The real is not out there, impenetrable, and we try to penetrate it but always fail, and all this pseudo-Nietzschean metaphoric also, you know that, that the real is like looking directly into the sun, too strong, it blinds us, we cannot, and so on and so on. No, the greatness of Lacan again is total immanence of the real to the symbolic. Which doesn't mean that symbolic is everything, that's another question, I will address it later. But Lacan's idea, if I get it correctly, is that the real in itself, if you want, is nothing but, as he Lacan puts it in his Seminar XX, an impasse de la formalisation, a deadlock of formalization, the necessary short circuit inconsistency of normalization. And the temptation to be resisted is precisely to project the cause of this inconsistency into an external realm, as if in itself symbolic order is consistent but it is disturbed from the outside through traumatic impacts of the real and so on and so on. Let me go back to Freud. Just look at his best known example of a traumatic real: Wolfman. You know, the guy seeing his parents' coitus a tergo. But read Freud carefully. Freud is not saying this was a trauma, something that the small guy Wolfman was not able to symbolize and so on. No, Freud says almost the exact opposite. He says that the small kid, okay maybe we are not sure, one year and a half old, saw probably mother and father copulating a tergo. And then as Freud emphasizes, at that point he didn't know what to do with it. There was no trauma. He just stored this as an empty memory. It’s years later, around four, five years, when the small Hans boy began to—no it's not Hans, sorry, it’s that Russian guy—began to be disturbed by sexuality, where do children come from, all that stuff, that he resuscitated that experience. The experience was as it were retraumatized. What was officially just okay, f*ck it, I don't know what they are doing there, moving like idiots and so on. And I think this is the most healthy attitude towards sex. Imagine not being aroused and observing two adults making love. Admit it, if you are honest, there is something extremely stupid about it. What's the point of it? I mean, more and more I’m—what? You don't believe in it? My favorite British joke, if you ask me, is that a Lord is doing on the park of his palace, how do you call this, push-ups, you know. And Butler comes to him—you must know the joke—and tells him: did his lordship not notice that the lady has already left, you know and so on. I mean, that's the truth of it. But okay, that's another story. What I want to say is this: that you see the point, that the real deadlock is not oh my God, the trauma, what my parents were doing and so on. The real deadlock is the immanent deadlock of sexuality, symbolic deadlock. What does it mean? Inconsistent and so on. And the real comes second. What I like to use here as a rather rough metaphor would have been antisemitism or other forms of racism. It's precisely the antisemitic vision that, you know, we have a harmonious social order, a Jew comes from outside, disturbs this order. Or in different, for us in Western Europe now, up to a point we can say there are refugees from the Middle East, whatever you want. My point is that, you see the paradox: the obstacle, the inconsistency, comes first. The Jew, the figure of the Jew, is just an attempt to fill in or to even to re-normalize, I would have said, an inconsistency which is immanent. And that's how, haha, I will answer one of your questions, I’m not so bad as you think. Just forget about these four discourses, I hate them so much. Do you have this here? You remember you asked me what does it mean in the—this is the lower part, the formulas of Lacan. This is the male side, S relates to woman as—this is very simple to read. This simply means that the male subject relates mostly, it’s more open, to woman reducing her to the object-cause of her desire. Which, when Lacan says this, we should read into this all the violence implied. You know that famous subtitle of Lacan somewhere in Seminar XI where he says: I love you but because I love in you something more than you, I will destroy you and so on and so on. I mean, there is even a movie on this, I mean this would be Vertigo. Scottie loves in Madeleine something more than Madeleine and so—but okay. Then you have S of barred A, the woman who doesn't exist, and she is split between signifier of the barred other, signifier of the inconsistency of the other, and the capitalized Phi. Now, what's the main point I want to make here? That this again, this aspect is relatively simple for Lacan. Maybe he simplifies it, it’s more complex, but basically, the way I read it is that in a typical masculine sexuality, when man relates to a woman, basically it has immanently the structure of a masturbation with a real partner. What do you mean by this? We know the common sense definition of masturbation. You do it to yourself but you just imagine some fantasy, whatever you dream about it. Lacan turns this around implicitly and his claim is that, but real sex from the male standpoint is nothing but masturbation with a real partner. That is to say, even if you do it with a real partner, you use the real partner just as a prop to actualize, to fantasize in body, in body, in a body as it were. Now I will not go into it too much because Lacan’s position is not that every sex is that and so on. But okay. What I want to go is to this much more intriguing aspect of how the non-existing woman, this division of the woman between capitalized Phi, which is usually read as the phallic function, and signifier of the inconsistency of the other. Here I want to elaborate things a little bit. I think it is totally wrong to read this as a sign of a—the sign of a division of woman. Even Lacan’s Seminar Encore where he speaks about jouissance feminine is often read in this way, as if woman is partially caught into the symbolic order, but partially she escapes it. And then of course, this part of woman which is not caught into the phallic symbolic order then can be given either a positive or a negative spin, of course. You can be a masculine sexist and claim, yeah, yeah, women are not fully civilized, fully within culture. Women are just partially civilized, they just—you have these wonderful paranoiac theories. My favorite one, it's horror, but you should read it if you want to get horrified. Now there is a new translation in the United States, I think. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character. The ultimate antisemite, anti-feminist. There is even a rumor that Hitler said that this is the only Jew that he would not—that shouldn't be killed. Because he was a Jew, he wrote his book when he was twenty-three, Sex and Character, brutal anti-feminism and antisemitism, and at the end, since he was a Jew, he killed himself. I mean, no, it was an authentic tragic position. He drew the conclusion that the best solution for humanity is collective suicide, with which I tend to agree. My favorite movie is Lars von Trier's Melancholia, but that's another question. So what I'm saying is that this false reading, I hope to prove, of sex—of jouissance feminine as the woman is not wholly within the symbolic order, you find a very brutal although nicely elaborated version in Weininger where he gives such a brutal example. It's vulgar but it's so nicely elaborated. He says that a woman simply doesn't cannot relate to truth. No, she knows is she lying or not, but she is not able to pursue truth for the sake of itself. She says a woman can choose to tell the truth, but it will be always motivated by some hidden pathological, usually sexual, interest, you know. Like, I don't know, can I be vulgar? Sorry, you know my jokes. I ask you: will it be raining tomorrow? You know what Weininger would have said? That you would first have thought, what does he want from me? Is this a proposal to take me out tomorrow? Do I want this guy to be on a date on him? And then, you know, your answer will be always conditioned by this. You are, sorry to inform you about this, you are not able to directly—that's a disgusting theory. But you know why I'm telling it to you? Uh-uh, I'm tricky here. Not to—okay, many people will accuse me that my entire perverted pleasure is under the excuse of attacking antisemitism to enjoy telling you this dirty anti-feminist stuff. No, no, it's more complex because I want to spoil your enjoyment much more. You know what's the true shock of Weininger? You cannot imagine modern art without him. And by when I say modern art, I mean top modern art. I mean, for example, Kafka. It’s clear from his letters, diary. For Kafka, if you look at feminine figures in Kafka, Kafka's novels, all those teachers and how do you call it, waitresses in the inns, in Castle, in The Trial, they are, they are Weininger figures. Then Arnold Schoenberg, and you notice these are Jewish guys. Arnold Schoenberg, then Edvard Munch, Strindberg, name them. Absolutely crucial for early modernity at least. Up to—I am always, I think I was too good to watch him. I think already mentioned this, did you see Tarkovsky's especially Solaris? I think it's a deeply Weiningerian film. It's a man who is haunted by the presence of his dead wife and the whole trajectory of the film is how to get rid of this dream, to establish a relationship with his father. And he literally almost quotes or enacts Weininger’s thesis that a woman doesn't exist, a woman is just a hallucination of men. A woman—and Weininger paradoxically even draws from this a kind of a democratic, not feminist, but open conclusion. He says it's meaningless to fight women because they don't exist. Women just materialize the ethical failure of men. What really only exists is man fighting for his ethical stance. And if you fail, you embody your failure in a woman. So the idea is you look, you get rid of this hold of a woman upon you, woman ontologically disappears. So again, my point now is that this reading of course has to be totally rejected. This reading of woman as whatever then you, in whatever way you formulate this excess, some primordial, natural, evil, cunningness, calculation, whatever, not fully in the symbolic order. In the sense of, and Weininger is here Kantian, he claims a woman—he can be very vulgar here—cannot understand categorical imperative. A woman is constitutively unable to do an ethical act in the sense of just for the sake of duty. There always has to be some calculation and so on. So again, not only we have absolutely to reject this, this version of the substantialization of woman as if we have the symbolic order and men can fully enter it in the sense of their entire jouissance is phallicized, which means subjected to symbolic castration, and then women who are just partially in it. Because you know what is even more dangerous is the opposite aspect, where you in a false way, and I find this in a way even more disgusting than this outright anti-feminist attitude, where you read that excess which in a woman resists symbolization as something great, positive. In the sense of, we men are fully into symbolic and we—that's why we lose our true vitality—while in a woman some part resists symbolization, some part is still connected to some earthly substantial vitality and so on. They even along these lines read phallic enjoyment as a pseudo-castrated enjoyment. We men can enjoy only in a castrated form. The wave of enjoyment survives symbolization which all—always has a castrating effect. In the sense that it's already within the symbolic order where the original object of desire is lost, whatever you want, while women still have contact with that pre-symbolic authentic jouissance feminine. So my first thesis would have been: it doesn't matter what do you choose. This very paradigm of man is fully within the symbolic order while woman is only partially in it, there is a part in her that resists, is absolutely to be abandoned. So, but nonetheless, you will say now, but nonetheless, there is a division here. Oh, the first thing to note is that this signifier of the barred other, which is on the feminine side, did you notice that it's not nothing real in the naive sense of outside the symbolic order in it? It's a signifier. It's just signifier of the inconsistency of the symbolic order. And now comes my big thesis. Big, okay. That this is not to be read as a division in the sense of here is one enjoyment, here is another enjoyment. No, it's just a distinction in stance, it's the same enjoyment just from a different perspective. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by a signifier of the inconsistency of the big other? There are old examples that I use all the time, so I will be very short. Think about Spinoza, his definition of God. Not Deus sive Natura, but this personalized God. He says very nicely that although God, as father up there, personalized God appears as the highest being, a fascinating greatness, it's just a name for our ignorance. Yes, we lost your sound. Really? At the crucial time. My God, this is a wonderful effect. I hope you would start to laugh, you know it's the same as—I always like this, you remember on TV, if you watch opera and then the sound goes off, it's the same as what I was describing as sex done by a British Lord, you know. All of a sudden you see the stupidity of, of gestures and so on. Okay, thanks, I hope now it works. What I wanted to say is that all that happens, the—this, it’s not simply phallic function, Lacan oscillates here, this capitalized Phi is phallus but phallus in its fascinating dimension also. Phallus—Spinoza is telling us something about Spinoza. Yeah, but I'm coming to that. Spinoza says that what appears to us as the signifier of the highest, the most noble thing like God, it's a false positive term. It's just, it's just imposing a false positive form on, on a gap, a negativity. And the thing to do is just to render this negativity, inconsistency, visible. Let me give you another example that I've used twenty, thirty times, not more. Precisely—okay, I'm ashamed to mention it, but okay, it works. You know Steven Spielberg, Jaws? Shark. Yeah. When I was young, there were debates, what does the shark which is slaughtering, attacking people at the seaside resort, what does it stand for? And there were right-wing theories, or leftists reading it in a right-wing way, claiming that oh, it’s clear, shark stands for the fear of ordinary Americans of nature, of immigrants and so on, all the external threats. Then there was our beloved haha, Fidel Castro, who I remember loved the movie. He said no, it's clear, I don't know how it was clear to him, he said no, it’s clear that the shark stands for the exploitative big capital and it is a deeply anti-capitalist film and so on. So what does the shark truly stand for? I claim it's the wrong question. It stands for everything and nothing. It's pure ideological operation. In what sense? Ordinary Americans, I give a very simplified reading, have many inconsistent fears. You fear immigrants, you fear global warming, nature, you fear big capital, banks, whatever, moral degradation. And it’s an ingenious operation to exchange all these fears for one big fear: the shark. The shark is all of that. The shark has nothing to do with the shark. It’s just one fascinating image which re—retains your consistency. And why am I saying this? As I developed already twenty, thirty times. It's exactly the same in classic antisemitism. Now my theory here, I don't want to go into it, I’m here apropos antisemitism, my position is much more elaborated. Because on the one hand I claim antisemitism really exists today. On the other hand, and I was nicely surprised how they were ready to swallow this in Tel Aviv when I gave a talk there. On the other hand I claim Zionism the way it functions today is the latest form of antisemitism. But okay, let's not develop it. What I wanted to say is that how does the figure of the Jew function? The first in classic antisemitism. The first thing you note immediately is that it's the same as with shark. It's absolutely inconsistent. The Jew is at the same time calculating, you know Jews are supposed just to count money all the time and so on, and, and, and sleazy, Jews are obsessed with sex, they want our—so too intellectual and sleazy. They are, they work too hard. This is a classical antisemitic cliché about Jews. We ordinary Americans, British men, we have some fun. Jews they just work all the night, no wonder they beat us at exams and so on. Over-intellectual, hardworking, and lazy. They don't wash, they smell bad and so on and so on. So did you see the parallel that I wanted to draw? You have a series of, if you are a normal petit bourgeois, a series of inconsistent fears. You are afraid of being screwed up by big capital, exploited, losing your job. You are afraid of immigrants as a threat, of nature, whatever. But the ingenuity of antisemitism is that all this inconsistent multiplicity of fears is replaced by one, by the fascinating presence of the Jew. And that's why I claim Jewish plot is plot, a plot in the
unknown
wonderful
wonderful
Slavoj Žižek
double meaning of the term. Plot like narrative and plot like Jewish plot. Jewish plot is Hitler's narrative which, you know, let's—it’s a very simplified version. Germans were confused in mid late twenties, everything is wrong, I lost my money in the bank, lost my job, poor people annoying my daughter, whatever. Hitler offers a wonderful, okay, not so wonderful, narrative. It's the Jewish plot. You regain a consistent narrative. So, and this also is the point, now comes my big point, more theoretical. Jew in this sense is one of the great examples of what Lacan calls master signifier. And he says something very precise here. He says that master signifier is the point where signifier falls into the signified. Now what does this mean? Uh-uh, I claim, I will give you another example. I claim it's the point where signifier has to intervene into the signified content to even constitute its consistency. Let me give you another example which I used twenty times, not My favorite anti-communist joke from Poland. You must know this, I repeated it here a couple of times that this wonderful joke—sorry, this idea of communism was that communism is the—socialism the way they built it in Poland, Soviet Union, is the synthesis bringing together all the most noble features of entire history of the world. It’s the synthesis of the highest achievements, no? And okay, the joke of course ironically refers to this and it goes like this: Our socialism is the synthesis of all the previous stages of human development. From early pre-state societies, it took primitivism. From ancient Greece and Rome, it took slavery. From feudalism, it took brutal domination. From capitalism, it took exploitation. And, you got it, that's the beauty, from socialism, it took the name. You see, that's the crucial, to get it together you have to add the name. It’s the performative moment if you want. So what I'm trying to say is... So you see, let's return to the Jew. You see, and incidentally we live in such decadent times, one of the saddest points of how in our times irony even if it is brutal sarcasm cannot be tolerated. It happened to my Jewish good friend Udi Aloni. I was with him in some city, German city, where he was staging a theater performance. And the German assistants were very inefficient, you know. They were bringing props on the stage, everything went wrong. And then Udi said something, he forgot that he is not with me because I talk with him all the time like that. He started to shout at the Germans: Where is your German efficiency? If during World War II you were to work in a clumsy way like that, you wouldn't even be able to carry through the Holocaust and so on, you know. Everybody went pale and so on and so on. It was too much for them, this joke. But I think because they were guilty, not because they were so shocked. That's another story. So let's go on. I hope you got what I was aiming at here. Imagine the Jew as long as you are within antisemitism is the fascinating presence, the Jew or the shark, this mega fascinating signifier, no? And then all you have to do is to see in it signifier of the inconsistency of the other. That it’s—ah, to give you another, and I wonder if you David would agree or not, because you're also—there are three superegos, the two ladies and you today with me, for whom I'm—I’m sorry, ignore me totally, that's the nicest thing to do. Because wouldn't you agree, I think that Marx also has a signifier of this inconsistency? At least if we accept the critical reading of it. I don't know enough to say is it true or not, but all I can say is according to some historians, Marx’s notion of Asiatic mode of production is a false notion. In what sense? Marx’s original scheme was the usual one: primitive tribal pre-class societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will come afterwards, communism or whatever. Then the idea is this one: Marx noted that there are modes of production in ancient China, in ancient South America and so on, which do not fit any of these categories. And you see my point: the critique of Marx here is that Asiatic mode of production is a pseudo-notion. It appears to be a positive notion for, but its actual conceptual meaning is just all those modes of production which do not fit any of my categories. You see my point, that it's the signifier of the inconsistency of Marx’s categorization of the modes of production. It holds the place within this categorization of all that does not fit into it. It's, if I may be a little bit ironic, it's like that LGBT+, this is the plus, no? And it’s not that I am making fun of it, rather the theory, but I will not go into it now, the theory of structural linguistics, semiotics and so on is that every system of meaning needs such a pseudo-element, an element which is a stand-in for what is excluded. And again, Lacan's name for this is master signifier. And the whole point is to see in the master signifier, which appears to be the highest point, oh, that God, whatever, the signifier of the inconsistency of the other. And that's crucial how we read it because what we—what some Marxists call, and they are right calling it, class struggle essentialism, they read class struggle like this: the ultimate meaning, you know, the secret meaning, the ultimate meaning of all phenomena in history is class struggle as the ultimate guarantee of meaning. Like you want to learn what a certain phenomenon really means, look at its role in class struggle and so on and so on. But I think there is a much more refined meaning of it. And Marx himself was on the trace of this other meaning. For example, if nowhere else in his absolutely magnificent readings of the '48 revolution, class struggle in France, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and others, where class struggle is not the ultimate meaning, whatever you do ultimately it means you support this or that class, but it's rather an operator of inconsistency of all others. For example, you have ecological struggle, it gets inconsistent. Why? Because it's distorted through class struggle. Class struggle doesn't exist in itself, it's just the operator of inconsistency. Or for example, you have a king, or the highest figure in political order, as we say in Marxism, its unifying role masks a certain antagonism. So again, going back to your question, I think that this is how we should read femininity. And also—ah, now I will tell you another thing. I will nonetheless return to one moment, for one moment, for brief moment I will succumb to your terror and say something about four discourses. This is the signifier produced here in analyst's discourse, you know, S1. Even I was often misreading it. What does Lacan think about that in the discourse of the analyst, a master signifier is produced? Some people even read this as if Lacan is claiming nonetheless at the end of analytic discourse a new master emerges, whatever. No, I think the master signifier is precisely the right word which makes you aware of this. You know, it's, for example, if you analyze—if you analyze antisemitism, let's take this as antisemitism. I am a split antisemitic subject, I'm confronting the psychoanalyst and like she is the one supposed to know. But what through the work of transference the analyst wants to bring me to is to produce that signifier. To become aware—so S1 is not again a new master name. It's simply to produce a signifier which ruins antisemitism for me, to put it in a very simplified way, because I have to accept that a Jew is just a mask for the inconsistency of the symbolic order and so on and so on. And it's another point which is crucial here. What I mentioned before, you know, this is the difference between Freud and Jung. For Freud following Lacan, the unconscious is not—Freud following Lacan? Yes. No, no, I didn't make a mistake, although of course, you know what I did now? I followed Helmut von Kleist. You know he wrote that wonderful text where he says that all big inventions—I'm not saying this is a big invention—what I did in rhetorics and so on, emerge so that you say something stupid and then you try quickly to patch things up to make sense of your mistake. So okay, in what sense Freud followed Lacan? But I admit it in advance, I'm just trying to squeeze out. In the same way as—ah, I will give you another example. My reading of Haiti revolution, and we are in your territory here. The same people attacked you and me for silent racism, claiming but still for us the model is French Revolution and all those third world guys can't do but copy the copy. You know, the white man has to do the first gesture. I think in a way which is not totally crazy, the temporality runs here the other way around. In some sense which is far from just metaphorical, French Revolution was a pale copy of the Haiti revolution which was the real thing. That is to say, to put it in Hegelian terms, only through its repetition in Haiti did French Revolution become fully what it was: a world-historical event. So I will put it like this: yes, French Revolution was the first, but it only became the first through its repetition. You know what I'm saying here? You will say I'm dreaming. If I'm dreaming then Marx is dreaming. You remember one of the most beautiful statements of Marx: "The anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape." Which means the anatomy of Haiti revolution is the key to the anatomy of French Revolution. I'm sorry, it was, Jacqueline, it was a desperate attempt to claim how Lacan is the key to Freud to squeeze out of my stupid slip. Please. But that—yeah, I agree with that part. And it’s about the four discourses. Yeah, I think—don't really want to talk about. But I, I don't read that A as the analyst. I read—sorry, I don't read the A as the analyst, I read it as the object petit a. Which is to say as the object of fantasy. Yeah. And I see the analytic discourse as the object petit a in relation or non-relation with the subject who is barred. Yeah. And that propels the dominant signifier and the chain of language beneath the bar as knowledge. And that's why it's only a fourth turn from the hysteric. Because the—and therefore the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst are so intimately connected. Um, because the hysteric starts from the position of the subject who is barred through what to put it in Freudian terms the—or no Lacanian—but that the—the membrane between the conscious and unconscious in the hysteric is stretched so thin that you can almost see straight through to the knowledge. Now, this is where I want to come back to what you're saying about the two positions, your two critiques of the idea that women are not quite in the symbolic in the same way as men. Because I have more time for that than you, but I have time for it in this sense, not some rarefication of woman's place outside the symbolic or her substantial being in a primordial nature. I totally agree with you. But the woman is related to the position of the hysteric and therefore her fourth turn from the discourse of the analyst is surely—and you may want to dispute—Lacan’s way of saying she is situated differently in relationship to knowledge. And for me that gives her an advantage. Yeah. No, I—sorry, I usually I'm in a paranoia with you, I expected a bigger—I expected you to be closer to our beloved Norman Bates, but you were a kind Norman Bates today. No, sorry, I totally agree, you know with what I especially agree? This crucial link between hysteria and analysis in the sense that if there is one good thing about Freud and Lacan is that they are far from this depreciation of hysteria, which was unfortunately, even I am unfortunately old enough to remember, one of the key elements even of the '68 discourse, at least the way student revolution it popularly functioned. The idea was this one: hysterics are women who just provoke the master, they don't want to go to the end, they oscillate, like—but a pervert is the true one, he goes to the end. Or even the formula was popular: what hysterics only dream about, perverts go to the end, they realize it. I think it's absolutely here to return to what was clear to Freud already, where he says although apparently a—sorry, pervert subject, you know, like totally you do whatever—but Freud says something very interesting. He says that nowhere is the unconscious more subtracted, more enclosed, more out of reach than in perversion. And authentic psycho—and even I think this has to be linked to something which Lacan emphasizes, when he says that every power, every structure of political power, authority, needs a pervert as its obscene shadow to sustain it. So it's not perversion is not subversive in this sense. Every strong power, the strongest it is, the more it needs a pervert. And again, against this, we should absolutely celebrate hysteria. And I totally agree with you, the only way where I don't even see where is the misunderstanding. Namely, I, you say this is not an analyst. Maybe not as a person, but isn't—okay, I'll put it like this, you know this better than me, probably, so I'm addressing the others. Lacan changed his position with this one, because throughout the fifties, for him the analyst was the big other simply, stood for the big other. And it was, I think that it’s not psychoanalyst as a—it's just the role psychoanalyst has to play as this impenetrable object annoying you, annoying—how does he become analyst or she object small a? On account of course of the supposed knowledge which is always hidden and so on and so on. So I would just claim that I agree with you, the hysterical subject is here, but the—the ana—what is the hyst—the analyst? The analyst is of course not the master signifier. It's also not knowledge. Knowledge is the traditional normative analyst who knows better than you and tells you. You know, it's just this enigmatic point which forces you and that's the beautiful thing, that the work is done here. Okay, Miller in one of his better bad-taste jokes pointed this out when he says that psychoanalysis is, is even better than capitalism. In capitalism the worker works but is paid a little bit. In psychoanalysis you the patient have to work and you have to pay for it, you know, it's a kind of ultra-cap. Sorry, yes? Can you just explain how this notation works? Okay, okay, I tried to avoid this but okay. Can I just finish one point literally two minutes, don't be afraid. Before I go on, just one point what I said there about the real, you know where already Miller is wrong? He should have read Lacan who knows it. Ancient Aztecs and Incas all that stuff, they were not as stupid as they may appear to be. You know what's so crucial? This is the big enigma of their sacred rituals. Why do they sacrifice people, or whomever, slaves, whatever, you know human sacrifices? That's the mystery. Not what you would have expected to. It's not the usual thing: we go hunting, we sacrifice things so that we will have lucky hunting, or we don't get enough rain, etc. No, the miracle is that they were sacrificing so that the most ordinary expected thing would happen. They were afraid that if they don't sacrifice, next day the sun will not rise and so on and so on. I found this an absolutely crucial
double meaning of the term. Plot like narrative and plot like Jewish plot. Jewish plot is Hitler's narrative which, you know, let's—it’s a very simplified version. Germans were confused in mid late twenties, everything is wrong, I lost my money in the bank, lost my job, poor people annoying my daughter, whatever. Hitler offers a wonderful, okay, not so wonderful, narrative. It's the Jewish plot. You regain a consistent narrative. So, and this also is the point, now comes my big point, more theoretical. Jew in this sense is one of the great examples of what Lacan calls master signifier. And he says something very precise here. He says that master signifier is the point where signifier falls into the signified. Now what does this mean? Uh-uh, I claim, I will give you another example. I claim it's the point where signifier has to intervene into the signified content to even constitute its consistency. Let me give you another example which I used twenty times, not My favorite anti-communist joke from Poland. You must know this, I repeated it here a couple of times that this wonderful joke—sorry, this idea of communism was that communism is the—socialism the way they built it in Poland, Soviet Union, is the synthesis bringing together all the most noble features of entire history of the world. It’s the synthesis of the highest achievements, no? And okay, the joke of course ironically refers to this and it goes like this: Our socialism is the synthesis of all the previous stages of human development. From early pre-state societies, it took primitivism. From ancient Greece and Rome, it took slavery. From feudalism, it took brutal domination. From capitalism, it took exploitation. And, you got it, that's the beauty, from socialism, it took the name. You see, that's the crucial, to get it together you have to add the name. It’s the performative moment if you want. So what I'm trying to say is... So you see, let's return to the Jew. You see, and incidentally we live in such decadent times, one of the saddest points of how in our times irony even if it is brutal sarcasm cannot be tolerated. It happened to my Jewish good friend Udi Aloni. I was with him in some city, German city, where he was staging a theater performance. And the German assistants were very inefficient, you know. They were bringing props on the stage, everything went wrong. And then Udi said something, he forgot that he is not with me because I talk with him all the time like that. He started to shout at the Germans: Where is your German efficiency? If during World War II you were to work in a clumsy way like that, you wouldn't even be able to carry through the Holocaust and so on, you know. Everybody went pale and so on and so on. It was too much for them, this joke. But I think because they were guilty, not because they were so shocked. That's another story. So let's go on. I hope you got what I was aiming at here. Imagine the Jew as long as you are within antisemitism is the fascinating presence, the Jew or the shark, this mega fascinating signifier, no? And then all you have to do is to see in it signifier of the inconsistency of the other. That it’s—ah, to give you another, and I wonder if you David would agree or not, because you're also—there are three superegos, the two ladies and you today with me, for whom I'm—I’m sorry, ignore me totally, that's the nicest thing to do. Because wouldn't you agree, I think that Marx also has a signifier of this inconsistency? At least if we accept the critical reading of it. I don't know enough to say is it true or not, but all I can say is according to some historians, Marx’s notion of Asiatic mode of production is a false notion. In what sense? Marx’s original scheme was the usual one: primitive tribal pre-class societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and whatever shit will come afterwards, communism or whatever. Then the idea is this one: Marx noted that there are modes of production in ancient China, in ancient South America and so on, which do not fit any of these categories. And you see my point: the critique of Marx here is that Asiatic mode of production is a pseudo-notion. It appears to be a positive notion for, but its actual conceptual meaning is just all those modes of production which do not fit any of my categories. You see my point, that it's the signifier of the inconsistency of Marx’s categorization of the modes of production. It holds the place within this categorization of all that does not fit into it. It's, if I may be a little bit ironic, it's like that LGBT+, this is the plus, no? And it’s not that I am making fun of it, rather the theory, but I will not go into it now, the theory of structural linguistics, semiotics and so on is that every system of meaning needs such a pseudo-element, an element which is a stand-in for what is excluded. And again, Lacan's name for this is master signifier. And the whole point is to see in the master signifier, which appears to be the highest point, oh, that God, whatever, the signifier of the inconsistency of the other. And that's crucial how we read it because what we—what some Marxists call, and they are right calling it, class struggle essentialism, they read class struggle like this: the ultimate meaning, you know, the secret meaning, the ultimate meaning of all phenomena in history is class struggle as the ultimate guarantee of meaning. Like you want to learn what a certain phenomenon really means, look at its role in class struggle and so on and so on. But I think there is a much more refined meaning of it. And Marx himself was on the trace of this other meaning. For example, if nowhere else in his absolutely magnificent readings of the '48 revolution, class struggle in France, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and others, where class struggle is not the ultimate meaning, whatever you do ultimately it means you support this or that class, but it's rather an operator of inconsistency of all others. For example, you have ecological struggle, it gets inconsistent. Why? Because it's distorted through class struggle. Class struggle doesn't exist in itself, it's just the operator of inconsistency. Or for example, you have a king, or the highest figure in political order, as we say in Marxism, its unifying role masks a certain antagonism. So again, going back to your question, I think that this is how we should read femininity. And also—ah, now I will tell you another thing. I will nonetheless return to one moment, for one moment, for brief moment I will succumb to your terror and say something about four discourses. This is the signifier produced here in analyst's discourse, you know, S1. Even I was often misreading it. What does Lacan think about that in the discourse of the analyst, a master signifier is produced? Some people even read this as if Lacan is claiming nonetheless at the end of analytic discourse a new master emerges, whatever. No, I think the master signifier is precisely the right word which makes you aware of this. You know, it's, for example, if you analyze—if you analyze antisemitism, let's take this as antisemitism. I am a split antisemitic subject, I'm confronting the psychoanalyst and like she is the one supposed to know. But what through the work of transference the analyst wants to bring me to is to produce that signifier. To become aware—so S1 is not again a new master name. It's simply to produce a signifier which ruins antisemitism for me, to put it in a very simplified way, because I have to accept that a Jew is just a mask for the inconsistency of the symbolic order and so on and so on. And it's another point which is crucial here. What I mentioned before, you know, this is the difference between Freud and Jung. For Freud following Lacan, the unconscious is not—Freud following Lacan? Yes. No, no, I didn't make a mistake, although of course, you know what I did now? I followed Helmut von Kleist. You know he wrote that wonderful text where he says that all big inventions—I'm not saying this is a big invention—what I did in rhetorics and so on, emerge so that you say something stupid and then you try quickly to patch things up to make sense of your mistake. So okay, in what sense Freud followed Lacan? But I admit it in advance, I'm just trying to squeeze out. In the same way as—ah, I will give you another example. My reading of Haiti revolution, and we are in your territory here. The same people attacked you and me for silent racism, claiming but still for us the model is French Revolution and all those third world guys can't do but copy the copy. You know, the white man has to do the first gesture. I think in a way which is not totally crazy, the temporality runs here the other way around. In some sense which is far from just metaphorical, French Revolution was a pale copy of the Haiti revolution which was the real thing. That is to say, to put it in Hegelian terms, only through its repetition in Haiti did French Revolution become fully what it was: a world-historical event. So I will put it like this: yes, French Revolution was the first, but it only became the first through its repetition. You know what I'm saying here? You will say I'm dreaming. If I'm dreaming then Marx is dreaming. You remember one of the most beautiful statements of Marx: "The anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape." Which means the anatomy of Haiti revolution is the key to the anatomy of French Revolution. I'm sorry, it was, Jacqueline, it was a desperate attempt to claim how Lacan is the key to Freud to squeeze out of my stupid slip. Please. But that—yeah, I agree with that part. And it’s about the four discourses. Yeah, I think—don't really want to talk about. But I, I don't read that A as the analyst. I read—sorry, I don't read the A as the analyst, I read it as the object petit a. Which is to say as the object of fantasy. Yeah. And I see the analytic discourse as the object petit a in relation or non-relation with the subject who is barred. Yeah. And that propels the dominant signifier and the chain of language beneath the bar as knowledge. And that's why it's only a fourth turn from the hysteric. Because the—and therefore the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst are so intimately connected. Um, because the hysteric starts from the position of the subject who is barred through what to put it in Freudian terms the—or no Lacanian—but that the—the membrane between the conscious and unconscious in the hysteric is stretched so thin that you can almost see straight through to the knowledge. Now, this is where I want to come back to what you're saying about the two positions, your two critiques of the idea that women are not quite in the symbolic in the same way as men. Because I have more time for that than you, but I have time for it in this sense, not some rarefication of woman's place outside the symbolic or her substantial being in a primordial nature. I totally agree with you. But the woman is related to the position of the hysteric and therefore her fourth turn from the discourse of the analyst is surely—and you may want to dispute—Lacan’s way of saying she is situated differently in relationship to knowledge. And for me that gives her an advantage. Yeah. No, I—sorry, I usually I'm in a paranoia with you, I expected a bigger—I expected you to be closer to our beloved Norman Bates, but you were a kind Norman Bates today. No, sorry, I totally agree, you know with what I especially agree? This crucial link between hysteria and analysis in the sense that if there is one good thing about Freud and Lacan is that they are far from this depreciation of hysteria, which was unfortunately, even I am unfortunately old enough to remember, one of the key elements even of the '68 discourse, at least the way student revolution it popularly functioned. The idea was this one: hysterics are women who just provoke the master, they don't want to go to the end, they oscillate, like—but a pervert is the true one, he goes to the end. Or even the formula was popular: what hysterics only dream about, perverts go to the end, they realize it. I think it's absolutely here to return to what was clear to Freud already, where he says although apparently a—sorry, pervert subject, you know, like totally you do whatever—but Freud says something very interesting. He says that nowhere is the unconscious more subtracted, more enclosed, more out of reach than in perversion. And authentic psycho—and even I think this has to be linked to something which Lacan emphasizes, when he says that every power, every structure of political power, authority, needs a pervert as its obscene shadow to sustain it. So it's not perversion is not subversive in this sense. Every strong power, the strongest it is, the more it needs a pervert. And again, against this, we should absolutely celebrate hysteria. And I totally agree with you, the only way where I don't even see where is the misunderstanding. Namely, I, you say this is not an analyst. Maybe not as a person, but isn't—okay, I'll put it like this, you know this better than me, probably, so I'm addressing the others. Lacan changed his position with this one, because throughout the fifties, for him the analyst was the big other simply, stood for the big other. And it was, I think that it’s not psychoanalyst as a—it's just the role psychoanalyst has to play as this impenetrable object annoying you, annoying—how does he become analyst or she object small a? On account of course of the supposed knowledge which is always hidden and so on and so on. So I would just claim that I agree with you, the hysterical subject is here, but the—the ana—what is the hyst—the analyst? The analyst is of course not the master signifier. It's also not knowledge. Knowledge is the traditional normative analyst who knows better than you and tells you. You know, it's just this enigmatic point which forces you and that's the beautiful thing, that the work is done here. Okay, Miller in one of his better bad-taste jokes pointed this out when he says that psychoanalysis is, is even better than capitalism. In capitalism the worker works but is paid a little bit. In psychoanalysis you the patient have to work and you have to pay for it, you know, it's a kind of ultra-cap. Sorry, yes? Can you just explain how this notation works? Okay, okay, I tried to avoid this but okay. Can I just finish one point literally two minutes, don't be afraid. Before I go on, just one point what I said there about the real, you know where already Miller is wrong? He should have read Lacan who knows it. Ancient Aztecs and Incas all that stuff, they were not as stupid as they may appear to be. You know what's so crucial? This is the big enigma of their sacred rituals. Why do they sacrifice people, or whomever, slaves, whatever, you know human sacrifices? That's the mystery. Not what you would have expected to. It's not the usual thing: we go hunting, we sacrifice things so that we will have lucky hunting, or we don't get enough rain, etc. No, the miracle is that they were sacrificing so that the most ordinary expected thing would happen. They were afraid that if they don't sacrifice, next day the sun will not rise and so on and so on. I found this an absolutely crucial
unknown
insight. In a way they already knew that natural order is, what we misperceive as natural order is sustained through a symbolic ritual. They were not stupid. Already their real was not this simple stupid natural real. Then, just the final point, then I will return to the point about this postmodern, whatever, today real. Miller should have known it, that this—what appears as, what we are witnessing today is, let's call it denaturalized nature. But where do we encounter it? I think that the true horror of modern science—horror for the traditional view where we have a clear distinction nature/culture and so on—is not everything is becoming culture, but that even nature is no longer nature as it should be. For example, under the—because of the industrial effects of science, I think that what we are getting today is these freaks of nature. You know, I was always afraid, I remember as a child there was a report in our newspaper, you know sometimes it happens, this horror, a cow with two heads and three legs is born and so on, but that's what we are doing today. This freakish nature. And that's like—so it's not what is happening today is not some nature outside outside, no, it's simply nature affected by technology. Which means there is no nature. That's how I would have resolved what Aaron was saying yesterday when I tried to squeeze him about that nature, not
insight. In a way they already knew that natural order is, what we misperceive as natural order is sustained through a symbolic ritual. They were not stupid. Already their real was not this simple stupid natural real. Then, just the final point, then I will return to the point about this postmodern, whatever, today real. Miller should have known it, that this—what appears as, what we are witnessing today is, let's call it denaturalized nature. But where do we encounter it? I think that the true horror of modern science—horror for the traditional view where we have a clear distinction nature/culture and so on—is not everything is becoming culture, but that even nature is no longer nature as it should be. For example, under the—because of the industrial effects of science, I think that what we are getting today is these freaks of nature. You know, I was always afraid, I remember as a child there was a report in our newspaper, you know sometimes it happens, this horror, a cow with two heads and three legs is born and so on, but that's what we are doing today. This freakish nature. And that's like—so it's not what is happening today is not some nature outside outside, no, it's simply nature affected by technology. Which means there is no nature. That's how I would have resolved what Aaron was saying yesterday when I tried to squeeze him about that nature, not
Slavoj Žižek
nature/culture like transcendental horizon or realism and so on. He said something very nice: that on the one hand for nature there is no culture. You know, for nature if it's even meaningful to talk about like that, for nature everything is nature. The difference nature/culture is not immanent to nature, as far as we can talk like that, it's too naive, I know. But for culture, the moment we are in culture, then every notion of nature is culturally mediated. No matter however you try to get at pure nature, it’s culturally mediated. So, but where I tried to catch him is—and I still have that problem, and I discover this is a problem for, for Heidegger even, for everyone—how to make philosophical sense—now I’ll say something horribly naive but I want it—of the simple fact that somehow we all assume that we are all humanity part of nature that we developed out of nature. Is it because even today philosophers of science, even who are full naturalist, they still made an exception, a transcendental exception. They claim that, yes, we are part of nature, but to scientifically explore it—that’s Habermasian position—you have to presuppose the discursive logic of rational scientific argumentation and so on, which is always already here and you cannot deduce it out of nature. Now, what's the position here? What I'm desperately trying to do is not to return to any Friedrich Engels style of dialectics of nature and so on, but to elaborate a much more refined model where of course where—like the transcendental, this idea of, you know, whatever we do always already we are within a certain discursive or hermeneutic horizon of meaning, we can step over it without falling back into a naive realism. And I think for me, modestly, this is the big philosophical problem today, and I will not bore you with it now, but I already sent to Madison today, I will be here for three days in end of October, beginning of November, and I will talk precisely on that. Psychoanalysis and philosophy and this problem. Okay, now, my God, okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it, but you know it's like—I hate you. Yeah, when we communists take over, try to prepare your dossier for Gulag, you know, like where your confession how—I can suggest a beginning, like already when I was a small boy, my parents educated me to hate the working class, begin with that. Sorry, okay, let's do it, I will nonetheless do it. The first thing is with Lacan that there are so many problems here, but the first one is that you never should forget that the whole scheme here is simply an articulation of Lacan's formula of signifier. Signifier represents subject for other—Lacan oscillates here, we don't have time to interpret it—for other signifiers, another signifiers, you have all the variations. So it's simply subject is represented by a signifier for other signifiers, but this operation never works out. There is a remainder, and this remainder is object small a. Object small a is that part of meaning which escapes meaning and so on and so on. And that's why, it's very important, on the lower level we have here practically the formula of fantasy, which I read in a very simple way. I say something, of course my statement intervenes in the symbolic field, but it's forever, imagine this lower level as an enigma of: but why did I say this? What was the meaning? What was behind? And I claim fantasy for Lacan answers precisely, is an answer to this abyss behind every meaning. Like you said this, but what did you mean by this? Why? Why? And fantasy answers this. Like in even in social life, we have a hierarchic order, things are enigmatic. Ah, a good racist has an answer. It's enigmatic because behind the visible hierarchic order there is the Jew, the Jewish conspiracy or whatever. So this is the basic form. Forget about fantasy not the master. This is simply the signifier that represents you within the symbolic field. Symbolic representation again, ultimately always fails, and it's precisely that gap, we can even put it like this, that the signifier of, of the lack of the other is here. And here, to fill in this gap—but you know because again, as Lacan points out, behind in human communication behind every meaning there is always this question: but why did you say it? But why? And it's you cannot get at the end of it. My favorite example here, it's a very stupid one is—because I like it. I don't know how it is here, but from what I heard, Susan, you can correct me. In American academia, let's say I give a talk, and I ask you how was my talk? You think it was shit, but you are too polite to say it openly. I was told that the way to say it that the standardized form is to say it was interesting. It was interesting means to say it was shit in a polite way. But what's the enigma here? The enigma is that now if you are a naive humanist you will say why not be open and say it was shit. Ah, the meaning would have already been different. If you tell me it was shit, I would have the full right to be shocked, because the statement "it was shit" implies much more. It's not just a qualification of my talk, but it's absolutely an additional personalized aggressiveness. So if you tell me it was shit, I would have full right to tell you. But if you really meant just that it was shit, why didn't you then tell me that it was interesting? I would have full right to say. And you see Lacan's idea: fantasy enters here, to fill in the gap in symbolic interaction, this enigma. You are saying this but why are you saying this? and so on and so on. That's the fundamental form. Lacan calls this four places: agent, truth—the truth I think also can be called the position of enunciation from which agent is talking—then the other, addressed by the agent, and product. Product here, I think, is not just product in this elevated sense of end of the production process, it's more product like remainder. Like what remains. What falls out even as anti-gestalt and so on. Then what Lacan does is turn, turn this around for one quarter. If the divided subject—and here, ah, here comes the beauty of Lacanian hermeneutics, but I'm really so ashamed telling you this because first you will get this in the paper now two hours from now and so on. Now this is a beautiful Lacanian theological dogmatic question: divided subject? Ah, between what and what? This is a big question. For Lacan it's not simply conscious/unconscious. The only consequent answer is between something and nothing. The subject is divided between something, the signifier that represents him, and the void, nothing. And the object a is a metonymy of the void, however you pull it. It fills in the void. Object a, as Lacan put it, is another of these false objects which just fill in the gap, which are just a positive form of the void. Okay, so what happens when that's the beauty: hysterical discourse. It's so clear. A divided subject confronts a figure of the master with a demand. The demand is what? I am some kind of object for others. Tell me, produce knowledge about what kind of an object I am. If you want, the most annoying form of this is: you are in love and you address your master, the lady—no, usually ladies do this—you address the man. Tell me why you love me. Like, give me reasons. Of course it's an absolutely impossible demand, because the moment you give reasons, it's no longer love, you know. Love is never like, I love you because of your beautiful legs, smile, or whatever. So and again, knowledge is produced here, which is why Lacan even emphasizes that science, not as part of the university machinery, but creative science, inventions, are part of discourse of hysteria. And this is the original for Lacan position of the subject. You know all that bullshit of desire is an open desire, the question of desire, I never know what I want. That's not for Lacan the original enigma of desire. Here Lacan doesn't refer to but says something that was later well developed by one who was not his follower, although associated with him, Jean Laplanche, who developed in a wonderful way this logic of what he called enigmatic signifier. A small child, already very early, notices that all people around him, parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, blah blah, play some games with him. He or she is something for them. And he or she also notices that they themselves don't know what these games are. But this is totally impenetrable for him. So this is the original hysterical question. Not "what am I?" sorry, precisely this, not "what do I want?" and it's always lack and I never get what I want, but: what is it in me that others see in me? That's why, for example, the original hysterical question is: "Why what am I for you?" or "What's in my name?" like—and this is why the proper hysterical reaction to every symbolic investiture is: "Okay, you proclaim me a professor, but am I really a professor? Do I deserve it? Am I like—what, you know, the hysterical question is what for an object I am for the other?" This is why, as my friend Mladen Dolar developed years ago in one of the early classic texts entitled "Beyond Interpellation," this is why hysteria is Lacan's answer to Althusser implicitly. Louis Althusser, you know his theory of interpellation. "Hey you," you recognize yourself. Interpellation is simply the allocation of a certain symbolic identity conferred on you by society. We are all identified as something: man, woman, professor, pupil, traitor, now in in Turkey there are many interpellations as traitor strangely. I love them in Turkey, how—my God, now they fired professors, no? and it’s, it's mad as shit. Okay. Sorry. I have the honor of being personally attacked half a year ago by Erdogan, you know. He attacked Chomsky, but then in one version he also mentioned me as the most corrupted, unworthy of—but I had to laugh so much because Erdogan—no, sorry, another pupil of Erdogan, his Goebbels, he has a guy who is Turkish Goebbels. And he said that it's such a shame that Žižek—me—speaks in such a totally irrational way, totally in discordance with great European rationalists like Lacan who speak in such a clear way and so on, haha. I had to die laughing, I mean. Okay, let's go on. So you got the point about hysteria. Then the other turn around would have been if you move in this direction, not this. Sorry, I didn't understand how hysteria is in relation to Althusser's interpellation. Ah, sorry, I'm sorry. It's simply like this: hysteria is the basic subversive reaction to ideological to interpellation. Interpellation means I recognize myself as something, whatever society claims that I am. And the basic hysterical reaction is: "But why am I what you, the big other, claim that I am?" And that's this is how I even read one of my favorite, you know, I'm a kitsch guy, don't kill me. I like Pre-Raphaelites. And you have that wonderful painting—no, I'm non-educated here, it's not Rossetti—who painted the moment when Angel comes to Mary? Is it Hunt? I think it's Holman Hunt, isn't it? I don't—yeah, yeah, but what I like is how furious she is, the horror. Basically it's a hysterical reaction wonderful of a woman like: "You are telling me that without f*cking I will have to bear God's—what the hell, why did I deserve it?" you know, like she is furious at this interpellation. And even my friends told me that this is the nicest part of Jewish legacy. The idea of, "Why didn't just God leave us alone, you know? Why were we to be elected people and so on?" It would have been so nice to remain there barbarians in the desert and so on. That's what Moses tells God when he calls him, it’s right there in the Bible. What does he say? He says "Why me? I can't speak, my brother's a lawyer, go talk to him." Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, sorry. Yes, we all know. Yes, but you know what would be my ultimate idea? We don't have time to go into this now. My ultimate idea would have been to deal with Jesus Christ himself as a hysteric. Like, "f*ck you, I want to screw ladies in Samaria, why, why do I have to play this role?" And I think that although I don't like Scorsese, but that his—what was his movie, the one? The Last Temptation of Christ. Yeah, it was almost all about this, Christ's resistance. "F*ck it, why should I be the son of God?" and so on, you know. And I think that... What about Mel Gibson's film? Sorry? Mel Gibson's film. Mel Gibson's film, I think is an absolute—but not because—no, I almost in a way I enjoyed it. You know why? For this obscenity of how they talk Latin and whatever, Aramaic. Aramaic, it's wonderful kitsch. No, you know what's for me—I already developed this, I will go on and—what's for me the ultimate bullshit of that film, and it brings us to all this topic of inconsistency. Where do we find this barred Other in the Bible? You know the last words of Jesus? There are seven. And I think the way to read them is precisely not to ask which was the original true word of Christ, or the other way around: can we put them in a proper order? We should read them along the lines of what in quantum physics they call superposition. We don't have to choose, they are one above the other at the same level. Not one after the other. And the two of the nastiest films, if I were to be a Christian and we were to be in medieval times, two people would be immediately burned in public: Mel Gibson and Franco Zeffirelli. For his. Because what they try to do is something which is for me an indescribable obscenity. They try to arrange the seven words, last words of Christ, into some kind of a logical order. You know, Christ says, "I'm thirsty," this is one. Okay, he gets a drink, then he said, "Okay, now it's finished, I'm coming to you my father" or whatever. It's an obscenity. So again, the point would have been to keep the inconsistency. Those movies are just terrible. And you know an interesting thing, sorry, I always talk too much. Happened, I don't know how many years ago, twenty, when we were celebrating the hundred years of invention of cinema, and Vatican did something quite interesting. They published a list of one hundred best films of all time. Which was a pretty good list. For example, you know what they included in religious films? The only one there was Pasolini, Matthew. None of that Zeffirelli. And Zeffirelli exploded and he published a text in Italy claiming that it's clear now that Vatican is under communist control, you know. No, because Zeffirelli was the member of the—how do you call it, the Italian neo-fascist party and so on, it’s clear. But let me go on, sorry. Sorry, you know I go on. I'll go on with that. University. Yeah. University. Imagine it like this. We have this enigma of what remains. You are interpellated but f*ck it, I don't know what you are, all the mystery behind. In this sense you can say that the subject is divided between this and this. Between the signifier that stands for you and what is in you beneath it. So university discourse addresses this surplus. This is I think a wonderful reading of Michel Foucault, discipline control. A knowledge which addresses this excess which resists symbolization and—this is the educational point of university discourse—it tries to produce out of it a full subject. Ah but here, it’s a beautiful example how the truth of the university discourse is nonetheless master. The way I read this is in a very simple way. Just look at all today's economists who explain things: you count this, to that, to the market. And they all desperately try to present it as neutral knowledge, you know. "These are facts, sorry, you do this, you do that," but it's clear that there is a position of the master, a normative dimension beneath it. It's not, never just neutral knowledge. This is a very nice insight here of Lacan of how even the most neutral, pretending to be neutral, scientific approach always has a bias of a master, because this master, this signifier represents the subject, this is also the subjective aspect of it. And now I want to return to what Jacqueline said before about feminine, because I think—this is now the true madness. I don't have time to develop it now, but I think that in some sense we can also sexualize the four discourses. That the axis of master and university is male—university universality, master exception—and here we get a—I agree with you Jacqueline absolutely—a much more subtle distinction. They are not external to each each. It's just a subtle shift from, from hysteria to to analyst. In a way, if you bring your
nature/culture like transcendental horizon or realism and so on. He said something very nice: that on the one hand for nature there is no culture. You know, for nature if it's even meaningful to talk about like that, for nature everything is nature. The difference nature/culture is not immanent to nature, as far as we can talk like that, it's too naive, I know. But for culture, the moment we are in culture, then every notion of nature is culturally mediated. No matter however you try to get at pure nature, it’s culturally mediated. So, but where I tried to catch him is—and I still have that problem, and I discover this is a problem for, for Heidegger even, for everyone—how to make philosophical sense—now I’ll say something horribly naive but I want it—of the simple fact that somehow we all assume that we are all humanity part of nature that we developed out of nature. Is it because even today philosophers of science, even who are full naturalist, they still made an exception, a transcendental exception. They claim that, yes, we are part of nature, but to scientifically explore it—that’s Habermasian position—you have to presuppose the discursive logic of rational scientific argumentation and so on, which is always already here and you cannot deduce it out of nature. Now, what's the position here? What I'm desperately trying to do is not to return to any Friedrich Engels style of dialectics of nature and so on, but to elaborate a much more refined model where of course where—like the transcendental, this idea of, you know, whatever we do always already we are within a certain discursive or hermeneutic horizon of meaning, we can step over it without falling back into a naive realism. And I think for me, modestly, this is the big philosophical problem today, and I will not bore you with it now, but I already sent to Madison today, I will be here for three days in end of October, beginning of November, and I will talk precisely on that. Psychoanalysis and philosophy and this problem. Okay, now, my God, okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it, but you know it's like—I hate you. Yeah, when we communists take over, try to prepare your dossier for Gulag, you know, like where your confession how—I can suggest a beginning, like already when I was a small boy, my parents educated me to hate the working class, begin with that. Sorry, okay, let's do it, I will nonetheless do it. The first thing is with Lacan that there are so many problems here, but the first one is that you never should forget that the whole scheme here is simply an articulation of Lacan's formula of signifier. Signifier represents subject for other—Lacan oscillates here, we don't have time to interpret it—for other signifiers, another signifiers, you have all the variations. So it's simply subject is represented by a signifier for other signifiers, but this operation never works out. There is a remainder, and this remainder is object small a. Object small a is that part of meaning which escapes meaning and so on and so on. And that's why, it's very important, on the lower level we have here practically the formula of fantasy, which I read in a very simple way. I say something, of course my statement intervenes in the symbolic field, but it's forever, imagine this lower level as an enigma of: but why did I say this? What was the meaning? What was behind? And I claim fantasy for Lacan answers precisely, is an answer to this abyss behind every meaning. Like you said this, but what did you mean by this? Why? Why? And fantasy answers this. Like in even in social life, we have a hierarchic order, things are enigmatic. Ah, a good racist has an answer. It's enigmatic because behind the visible hierarchic order there is the Jew, the Jewish conspiracy or whatever. So this is the basic form. Forget about fantasy not the master. This is simply the signifier that represents you within the symbolic field. Symbolic representation again, ultimately always fails, and it's precisely that gap, we can even put it like this, that the signifier of, of the lack of the other is here. And here, to fill in this gap—but you know because again, as Lacan points out, behind in human communication behind every meaning there is always this question: but why did you say it? But why? And it's you cannot get at the end of it. My favorite example here, it's a very stupid one is—because I like it. I don't know how it is here, but from what I heard, Susan, you can correct me. In American academia, let's say I give a talk, and I ask you how was my talk? You think it was shit, but you are too polite to say it openly. I was told that the way to say it that the standardized form is to say it was interesting. It was interesting means to say it was shit in a polite way. But what's the enigma here? The enigma is that now if you are a naive humanist you will say why not be open and say it was shit. Ah, the meaning would have already been different. If you tell me it was shit, I would have the full right to be shocked, because the statement "it was shit" implies much more. It's not just a qualification of my talk, but it's absolutely an additional personalized aggressiveness. So if you tell me it was shit, I would have full right to tell you. But if you really meant just that it was shit, why didn't you then tell me that it was interesting? I would have full right to say. And you see Lacan's idea: fantasy enters here, to fill in the gap in symbolic interaction, this enigma. You are saying this but why are you saying this? and so on and so on. That's the fundamental form. Lacan calls this four places: agent, truth—the truth I think also can be called the position of enunciation from which agent is talking—then the other, addressed by the agent, and product. Product here, I think, is not just product in this elevated sense of end of the production process, it's more product like remainder. Like what remains. What falls out even as anti-gestalt and so on. Then what Lacan does is turn, turn this around for one quarter. If the divided subject—and here, ah, here comes the beauty of Lacanian hermeneutics, but I'm really so ashamed telling you this because first you will get this in the paper now two hours from now and so on. Now this is a beautiful Lacanian theological dogmatic question: divided subject? Ah, between what and what? This is a big question. For Lacan it's not simply conscious/unconscious. The only consequent answer is between something and nothing. The subject is divided between something, the signifier that represents him, and the void, nothing. And the object a is a metonymy of the void, however you pull it. It fills in the void. Object a, as Lacan put it, is another of these false objects which just fill in the gap, which are just a positive form of the void. Okay, so what happens when that's the beauty: hysterical discourse. It's so clear. A divided subject confronts a figure of the master with a demand. The demand is what? I am some kind of object for others. Tell me, produce knowledge about what kind of an object I am. If you want, the most annoying form of this is: you are in love and you address your master, the lady—no, usually ladies do this—you address the man. Tell me why you love me. Like, give me reasons. Of course it's an absolutely impossible demand, because the moment you give reasons, it's no longer love, you know. Love is never like, I love you because of your beautiful legs, smile, or whatever. So and again, knowledge is produced here, which is why Lacan even emphasizes that science, not as part of the university machinery, but creative science, inventions, are part of discourse of hysteria. And this is the original for Lacan position of the subject. You know all that bullshit of desire is an open desire, the question of desire, I never know what I want. That's not for Lacan the original enigma of desire. Here Lacan doesn't refer to but says something that was later well developed by one who was not his follower, although associated with him, Jean Laplanche, who developed in a wonderful way this logic of what he called enigmatic signifier. A small child, already very early, notices that all people around him, parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, blah blah, play some games with him. He or she is something for them. And he or she also notices that they themselves don't know what these games are. But this is totally impenetrable for him. So this is the original hysterical question. Not "what am I?" sorry, precisely this, not "what do I want?" and it's always lack and I never get what I want, but: what is it in me that others see in me? That's why, for example, the original hysterical question is: "Why what am I for you?" or "What's in my name?" like—and this is why the proper hysterical reaction to every symbolic investiture is: "Okay, you proclaim me a professor, but am I really a professor? Do I deserve it? Am I like—what, you know, the hysterical question is what for an object I am for the other?" This is why, as my friend Mladen Dolar developed years ago in one of the early classic texts entitled "Beyond Interpellation," this is why hysteria is Lacan's answer to Althusser implicitly. Louis Althusser, you know his theory of interpellation. "Hey you," you recognize yourself. Interpellation is simply the allocation of a certain symbolic identity conferred on you by society. We are all identified as something: man, woman, professor, pupil, traitor, now in in Turkey there are many interpellations as traitor strangely. I love them in Turkey, how—my God, now they fired professors, no? and it’s, it's mad as shit. Okay. Sorry. I have the honor of being personally attacked half a year ago by Erdogan, you know. He attacked Chomsky, but then in one version he also mentioned me as the most corrupted, unworthy of—but I had to laugh so much because Erdogan—no, sorry, another pupil of Erdogan, his Goebbels, he has a guy who is Turkish Goebbels. And he said that it's such a shame that Žižek—me—speaks in such a totally irrational way, totally in discordance with great European rationalists like Lacan who speak in such a clear way and so on, haha. I had to die laughing, I mean. Okay, let's go on. So you got the point about hysteria. Then the other turn around would have been if you move in this direction, not this. Sorry, I didn't understand how hysteria is in relation to Althusser's interpellation. Ah, sorry, I'm sorry. It's simply like this: hysteria is the basic subversive reaction to ideological to interpellation. Interpellation means I recognize myself as something, whatever society claims that I am. And the basic hysterical reaction is: "But why am I what you, the big other, claim that I am?" And that's this is how I even read one of my favorite, you know, I'm a kitsch guy, don't kill me. I like Pre-Raphaelites. And you have that wonderful painting—no, I'm non-educated here, it's not Rossetti—who painted the moment when Angel comes to Mary? Is it Hunt? I think it's Holman Hunt, isn't it? I don't—yeah, yeah, but what I like is how furious she is, the horror. Basically it's a hysterical reaction wonderful of a woman like: "You are telling me that without f*cking I will have to bear God's—what the hell, why did I deserve it?" you know, like she is furious at this interpellation. And even my friends told me that this is the nicest part of Jewish legacy. The idea of, "Why didn't just God leave us alone, you know? Why were we to be elected people and so on?" It would have been so nice to remain there barbarians in the desert and so on. That's what Moses tells God when he calls him, it’s right there in the Bible. What does he say? He says "Why me? I can't speak, my brother's a lawyer, go talk to him." Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, sorry. Yes, we all know. Yes, but you know what would be my ultimate idea? We don't have time to go into this now. My ultimate idea would have been to deal with Jesus Christ himself as a hysteric. Like, "f*ck you, I want to screw ladies in Samaria, why, why do I have to play this role?" And I think that although I don't like Scorsese, but that his—what was his movie, the one? The Last Temptation of Christ. Yeah, it was almost all about this, Christ's resistance. "F*ck it, why should I be the son of God?" and so on, you know. And I think that... What about Mel Gibson's film? Sorry? Mel Gibson's film. Mel Gibson's film, I think is an absolute—but not because—no, I almost in a way I enjoyed it. You know why? For this obscenity of how they talk Latin and whatever, Aramaic. Aramaic, it's wonderful kitsch. No, you know what's for me—I already developed this, I will go on and—what's for me the ultimate bullshit of that film, and it brings us to all this topic of inconsistency. Where do we find this barred Other in the Bible? You know the last words of Jesus? There are seven. And I think the way to read them is precisely not to ask which was the original true word of Christ, or the other way around: can we put them in a proper order? We should read them along the lines of what in quantum physics they call superposition. We don't have to choose, they are one above the other at the same level. Not one after the other. And the two of the nastiest films, if I were to be a Christian and we were to be in medieval times, two people would be immediately burned in public: Mel Gibson and Franco Zeffirelli. For his. Because what they try to do is something which is for me an indescribable obscenity. They try to arrange the seven words, last words of Christ, into some kind of a logical order. You know, Christ says, "I'm thirsty," this is one. Okay, he gets a drink, then he said, "Okay, now it's finished, I'm coming to you my father" or whatever. It's an obscenity. So again, the point would have been to keep the inconsistency. Those movies are just terrible. And you know an interesting thing, sorry, I always talk too much. Happened, I don't know how many years ago, twenty, when we were celebrating the hundred years of invention of cinema, and Vatican did something quite interesting. They published a list of one hundred best films of all time. Which was a pretty good list. For example, you know what they included in religious films? The only one there was Pasolini, Matthew. None of that Zeffirelli. And Zeffirelli exploded and he published a text in Italy claiming that it's clear now that Vatican is under communist control, you know. No, because Zeffirelli was the member of the—how do you call it, the Italian neo-fascist party and so on, it’s clear. But let me go on, sorry. Sorry, you know I go on. I'll go on with that. University. Yeah. University. Imagine it like this. We have this enigma of what remains. You are interpellated but f*ck it, I don't know what you are, all the mystery behind. In this sense you can say that the subject is divided between this and this. Between the signifier that stands for you and what is in you beneath it. So university discourse addresses this surplus. This is I think a wonderful reading of Michel Foucault, discipline control. A knowledge which addresses this excess which resists symbolization and—this is the educational point of university discourse—it tries to produce out of it a full subject. Ah but here, it’s a beautiful example how the truth of the university discourse is nonetheless master. The way I read this is in a very simple way. Just look at all today's economists who explain things: you count this, to that, to the market. And they all desperately try to present it as neutral knowledge, you know. "These are facts, sorry, you do this, you do that," but it's clear that there is a position of the master, a normative dimension beneath it. It's not, never just neutral knowledge. This is a very nice insight here of Lacan of how even the most neutral, pretending to be neutral, scientific approach always has a bias of a master, because this master, this signifier represents the subject, this is also the subjective aspect of it. And now I want to return to what Jacqueline said before about feminine, because I think—this is now the true madness. I don't have time to develop it now, but I think that in some sense we can also sexualize the four discourses. That the axis of master and university is male—university universality, master exception—and here we get a—I agree with you Jacqueline absolutely—a much more subtle distinction. They are not external to each each. It's just a subtle shift from, from hysteria to to analyst. In a way, if you bring your
unknown
hysteria to the end, you become an analyst. That's why every good psychoanalyst
hysteria to the end, you become an analyst. That's why every good psychoanalyst
Slavoj Žižek
will tell you, if you have non-hysterics, the big problem of psychoanalytic treatment, if you get a pervert, is to hystericize him first. Because hystericization is in a way a condition of analytic work. That's the problem with perverts, you know. I'm not sure here, maybe some of you got a better position, but, like, where would the discourse of perversion fit here? I'm tempted to say but I'm not sure that perversion has the structure of
will tell you, if you have non-hysterics, the big problem of psychoanalytic treatment, if you get a pervert, is to hystericize him first. Because hystericization is in a way a condition of analytic work. That's the problem with perverts, you know. I'm not sure here, maybe some of you got a better position, but, like, where would the discourse of perversion fit here? I'm tempted to say but I'm not sure that perversion has the structure of
unknown
university
university
Slavoj Žižek
discourse. Because the first distinction as Lacan emphasizes between hysteria—and hysteria also covers obsessional neurotic, I'm here like Lacan orthodox Freudian, for Freud obsessional neurosis, compulsive neurosis is a sub-species of hysteria. It's not a—but what they, although they ask a different question, they are both discourses of questioning.
discourse. Because the first distinction as Lacan emphasizes between hysteria—and hysteria also covers obsessional neurotic, I'm here like Lacan orthodox Freudian, for Freud obsessional neurosis, compulsive neurosis is a sub-species of hysteria. It's not a—but what they, although they ask a different question, they are both discourses of questioning.
unknown
"What defines hysteria,
"What defines hysteria,
Slavoj Žižek
hysterical constellation is questioning. I am there, but what am I there?" to questioning. While one big thing about a pervert is that he doesn't question, he knows. The pervert is the one who
hysterical constellation is questioning. I am there, but what am I there?" to questioning. While one big thing about a pervert is that he doesn't question, he knows. The pervert is the one who
unknown
knows about the other in this formal
knows about the other in this formal
unknown
sense. I claim Stalinism
sense. I claim Stalinism
Slavoj Žižek
was somehow
was somehow
unknown
a discourse of perversion. Not because Stalinists were doing horrible
a discourse of perversion. Not because Stalinists were doing horrible
Slavoj Žižek
things, but you know, the basic obscenity of Stalinism is not to tell you, "I don't care what you think, you have to follow the party," but to tell you, "Party knows better than you what you really want, or what is really good for you," and so on. Well, I think that's exactly right. That's why Freud says you have a splitting of the ego in the pervert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this isn't—so yeah, the product of perversion is the split ego. This is just orthodox Freudian treatment of perversion. And that S1 is the maternal phallus. Ah, here I am, I don't know, my mother didn't have a phallus, so I don't know how—I'm just talking about Weininger. I know, sorry, I know. Where do you have maternal phallus here? Right, yeah. That's the basis of his claim to total knowledge. Yes, although you know I prefer, I prefer to abstain from giving the final opinion here because all I'm ready to say—I don't know enough about that—is that what fascinates me now. And the French guy, you know, Miller paid for his treason how he is by far no longer the best interpreter of Lacan in French. You have now the last decade at least two guys: François Balmès, who unfortunately died of cancer, I don't know what, and Guy Le Gaufey—L-E and then G-O-U-F-E-Y, Guy Le Gaufey. And now finally we succeeded to translate, he wrote the best reading that I know of Lacan's formula of sexuation. It will be translated for I think Northwestern University Press now. And what I want to say is that Le Gaufey has wonderful insights on what does Freud mean by potence and impotence and omnipotence and so on. And in a wonderful reading he claims that the strict psychoanalytic notion of impotence is, apparently, impotent mother or whoever, that impotence, sorry, omnipotence is always an effect of impotence. That, like you almost have it here again, the omnipotent Other is a mask of the Other's impotence. Like the clearest example would have been in religion. The predestination God, omnipotent, no? is a mask of the fact that God is an idiot who can't even decide and screws up with predestination and so on and so on and so on. So again, omnipotence I think it's an extremely interesting, interesting category. But you know what? Where are we now? Yes, okay. We are at the end, and I hate you, sorry, for—we will go tomorrow on, but what about N? Which N? The analyst. The analyst here, this is now I thought it's clear relatively simple. It's simply that you are in analysis and the analyst should never play the normative role of "I know better what you"—the knowledge is just the presupposed knowledge in transference. But the analyst has to provoke you through he is non-commitment, frustration and so on, to produce a signifier which of the your signifier of inconsistency. Maybe I will try to develop this tomorrow. Maybe a good example of this signifier would have been as if a good punchline in a joke, you know, like like all... And here I have the nastiest example how Lacan was imperfect. In his Seminar IV, the—the some on unconscious formations of the unconscious, it's so crazy how Lacan himself is sometimes the worst anti-Lacanian. He quotes that perfect joke and misses the Lacanian point, the punchline. The joke is, you know, about this East European, how do you call it, matchmaker, who tries to sell the woman to the potential guy, bride, no? And you know the joke is that for every negative feature he finds a good reason, no? Like the bride complains she is ugly. The guy says, "Okay, so you will not have to worry that she will—that she will deceive you, you know, nobody would want to," and so on through all. The guy says, "But she even cannot read." The guy says, "Okay, you will not have to worry that she will talk back to you, she will just in silence," so all this. And Lacan then says, it's incredible, he says: "And so on indefinitely." No, it's not and so on indefinitely. It’s a wonderful, precisely the new S1 reversal where at the end the bride-to-be produces a feature which you cannot in any way present as a good reason. And you know what the, you must know what, the guy the, how do you call it, matchmaker asks: "But what do you want her to be, perfect?" or whatever, you know, after all. I think that you see something like this, this is how I read S1 produced in analyst's discourse. It's just a signifier which prevents you from continuing with the perverse game of endless repetition, whatever and so on and so on. So again, here is what I propose now because there are so many other things to do as always. I, Jacqueline, I read your text, thanks very much, on that. And you know what I want to refer to tomorrow? You have towards the end—because I cheat, I always look at the end at the punchline. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Usually people complain even in restaurants that I speak too loud, sorry, I'm not used to it. You remember towards the end of your text on, on trans gender you mention this option of maybe sexual difference itself will disappear and blah blah. Well, I want to go into that. Is this a real prospect of brain sciences blah blah? Because I want to—so
things, but you know, the basic obscenity of Stalinism is not to tell you, "I don't care what you think, you have to follow the party," but to tell you, "Party knows better than you what you really want, or what is really good for you," and so on. Well, I think that's exactly right. That's why Freud says you have a splitting of the ego in the pervert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this isn't—so yeah, the product of perversion is the split ego. This is just orthodox Freudian treatment of perversion. And that S1 is the maternal phallus. Ah, here I am, I don't know, my mother didn't have a phallus, so I don't know how—I'm just talking about Weininger. I know, sorry, I know. Where do you have maternal phallus here? Right, yeah. That's the basis of his claim to total knowledge. Yes, although you know I prefer, I prefer to abstain from giving the final opinion here because all I'm ready to say—I don't know enough about that—is that what fascinates me now. And the French guy, you know, Miller paid for his treason how he is by far no longer the best interpreter of Lacan in French. You have now the last decade at least two guys: François Balmès, who unfortunately died of cancer, I don't know what, and Guy Le Gaufey—L-E and then G-O-U-F-E-Y, Guy Le Gaufey. And now finally we succeeded to translate, he wrote the best reading that I know of Lacan's formula of sexuation. It will be translated for I think Northwestern University Press now. And what I want to say is that Le Gaufey has wonderful insights on what does Freud mean by potence and impotence and omnipotence and so on. And in a wonderful reading he claims that the strict psychoanalytic notion of impotence is, apparently, impotent mother or whoever, that impotence, sorry, omnipotence is always an effect of impotence. That, like you almost have it here again, the omnipotent Other is a mask of the Other's impotence. Like the clearest example would have been in religion. The predestination God, omnipotent, no? is a mask of the fact that God is an idiot who can't even decide and screws up with predestination and so on and so on and so on. So again, omnipotence I think it's an extremely interesting, interesting category. But you know what? Where are we now? Yes, okay. We are at the end, and I hate you, sorry, for—we will go tomorrow on, but what about N? Which N? The analyst. The analyst here, this is now I thought it's clear relatively simple. It's simply that you are in analysis and the analyst should never play the normative role of "I know better what you"—the knowledge is just the presupposed knowledge in transference. But the analyst has to provoke you through he is non-commitment, frustration and so on, to produce a signifier which of the your signifier of inconsistency. Maybe I will try to develop this tomorrow. Maybe a good example of this signifier would have been as if a good punchline in a joke, you know, like like all... And here I have the nastiest example how Lacan was imperfect. In his Seminar IV, the—the some on unconscious formations of the unconscious, it's so crazy how Lacan himself is sometimes the worst anti-Lacanian. He quotes that perfect joke and misses the Lacanian point, the punchline. The joke is, you know, about this East European, how do you call it, matchmaker, who tries to sell the woman to the potential guy, bride, no? And you know the joke is that for every negative feature he finds a good reason, no? Like the bride complains she is ugly. The guy says, "Okay, so you will not have to worry that she will—that she will deceive you, you know, nobody would want to," and so on through all. The guy says, "But she even cannot read." The guy says, "Okay, you will not have to worry that she will talk back to you, she will just in silence," so all this. And Lacan then says, it's incredible, he says: "And so on indefinitely." No, it's not and so on indefinitely. It’s a wonderful, precisely the new S1 reversal where at the end the bride-to-be produces a feature which you cannot in any way present as a good reason. And you know what the, you must know what, the guy the, how do you call it, matchmaker asks: "But what do you want her to be, perfect?" or whatever, you know, after all. I think that you see something like this, this is how I read S1 produced in analyst's discourse. It's just a signifier which prevents you from continuing with the perverse game of endless repetition, whatever and so on and so on. So again, here is what I propose now because there are so many other things to do as always. I, Jacqueline, I read your text, thanks very much, on that. And you know what I want to refer to tomorrow? You have towards the end—because I cheat, I always look at the end at the punchline. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Usually people complain even in restaurants that I speak too loud, sorry, I'm not used to it. You remember towards the end of your text on, on trans gender you mention this option of maybe sexual difference itself will disappear and blah blah. Well, I want to go into that. Is this a real prospect of brain sciences blah blah? Because I want to—so
unknown
much new age or technological nonsense is written there, you know. But I think there is something real going on there. We cannot just dismiss it. And I would like to go
much new age or technological nonsense is written there, you know. But I think there is something real going on there. We cannot just dismiss it. And I would like to go
Slavoj Žižek
also a little bit into that tomorrow. But I will go on with four discourses. And I hate you, you know why? Because I have to break my word and really say something
also a little bit into that tomorrow. But I will go on with four discourses. And I hate you, you know why? Because I have to break my word and really say something
unknown
a little bit about four discourses. But the big thing
a little bit about four discourses. But the big thing
Slavoj Žižek
remains: where do I see capitalism? But again, that's the deal I'm making with you. Now, literally now in half an hour, you will get thirty-five dense pages of the text where I explain all this and capitalism. And what I propose so that tomorrow is the last day that I don't that we don't lose time, we can maybe even begin by some of you attacking me, reacting to that. And you know me enough to know that whatever you say I will find a way in replying you to talk about whatever I want, you know. So don't worry about that, you know. Yeah. So but what do you think Jacqueline? You know what's my problem here? I don't totally subscribe this four discourses like I have this problems. Is this a non-historical, like eternal formula? I'm more tempted to read it in a historical way that Lacan is simply putting into a formula a certain modern dynamic of disintegration of the classical master and then where this can lead us. As strictly something historically limited. You know Lacan is here for me caught in the same problem as for me at least either Judith Butler or Ernesto Laclau. Look, if you look I ask this Judith once: her theory of this all this, you know, gender trouble, performative construction of, I ask her a simple question: is this simply a trans-historical theory so that already a primitive Neanderthal half-apeman were discursively constructing their identity? Or is this a specifically—specific theory of our post-traditional era? Now what I prohibited her is to say that it's both at the same time in this pseudo-Hegelian way that something which is eternally true only becomes visible as such today. And sorry, before I give you the word, I have the same problem with Ernesto’s hegemony idea. Is it that already Neanderthalians were fighting for hegemony? Or because on the other hand Ernesto theory of hegemony is so clearly historically conditioned. So how to bring these two together? Strike back. I would simply say that the discourse of knowledge and perversion which go together is the discourse of totalitarianism. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. That’s what I think Lacan is talking about. And that's the moment that conditions hysteria. But Lacan is here cheating, you know in what sense? I'll tell you. He is too general. Sometimes, for example, I know he says about Soviet Union that if there ever was a university discourse in power, it’s Soviet Union and so on. But at the same time he claims modernity as such, sometimes he claims capitalism is university... He, he cheats there. And maybe, maybe it’s simply something quite simple for Lacanians to say: that maybe this theory is simply not strong enough to catch the historical specificity. I mean, you know what's my position here? I'm a good Christian, but in a Marxist sense. By this I mean I am for trans-historic universality, but every trans-historic universality has to be historically specified, no? This absolute must, and so on. Okay, tomorrow we go on. Today, pray for me that I will survive it. I have to go—I couldn't say no—to the theater. Can you imagine me in a theater sitting for three hours to see, to see Richard III? I already did my duty, I saw on Wikipedia the narrative so that if I fall asleep I will not miss anything. But I have to do it because Sophie hinted gently that Ralph wants me there and so on. And I already said in advance that I will be very tired afterwards, because admit it, even if you are against death penalty, there is one situation where death penalty is justified. If I meet Ralph Fiennes after the scene and he looks at me innocently and says, "Slavoj, I don't care what you say, even if you were disgusted," which is a pure lie, "but just tell me please what was your impression," you know. And then this expected grace, you know, that the big thing that I will say or whatever, you know. I try to play this game as far as possible. I tried to redeem his Ralph's Coriolanus with a totally crazy reading that Coriolanus is a true working-class hero and so on, but I didn't believe in my theory. But with Richard III, you know what's my problem immediately with Richard III? I'm maybe here reactionary, I am for him, I am against Tudors. I think he was the last good king. I read history books, laws that he enforced, they were pretty progressive. He was the first king who explicitly tried to push legal equality of common people. He was absolutely not this type of... and on the other hand, if there were arch-Stalinists, these were the early Tudors, and they were rewriting history like crazy to justify their claim. Sorry. You tell him it was interesting. Sorry? What? If he asks you whether
remains: where do I see capitalism? But again, that's the deal I'm making with you. Now, literally now in half an hour, you will get thirty-five dense pages of the text where I explain all this and capitalism. And what I propose so that tomorrow is the last day that I don't that we don't lose time, we can maybe even begin by some of you attacking me, reacting to that. And you know me enough to know that whatever you say I will find a way in replying you to talk about whatever I want, you know. So don't worry about that, you know. Yeah. So but what do you think Jacqueline? You know what's my problem here? I don't totally subscribe this four discourses like I have this problems. Is this a non-historical, like eternal formula? I'm more tempted to read it in a historical way that Lacan is simply putting into a formula a certain modern dynamic of disintegration of the classical master and then where this can lead us. As strictly something historically limited. You know Lacan is here for me caught in the same problem as for me at least either Judith Butler or Ernesto Laclau. Look, if you look I ask this Judith once: her theory of this all this, you know, gender trouble, performative construction of, I ask her a simple question: is this simply a trans-historical theory so that already a primitive Neanderthal half-apeman were discursively constructing their identity? Or is this a specifically—specific theory of our post-traditional era? Now what I prohibited her is to say that it's both at the same time in this pseudo-Hegelian way that something which is eternally true only becomes visible as such today. And sorry, before I give you the word, I have the same problem with Ernesto’s hegemony idea. Is it that already Neanderthalians were fighting for hegemony? Or because on the other hand Ernesto theory of hegemony is so clearly historically conditioned. So how to bring these two together? Strike back. I would simply say that the discourse of knowledge and perversion which go together is the discourse of totalitarianism. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. That’s what I think Lacan is talking about. And that's the moment that conditions hysteria. But Lacan is here cheating, you know in what sense? I'll tell you. He is too general. Sometimes, for example, I know he says about Soviet Union that if there ever was a university discourse in power, it’s Soviet Union and so on. But at the same time he claims modernity as such, sometimes he claims capitalism is university... He, he cheats there. And maybe, maybe it’s simply something quite simple for Lacanians to say: that maybe this theory is simply not strong enough to catch the historical specificity. I mean, you know what's my position here? I'm a good Christian, but in a Marxist sense. By this I mean I am for trans-historic universality, but every trans-historic universality has to be historically specified, no? This absolute must, and so on. Okay, tomorrow we go on. Today, pray for me that I will survive it. I have to go—I couldn't say no—to the theater. Can you imagine me in a theater sitting for three hours to see, to see Richard III? I already did my duty, I saw on Wikipedia the narrative so that if I fall asleep I will not miss anything. But I have to do it because Sophie hinted gently that Ralph wants me there and so on. And I already said in advance that I will be very tired afterwards, because admit it, even if you are against death penalty, there is one situation where death penalty is justified. If I meet Ralph Fiennes after the scene and he looks at me innocently and says, "Slavoj, I don't care what you say, even if you were disgusted," which is a pure lie, "but just tell me please what was your impression," you know. And then this expected grace, you know, that the big thing that I will say or whatever, you know. I try to play this game as far as possible. I tried to redeem his Ralph's Coriolanus with a totally crazy reading that Coriolanus is a true working-class hero and so on, but I didn't believe in my theory. But with Richard III, you know what's my problem immediately with Richard III? I'm maybe here reactionary, I am for him, I am against Tudors. I think he was the last good king. I read history books, laws that he enforced, they were pretty progressive. He was the first king who explicitly tried to push legal equality of common people. He was absolutely not this type of... and on the other hand, if there were arch-Stalinists, these were the early Tudors, and they were rewriting history like crazy to justify their claim. Sorry. You tell him it was interesting. Sorry? What? If he asks you whether
unknown
you
you
Slavoj Žižek
like it you should tell him it was interesting. I will because I think he is not in this academic—in this academic stuff, so he will—"Ah, nice, I'm glad that you say this, Slavoj." But you know what, for a brief second, because I'm afraid of women with glasses like you, I thought that you wanted to say that my comment on Ralph and so on was interesting, so... [laughter] Because you know, that's my idea of women—don't take it personally—women with glasses, they can be strict and so on. Now comes the politically incorrect part, but you know, when a woman with glasses takes off the glasses, it means now you can do whatever you want, you know. [laughter] I rather stop before you arrest me. Thanks very much. Okay. Is Madison still here? No. Okay, but maybe she already sent it to you, no? She promised me again that she will—sorry? Not yet. Oh my God, I hate you these efficient digital girls who know everything,
like it you should tell him it was interesting. I will because I think he is not in this academic—in this academic stuff, so he will—"Ah, nice, I'm glad that you say this, Slavoj." But you know what, for a brief second, because I'm afraid of women with glasses like you, I thought that you wanted to say that my comment on Ralph and so on was interesting, so... [laughter] Because you know, that's my idea of women—don't take it personally—women with glasses, they can be strict and so on. Now comes the politically incorrect part, but you know, when a woman with glasses takes off the glasses, it means now you can do whatever you want, you know. [laughter] I rather stop before you arrest me. Thanks very much. Okay. Is Madison still here? No. Okay, but maybe she already sent it to you, no? She promised me again that she will—sorry? Not yet. Oh my God, I hate you these efficient digital girls who know everything,
unknown
sorry. [music]
sorry. [music]